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Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant form of high-status consumption, making boundary-crossing a source of cultural capital. Consequently, the right to adopt a practice from a culture that is not one's own is determined on the basis of the costs and benefits one is presumed to accrue. People express disapproval at boundary-crossing if they believe it devalues or extracts value at the expense of the target culture. We call this process cultural tariffing. We test our theory in a between-subject experimental design, demonstrating that individuals who enjoy a privileged social position, as inferred from their social identity or socioeconomic status, have less normative latitude to cross cultural boundaries. This is explained by perceptions that these actors are either devaluing or exploiting the target culture. While symbolic boundaries and cultural distinction theories are inconsistent with our results, we find that Americans who are disenchanted about group-based social mobility are the most likely to be outraged by cultural boundary-crossing. Cultural tariffing, we therefore posit, is a form of symbolic redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Cultural diversity is commonly thought to present a tradeoff between task coordination and creative problem solving, with diversity arising primarily through cultural differences between individuals. In contrast, we propose that diversity can also exist within persons when individuals hold multiple cultural beliefs about the organization. We refer to these different forms as interpersonal and intrapersonal cultural heterogeneity. We argue that the former tends to undermine coordination and portends worsening firm profitability, while the latter facilitates creativity and supports greater patenting success and more positive market valuations. To evaluate these propositions, we use computational linguistics to identify cultural content in employee reviews of nearly 500 publicly traded firms on a leading company review website and then develop novel, time-varying measures of cultural heterogeneity. Our empirical results lend support for our two core propositions, suggesting the need to rethink the performance tradeoffs of cultural heterogeneity: it may be possible to reap the creativity benefits of higher intrapersonal heterogeneity and, at the same time, the efficiency benefits of lower interpersonal heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their insightful comment, DellaPosta and Davoodi argue that our finding (Goldberg and Stein 2018) that segmented networks inhibit cultural differentiation does not generalize to large networks. However, their demonstration rests on an incorrect implementation of the preference updating process in the associative diffusion model. We show that once this discrepancy is corrected, cultural differentiation is more pronounced in fully connected networks, irrespective of network size and even under extreme assumptions about cognitive decay. We use this as an opportunity to discuss the associative diffusion model's assumptions and scope conditions, as well as to critically reassess prevailing contagion-based diffusion models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. We propose an alternative explanation we call associative diffusion. Drawing on two insights from research in cognition—that meaning inheres in cognitive associations between concepts, and that perceived associations constrain people’s actions—we introduce a model in which, rather than beliefs or behaviors, the things being transmitted between individuals are perceptions about what beliefs or behaviors are compatible with one another. Conventional contagion models require the assumption that networks are segregated to explain cultural variation. We show, in contrast, that the endogenous emergence of cultural differentiation can be entirely attributable to social cognition and does not require a segregated network or a preexisting division into groups. Moreover, we show that prevailing assumptions about the effects of network topology do not hold when diffusion is associative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]