Who you know or how you’re known?

Research indicates the importance of networks on professional achievement. Particularly in the art world, two types of professional networks are significant: collaboration-based, in which artists choose whom to work with and symbolic networks, where others connect artist for comparison and evaluation. Understanding the interplay between these two connection types, and their relative effect on artistic careers, is the focus of this research. For this study, I examine the Dutch film industry. I execute a two-staged research: first, I quantitatively map the professional networks between actors in Dutch films coming out in the cinema between 1997 and 2012. By analysing what positions actors have in a network on a specific point in their career through block modelling and sequence analysis, I find three ideal types of careers, with different amounts of career rewards: the long-term central, the long-term peripheral, and the sporadic career. Peripheral careers and sporadic careers in the centre of networks are evenly successful. Second, by making use of case studies of the ideal types emerging from the first analysis, I indicate how symbolic networks – the ways in which people talk and think about you – might differ for these actors. Findings indicate several dimensions on which symbolic network positions might differ: centrality, density and fragmentation. Further, I find these networks are multi-modal, trans-national and span different fields of cultural production.