In the last half century, the American consuming public has fragmented from relatively concentrated tastes such as a meat and potatoes diet and Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News into an abundance of varied and often polarized tastes such as vegan vs. caveman diets and Fox News vs. MSNBC. This growth in the diversity and division of consumer tastes over time is significant because tastes influence the formation of social networks and groups, the structure and regulation of markets, and the environmental impacts of consumption. However, our understanding of the trends in market differentiation and their causes is underdeveloped. Usual explanations emphasize technological improvements but producers can use these technologies to fill retail shelves with either diverse or redundant products, and there is much variation among technologically-similar markets. Instead, I theorize how market structures and political pressures combine to persistently extend differentiation. In three sections, I unpack these dynamics by charting trajectories in market diversity, identifying internal market mechanisms, and analyzing how external social groups affect market differentiation. The last section examines the case of the environmental movement and natural products in order to better understand the consequences of entanglement between movements and markets. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of differentiation in consumer society, as well as to broad literatures on market organization, innovation, social movements in markets, and cultural systems.
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Differentiation in Markets: A Study of Social Structure and Politics.
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