Social Stratification and Cultural Practice in the United Kingdom

• In Event: 070 - Regular Session. Cultural Capital

Abstract

Many studies of cultural practice have identified omnivorousness as a dominant theme. While most of the earlier studies also linked cultural activities with socio-economic underpinnings, the currently prevailing view is that class plays little role in cultural distinction in contemporary capitalist societies like Britain. An important reason for disagreement about the determinants of cultural distinction is lack of appropriate data containing both parents’ and own cultural practices in addition to class, education and other attributes. In this study we use the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey (2003/5) in the UK that contains unprecedented details in all these aspects. Using Item Response Theory (IRT) models to construct the latent scores for three domains of cultural practice from fifty cultural activities and analysing their association with parental education, cultural practice, the respondent’s mobility trajectory and other socio-demographic attributes including social capital, we find very powerful and highly interwoven effects of socio-cultural transmission in the cultural life of contemporary UK, substantiating some theoretical expectations of Bourdieu’s (1984[1979]) Distinction while at the same time moving beyond the confines of his interpretation of class habitus.

Authors

• Yaojun Li, Manchester University

• Alan Warde, Manchester University

• Michael A. Savage, London School of Economics and Political Science