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Abstract

This dissertation comprises three standalone studies. Each pertains to a different problem involving ``the moral" within cultural industries. The first study, ``What is taste?," is a theoretical essay that seeks to clarify the semantic ambiguity a well-worn concept in the sociology of culture and the field generally, that of cultural taste. In this essay, I survey contemporary empirical research on cultural tastes and use abductive reasoning from measurements of taste to clarify the semantic ambiguity surrounding taste. I argue that taste should be conceptualized as a person’s thick subjectivity in a cultural field, that is to say a fundamentally multidimensional orientation that describes how we feel, consume, and praise in a cultural field. The second study, ``The costliest signals of authenticity? How death inflates artistic reputations in hip-hop," is an empirical project that examines how the death of an artist affects artistic reputations. Drawing on a balanced panel data of audience evaluations from a major online review aggregator, I show how the death of an artist durably inflates the artistic reputations in hip-hop. Audience evaluations of an artist's work improves in the short-term after an artist's death, and these improved evaluations persist in the medium- and long-term after an artist's death. I find that such ``death effects" on artistic reputations are mediated by three distinct mechanisms: (a) sympathetic censoring and eulogizing effects, (b) audience shift, and (c) the costly signaling of authenticity, a variety of symbolic capital local to the field of hip-hop. The third study, ``Denunciations and scandals in a cultural market," is an empirical project that examines the sequences of denunciations and scandals (for want of a better expression, ``cancel culture") that have become zeitgeist in the cultural industries over the past decade. I examine denunciations and scandals within a particular cultural market, that of Anglophone young adult (YA) fiction, 2015-2019 by constructing a novel scandal event data set that links three disparate types of data: (a) unstructured text and social media metrics from Twitter, (b) newspaper archival data from mass circulation newspapers, and (c) book sales data. After estimating a Poisson fixed effect model, I find that the negativity of Twitter discourse around a writer is positively associated with media attention to alleged transgressions committed by the same writer. Such associations are moderated by what I term an anonymity discount and agitprop effect. Finally, I find that the direct effects of scandal are heterogeneous by the types of transgressions involved. Comparing cumulative abnormal returns across relevant cross-sections, I find negative direct effects of scandal to be exclusive to cases involving field-specific norm transgressions.

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