The British Social Space and Symbolic Space in the Early 21st Century
This paper constructs a model of the UK social space and symbolic space in the early twentyfirst century and maps their degree of homology. It does so on the basis of a secondary
analysis of the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey, carried out in 2003, the
published results of which purported to be a test, update and even partial rejection of Pierre
Bourdieu’s foundational work class and culture insofar as the ‘capital composition’ principle
was deemed largely irrelevant and engagement and (limited) omnivorousness the new modes
of cultural legitimacy. Curious to see how much this was to do with certain methodological
and conceptual decisions rather than actual social changes, I proceeded in a manner more
akin to Bourdieu’s own, i.e. constructing a map of the social space, basing the symbolic space
on cultural knowledge and taste while steering clear of problematic genre categories and
drawing in extra data and logic to rectify the limits of the survey. The outcome is somewhat
different: omnivorousness drops out the picture, and the structure of the symbolic space and
its homology with the social space appear to follow the same three principles discovered by
Bourdieu in France decades ago, that is, total volume of capital, trajectory (in the form of
age) and capital composition.
When I began to work in sociology, one of the favourite words of some ‘sociologists’
was ‘mutation’. ‘Everything is undergoing mutation...’. Even today they say men are
changing because women are changing, etc. Everything changes constantly. It seemed
to me, quite early on, that there’s stability, there’s inertia. So I tried, using statistical
techniques, to document this inertia, to uncover the constants that make science
possible.
Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology is a Combat Sport
Introduction: Three Responses to ‘Bourdieu’s Suicide’1
Distinction, that weighty tome in which Pierre Bourdieu (1984) plotted the fundamental
structures of cultural difference and domination in 1960s and 1970s France and their
homology with the class structure, must surely be one of the most replicated, reappraised and
(supposedly) rectified or rejected research monographs in sociology. Notwithstanding those
who once boldly claimed the disappearance of any link between social position and modus
vivendi, now largely discredited by subsequent research, two camps seem to have emerged
amongst the book’s latter-day assessors. First of all there is the famous strand of work,
originating in the US and kick-started by Richard Peterson (1992, 1997), which touts the
evolution of symbolic domination. Dominant, legitimate culture, and therefore cultural
1
See Wacquant (2000).
capital, is no longer premised on exclusive, obscure cultural forms or knowledge as opposed
to popular culture, the claim goes, but is a question of engagement, breadth, variety and
openness – in other words, cultural ‘omnivorousness’ and cosmopolitanism – as opposed to
disengagement or narrow interests. From its earliest airings to the most sophisticated later
investigations, however, this thesis has rested on methods and variables (ultimately rooted in
a particular vision of the social world) which render it artefactual or, at the very least, which
diverge so far from Bourdieu’s own that no sure refutation of revision can be sensibly
claimed. The use of extraordinarily broad ‘genre’ categories of the kind more or less absent in
Distinction, for example, fail to tap internal variation and different modes of consumption
premised on the real nub of cultural capital, and cultural domination, in Western societies:
greater or lesser symbolic mastery (Holt, 1997; Atkinson, 2011).2 Moreover, in most
instances – especially in Chan and Goldthorpe’s (e.g. 2007) research – defenders of the
omnivore thesis mobilise measures of ‘class’ rooted in totally different traditions. Being
premised on differences in life chances rather than symbolic power, and taking the form of
unidimensional and economistic hierarchies rather than a multidimensional social space, they
roll together class fractions (in the ‘service class’) with vastly different balances of economic
and cultural capital – for example, higher-level business executives and intellectuals – and
therefore different orientations toward symbolic goods (i.e. ascetic versus hedonistic
orientations). It thus comes as little surprise that the consumption of the ‘service class’ is
internally variegated, or that when education, a key proxy of cultural capital and class
fractions, is factored in it makes a substantial difference. This is exacerbated by reliance, in
many cases, on linear statistical techniques of the kind Bourdieu avoided, rather than the
multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) capable of revealing the hidden relational structures
of correspondence he favoured (Wuggenig, 2008). At the very least it can hardly be fair to
reject or question the broad tenets of Distinction without a like-for-like comparison.
