Changing of the guards: Status dynamics and innovation in American TV shows, 1956–2010

•Changes in status – at the individual and the field level – affect the relationship between status and innovation.•High status actors tend to be highly innovative when they experience dramatic increases in their status position.•High status actors are least innovative when the status system is unstable.•Instability in the status system increases the innovativeness of low status actors.•We use structural topic modeling and network analysis to gauge the degree to which cultural products recombine elements that were rarely used together before. Researchers have advanced two opposing accounts of the relationship between status and cultural innovation. We aim to reconcile these views – and their conflicting findings that either high- or low-status cultural producers are more likely to innovate – by adopting a dynamic view of status. We argue that changes in status – at the individual and the field level – affect the relationship between status and innovation. Focusing on the national American television industry over the period 1956–2010, we found that increases and decreases in producers’ status moderated the effect of their current status on the innovativeness of their shows. We also found that the degree of instability in the overall status hierarchy of producers conditioned the impact of status on show innovativeness. When the status hierarchy was relatively stable, high-status producers tended to create more innovative shows than low-status producers. Greater levels of instability, however, decreased the show innovativeness of high-status producers but increased that of low-status producers. By exposing the pressures and opportunities that cultural producers experience as a result of changes in both their status and the status hierarchy, we reveal that the relationship between status and innovation is more nuanced than prior studies suggested.