If things had worked out differently, Gokhan Ertug might be earning a living playing the guitar in a jazz band. That did not work out, but his deep and abiding interest in music continues to influence him even now, as he works as an Associate Professor at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business.
In “Middle-status conformity revisited: The interplay between achieved and ascribed status,” a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2019, which he co-authored, Associate Professor Ertug examined how someone’s status relates to the likelihood that he or she will conform to or deviate from the norm. However, instead of looking at data from companies or business professionals, he turned to data from symphonic orchestras.
The researchers looked at 27 symphony orchestras in the United States and examined their programmes between 1918 and 1969 to see if the conductors in these orchestras chose conventional pieces or more adventurous works. They then examined the relationship between the status of the conductor and the music they choose to play each season.
The prevalent theory in the field states that people with high and low status are the ones most likely to deviate from the norm. This is presumably because they have less to lose. People with high status can do risky things because if they fail, they are cushioned by their status. People with low status have very little to lose so they can also take the risk to experiment by not conforming. It’s those in the middle who are most likely to stick to the norm because they do not have much of a buffer for failure and they can slip down the ladder if they make a mistake.
Associate Professor Ertug and the other researchers decided to see if the model held true when they applied the lens of achieved and ascribed status. Achieved status is the status that people enjoy because of their personal achievements. An ascribed status, on the other hand, is one that people are given regardless of their individual merit, or achievements. It might be the result of race, gender, family origin, nationality, for example.
The researchers looked at conductors of these orchestras and classified them into those with high and not high ascribed status, also tracking their achieved status. In the classical music world, being German or Austrian gives a conductor a high ascribed status, said Associate Professor Ertug, so that was the criteria for ascribed status. To judge if a conductor had a high achieved status, they looked at the number of recordings made by the conductor.
Based on the conventional model, it was expected that conductors with high achieved status and those with low achieved status would be more likely to program unconventional music. However, what Associate Professor Ertug and his co-authors found was that this pattern held true only for those conductors who have high ascribed status. The pattern was the opposite for conductors who did not have ascribed status, where those with low and high achieved status conformed more and those of middle status deviated more.
“If you’re a Singaporean conductor [not having high ascribed status] and you achieve a lot, you might be less likely to take a risk because unlike other high status guys [those who might also have high ascribed status], you might actually lose a lot more in case your experiment does not pay off,” he explained.
Conductors with low achieved and low ascribed status were conservative since: “If you have low achieved and low ascribed status, you can really disappear from the field if you take a risk and fall flat. It all boils down to what you have to lose.”
Associate Professor Ertug was drawn to this topic because of his enduring passion for music as well as his family background (his uncle played the bassoon in Turkey’s Presidential Symphony Orchestra).
His background also informs other efforts. His mother is an amateur artist and his wife has a degree in fine art, so it is not surprising that he has also turned to that world. He was the lead author in a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2016 on “The art of representation: How audience-specific reputations affect success in the contemporary art field.”
The paper looked at 50,000 contemporary artists around the world and analysed how their reputation affects how they do, in terms of having exhibitions, in museums and in art galleries. While galleries and museums might seem similar, galleries are more concerned with the commercial viability of the work whereas museums are more concerned with artistic quality.
While the literature tends to treat reputation as one, single undifferentiated entity, what the researchers found was that this was not true. “Artists could have different reputations for galleries versus museums,” he said. If an artist has a reputation for artistic quality, this will have a stronger relationship with the artist’s success with museums than with galleries. On the other hand, an artist’s reputation for commercial viability will have a stronger relationship with that artist’s success with galleries than with museums.
In addition to writing about music and art, he also writes about sports. He has written a paper on whether coaches in the National Basketball Association (NBA) display racial bias and another paper on how reputations and status affects team performance, hiring, and salaries in the NBA.
In addition to status and reputation, his research interests also include entrepreneurship and innovation. Here, the research data tends to be more conventionally focussed on the performance of business firms. He recently completed a 20,000 word review piece on inequality and organisations which has been published in the Academy of Management Annals.
Associate Professor Ertug has been at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business since 2008. Singapore was a familiar place for him because he had done his PhD in INSEAD and had spent two years in its Singapore campus.
“I had seen it an easy place to get work done. You can be quite productive here.”
Associate Professor Ertug and his wife are now well ensconced in Singapore and enjoy living here. However, don’t ask him to recommend a place for Turkish food though as he is not a foodie, he said.
To relax, he also watches sports. He is, by default, a fan of the Istanbul-based football team Galatasaray because it is the team that his grandfather also supported. He also follows basketball, though he is not a supporter of any particular NBA team. “I support the underdog so it used to be any team that plays against the Golden State Warriors,” he chuckled.
