Ziwen
Chen

What happens when racial classifications ordinarily applied to people are attached to market objects? I develop the concept of market translation to explain how markets can preserve a classification's ability to sort products while changing the value attached to its categories. I examine this process in women's fashion, where garments are often labeled with first names such as the Emma sweater or the Aliyah dress. Using 1.39 million apparel products from more than 10,000 independent Shopify retailers, I document a whiteness penalty: products with more white-associated names are priced lower than observationally similar products with less white-associated names, even when the underlying garment is held constant across retailers. I argue this reversal arises because fashion markets operate under a logic of distinction rather than competence: minority-associated names appear more culturally marked and therefore more distinctive, while white-associated names read as the unmarked default and therefore less boutique. Two survey experiments replicate the penalty at the level of consumer perception and find no strong moderation by participant race, age, or political ideology, suggesting the association reflects a broadly shared cultural understanding. Finally, archival evidence on retailer owners and employees shows that name selection reflects bounded search from producers' proximate social environments rather than strategic optimization, explaining why the penalty persists despite the market incentive to exploit minority-associated names. Taken together, these findings show that what counts as a penalty in one institutional context can become a premium in another, and that the direction of racialized valuation depends on the evaluative logic of the context in which it operates.

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.