There is, however, a second strand of post-Distinction work, Scandinavian in
provenance and still rather less famous than the omnivore thesis, though perhaps now rising
in prominence – at least in Europe. Represented by Prieur et al (2008) and Rosenlund (2011),
though with others increasingly doing similar work (see Prieur and Savage, 2013), the
orientation is somewhat different. Most of Bourdieu’s meta-theoretical and methodological
insights – relationalism, MCA as an appropriate statistical method and so on – are taken on
2
I have found only very occasional uses by Bourdieu (1984) himself of genre categories, notably for books and
in reference to ‘classical music’, but they are absent from his constructions of the lifestyle spaces for the
different classes. Perhaps we can forgive him the odd use of genre categories because he was the pioneer; in any
case, now we know the problems there is no excuse.
board and, consequently, the strategy has been to construct the space of social positions
within the nation under examination first, to map out the space of lifestyle practices
subsequently and then to explore the degree of homology between the two. Practices have
certainly changed with the times, but omnivorousness is nowhere to be seen, while the capital
composition principle is found alive and well.
Where there are two poles there is usually a ‘middle way’ of some kind, and the postDistinction crowd is no different. In this case the clearest representatives are the team behind
the 2003 Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) survey in the UK, the results of
which were mostly reported in Culture, Class, Distinction (Bennett et al, 2009). Given the
high profile of most of the team members and the laudatory comments on the back cover
from renowned international scholars, there can be little doubt of the symbolic power wielded
by this intervention in the social scientific field, and indeed, one team member has gone on to
explore the ideas broached there further in the much-anticipated and widely-trumpeted ‘Great
British Class Survey’ run by the BBC (Savage et al, 2013). So what exactly makes it a middle
way? Well, on the one hand, it deploys MCA to construct a space of lifestyles – and indeed
separate spaces of ‘stylistic possibles’, as Bourdieu called them: music, television, visual arts
and so on. However, while Bourdieu identified three axes – the rare versus the common
corresponding with total volume of economic, cultural and social capital; asceticism versus
hedonism homologous with capital composition (primarily cultural versus primarily
economic); plus the effect of trajectory – the British-based team revealed four. The first
distinguished those who are engaged in all sorts of culture, both ‘high’ and popular forms,
versus those who are disengaged – so omnivores of a kind versus the rest – and corresponds
with their measure of class. Secondly, a taste for ‘traditional’ forms of culture versus more
commercial forms corresponds with age, then an axis distinguishing ‘inwardly-oriented’
practices versus ‘outwardly oriented’ practice corresponds with gender, and finally a fourth
axis differentiates ‘voracious’ consumers of culture with inherited cultural capital (measured
by father’s education) from more moderate ones without. Moreover, by projecting a slightly
disaggregated version of the Goldthorpe-inspired National Statistics Socio-Economic
Classification (NS-SEC) – usually just referred to as ‘class’ by the team – into the lifestyle
space, a slightly different line-up made a case for the migration of lower managers from the
service class to the intermediate class on account of their lifestyle practices (Le Roux et al,
2008). On this broad basis the CCSE project has been explicitly aligned with the
Scandinavian studies, downplaying any real differences in the interest of presenting a ‘united
front’ of sorts (Prieur and Savage, 2011, 2013).
On the other hand, however, there are methodological differences (one might say
shortcomings) which nudge the CCSE study further toward the pro-omnivore research. First,
and despite an underlying commitment to a ‘capitals, assets and resources’ approach drawing
from Bourdieu’s own vision (Savage et al, 2005), the authors chose to dispense with the
initial task of constructing the social space of class positions, the map of maximal similarity
and dissimilarity in capital possession, under the misconception that the notion excludes
gender and ethnicity from the equation. Relying instead on the NS-SEC, with its
incompatible logic of employment contracts as the source of life chances, is bound to cause
difficulties, not least the inability to explore the homologies between class fractions and the
capital composition principle. Secondly, their model of the lifestyle space was heavily shaped
by deployment of various genre categories – of TV, films, music and so on – obscuring
internal variation and modes of consumption. At the same time, the researchers did not make
much use, as Bourdieu did, of measures of cultural knowledge in constructing the symbolic
space – how many and which composers, artists, writers etc. they know – even though they
had the variables available. Nor did they mobilise measures capable of detecting the more
hedonistic, opulent lifestyle identified by Bourdieu among the economically rich (e.g. boat
ownership, holiday preferences, car value and so on), a move which may well have brought
out the capital composition principle more strongly, but this time because the questions
simply were not asked. Finally, and as a corollary of proceeding minus social space, Bennett
et al were content to work with just one model of the overall lifestyle space, whereas
Bourdieu worked with separate analyses of within-class differences in order to neutralise the
effect of volume of capital and foreground the capital composition principle.
