The Global Omnivore: Identifying Musical Taste Groups in Austria, England, Israel and Serbia

This research offers a unique opportunity to revisit the omnivore hypothesis under a unified method of cross-national analysis. To accomplish this, we interpret omnivourism as a special case of cultural eclecticism (Ollivier, 2008; Ollivier, Gauthier and Truong, 2009). Our methodological approach incorporates the simultaneous analysis of locally produced and globally known musical genres. Its objective is to verify whether cultural omnivourism is a widespread phenomenon, and to determine to what extent any conclusions can be generalised across countries with different social structures and different levels of cultural openness. To truly understand the scope of the omnivourism hypothesis, we argue that it is essential to perform a cross-national comparison to test the hypothesis within a range of social, political and cultural contexts, and a reflection of different historical and cultural repertoires (Lamont, 1992)

Class, Lifestyles and Politics: Homologies of Social Position, Taste and Political Stances

In this chapter we focus on the notion of homology, understood as a systematic correspondence between social structures. We discuss and empirically assess a specific hypothesis forwarded in Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction about a homologous relationship between three structures: a social space, a space of lifestyles and a space of political stances. Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we advance a novel technique for assessing the homology thesis. Focusing on the case of contemporary Norwegian society, we show that the distinct social universes of class, culture and politics exhibit strikingly similar structures. The structure of the social space – with a primary division between high and low volumes of capital, and a secondary chiastic division between cultural and economic – is echoed in both the space of lifestyles and the space of political stances. The chapter not only unveils the persistence of class-structured lifestyles and political attitudes, it also develops methodological tools to move beyond the misguided substantialist fallacy often implicated in assessing the homology thesis. The truly relational way of assessing it, we argue, is to compare rigorously the structures of independently constructed spaces, and not singular variables drawn from the social universes in question

Antipodean fields

The papers collected in this special issue of the Journal of Sociology seek both to develop a sense of the cumulative impact of Bourdieu's work on Australasian ('antipodean') debates, and to get a sense of how these debates might raise questions regarding the portability of Bourdieu's categories. We discuss the distinctive disciplinary orientations of the uptake of Bourdieu's work both here and internationally, and propose some explanations of the ways in which the antipodean uptake has modified its focus and conceptual force. These have to do, first, with the salience of different and more fluid models of the structural variables of class, gender and ethnicity; second, with a questioning of the nation-state as the 'natural' border of cultural fields; and third, with the way Indigeneity, in both Australia and New Zealand, is seen to transform the 'mainstream' culture and thereby to challenge many of the conventional ways of thinking about such things as cultural artefacts, cultural markets, and the 'rules of art'