through the last ten or fifteen years.

through the last ten or fifteen years, sociologists have given considerable attention to the character of market ties as conduits for emanates of information and resources. The basic argument is that market ties depict channels for the transmission of convenients and services valued by market actors. Examples of this network-based approach include research in succession interpersonal networks and job search (Granovetter, 1974; Fernandez and Weinberg, 1997) the diffusion of information by means of interlocking directorships (Davis, 1991; Haunschild, 1994) and market patterns emphasizing how a firm's position in the proceed of payments and resources affects its autonomy (Burt 1980 1992) More newly sociologists have suggested that ties are also important conveyer of identity in that an actor's relations in a market influence to what degree others perceive the actor (eg Baum and Oliver, 1991) the same stream of research emphasizing the part of networks as conveyers of identity is research onward the role of status in the marketplace (Podolny, 1993 1994; Han, 1994; Stuart, Hoang, and Hybels, 1999) In this work, a market exchange is viewed, at least in part, as an act of affiliation whereby the average status of a market actor's affiliates influences perceptions of the actor and thus the be derived of payments, resources, and opportunities available to that actor.

In this paper, we solicit to advance this line of research at examining status more completely. Specifically, our work prolongs previous research in three ways. First, we point out to that an actor's status position influences the quality at which the actor selects to produce, as well as the economic recurs the actor derives from producing at a given quality. While prior research upon market status has regarded the powers of status and quality in succession market outcomes as largely independent, in this studious mood we examine how the affiliations constituting an actor's status position actually affect the actor's choice of quality and its following returns. Second, previous research into status dynamics in one as well as the other market and nonmarket settings has at best occupyed extremely imperfect correlates of quality (eg Podolny, 1993) In this cogitation we examine status relations in the California wine industry - a words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following that allows us to include more direct measures of past and existing quality because of the substantial amount of time and attention the industry addicts to measuring quality differences across cropss Finally, though previous research has revealed a certain amount of stability in status above time, to date there has been little if any research that has documented a mechanism by way of which this inertia occurs. In this studious mood we clarify a mechanism underlying the reproduction of the status ordering through demonstrating how an actor's generally received affiliations affect and constrain replys to subsequent affiliations.

AFFILIATION, STATUS, AND QUALITY

It is well accepted that consumers' expectations about the quality of a producer's effects determine - at least in part - the come of payments and resources that the agriculturist receives, but what determines like expectations in the first place? The quality of past offerings certainly provides the same source of expectations. Economic gauges of reputation, for example, frequently emphasize the importance of past quality (eg Shapiro, 1983; Allen, 1984; Wilson, 1985) as do a certain sociological models (Raub and Weesie, 1990; Kollock 1994) Expectations about quality also derive from affiliations that market actors disentangle through their exchange relations. As market actors penetrate into exchanges with other actors, they many times become identified with one another. For example, when a firm penetrates into an ongoing exchange relation with an auditor, the auditor's status affects to what degree others perceive the firm (Han, 1994) Similarly, when a hospital establishes and publicizes relations with a well-respected agency or donor arrange it increases the perceived quality of its services (Perrow 1961) And when a young firm affiliates with a more established community assign places to or other well-known organization, it may increase the perceived legitimacy of its activities and thus its chances of survival (Wiewel and hunting-horse 1985; Baum and Oliver, 1991)

individual conception of the market that draws attention to the pair past demonstrations of quality and affiliations as a basis for expectations is the status-based standard of market competition (Podolny, 1993; Podolny and Phillips, 1996) According to this design a market actor's status has a dual foundation in the two its past demonstrations of quality and the status of its exchange partners. The actor's concede status, in turn, has a positive impact forward a number of market consequences such as market share (Podolny, Stuart, and Hannan, 1996) the spread between require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones and price (Podolny, 1993), influence athwart the direction of technological innovation (Podolny and Stuart, 1995) and the reactions of the financial community (Stuart, Hoang, and Hybels, 1999)

Although this earlier research has acknowledged the dual influence of the one and the other past quality and status, for the chiefly part these factors have been treated as independent determinants of market results In addition, status has rarely been examined with anything more than excessively indirect proxies for past quality. Podolny's (1993) examination of the status-price relationship, for example, relied onward measures of a firm's past market demeanor to control for the forces of prior quality. Similarly, Podolny and Stuart's (1995) examination of the consequences of status on innovation used incident dependence terms to control for quality differences across inventions.