Why cultural attitudes and lifestyles remains so stratified and differentiated in the context of cultural globalisation?

A well-established tradition of research in the social sciences insists on the symbolic dimensions of social stratification and social classes’ relations in contemporary societies that are not reducible to their relations in the sphere of production. Fist and foremost, many authors, from Halbwachs and Veblen to Bourdieu, have intended to challenge the predominantly “production-based” conception of social classes, inherited form the Marxian tradition, insisting on what could be designed as a “consumption-based” theory of social classes, in which people tend to differentiate themselves from each other on the base of their patterns of consumption expenditures, lifestyles, tastes and habits in such diverse areas than clothing, food or cultural activities, but also on the base of their moral or political values, and even their religious or spiritual beliefs. Theses two conceptions – production-based and lifestyles-based theories of social classes – are in fact far form being mutually exclusive, to the extent that the social stratification of lifestyles often extends end expresses the social cleavages that originate in the sphere of production. But the lifestyles-based theory nonetheless suggests the relative autonomy of people lifestyles as to the purely economic factors. In particular, in the sphere of consumption, the behaviours patterns are merely considered as an exclusive matter of price/earning optimization, but entail a cultural and social framing of people choices and preferences. In this paper, we will try to evaluate the relevance of this “consumption-based” or “lifestylesbased” orientation and, perhaps more generally, the relevance of all the class-schemes that focus on the symbolic dimensions of social interactions, be they religious, spiritual or cultural, in a broader sense

Reading and Television-Watching: Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

What are the cultural effects of generalized access to upper secondary education, which became effective in France in the 1980s and 1990s? Data on reading and television-watching suggest that reading is in decline, a decline concentrated among high school and higher education graduates, and that television occupies a greater place in the lives of generations who attended school in the 1980s and 1990s than in those of the preceding generations. These two developments result from a complex combination of the “net” and structural effects of mass education. Mass education has slowed the decline of reading and mitigated the increase in television-watching: the proportional weight in the population at large of categories most likely to read heavily and least likely to be intensive TV watchers – i.e., high school and higher education graduates– has grown, as reading and television-watching levels among the highest educated have gradually, over the generations, come to resemble those for the less educated. This combined development may be interpreted in two ways that are not necessarily mutually exclusive: 1) both the decline of reading and the increase in television-watching reflect a change in the cultural function of education, a change in turn due to changes in teaching methods and curriculum content reinforced by the sharp rise in influence of the mass media; but 2) these changes also reflect morphological changes in the world of upper secondary and higher education students: with the generalizing of access to the baccalauréat [French high school-leaving degree], the proportion of “inheritors” has considerably fallen. The changes can therefore be read persuasively both as a sign that schooling in France has lost some of its cultural authority and that cultural gaps within the generations who experienced mass education have narrowed

Testing the “Omnivore/Univore” Hypothesis in a Cross-National Perspective. On the Social Meaning of Ecletism in Musical Tastes:Paper presented at the Summer meeting of the ISA RC28, UCLA – 19/08/2005

Are musical tastes still strongly and universally correlated with social class, as asserted by Pierre Bourdieu in a suggestive formulation (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 158) . A lot of evidences, based on the sociological literature on tastes and cultural consumption, support the robustness of this correlation, while less straightforwardly defined than stated by Bourdieu. Indeed, this correlation appears to be slightly defined as a correspondence between social stratification and cultural legitimacy scale (i.e. highbrow arts and culture for the upper middle classes vs. lowbrow arts and culture for the lower classes. see Gans, 1974; Levine, 1988), and it tends to be more adequately described as a matter of scope of tastes and cultural habits, as stated by Richard Peterson, basically opposing the quite ‘omnivorous’ upper-middle classes, listening as much higbrow music as middlebrow or lowbrow music, to the more ‘univorous’ popular classes, narrowly restricted to a limited number of lowbrow musical genres (Peterson & Simkus, 1992; Peterson &Kern, 1996) (...)

