Comments on Chan and Flemmen et al's conceptualization of class, status and cultural consumption.

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

Imported on 2024-06-10 13:14

⭐ Important

• & Chan’s operationalizations do justice to the complex, dynamic, and multi-faceted character of cultural repertoires. For instance, Chan argues that only a small portion of the culturally and economically advantaged now engages with conventional ‘highbrow’ culture, but he continues to take their appreciation as the sole indicator of a repertoire of distinction. (p. 893)
• & Warde and Gayo-Cal (2009) and more recently Hanquinet (2017) used such a measure to define taste boundaries, and they demonstrated how different orders of distinction can coexist. (p. 893)
• & Both the dataset and the analytical method employed in the article of Flemmen, Jarness and Rosenlund are successful in revealing this variation in cultural profiles. They aim to challenge Chan and Goldthorpe’s (2007) interpretation of Bourdieu’s perspective as being one-dimensional by empirically showing how his approach could be put to use to distinguish stratification on multiple levels. In other words, Flemmen et al. argue that the same toolbox Bourdieu used to show the homology between social space and space of lifestyles can be utilized to show the points of mismatch between the two, revealing distinctions between Weberian Status1 and Class. (p. 894)
• & I share the reservations of Flemmen et al. in regards to measuring the distribution of social honour, namely Status, by classifying occupational groups on the basis of their friendship patterns and artificially ranking them, as Chan and Goldthorpe do. I agree that multi-layered processes, many material, are at play when it comes to the formation and maintenance of social networks.To be more precise, differential association is influenced far too much by economic factors to measure Status, which is supposed to indicate a form of stratification outside of the material realm. (p. 894)
• & Flemmen et al. criticize Chan and Goldthorpe for lumping status and non-status forms of inequality together in the pursuit of creating a scale for the distribution of honour in a given society. They suggest that ‘the economic and symbolic...can be analytically distinguished and empirically modelled’ (p. 19), mapping the distributions of capital and lifestyle indicators separately. Their analysis reveals different clusters; however, the extent to which social prestige is yielded by social profiles, or the directionality of the hierarchy amongst them, is only meaningful as long as the space of lifestyle is parallel to the social space. (p. 895)
• & In other words, we consider ‘the traditional and established’ cluster to have higher Status than the ‘illegitimates’ not because the classical music they like is more valuable intrinsically but rather because they correspond to respective positions in the hierarchically ordered social space. What Flemmen et al. define as autonomy then potentially generates problems for understanding and explaining the power dynamics between different lifestyle groups. (p. 895)
• & Flemmen et al. consider this misalignment as a sign of autonomy (p. 895)
• & In an earlier debate on the concept of cultural capital, Goldthorpe (2007a) accused those who sought to refine it with ‘domesticating’ Bourdieu’s theory. According to him, the challenge lies in ‘how much of the theoretical baggage that comes with the concept in its original version these sociologists would wish to retain and how much to jettison’ (Goldthorpe, 2007b, p. 5). (p. 895)