We are left asking a rather obvious question: would the conclusion have been any
different if Bennett et al had done things differently? If the above limitations were
circumvented by following different principles and making different methodological choices,
more in tune with the Scandinavian studies (and Bourdieu himself of course), what would be
the outcome? Happily, since the CCSE data is available to (re-)use, we do not have to sit and
ponder hypothetical ‘what ifs’ but can generate answers ourselves. This paper, then, presents
a highly-condensed synopsis – fuller analysis, results and interpretation are ongoing – of my
own effort to do just this. It proceeds in two steps. First, it undertakes the necessary
preliminary task of constructing the UK social space in the 21st Century, deriving from it a set
of categories that can be used as adequate proxy measures in analysis. After that it goes on to
reanalyse the CCSE data in order to construct a space of lifestyles before closing with a
discussion of the ramifications of its findings.
Construction of the British Social Space
The usual method of constructing social spaces in Bourdieu-inspired research (though
whether it is what Bourdieu did is a different question) is to conduct an MCA on survey data
charting capital possession and map the place of existing occupational categories within the
resulting model. However, since the extant occupational categories in the UK are those of the
NS-SEC, which I have already criticised, we need to go a little bit further than that. Basically,
we need to start with the most differentiated measure of occupation possible and rebuild new
aggregate categories on the basis of possession of economic, cultural and social capital, since
these are the main sources of power and recognition within Western capitalist societies (cf.
Hansen et al, 2008). In Britain the most differentiated measure is the Standard Occupational
Classification (SOC) codes, with over 350 categories running from ‘senior officials’ and
‘chief executives’ to ‘car park attendants’ and ‘shelf fillers’. Working with a variable with
such a copious amount of categories rules out the possibility of using an MCA on a single
dataset as a viable guide for recombination, especially in a dataset with as low a sample size
as the CCSE one. Instead, the categories were constructed via systematic exploration of
multiple tables of measures of capital by SOC code across several large government data sets.
Firstly, distribution of economic capital was examined by exploring the mean net
income of the unit level occupations, controlling for remuneration rhythms, in the April-June
sweep of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for 2011, supplemented by comparison with the
equivalent datasets for 2010 and 2009 to neutralise anomalies.3 Even in a survey with a
sample size as large as the LFS, however, the number of SOC code categories meant a few
codes yielded inadequate income data and decisions rested more on other criteria. Secondly,
the distribution of cultural capital, in the form of highest educational qualifications possessed,
was investigated at the unit level. Finally, the construction of the social space also took into
account (as Bourdieu himself did), on the one hand, ‘occupational effects’, or differences in
industry, work conditions, career structures etc. conditioning stability of capital and trajectory
– thereby incorporating that which the NS-SEC does capture, so as to replace rather than
merely complement it, as well as Oesch’s (2011) recent call for a focus on homogeneity of
work cultures – and, on the other hand, ‘field effects’ in Bourdieu’s sense, that is, implication
in struggles over different species of the core capitals in different fields (literary versus
scientific cultural capital; asset-based versus disposable income-based economic capital, etc).
3
Net income, accounting for the tax regime, allows a more precise approximation of conditions of existence
than gross income.
