Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry

  • Baker W
  • Faulkner R
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Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The theoretical concept of role as resource is introduced and illus-trated. The concept combines critical elements of the structural, interactionist, and network approaches to role. A role is a resource in two senses: it is a means to claim, bargain for, and gain member-ship and acceptance in a social community, and it grants access to social, cultural, and material capital that incumbents and claimants exploit in order to pursue their interests. This article examines the impact of a major transformation-the rise of the blockbuster-on roles and positions in Hollywood filmmaking and discerns two pro-cesses underlying the growth and decline of roles in culture produc-tion. Through adaptation, filmmakers adopt role combinations with intrinsic capabilities of solving technical and organizational prob-lems. Through imitation, filmmakers copy the role combinations associated with early blockbusters and gain legitimacy in Holly-wood's institutional environment. These responses resulted in two fundamental trends: the increasing specialization of the producer and separation of the business and artistic domains, and the increas-ing fusion of artistic roles. Role and position are fundamental concepts in sociology. They suffer,

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Baker, W. E., & Faulkner, R. R. (1991). Role as Resource in the Hollywood Film Industry. American Journal of Sociology, 97(2), 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1086/229780

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