School News
Professors Natalia Levina and Manuel Arriaga awarded 2015 OCIS Best Published Paper Award
—
Natalia Levina, NYU Stern Associate Professor of Information Systems, and Manuel Arriaga, NYU Stern Visiting Research Professor and alumnus, were awarded the 2015 Best Published Paper Award by the Organizational Communications and Information Systems (OCIS) Division of the Academy of Management for their paper, “Distinction and Status Production on User-Generated Content Platforms: Using Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Production to Understand Social Dynamics in Online Fields,” which was published in the Information Systems Research journal. The OCIS Division executive board selected the winning paper out of 14 finalist papers, which were published in top management, information systems and organizational communications journals in 2014.
Levina and Arriaga’s paper proposes an analytical lens for studying social status production processes across a wide variety of social media platforms. It integrates various streams of research, including those focused on social network analysis in social media, online communities, reputation systems, blogs and multiplayer games. Drawing on sociological theory of cultural production, the paper introduces the notion of an online field to unpack how people and companies gain and maintain status through content production in settings where user attention becomes the key currency. It also details what role platform design choices play in shaping which forms of distinction count and how they are pursued.
Levina and Arriaga’s paper proposes an analytical lens for studying social status production processes across a wide variety of social media platforms. It integrates various streams of research, including those focused on social network analysis in social media, online communities, reputation systems, blogs and multiplayer games. Drawing on sociological theory of cultural production, the paper introduces the notion of an online field to unpack how people and companies gain and maintain status through content production in settings where user attention becomes the key currency. It also details what role platform design choices play in shaping which forms of distinction count and how they are pursued.