The resultant categories were then, in an exercise of testing ‘construct validity’, calibrated
against multiple further, rather more robust, measures of economic, cultural and social
capital, occupational effects and trajectory drawn from a variety of available surveys – the
Wealth and Assets Survey 2008, the British Cohort Study 2009, the General Household
Survey 1991 and the CCSE data – in some cases resulting in re-exploration and repositioning
of unit categories (some of these are presented in Tables 1 and 2). The construction of the
classes and class fractions and the mapping of their relative positions and dispersion are
therefore informed by a considerable labour of analysis, though it should be stressed that it
remains a conceptual model premised on a series of theoretical decisions. Ultimately, the
fundamental structure of the UK social space in the 21st Century was deemed to resemble that
of 1960s-70s France, as well as 1990s Norway (Rosenlund, 2011), contemporary Denmark
(Prieur et al, 2008) and doubtless many other Western capitalist societies. That is to say, the
primary axis of differentiation is total volume of capital, opposing a dominant class to a
dominated one, with an intermediate class in between, as well as their internal class fractions
(in black in Figure 1; analytical boundaries are indicated by the dashed lines), while the
second axis pulls class fractions apart horizontally according to whether the composition of
their capital is primarily cultural or economic in nature (indicators of which are in grey in
Figure 1).4 In this regard the social space is also highly gendered insofar as the culturalcapital rich left hand side is disproportionately female and the right side male-dominated.
[Tables 1 and 2]
[Fig 1 here]
Construction of the British Space of Lifestyles
With the social space constructed the next step is to build a model of the symbolic space, i.e.
the maximal space of cultural difference and domination, and map the degree of homology
between the two topologies. For this we can turn to the CCSE survey data. In order to rectify
the procedural problems of the original research already mentioned, variables were selected
for this analysis which better reflect differences in cultural knowledge, taste and practice.
Specifically, those tricky genre questions have been banished, while degree of visitation of
different cultural institutions or events (galleries, pubs, museums, etc) was retained. Added in
were questions tapping knowledge of and interest in selected film directors, books, musical
4
Much more detail on the capital profiles of class fractions, the evolution of the social space and the stability of
capital is presented elsewhere (Atkinson, forthcoming).
works, artists and artistic movements and styles. True enough, even these can be subject to
multiple readings and modes of consumption, but they are far better at detecting symbolic
mastery than giant genre classifications. Indeed, some cultural producers and products asked
about were so obscure, with so few people having heard of them, that they had to be excluded
from the MCA, even if the distribution of awareness by class and class fraction, revealing the
link with cultural capital possession, is still highly informative (Table 3). All in all 34
questions were included, generating 168 active categories, or ‘modalities’.5 Several indicators
of social position, including the categories of the social space but also educational level,
household income, age, ethnicity and gender, were included as supplementary variables, that
is to say, they did not contribute to the construction of the symbolic space but were instead
projected into it as a means of indicating homologies. Unfortunately the relatively small
sample size means that some class fractions – the public sector executives and engineers in
particular – have low numbers and so should be treated with caution in the interpretation of
their positions.
[Table 3 here]
The model distinguished three principal axes of the symbolic space which together
explain 93 percent of the total variation – a fairly high proportion compared to other MCA
models. The first, primary axis accounts for a considerable 73 percent of this and
distinguishes those with greater knowledge of cultural producers and works and greater
attendance at cultural institutions from those with low knowledge and attendance. On
inspection of the modalities contributing to the construction of the axis, moreover, it is clear
that the producers, works and practices that make the most difference are hardly the all-andsundry that we might expect were the omnivore thesis valid, but those specifically associated
with consecrated, legitimate culture: Ingmar Bergman, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert,
Vivaldi, Mahler, theatre, galleries, all visual artists and so on. Indicators of newer and more
‘popular’ cultural forms on the other hand – knowledge of and taste for Spielberg, Hitchcock,
Britney Spears, Eminem, rock concerts etc – fail to contribute significantly and cluster more
toward the middle of the axis (Figure 2). As it stands, then, we appear to have not so much an
engagement versus disengagement axis, as for Bennett et al (2009) and Le Roux et al (2008),
A ‘specific’ MCA was conducted, which essentially just means that certain modalities are excluded from the
model, in this case all the ‘don’t knows’, refusals to answer and modalities with fewer than five percent of
respondents.
