The Emergence of Producer-Audience Worlds

This article proposes a cognitive sociological account of the emergence of social worlds that coordinate producers and audiences. The proposed model considers the emergence process in three stages. The first stage concerns the arrival of new labeled clusters of producers and objects. The second involves the conceptualization of the labeled clusters within high-energy social scenes. The final stage occurs with widespread taken for grantedness of the concept at the center of the scene. The article discusses the role of social structure in these stages and defines the emergence process in terms of hazards, the event rates of each stage, which can be modeled in empirical analysis. The proposed account can explain the emergence of worlds in a variety of social contexts, including genres in creative industries, disciplines in science, and forms of social protest.