Typecasting and Generalism in Firm and Market: Genre-Based Career Concentration in the Feature Film Industry, 1933-1995

This article attempts to bridge and contribute to three related lines of inquiry: the effect of economic organization on cultural diversity; the origins of career specialism; and the contrast between market and firm as alternative modes of governance. In particular, I use the natural experiment engendered by the transformation of Hollywood from the firmbased studio system to the contemporary market system to test the claim that typecastingdriven restrictions on generalist identities in an internal labor market are comparable in their significance to those found in the external labor market (Faulkner 1983; Zuckerman et al., 2003). Results support this claim and thereby suggest that incentives for experimentation by employers in internal labor markets counterbalance the greater control over work assignments enjoyed by independent contractors in the external labor market.