What Does Friendship Mean? How Cultural Capital Conditions the Meanings of Social Relationships

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Cultural Capital II

Abstract

Social network theorists have commonly engaged in an implicit assumption that categories of social relationship have the same meaning for all of their respondents. In this article, I challenge this assumption by analyzing how variation in cultural tastes facilitates meaningful differences in individuals’ cultural models of friendship. I draw upon Lizardo’s (2006) theory of highbrow culture’s restricted conversion value to formulate and, running heterogeneous choice models on 2002 General Social Survey data, test two hypotheses regarding cultural tastes’ influence on cultural models of friendship. First, because highbrow cultural forms encourage the formation of strong ties between those with similar tastes, individuals who prefer highbrow cultural forms will be more likely to value signals of intimacy as an important semantic dimension of friendship. Second, because highbrow cultural forms encourage the formation of boundaries between those with dissimilar tastes, individuals who prefer highbrow cultural forms will be more likely to value signals of intelligence as an important semantic dimension of friendship and as a possible basis for exclusion. Preliminary analyses find support for both hypotheses.

Author

• Kyle Puetz, University of Arizona