When Audiences and Critics Disagree: A Configurational Study on Categories and Cultural Valuation

Prior studies in cultural valuation have shown that critics and general audiences could have distinctive tastes, but little is explained about how each group materializes its evaluation criteria in a given context. To address this issue, we studied feature films that received a positive overall rating from audiences but not critics and explored factors that contributed to the financial success of these films. Leveraging the importance of the genre system in the film industry and building on the category literature, we articulated core concepts in categories and theorized their unique influence on audiences and critics. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we identified configurations that consistently led to high performance and investigated the specific cases within each configuration qualitatively. We found that categorical features played various roles in the four configurations in our analysis, showing multiple ways of generating appeal among audiences. By comparing critics’ reviews of the case exemplars, we showed that experts employed alternative reasonings and considered the same conditions that audiences considered in a different manner. We demonstrated ways in which categories and categorical features could cause disagreement between groups of audiences in evaluation.