The Conversion of Cultural Tastes into Social Network Ties

• In Event: 377 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture 3: Art, Taste, and Socio-Economics

Abstract

In recent years, sociologists have focused less on cultural tastes as “effects” of social structure and more on their causal efficacy in the creation and maintenance of social ties. We argue, however, that the traditional cultural measures used by these studies result in overly simplified—and potentially spurious—conclusions. In this analysis, we combine insights from literature on cultural classification, capital conversion, and contextualized meaning to demonstrate that social network evolution occurs within a multileveled cultural ecology. Within this ecology, both “exogenous” (i.e. society-wide) and “endogenous” (i.e. milieu-specific) features of tastes are socially consequential—but not equally so for all domains of taste and all points in time, and not exclusively via the mechanism of “dyadic capital conversion” on which prior work has focused. These findings, based upon a unique, user-generated data instrument and recent advances in longitudinal network modeling, show that reliance on conventional cultural and network data can result in a misdiagnosis of the causal mechanisms at work and an under-appreciation of the diverse ways in which tastes actually influence social ties.

Authors

• Kevin Lewis, University of California-San Diego

• Jason Kaufman, Kaufman College