Grégoire CROIDIEU

This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

Niche, genre, and classification are key concepts in creative industries. The literature on niche views markets as an economic resource primarily comprising consumers. In the genre perspective, markets are seen as mediated social constructions generated through the interaction of producers, consumers, and media actors. In the research on classification, markets are seen as outcomes of categorical struggles to define the constitutive character of an industry. Although the three concepts are inter-related, scholars tend to treat each concept in isolation leaving unclear their differential insights and thereby neglecting the possibility of generating new insights by synthesizing these concepts. Drawing on multiple perspectives and disciplines, we review and synthesize the extant literature on each of these concepts and show those they can be used in tandem through an application to the California wine industry. Our review highlights how the three perspectives shed light on categorical dynamics in creative industries, while building on different levels of analysis, involving different number and types of actors and yielding different insights depending on the stages of industry evolution.