Art for Whose Sake? Managing Professional Autonomy and Empowered Clients in the Porcelain Capital of China
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Existing research suggests that experts often protect their professional autonomy by rejecting lay clients’ feedback or passing it to intermediaries (e.g., managers and agents). However, the rise of review platforms and disintermediated marketplaces has empowered clients to publicly share challenging feedback, and experts’ defensive tactics may further erode public trust in their services. In contrast, our qualitative study of 67 porcelain artists in China reveals that experts can effectively translate clients’ feedback to preserve their professional autonomy. These artists decomposed and distilled their expertise—differentiating the essential, identity-defining aspects from the more-peripheral, expendable ones—allowing them to incorporate clients’ feedback into the latter aspects while retaining control over the former ones. This strategy enabled the artists to integrate client-driven creations into their professional identity as artistic experts, thereby preserving their professional autonomy. Notably, not all artists adopted this strategy. Those who considered their work as an indivisible whole were financially compelled to bend to clients’ demands, or they chose to exit the profession. These findings present a paradoxical view of professional autonomy, suggesting that experts can maintain their professional freedom by granting clients limited and selective influence, thereby fostering clients’ compliance and public recognition in an era of increasing influence by lay audiences.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it