5
but a legitimate culture versus non-legitimate culture axis. In order to specify the latter a bit
more and avoid a purely negative characterisation, however, favourite sports to watch,
newspapers read and descriptions of the idea home were projected into the model as
supplementary variables (Figure 3).6 Legitimate culture can thus be seen to be homologous
with tastes for an ‘imaginative’ or ‘distinctive’ home and broadsheet newspapers while nonlegitimate culture corresponds with desire for a ‘clean and tidy’ home, traditional ‘pub sports’
such as snooker and darts, combative pursuits such as wrestling or boxing and celebrity-filled
and sensationalist ‘redtops’ (Sun, Star, Mirror etc.), as well as the active modality of
watching TV for over 5 hours a day. In the middle are a range of sports, most notably football
(soccer) and swimming, plus popular non-redtop ‘middlebrow’ tabloids (The Daily Mail, the
Express, etc.). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, when measures of social position are
projected into the model it can be seen that this axis is largely homologous with total volume
of capital, opposing the dominant and dominated, though with a bias toward possession of
cultural capital no doubt because measures of the more hedonistic dominant lifestyle are
absent (Figures 4 and 5). Hence intellectuals, cultural producers and even teachers are pulled
further up the axis, into the zone of legitimate culture, vis-à-vis business executives.
[Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5 here]
The second axis, which accounts for 14 percent of the variance, opposes newer forms
of both legitimate and commercialised culture (Eminem, Britney Spears, Harry Potter, Tracey
Emin) and certain practices (pub or rock gig-going) from more ‘traditional’ forms of culture
(cricket, golf, ‘traditional’ homes etc). This maps fairly neatly onto age, and is thus evidently
the same new/youth culture versus established culture axis unearthed by Bennett et al (2009),
Le Roux et al (2008) and Savage et al (2013) – or rather an avant-garde versus rear-guard
axis, as Bourdieu frequently identified in most fields of struggle (and indeed within classes).7
Perhaps more interesting, especially when compared against the first axis, is the third axis,
6
They were left out of the active model because they have too many categories, especially compared to the
other variables, and recodings (such as the rather arbitrary ones of Bennett et al, 2008: 273) dulled
distinguishing power too much.
7
The axis is heavily shaped by tastes for music, which contribute by far the largest to the explained variance,
and there is a danger the model is a bit unbalanced. Faced with the choice of banishing tastes in music from the
analysis, and thus reducing the range of stylistic possibles constituting the symbolic space, or having a slightly
unsteady (but still informative) model, I opted for the latter course. Interestingly, if the age range of the sample
is narrowed, as recommended by Rosenlund (2011) for example, the second and third axes swap positions.
However, since the lifestyle space is supposed to be a relatively autonomous, if highly homologous, space of
general cultural difference, struggle and domination within a social universe, taking account of time, then it
makes sense to keep the broader age range in.
which covers 6 percent of the variance. The latter distinguishes, on the one hand, both (i)
those with knowledge of and interest in especially obscure and consecrated cultural goods,
producers and practices (Bergman, Maya Angelou, Flaubert, Andy Warhol, theatre, galleries,
little TV watching etc.) and (ii) those with especially poor knowledge of cultural goods and
producers from, on the other hand, everybody else (Figures 6 and 7). This is, in other words,
an ‘extreme’ versus ‘middling’ possession of cultural capital axis, and, as is usually the case
for this kind of finding, takes a horseshoe shape (aka the well-known ‘Guttman effect’).8
Unsurprisingly the most important explicative supplementary variable is education, which
tracks much of the horseshoe fairly closely (Figure 8). Ethnicity also seems to follow the
curve, with black Britons and those from the Indian subcontinent possessing ‘low’ knowledge
while white Britons and ‘white others’ (Europeans, Americans etc.) are at the knowledgeable
end. This at first suggested an internationalist/cosmopolitan axis associated with ethnicity
and, in turn, the structures of the world-system, but when all ethnic minorities (who do not
number that highly in the sample anyway) were removed from the model the pattern was
unchanged, confirming the original extreme-versus-middling cultural capital interpretation. In
fact, if the patterning of social space positions is examined closely, and rotated in the mind’s
eye about 45 degrees anticlockwise, the plane of axes one and three can be taken as
indication of the capital composition principle, albeit in terms of distinguishing the cultural
fractions of the dominant class and identifying economic fractions purely in negative terms as
less keen on that which is rare because it requires symbolic mastery (rather than money).
