Ziwen
Chen

Racial classifications typically reproduce status hierarchies, disadvantaging minority-associated identities in domains from hiring to housing. This paper identifies a boundary condition of that pattern in the women's fashion market, where retailers assign human first names to products. Using more than 1.3 million Shopify listings, I show that minority-named products command systematically higher prices than comparable White-named products. I call this reversal the minority premium. Using an abductive approach, I evaluate two explanations: an omnivorousness account, in which elite consumers value minority-associated products as a form of cosmopolitan or diversity-signaling consumption, and a differentiation account, in which minority-associated names simply mark a product as distinct from an implicitly White market default. Four preregistered experiments with 1,248 participants replicate the premium at the consumer level, and the evidence favors differentiation. Experimentally fixing differentiation reduces the premium, whereas income, education, race, and omnivorous consumption do not reliably moderate it. These findings show that the evaluative meaning of racialized signals depends on market context: classifications that reproduce disadvantages when attached to people can generate value when attached to products in markets organized around uniqueness and differentiation.

The 1980s saw the expansion of a market-oriented culture, extending the logic of competition and commodification to the personal sphere. Various accounts suggest that this neoliberal turn prompted individuals to understand themselves as projects requiring monitoring and optimization, like how a firm manages inventory or productivity. Yet, empirical evidence for this cultural shift — what we term the managerialization of everyday life — remains debated and largely anecdotal. To address this gap, we develop computational linguistic methods involving Large Language Models (LLMs) for tracing the diffusion of explicit and implicit managerialized discourse across multiple cultural domains from 1950 to today, including newspapers, films, novels, congressional speeches, and case law proceedings. We also apply these methods to interviews with a representative sample of contemporary Americans. Our analyses reveal a secular rise in management metaphors applied to the body, subjectivity, and social relationships, since the mid 20th century. 1980 marks a key turning point, consistent with the ascendance of neoliberal politics in Western societies. We document sociodemographic variation in the uptake of managerialized language, finding that women were among the earliest adopters. By the turn of the 21st century, managerial discourse had become institutionalized, with younger, White, affluent, and college-educated individuals at the forefront of its cultural entrenchment. Our findings provide large-scale evidence of how shifts in economic institutions reshape the way people conceptualize themselves and their social ties, and challenge prevailing narratives about the decline of rationality in contemporary life.