Patterns of Market Polarization and Market Matching in the Korean Film Industry

Despite its embedded ambiguity, conventional wisdom tends to prevail over time. This may be because old adages recurrently embrace some ingredients of truth. As James A. Mathisen highlights, conventional wisdom plays a significant role in constituting knowledge as a starting point.1 For many people, numerous adages (the rich get richer while the poor get poorer; birds of a feather flock together) are most commonly perceived as true. More interestingly, the accuracy of the two folk wisdoms appears to be more salient in culture-producing industries, including the motion picture industry. Concomitantly, the two adages have long been connected to diverse societal phenomena and sociological knowledge. Although the movie market is a sociological topic, prior research concerning the motion picture industry has been relatively sparse in sociology. Among meager previous studies, Robert R. Faulkner and Andy B. Anderson's work is conspicuous.2 They sought to scrutinize the U.S. motion picture industry, Hollywood, in depth in terms of the interaction between markets and career mobility. They argued that the movie business, which operates through a single project (per movie), tightly interconnects with career trajectory for those who participate in the project. In particular, Hollywood tends to generate the embedded patterns of market polarization (the rich get richer while the poor get poorer) and market matching (birds of a feather flock together). That is, the key operating mechanism of Hollywood is saliently recurrent mar ket polarization and market pairings. Furthermore, in the movie industry, patterns of market polarization and market pairings have been reiterated under the cloak of a coping mechanism for a high degree of risk and uncertainty. The film industry per se is an epitome, which contains an element of volatile risk and uncertainty. There appear to be extreme risk and ambiguity involved in