[Figures 6, 7 and 8]
Since the analysis so far is somewhat weighted toward distinguishing the lifestyle of
those rich or poor in cultural capital, but less so those rich or poor in economic capital – for
the simple reasons that the CCSE data is, as we know, fairly limited on this front – we have
to turn elsewhere to rectify the imbalance. Specifically, we can explore the UK government’s
Wealth and Assets Survey for 2006-8, which yields information on the average value of
household goods (furniture, electric goods, etc.), average value of collectibles and valuables
(antiques and artworks), and rate of possession and average value of vehicles and
personalised number/registration plates, all of which may disclose signs of a lifestyle defined
8
The horseshoe shape indicates that axis 1 and 3 are not completely independent, which is hardly surprising. A
number of models using different variables and codes were run but the horseshoe persisted.
by distance from economic necessity.9 The government’s Living Costs and Food Survey
2010 also yields useful information on numbers of vehicles owned in a household (Tables 5
and 6). The patterns are fairly clear: the factions of all classes richer in economic capital –
business executives, lower managers and skilled trades – but also professionals, who possess
most capital overall in a balanced composition – have, compared to their counterparts richer
in cultural capital, a greater value of household contents and valuables, which can be taken to
indicate volume and expense, and therefore lavishness, of goods. The exception is the cultural
producers, the value of whose contents is likely to be pushed up by their disproportionate
possession of original artworks (30 percent owning six or more, the highest rate overall and
compared to only 18 percent of business executives according to the CCSE data). Moreover,
the economically rich are more likely to possess a car, to possess multiple cars (especially in
the dominant and dominated classes) and to possess private registration plates than their
counterparts across the second axis of the social space, and the average values in most cases
(indicating exclusivity) are noticeably higher. Interestingly the average price of registration
plate is highest among lower managers and proprietors, perhaps indicating a level of striving
for symbolic recognition. Rate of ownership of ‘other vehicles’ is an awkward measure since
it includes boats, motorhomes and caravans (though not motorbikes or vans), which may
themselves be differentially possessed across the social space, but the average values are
more indicative, save the finding that those in sales and customer services appear to have
unusually expensive tastes here. In any case, while the precise rates and values of the
indicators in Tables 4 and 5 differ between classes, overall they serve to pull out the capital
composition principle more clearly. Doubtless other variables not currently available – such
as holiday preferences – and greater data on the economic elite – who have a habit of
escaping surveys – would further sharpen the opposition, and, indeed, it is notable that
Bourdieu deployed a greater variety of data sources, such as magazine articles and adverts (of
the kind still readily available today), to demonstrate the lavish, hedonistic lifestyle of the
rich. Nevertheless, the above analyses give me enough confidence to hypothesise a tentative
model of the homologies between the social space and symbolic space in contemporary
Britain (Figure 9).
[Table 4 and 5 here]
[Figure 9 here]
9
Another tactic is to conduct within-class MCAs, as Bourdieu himself did, in order to neutralise the capital
volume axis. In fact this has been done, but the result will be presented elsewhere.
Discussion
So what are the consequences of all this for understanding cultural domination? First things
first, with blanket genre categories removed from the analysis, omnivorousness seems to
disappear, and in its place we find a familiar divide between exclusive culture on the one
hand – whether by dint of symbolic mastery or money – and indicators of necessity,
corporeality and sociality on the other, with indicators of middlebrow taste clustering in
between. Perhaps omnivore advocates would claim that the failure of orientations toward
certain ‘popular’ cultural producers to contribute to this axis indicates that they are equally
known and liked across social space, and argue the difference is that the dominant know and
like exclusive producers as well. That does not take away from the basic fact that the
statistically salient source of socio-cultural difference is the restricted versus the common,
though, and for the omnivore thesis to prevail it would need evidence, of the kind usually
better supplied by qualitative research, of the supposedly new ‘open’ or ‘cosmopolitan’
disposition underpinning it rather than plain old symbolic mastery (or money) – something
which my own previous research certainly found lacking (Atkinson, 2011).
