Educational expansion and the recomposition of cultural legitimacy in the US and France

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 16. Education, Habitus, & Cultural Capital

Abstract

This paper argues that part of the apparent transatlantic divergence in cultural stratification theory reflects historical timing as much as national difference. Rather than treating scholarly traditions as fully competing models, it interprets them as observations of cultural change taken at different moments within a shared transformation. These debates are often framed as rival accounts of how culture and inequality relate: either legitimacy remains central to social reproduction, or it has been displaced by more plural and flexible repertoires. Yet this framing risks overstating theoretical opposition by underestimating historical timing. France and the United States exhibit broadly similar long-run changes in highbrow participation, but with an important lag in timing.
The central claim of this paper is that the timing of educational expansion—earlier and more gradual in the United States, later and more abrupt in France—reorganized cohort replacement and altered when traditional highbrow practices lost broad distinctive force.

Empirically, the analysis draws on harmonized repeated cross-sectional surveys tracking cultural participation in France (EPC waves 1973–2018, Ministry of Culture) and the United States (SPPA waves 1982–2022, National Endowment for the Arts). Temporal dynamics are modeled using Age–Period–Cohort Interaction (APC-I) models, which identify inter-cohort deviations and intra-cohort life-course trajectories by conceptualizing cohort as an age-by-period interaction. Classical music concert attendance serves as a flagship marker of institutionalized highbrow legitimacy, and results are extended to a compact set of harmonized practices (reading/literature, museums/heritage, theater/live arts, and movies).

The expected contribution is threefold: (1) to reinterpret highbrow decline as a recomposition of cultural legitimacy rather than straightforward deinstitutionalization; (2) to conceptualize education as an institutional and temporal mechanism shaping cohort replacement and cultural convertibility; and (3) to show how stratification increasingly operates both between domains and within domains as legitimacy is redistributed across cultural forms.

Author

• Stephane Dorin, University of Limoges