Social status and cultural consumption

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

Imported on 2024-06-10 13:08

⭐ Important

• & For example, in a relatively early but still often cited study, Herbert Gans (1974) presents a range of research findings in support of the view that ‘highbrow’, ‘lowbrow’ and also versions of ‘middlebrow’ cultural taste and consumption do in fact rather systematically map onto the ‘socio-economic’ stratification of American society. (p. 3)
• & Gans’s work can then be taken as providing one of the leading examples of what we would label as ‘homology’ arguments: that is, arguments to the effect that a close correspondence exists between social and cultural stratification, and one that is created and maintained by certain identifiable processes. Homology arguments, in one version or another, could in fact be regarded as representing the orthodoxy in the field for some twenty years or more after Gans wrote. (p. 3)
• & However, during the period in question, a new, far more ambitious and generally more influential form of the homology argument was elaborated in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (see esp. Bourdieu, 1984). For Bourdieu, the correspondence that prevails between social and cultural stratification is yet more strongly determined than that envisaged by Gans and has also a much larger significance. Social classes display different patterns of cultural taste and consumption – and also of distaste and aversion – as part of their characteristic lifestyles, along with closely related patterns of material consumption as, for example, in food and dress (p. 3)
• & The cultural field, he insists, no less than the economic field, is one in which class competition and conflict are always present. (p. 4)
• & One focus of scepticism was on the extent to which Bourdieu’s analyses could be generalised from the French – or even perhaps from the Parisian – case.4 (p. 4)
• & In the course of earlier debates on mass culture, researchers such as Wilensky (1964) had already produced evidence to show that participation in such culture via TV, newspapers, magazines etc. – was in fact quite extensive across all strata of American societ (p. 5)
• & In this context, new approaches to the understanding of the interrelation of cultural consumption and social stratification were thus encouraged, and homology arguments became challenged by rival arguments of at least two main kinds. (p. 5)
• & The first of these we would label as ‘individualisation’ arguments. Such arguments have a rather close affinity with more general claims of the decay or even ‘death’ of social class that became common in the later twentieth century. Authors such as Beck (1992) or Giddens (1991) maintain that the societies of ‘high’ or ‘late’ modernity are characterised by an accelerating process of the ‘individualisation of social inequality’. In many respects, these authors would accept that structures of inequality display a remarkable stability over time. (p. 5)
• & None the less, they believe, class – and status – have declining influences on social action and, above all, on the formation of lifestyles and of the patterns of consumption, material and cultural, through which they are expressed. In these respects, class no longer provides an adequate (p. 5)
• & ‘context of orientation’ and status-based social milieux ‘lose their lustre’ (Beck, 1992, pp. 88–89). (p. 6)
• & What is then implied is that any homology between social and cultural hierarchies that may have existed in the past – in more ‘traditional’ forms of society – is now in dissolution. No expectation can be maintained that different patterns of cultural consumption will stand in some systematic relationship to structures of social inequality. (p. 6)
• & In Warde’s apt phrase (1997, p. 8), the emphasis shifts dramatically ‘from habitus to freedom’. Indeed, in more extreme individualisation arguments, such as those advanced by Bauman (1988, 2002), consumption at large becomes celebrated as ‘the focus and playground for individual freedom’. (p. 6)
• & However, while individualisation arguments thus call homology arguments directly into question, their influence on sociologists with research interests in the field of cultural consumption would appear, so far at least, to be rather limited. (p. 7)
• & Two reasons for this can be suggested. First, individualisation arguments are concerned with consumption in general, and although clearly intended to apply to its cultural no less than to its material aspects, the former have not received any special attention. Second, individualisation arguments cannot themselves claim any strong research basis. (p. 7)
• & the second main challenge that has been raised to homology arguments is of a quite contrasting kind. This comes in the form of arguments that are specifically concerned with cultural consumption and that are grounded in by now quite extensive social research – that is, what we label as ‘omnivore–univore’ arguments. (p. 7)
• & These developments, in the form of omnivore–univore arguments, derive, like individualisation arguments, from the idea that a close mapping of cultural onto social hierarchies no longer exists. But rather than claiming that cultural consumption is now free of any systematic relationship with social stratification, proponents of omnivore–univore arguments see a new relationship as having emerged. (p. 7)
• & In present-day societies, they would maintain, members of higher social strata, apart perhaps from a very small minority, do not shun popular or lowbrow culture but, as Wilensky observed, they regularly participate in it; and indeed, if anything, do so yet more actively than members of lower strata. (p. 7)
• & However, a significant difference remains in the consumption (p. 7)
• & of high or more ‘distinguished’ cultural forms. (p. 8)
• & The crucial contrast that is created is not then that of ‘snob versus slob’ but rather that of cultural omnivore versus cultural univore (Peterson, 1992, p. 252). (p. 8)