A second important point is that the capital composition principle, so often fudged in
pro-omnivore research and downplayed in the CCSE study, persists. True, everything would
appear to suggest that age, or youth culture and traditional culture, avant-garde and rearguard,
which are by no means disentangled from the structures of social space, constitute the second
axis of symbolic space in 21st Century Britain, even if a few different methodological
decisions here and there – removing music from the model, narrowing the age range of the
sample and so on – could have provided a different result. Still, the two main dimensions of
social space evidently continue to differentiate conditions of existence, generate divergent
dispositions and tastes and ensure objective and subjective association of class position with
certain practices and symbols. Though there has not been the space to explore pertinent data
here, we can suppose they also underpin the symbolic violence continuously exercised in UK
society documented elsewhere (Skeggs, 1997, 2005; Atkinson, 2010; Skeggs and Wood,
2012), itself indicative of the contemporary bases of (mis)recognition. I am not saying that
the situation is exactly the same as 1960s France – obviously the substance of lifestyle
practices has changed over time, but the principles through which they are differentiated
relationally seem somewhat stable. This might still come across as too conceptually
conservative for some – and I have certainly been accused before of being too ‘faithful’ to
Bourdieu and unwilling to accept ‘innovation’, despite my own efforts to deepen his
construction of the social world using phenomenology – but I have yet to see any convincing
logic for using genre labels or incompatible measures of class to ‘test’ or ‘update’ Bourdieu’s
general model, and sometimes wonder whether the omnivore thesis represents a scholastic
projection of the cultural sociologist’s head, with a certain construal of their own tastes, on to
the body of the music listener, film watcher etc, much as Sartre imposed the philosopher’s
head on the waiter’s body.
It has to be acknowledged, however, that another consequence follows from the
removal of genre categories from the analysis: the lowered visibility of gender. It is not
completely invisible, since the structure of the social space is gendered anyway – with
women clustering on the left hand side of the social and symbolic spaces – but certainly its
prominence is reduced. This is a shame, because the division between feminine ‘inwardly
oriented’ tastes (romance, soaps etc) and masculine ‘outwardly oriented’ tastes (sport, news,
etc), itself refracted by class in a way by no means incompatible with the particular version of
‘intersectionality’ sketched in Masculine Domination (Bourdieu, 2001), was one of the more
interesting and fruitful insights of the original CCSE study. Evidently genre categories, at
least for television, books and film, are good discriminators in this regard, just poor measures
of differences associated with distance from necessity and symbolic mastery. Care thus needs
to be exercised when examining the intersection of class and gender statistically, but,
nevertheless, it is no great leap of imagination to hypothesise, as an additional axis of the
symbolic space more or less homologous with gender dispersion in the social space, the
differential tendency toward ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ goods and practices.
Finally, I am all too aware that the CCSE data mobilised here is relatively old, though
I doubt much has changed fundamentally in the last ten years to alter the general structuring
of the symbolic space or its homology with the social space, and, more importantly, that some
may claim it has been superseded now by the much larger and more comprehensive BBC
survey data, with its postulation of ‘emergent cultural capital’, or forms of popular culture
valued by the young (Savage et al, 2013). However, while any actual secondary analysis of
that data would have to wait until it is archived, some of the lessons here give cause to
caution against ready acceptance of the BBC team’s methodological strategy and
interpretations of their findings. We might note, for example, that the thesis of emergent
cultural capital is based on some extremely flimsy measures of cultural practice, such as
liking any sport or going to any kind of gig, and that indicators of economic capital and
ostentatious lifestyles are even scarcer than in the CCSE study. More fundamentally, the
BBC team once again refuse to see the social space and symbolic space as two relatively
autonomous, if highly homologous, spaces mediated by habitus, but mash the two together
and, in the process, cut education out of the picture and obscure the causal link – symbolic
mastery born of a certain distance from necessity – between social position and taste. Maybe
if the data had been approached differently, and better variables used, once again a rather
different conclusion might have emerged. We may just see.
References
Atkinson, W. (2010) Class, Individualization and Late Modernity: In Search of the Reflexive
Worker. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Atkinson, W. (2011) ‘The Context and Genesis of Musical Tastes: Omnivorousness
Debunked, Bourdieu Buttressed’ Poetics, 39 (3): 169-186.
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