Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion in Britain

1. Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion in Britain Mike Savage, (Sociology & CRESC), University of Manchester

2. Researching Cultural capital The concept of cultural capital has been used since the 1960s, especially by educational sociologists, to explain the success of middle class kids in the educational system through their possession of the dispositions and capacities to outperform their peers. Most British sociologists have two very different ‘takes’ on cultural capital 1. ‘Old-school’ stratification sociologists have generally been critical of Bourdieu though they have not systematically measured cultural capital directly • Halsey and educational inequality (parental education taken as surrogate for cultural capital) • Goldthorpe and class inequality (premised on RAT approaches) 2. British cultural sociologists have emphasised (some) theoretical aspects and not his methodological and empirical endeavours • Featherstone, Lash & Urry on post-modernism and the new petty bourgoisie • the almost exclusive use of qualitative case studies (Charlesworth, Skeggs etc) Tony Bennett, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde & I set out to measure cultural capital through emphasising the need to place habitus and cultural capital within the contexts of cultural fields, namelymusic, reading, film, TV, sports, art, leisure, eating out. (Researchers, Yaojun Li, Modesto Gayo-Cal and Dave Wright)

3. What is cultural capital? Bourdieu sees cultural capital as implicated in the reproduction of class privilege. It involves a distance from ‘everyday life’, and some kind of tension between high and low culture, but there are different forms this might take:.. • The ‘Kantian aesthetic’, distance from the necessary • ‘Snob’ culture or ‘the leisured aesthetic’ • The institutionalised ‘canon’ (through familiarity with cultural artefacts legitimised in education curriculum) • The ‘cultural omnivore’ (Petersen, Bryson, Erickson) • ‘national cultural capital’ (Hage) These definitions relates to different understandings of the middle class. Is there a divide between ‘industrialists’ and ‘intellectuals’, or can we see them united in a broader ‘service class’.

4. CCSE research • Project includes 25 focus groups, 60 in depth interviews, and national survey of 1564 respondents, plus ethnic boost of 200. • Survey questions on 8 cultural subfields, tapping taste, participation and knowledge TV – stations watched, programmes (dis)liked, frequency of viewing Film - genres & directors (dis)liked, frequency of attendance Music - genres & artists (dis)liked, attendance at musical event Reading – genres and writers (dis)liked, books read, Visual arts – genres & artists (dis)liked, works possessed, Eating out – kind of venues (dis)liked Embodiment – sport, body modification, clothes, household style • Also questions on economic and social ‘capital’; domestic division of labour; parents’ cultural interests and background; respondents’ social, cultural and political attitudes

5. How do we analyse this data? • Recent cultural sociology increasingly applies orthodox modelling procedures in recent work, seeking to predict specific kinds of cultural outcomes (see examples in Poetics) • The danger is that this uses crude indicators, and the complexity of cultural taste, participation and knowledge is not examined. • We were therefore attracted to Abbott’s (2001) call for the revival of descriptive quantitative approaches (e.g. factor and cluster analysis, social network analysis) over explanatory methods (e.g regression) which rely on problematic assumptions of ‘general linear reality’. • This tallies with Bourdieu (1984) and Peterson’s (1983) call for descriptive quantitative methods as a means of understanding the ‘patterning of culture’

6. Using orthodox modelling approaches…. 1. (Pre?) define variables which indicate ‘high culture’ and see which groups are predisposed to them? Table 1 indicates some of the predictable relationships that can be delineated in this way…..

7. Table 1: Logistic Regression on liking of musical genres

8. Using orthodox modelling approaches…. 1. (Pre?) define variables which indicate ‘high culture’ and see which groups are predisposed to them? Table 1 indicates some of the predictable relationships that can be delineated in this way age effects are the most powerful education effects are more powerful than class effects the middle classes like most genres, ethnic effects are powerful in several cases But, lots of odd results, consider Heavy Metal & self employed, Rock music and employers, ethnic minorities liking classical music, etc: 2. We don’t get an easy sense of the overall ‘patterning of culture’ through such methods. Therefore we are keen to describe the nature of cultural taste more fully so that we can interpret inductively which cultural practices, if any, are relationally demarcated from others…. Which explains why we turned to ‘Geometric Data Analysis’

9. Geometric Data Analysis (GDA) • Aided by Johs Hjellbrekke (Bergen), Brigitte LeRoux, and Henry Rouanet (Paris V). • Adapts a form of principal components analysis to locate responses as coordinates in geometric space according to categorized responses to 165 modalities, (derived from 41 questions) covering taste for, and participation in, music, reading, eating out, sport, • We can then inductively interpret the axes to empirically assess which cultural practices are related and to consider what forces separate practices out. • By superimposing socio-demographic variables on this ‘space of lifestyles’ we can assess how far the cultural patterns revealed appear to socially structured ….We can read the figures as cultural maps

10. Table 3 Contribution by domain, participation and taste for first four principal axes

11. Table . MCA cloud of contributing modalities, axis 1 and 2.

12. The cultural field

13. Table . MCA cloud of individuals: preferences for classical music lit up, axis 1 and 2.

14. Table . MCA cloud of individuals: frequency of opera attendance lit up, axis 1 and 2.

15. Cultural capital/education/ class

16. The cultural field Professional/managerial, well-educated, young Routine jobs, poorly educated, young Professional/managerial, well-educated, older Routine jobs, poorly educated, older

17. So, is there cultural capital in the UK? • There are powerful structural divisions within the cultural field, though these vary between domains. • But, no primary divide between the Kantian (‘intellectual’) and the ‘leisured’ (industrialist’) aesthetic. • The middle classes are increasingly attracted to ‘omnivore’ taste, meaning that the divide between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture is replaced by that between ‘multiply engaged’ and ‘disengaged’. • Age effects are powerful, and neglected. • This is all bounded within a ‘white ethnic’ framing.