In the late 2010s, US romance publishing underwent an astonishing change. Previously, same-sex couples were all but nonexistent in romances released by major publishers. By 2022, every large publisher in the United States issued romances featuring same-sex couples: A few also published bisexual, trans, or polyamorous romances. This article turns to neo-institutionalism to analyze how processes of isomorphism contributed to this change. Through interviews with 10 authors and 7 editors, we show how specific mechanisms associated with isomorphism—coercion, mimesis, and normative pressures—explain this major shift. Contrary to prevailing literature, we find that structural innovations moved from publishing’s periphery to its core in a process we call reverse isomorphism. We contribute to discussions of representation in media by showing how social, organizational, and institutional processes facilitate or suppress underrepresented voices. At the same time, we caution that new structures may create new types of marginalization.
AbidinC (2019) Yes homo: gay influencers, homonormativity, and queerbaiting on YouTube. Continuum33(5): 614–629.
2.
AndersonCW (2013) Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
3.
BarotL (2016) Queer romance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America: snapshots of a revolution. In: GleasonWASelingerEM (eds) Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?London: Ashgate, pp. 389–404.
BrouilletteS (2002) Corporate publishing and canonization: neuromancer and science-fiction publishing in the 1970s and early 1980s. Book History5(1): 187–208.
6.
BurtR (2004) Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology110(2): 349–399.
CaplanRboydD (2018) Isomorphism through algorithms: institutional dependencies in the case of Facebook. Big Data & Society5(1): 205395171875725.
9.
ChildressCC (2015) Regionalism and the publishing class: conflicted isomorphism and negotiated identity in a nested field of American publishing. Cultural Sociology9(3): 364–381.
10.
ChildressCC (2019) Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
11.
ChristensenCM (2016) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
DiMaggioPJPowellWW (1983) The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review: 147–160.
20.
DuffyBEPoellTNieborgDB (2019) Platform practices in the cultural industries: creativity, labor, and citizenship. Social Media + Society5(4): 2056305119879672.
21.
DugganL (2002) The new homonormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics10: 175–194.
22.
ElberseA (2013) Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. 1st ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
23.
FerranteAA (2017) Super troopers: the homonormative regime of visibility in RuPaul’s Drag Race. In: GudelunasDBrennanN (eds) Rupaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture: The Boundaries of Reality TV (1st ed., 2017 ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
24.
FranssenTKuipersG (2013) Coping with uncertainty, abundance and strife: decision-making processes of Dutch acquisition editors in the global market for translations. Poetics41(1): 48–74.
25.
FreemanJH (1982) Organizational Life Cycles and Natural Selection Processes. In: StawBCummingsL (eds) Research in Organizational Behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 1–32.
HesmondhalghD (2018) The Cultural Industries. 4th ed.London: Sage.
33.
HesmondhalghD (2021) Is music streaming bad for musicians? Problems of evidence and argument. New Media & Society23: 3593–3615.
34.
HesmondhalghDMeyerLM (2014) Popular music, independence and the concept of the alternative in contemporary capitalism. In: BennettJStrangeN (eds) Media Independence. London: Routledge, pp. 94–116.
35.
HurstonZN (1950) What white publishers won’t print. Negro Digest, April.
36.
JerolmackCMurphyAK (2019) The ethical dilemmas and social scientific trade-offs of masking in ethnography. Sociological Methods & Research48(4): 801–827.
37.
KuipersG (2011) Cultural globalization as the emergence of a transnational cultural field: transnational television and national media landscapes in four European countries. American Behavioral Scientist55(5): 541–557.
38.
KuipersGde KloetJ (2009) Banal cosmopolitanism and the lord of the rings: the limited role of national differences in global media consumption. Poetics37(2): 99–118.
39.
LaaksonenS-MKoivulaMVilliM (2022). Mediated by the giants: Tracing practices, discourses, and mediators of platform isomorphism in a media organization. New Media & Society. DOI: 10.1177/14614448221122220
40.
LarsonC (2020) Open networks, open books: gender, precarity and solidarity in digital publishing. Information, Communication & Society23: 1892–1908.
41.
LarsonC (2022) Streaming books: confluencers, kindle unlimited and the platform imaginary. Communication, Culture and Critique15(4): 520–530.
42.
LatzerM (2009) Information and communication technology innovations: radical and disruptive?New Media & Society11(4): 599–619.
MeyerJWRowanB (1977) Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology83(2): 340–363.
47.
NapoliPM (2014) On automation in media industries: integrating algorithmic media production into media industries scholarship. Media Industries Journal1(1): 33–38. DOI: 10.3998/mij.15031809.0001.107.
NieborgDBPoellT (2018). The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. New Media & Society, 20(11), 4275–4292. DOI: 10.1177/146144481876969
51.
PetreC (2021) All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
52.
PoellTNieborgDBDuffyBE (2021) Platforms and Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press.
53.
PowellWWDiMaggioP (eds) (1991) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
54.
Publishers’ Weekly (1982) Romance writers hold second annual meeting. Publisher’s Weekly, 25June.
Sánchez-SorianoJ-JGarcía-JiménezL (2020) The media construction of LGBT+ characters in Hollywood blockbuster movies. The use of pinkwashing and queerbaiting. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social77: 95–115.
StrangDSouleSA (1998) Diffusion in organizations and social movements. Annual Review of Sociology24(1): 265–290.
59.
ThompsonJ. B. (2021). Book wars: The digital revolution in publishing. Cambridge: Polity Press.
60.
ThompsonJB (2012) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. 2nd ed.New York: Plume.
61.
TomasenaJM (2019) Negotiating collaborations: BookTubers, the publishing industry, and YouTube’s ecosystem. Social Media + Society5(4): 205630511989400.
62.
VosTPRussellFM (2019) Theorizing journalism’s institutional relationships: an elaboration of gatekeeping theory. Journalism Studies20(16): 2331–2348.
63.
WaldfogelJ (2018) Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
64.
WeberMGerthHHMillsCW (1958) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
