Genres, webs of fields, and institutional change The development of dance in the US, UK, and the Netherlands, 1985 – 2005

This PhD dissertation addresses the question of how and why new genres become (un)successfully institutionalized. We know that genres—once institutionalized and “taken-for-granted”—help one to categorize works of art as well as the people associated with works of art. In this dissertation, I investigate how novel genres come to be and start to fulfill such an “ordering” function in social life. The dissertation focuses on the history of the dance music genre in the US, UK, and the Netherlands, three countries that show marked variation in the way in which the dance developed. It works with data on dance label foundings, the commercial success of dance records, coverage by traditional newspapers and the specialized music press, among others, which are analyzed using both computational social science and qualitative/historical methods.
One common theme that runs through the empirical chapters is that they demonstrate the importance of analyzing how the dance fields in the US, UK, and the Netherlands were shaped by their relationships with so-called “proximate fields”: the media, other music genres, or, for instance, the state. Innovatively building on Fligstein and McAdam’s general theory of fields, this dissertation contributes to three more specific terrains related to genre trajectories, incumbent–challenger dynamics, and transnational fields.