Search behavior, social positions, and institutional logics: The U.S. feature film industry, 1997-2006

This dissertation examines how social actors' search behavior is enabled and constrained by their embeddedness in the social structure, with a focus on the role of social positions and institutional logics in allocating the actors' attention to problems and opportunities. While the actors' social positions are collectively determined by the constituent members of a social system based on multiple evaluative criteria, the relative salience of and relationships among these criteria vary under different institutional logics. Therefore, interactions between the prevailing logics and the actors' past achievements along multiple evaluative criteria generate diverging positional dynamics and behavioral consequences in different institutional contexts. Building upon the theories of attention and search, I propose that the actors with low levels of past achievements along primary evaluative criteria are likely to engage in problem-driven search, whereas those with high levels of past achievements along ancillary evaluative criteria are likely to engage in opportunity-driven search. I also propose that the complementarity between primary and ancillary criteria determine whether the opportunity-driven search triggers exploration within or across the institutional boundary.;I examine these propositions in the context of the U.S. feature film industry: First, I demonstrate how this industry has been partitioned into the mainstream and independent segments and how their dominant logics---a market logic and an aesthetic logic, respectively---determine the relative salience of and relationships among the three evaluative criteria---box-office grosses, award nominations, and critical reviews; Then, I formulate and test my hypotheses on how the film directors' relative positions along these criteria influence their search behavior---genre exploration and boundary cross-over---under the competing institutional logics. I conclude this dissertation with discussions of its contributions to the literature on search behavior, social positions, and institutional logics, and its implications for the cultural industries.