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Career gatekeeping in cultural fields

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Abstract

This paper presents a comparative analysis of career gatekeeping processes in two cultural fields. Drawing on data on appointment procedures in German academia and booking processes in North American stand-up comedy, we compare how gatekeepers in two widely different contexts evaluate and select candidates for established positions in their respective field and validate their decisions. Focusing on three types of gatekeeping practices that have been documented in prior research—typecasting, comparison, and legitimization—our analysis reveals major differences in how gatekeepers perform these practices across our two cases: (1) typecasting based on ascriptive categories versus professional criteria, (2) comparisons that are ad-hoc and holistic versus systematic and guided by performance criteria, and (3) legitimation by means of ritualization versus transparency. We argue that these differences are related to the social and organizational context in which gatekeepers make selection decisions, including differences in the structure of academic and creative careers and the organization of the respective labor markets in which these careers unfold. These findings contribute to scholarship on gatekeeping in cultural fields by providing comparative insights into the work of career gatekeepers and the social organization of career gatekeeping processes.

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Notes

  1. In using the distinction between established and unestablished positions, we build on prior sociological research on cultural fields that has described the transition from unestablished, outsider positions to established, insider positions as a crucial step in the careers of cultural producers (see Dowd and Pinheiro 2013; Dubois and François 2013). We acknowledge, however, that there is no universal, clear-cut definition of an “established” position. What constitutes an “established” position varies from field to field, and can be marked more or less formally (e.g., in some fields, there are formal titles for “established positions,” such as “full professor” in academia, while in other fields these positions are identified in a less official manner). In the current analysis, we address the slipperiness of this term by using social actors’ own intersubjective definitions of established and unestablished positions.

  2. Gatekeepers are not restricted to cultural fields; in fact, the concept was first developed to demonstrate the decision-making power of housewives in household food decisions (Lewin 1943). The first systematic applications occurred in research on mass media (cf. Shoemaker and Vos 2009).

  3. It is worth noting that the foci of research on gatekeepers for cultural producers largely mirror the foci of research on gatekeepers for cultural products. Most strikingly, both literatures mostly draw on single case-studies, with few exceptions comparing cases within the same field (Greenfeld 1988; Lane 2013; Velthuis 2003; Verboord 2011).

  4. Professors have traditionally been hired by the minister representing the local state [Land]. This approach was based on a main principle of German higher education policy dating back to the early 19th century: Although universities were free to choose their faculty and could submit a shortlist to the rector (the head of the university), appointments were overseen by the states [Länder] in order to prevent nepotism. For the same reason, the local states were also in charge of budgets and positions. Reforms enacted in 2001 sought to provide universities with more autonomy in their hiring policies, and since then most states have transferred their right to appoint professors to the universities (see the overviews in Musselin 2010; Möhlmann 2014).

  5. The number of reviews in an archival appointment record varies across the 144 appointment procedures in our sample. Most records include three to four reviews, while some outliers include nine or more reviews. A few archival records also do not include any reviews, which probably just means that the reviews have not been archived for this particular procedure.

  6. This ratio does not consider differences between sub-disciplinary fields. In bigger sub-fields like modern history the ratio is actually closer to 1:13.

  7. It is a bit more complicated to hypothesize about the ratio between available professorships and candidates during the period of study. We know there were relatively more positions available. In several cases, the minutes of the meetings of appointment commissions actually note peers complaining about a lack of suitable candidates, or a lack of supply on the market. At the same time, the archival records facilitate a reliable overview of the applications for professorships, and these records suggest that, in the course of the educational expansion, the academic field was more open to newcomers and lateral entries, which would increase the number of candidates.

  8. In this regard, the role of the JFL Festival in the North American field of stand-up comedy is comparable to the Fringe Festival in the field of British comedy (studied by Friedman 2014), as well as to similar field-coordinating events in other cultural fields, such as the fashion week in Paris (studied by Godart and Mears 2009).

  9. A scout working for the JFL Festival estimated that 250–300 comedians participate in the annual auditions for the festival (McCarthy 2016). From this pool of comedians, about 40 receive an invitation to perform Montreal, which corresponds to about 13–16% of the initial pool of comedians participating in the auditions.

  10. Access was requested from archives at 30 universities; 14 university archives were either not in possession of appointment records or denied access because they deemed that the retention period of the respective records was not over. Archival rights prevent access to records from appointment procedures after 1985 because participants are usually still alive. The sampled records vary with respect to several dimensions, such as age of the university, size of the department, and career stage of the candidates.

  11. Of course, archival records have their own peculiarities and limitations that must be considered. If this is achieved, alleged deficits become sociological phenomena in their own right, referring to the organizational and bureaucratic contexts in and for which appointment records are produced and received. Following Garfinkel (1967), there are ‘good’ organizational reasons for ‘bad’ records, and these reasons are highly relevant for sociological research.

  12. Research on more recent job advertisements for German professors shows that the advertisements are becoming longer, include more criteria, and are thus more detailed (Klawitter 2015). We do not observe such a development in our period of study.

  13. All quotes have been translated from German. In order to guarantee anonymity for those involved in the procedures, we omit information that would allow the identification of individuals.

  14. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the range of meanings of diversity that bookers consider tends to be relatively narrow. It is mostly limited to either gender and ethno-racial diversity, while other dimensions of diversity remain unconsidered. For example, few bookers consider age as an important source of diversity. This lack of attention to candidates’ age is reflected in the line-ups of the Festival’s annual New Faces shows, which are typically dominated by candidates in their early 20s to 40s.

  15. Because the production of transparency is a complex issue, it is worthwhile to briefly return to the peculiar character of archived appointment records as data, which we discuss in the previous section on data and methods. Drawing on archived records, we must assume that documents, even when their purpose is to provide transparency, do not have a revelatory character that exposes how decisions were really made (whatever this is supposed to mean precisely). It is more realistic to assume that the archived documents are part of a bureaucratic front stage on which legitimate decision-making procedures are performed (Prior 2008). However, even if transparency is only performed, it has legitimizing and stabilizing effects (Flyverbom et al. 2015; see also Power 1997).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Michèle Lamont, Matthew Clair, Désirée Waibel and the members of the ISF group in the Department of Sociology at Harvard for their comments on previous versions of this paper. We also would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of AJCS for their comments and suggestions. Research support from German Research Foundation (Project Number 254562991), and the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University is gratefully acknowledged. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2017 meeting of the American Sociological Association.

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  1. LCSS Leibniz Center for Science and Society, Leibniz University Hannover, Lange Laube 32, 30159, Hannover, Germany

    Julian Hamann

  2. Department of Sociology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Stefan Beljean

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Hamann, J., Beljean, S. Career gatekeeping in cultural fields. Am J Cult Sociol 9, 43–69 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00078-7

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