The moderating effect of economic reputation on middle-status conformity: a study on the Italian film industry

The relationship between an actor’s status and his/her decision to conform to extant social norms of behavior or to deviate from them is a common theme in the managerial and sociological research. Drawing on previous studies that have highlighted the presence of a U- shaped relationship between status and nonconformity, whereby low-status and high-status actors are more likely to deviate from accepted norms of behavior, this paper aims at investigating how reputation moderates the relationship between status and nonconformity. By relying on a sample of more than 1,500 films introduced from 1990 to 2011 by 730 Italian film producing companies, we hypothesize and find that an organization’s economic reputation negatively moderates the curvilinear U-shaped relationship between its status and nonconformity in a way that, for high reputation, the high propensity of a high-status organization to non-conform is mitigated.