1 IN OR OUT? HOW CONSUMER PERFORMANCES LEAD TO THE EMERGENCE OF NEW TASTES Pierre-Yann Dolbec, Concordia University Andre F. Maciel, University of Nebraska–Lincoln In contemporary consumer culture, a growing number of markets has assigned an increasing emphasis to aesthetic taste (Featherstone 2007; Slater 1997). Organizations often are key drivers of this emphasis, as it allows them to hasten product obsolescence while feeding consumers’ status games, a logic well detailed by Simmel (1904/1957) and many others who later built on this argument (Aspers and Godart 2013; Crane 1999; Holt 2002: Lynes 1949/1980). Whereas the role of organizations in producing new aesthetic tastes has been extensively documented, the role of consumers in creating these tastes is a less theorized area of inquiry. When research engages with this topic (Hebdige 1979; Sandıkcı and Ger 2010; Thornton 1996), it typically explains consumer-driven tastes as the politicized response from social groups that perceive predominant aesthetic standards as highly dissonant from their worldview, socioeconomic status, or both. Though certainly important, these broad explanations tend to miss the micro-interactions and interpersonal negotiations that lead to the development of new aesthetic tastes within specific consumer collectives (Aspers and Godart 2013; Hennion 2007). To help address this oversight, we inquire about how networked consumers actively shape the emergence of new tastes. In particular, we reveal how a set of consumer-led micro-processes progressively contribute to the emergence of what Arsel and Bean (2013) conceptualize as a taste regime, a discursively constructed normative system that orchestrates the aesthetics of a practice