Here is a sample of my published research.
“Point Break? The Efficacy of Creative Differences as a Protective Label for Future Work”
w/ Spencer Harrison, Yanbo Song, and Khwan Kim
Forthcoming
Academy of Management Journal
Creative projects require teams to both generate and integrate divergent ideas. While divergent ideas are necessary for creative success, they can also foster disagreements that can lead to collaborative breakdowns where individuals leave a project. Because creative work requires a strong reputation for moving from project to project, collaborative breakdowns threaten the ability to secure future work opportunities. We conducted a qualitative and a quantitative study to investigate the effectiveness of “creative differences” as a protective label for individuals that leave creative projects. Our inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews with Hollywood professionals reveals the potential for reputational damage following a collaborative breakdown, as well as the role of “creative differences” as a professionally ambiguous attribution meant to mitigate this damage. However, our informants offered conflicting views on its efficacy. From these insights, we abductively test hypotheses in a quantitative study examining directors who depart films due to creative differences, comparing them with those who leave for other reasons. Our study contributes by uncovering a novel dilemma in creative work – the role of collaborative breakdowns – and the potential hazards of relying on professionally ambiguous attributions as reputational shields for future career opportunities.
“Must-See TV or Must-Keep TV: The Nuances of Creative Performance and Team Composition in Television”
/w Kelly Patterson and Keyvan Kashkooli
2025
Academy of Management Discoveries 11:423-447.
Click here for the article on the journal’s website. To watch a neat whiteboard animation that explains the paper, click here.
This study investigates the impact of creative team composition on two performance outcomes: commercial viability and survival. While prior research has tended to emphasize the benefits of insider–outsider balance, we find that television viewers and network executives react differently to shows produced by staffs featuring various staffing levels. Analyzing viewership numbers and renewal (i.e., survival) outcomes among U.S. comedy shows airing on broadcast television (1987–2006), our empirical findings suggest that, while both viewers and executives demonstrate concerns over the impact of staffing choices on creative content, executives are more sensitive to various team composition choices. We unexpectedly find that executives prefer shows produced by teams with more extreme (very high and very low) levels of collaboration experience and plot content, while preferring shows featuring a balanced proportion of newcomers to the domain (“rookies”). Audience convergence appears in a specific way, as executives and viewers both prefer series produced by teams with a proportion of genre-spanning writers that matches the average throughout the genre. Our insights into the performance of creative teams, their staffing, and the role of executives in introducing novelty into a creative domain invites future research into the mechanisms driving success, selection, and innovation in project-based creative settings.
“No Laughter Among Thieves: Authenticity and the Enforcement of Community Norms in Stand-Up Comedy”
2018
American Sociological Review 83:933-958.
Click here for the article on the journal’s website. Science featured this article as an “Editors’ Choice” in the October 5, 2018 issue.
Why might observers label one social actor’s questionable act a norm violation even as they seem to excuse similar behavior by others? To answer this question, I use participant-observer data on Los Angeles stand-up comics to explore the phenomenon of joke theft. Informal, community-based systems govern the property rights pertaining to jokes. Most instances of possible joke theft are ambiguous owing to the potential for simultaneous and coincidental discovery. I find that accusations are not strongly coupled to jokes’ similarity, and enforcement depends mainly on the extent to which insiders view the comic in question as being authentic to the community. Comics who are oriented toward external rewards, have a track record of anti-social behavior, and exhibit lackluster on-stage craft are vulnerable to joke theft accusations even in borderline cases because those inauthentic characteristics are typical of transgressors. Vulnerability is greatest for comics who enjoy commercial success despite low peer esteem. Authenticity protects comics because it reflects community-based status, which yields halo effects while encouraging relationships predicated on respect. In exploring accusations of joke theft and their outcomes, this study illustrates how norms function more as framing devices than as hard-and-fast rules, and how authenticity shapes their enforcement.
This article won the 2019 ASA Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section’s Outstanding Published Article Award.
“The Layers of a Clown: Career Development in Cultural Production Industries”
2017
Academy of Management Discoveries 3(2):145-164.
Academy of Management members can download the paper here. To watch a neat whiteboard animation that briefly explains the paper, click here.
Drawing from a roughly 5-year participant-observation study of stand-up comedians in Los Angeles, CA, this article investigates the career development of artists within cultural production industries. This article introduces and defines the model of a layered career. In the case of stand-up comedy, individuals progressively move through three layers. Each exhibits its own distinctive organizational bases, core challenges, interactional processes, relationship types, and rewards. While development involves an individual matriculating through layers, it also requires artists to maintain their participation in prior layers, because each layer is ideally suited for different aspects of practice, creativity, and social support. Careers in these contexts involve building a durable infrastructure rather than a simple passage through discrete statuses. Furthermore, one’s career progress depends on the formation of relationships, particularly tight mentorships and arm’s length endorsements. This article ties the layered career model to cultural production industries wherein development typically involves informal institutions, decentralized organizations, the accumulation of tacit knowledge, and the cultivation of novel creative identities. This article emphasizes the applicability of the layered career model to the study of artistic careers. It also suggests this framework’s wider implications for research into contingent and informal employment.
This paper was a runner-up for Academy of Management Discoveries’ Best Paper in 2018 and earned honorable mention for the ASA’s James D. Thompson Graduate Student Paper Award in 2017. An earlier version was the runner-up for the AOM OMT Division’s Louis Pondy Prize for the best dissertation-based paper.
Working Papers
(Copies Provided upon Request)
Patrick Reilly. (2025) [paper about creative workers and their audiences]. Under Review
Kelly Patterson & Patrick Reilly. (2023) Unfocused or unemployed: Career histories as screening criteria in the hiring of broadcast television writers. Working Paper.
Pascale Frické, Natalya Alonso, & Patrick Reilly. (2021) Living the dream? Unpacking the causes and consequences of unforeseen work realities. Working paper.
Projects in Progress
Patrick Reilly & Clayton Childress. Nepo-Baby Driver: Mechanisms of Nepotism in Competitive Elite Labor Markets.
Patrick Reilly, Kevin Lee, and Timothy Dowd. The Sociology of Authorship.
Patrick Reilly. A Theory of Comps.