• & It has, for example, been observed (see e.g. Sullivan and Katz-Gerro, 2007; Coulangeon and Lemel, 2007) that two different understandings of cultural omnivorousness are possible. It could be taken to refer either to a general cultural ‘voraciousness’, in the sense of a large appetite for all forms of cultural consumption, or, more specifically, to a tendency towards ‘taste eclecticism’ that finds expression in patterns of cultural consumption that cut across established categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’. (p. 8)
• & Following from this interpretation of omnivorousness, however, it has further been asked whether, insofar as cultural omnivores do display such openness and a consequent disregard for supposed hierarchies of taste, their presence is not largely consistent with individualisation arguments. Omnivore cultural consumption, it has been suggested, may be concerned more with individual self-realisation than with setting down social markers and creating social distinction (see e.g. Wynne and O’Connor, 1998) (p. 9)
• & In other words, omnivores may be seen as embracing a new aesthetic which, even if more inclusive, democratic and relativist than that which earlier prevailed, can still serve to express cultural and social superiority, and especially when set against the far more restricted cultural tastes and consumption of univores (cf. L ́ opez-Sintas and Garcı ́a- ́ Alvarez, 2002). (p. 9)
• & Omnivore–univore arguments can then be seen as posing a challenge to homology and to individualisation arguments alike. On the one hand, the idea of a simple matching of social and cultural hierarchies is called into question, as in turn are Bourdieusian claims that cultural taste and consumption closely reflect ‘class conditions’, via (p. 9)
• & the mediation of distinctive and exigent forms of habitus, and that cultural exclusiveness represents the main form of ‘symbolic violence’ through which cultural reproduction promotes social reproduction. On the other hand, while over-socialised conceptions of the actor are thus rejected, so too are ideas of cultural consumption as now essentially reflecting no more than the highly personalised choices and selfidentity projects that individuals pursue, and in a way that is free of constraints imposed by, and of motivations grounded in, the positions that they hold within structures of social inequality. (p. 10)
• & The source of these inadequacies, we would argue, is a failure to maintain the (p. 10)
• & distinction, classically proposed by Max Weber (1968, vol. 2; pp. 926939 esp.), between class and status as two qualitatively different forms of social stratification, the empirical connection between which may vary widely by time and place. In all the papers in the present volume the class/status distinction is explicitly recognised and, as will be seen, plays an important part in the data analyses, and in the interpretations of these analyses, that are presented. (p. 11)
• & Again following Weber, we would regard a status order as a structure of relations of perceived, and in some degree accepted, social superiority, equality and inferiority among individuals that reflects not their personal qualities but rather the ‘social honour’ attaching to certain of their positional or perhaps purely ascribed attributes (e.g. ‘birth’ or ethnicity). (p. 11)
• & Weber refers to as ‘commensality’ and ‘connubium’ – who eats with whom, who sleeps with whom; and further in lifestyles that are seen as appropriate to different status levels. (p. 12)
• & On the one hand, and most notably in the American case, this failure reflects a loss of Weberian refinement, already apparent in the 1950s and 1960s, as leading figures in the field of social stratification sought in effect to reinterpret class in terms of status – perhaps on account of anti-Marxist sentiment. (p. 12)
• & American authors earlier referred to, such as Gans and Peterson, in advancing homology and omnivore–univore arguments respectively, tend to use the terms ‘class’ and ‘status’ as more or less synonymous (p. 12)
• & or to merge them in the idea of ‘socioeconomic’ status. (p. 13)
• & On the other hand, and chiefly in the European case, the distinction between class and status has been elided as a result of efforts not to reduce class to status but rather to reduce status to class – a consequence, in part and at least initially, of the revival of academic Marxism in the 1970s. (p. 13)
• & On Bourdieu’s own account, his major work starts out from ‘an endeavour to rethink Max Weber’s opposition’ between class and status (1984, p. xii), and indeed to transcend it. (p. 13)
• & Bourdieu would accept that status is expressed by differential association and above all by style of life. But he then rejects Weber’s view of the class positions of individuals or groups as being analytically and empirically separable from their status positions. Rather, status has to be seen as the symbolic aspect of the class structure. (p. 13)
• & That is, the expectation that the stratification of such consumption will be primarily on the basis of status rather than of class – and that these two forms of stratification will not, typically, be so closely related to each other as to make it impossible to test whether or not this expectation is borne out.11 (p. 14)
• & At the same time, we recognise income and education as other potentially important stratifying forces in regard to cultural consumption that are related to, yet distinct from, class and status. Thus, income may be taken as a good indicator of more immediately available economic resources, and education of cultural resources – although also, perhaps, of individual psychological attributes, such as ‘information processing capacity’ (cf. Moles, 1971; Berlyne, 1974) that can independently exert an influence on cultural consumption. In our empirical analyses, therefore, separate measures of income and education are in general included, in addition to those of class and status. (p. 15)

⛔ Weaknesses and caveats

• ! internal consistency or ‘semantic unity’ of these lifestyles, and likewise their sharp demarcation across classes, is the product and expression of the habitus of individual class members: that is, of the socially constituted ‘system of dispositions’ that (p. 3)
• ! they acquire in early life, that exerts a quite pervasive influence on their perceptions and practices, and that reflects the possibilities and exigencies that are created by particular ‘class conditions’.3 (p. 4)