Cultural and Sports Participation in France: Choices, Diversity, and Accumulation

The French 2003 survey of household living conditions includes a cultural and sports participation module that covers radio and television consumption, reading, cultural outings, amateur activities, and sports, but also hunting and fishing. The social differentiation of attitudes to recreational activities is primarily determined by an accumulation criterion, which categorises individuals on the basis of the number and frequency of the activities in which they engage. Most activities do not seem mutually exclusive. People are all the more likely to engage in one if they already engage in another. An individuals ranking on the activity-accumulation scale seems more correlated with educational attainment than with income level. Differences in attitudes do not appear solely determined by the accumulation criterion. There is a contrast between persons who are not significantly engaged and two profiles of persons substantially more involved: individuals participating chiefly in sports activities, and individuals participating mainly in cultural activities.Cultural Consumption, Social Stratification, Leisure, Time Use

L’équipement automobile, entre contrainte et distinction sociale

Emblématique de la société de consommation et de production de masse, l'automobile connaît en France une diffusion qui, tant du point de vue de l'accès à la motorisation que de la distribution des différentes catégories de véhicules (marque, modèle, puissance, ancienneté et statut d'acquisition), fait apparaître des différences importantes entre les groupes sociaux. Entre ces derniers s'insinuent de nouveaux types de clivages (multi-motorisation, progression de la place des marques étrangères, notamment). L'analyse conjointe des habitudes de déplacements et des caractéristiques d'équipement automobile des ménages motorisés en 2008 met en évidence l'articulation d'effets propres aux contraintes de mobilité et aux habitudes de déplacement, qui n'entament pas toutefois la robustesse des écarts entre groupes sociaux. Le statut d'acquisition des véhicules apparaît comme un marqueur social soumis à un cycle de diffusion et de banalisation que révèle l'accès socialement différencié au marché du neuf et de l'occasion. Il se combine au type de véhicule. Les voitures allemandes, en particulier les plus puissantes, apparaissent ainsi comme un marqueur spécifique de l'appartenance aux classes supérieures, en particulier chez les indépendants. Ces écarts soulignent les éléments de compétition statutaire et symbolique qui continuent d'entourer l'acquisition et les usages de l'automobile

Le rendez-vous manqué du savant, du populaire et des Distinction Studies

Le Savant et le Populaire est à peu de choses près contemporain de l’essor, à l’orée des années 1990, d’un vaste ensemble de recherches, en grande partie initiées outre-Atlantique, fondées sur la mise à l’épreuve empirique des propositions théoriques de Bourdieu, et plus précisément des thèses exposées dans La Distinction. Cette mise à l’épreuve, qui s’est appuyée le plus souvent sur le recours aux outils de l’analyse statistique de données d’enquête, se donnait pour ambition de soumettre la ..

La vie entre quatre murs : travail et sociabilité en temps de confinement

Jusqu’à quel point le Covid-19 perturbe-t-il notre vie de tous les jours ? Comment la population française vit-elle le confinement ? Dans quelles mesures les inégalités sociales sont-elles exacerbées et la cohésion sociale menacée ? Le projet CoCo apporte des éléments de réponse à ces questions d’actualité en compa­rant les conditions de vie en France avant et après le blocage. Il s’agit du troisième rapport préliminaire de la série que nous publierons dans les prochaines semaines. Nous analysons ici la façon dont la société française a fait face aux 6 premières semaines de confinement, notamment en ce qui concerne les changements de conditions de travail et de vie sociale. Nous continuons à surveiller les éléments de santé et de bien-être autodéclarés comme dans les 2 précédents numéros

Aliénation

Le concept d’aliénation, issu du vocabulaire du Droit, où il se réfère au transfert de propriété, a été initialement importé en sociologie par Karl Marx pour caractériser la condition des travailleurs en régime capitaliste, séparés du produit de leur travail et privés de la maîtrise de son organisation. Il désigne par extension l’ensemble des situations de dépossession de l’individu au profit d’entités extérieures et de perte de maîtrise des finalités de son activité. De ce fait, l’aliénation..