The Consumer Society Reader by Juliet Schor

Author:Juliet Schor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2011-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

ENDNOTES

1 Compare Warner’s findings to imperialist interpretations in consumer research asserting that lifestyle and social class are synonomous (Levy 1966; Myers and Gutman 1974).

2 It is impossible to do justice to Bourdieu’s theory, complexly articulated over many dozens of studies over more than 30 years, in a short review. Instead I briefly summarize the key concepts that pertain specifically to Bourdieu’s work on social reproduction linking cultural capital to the field of consumption, and then highlight those aspects of the theory that distinguish it from Warner. Interested readers are encouraged to read Distinction and supporting theoretical statements that outline Bourdieu’s project, such as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) and Bourdieu (1977).

3 Bourdieu’s broad theoretical statements support the contemporary interpretation, yet he often makes ahistorical generalizations about the superordinate status of the high arts as a locus for high cultural capital consumption. In Distinction, Bourdieu encourages the latter reading because, in his intensive effort to isolate and describe synchronic differences in formal qualities of taste that vary with cultural capital, he does not execute a fully cultural analysis in which social differences in meanings of those objects consumed, and their sociohistorical genesis, also become a focus of investigation (Calhoun 1993; Gartman 1991).

4 I selected the terms “HCC” and “LCC” to connote a hierarchy of tastes and, thus, of social and moral value. The terms are not intended to denigrate LCCs. Just the opposite: by illuminating hierarchies that are smoothed over in everyday life, I hope to defuse their exclusionary power.

5 Empirical assessments of Bourdieu’s theory typically compare two or more social class groupings as I do here. However, many studies use measures of social class to group informants that conflict directly with Bourdieu’s formulation. For example, Halle (1992) uses Warnerian measures of income and and neighborhood measures that necessarily conflate economic and social capital with cultural capital, while Erikson (1996) uses Erik Olin Wright’s class measures, which are primarily measures of economic capital. I follow Bourdieu’s theory more carefully in distinguishing the three socialization agents that are considered central in developing cultural capital resources (for a detailed discussion, see Holt [1997a]). Most studies do not measure all three sources of cultural capital acculturation. The occupation scale is adapted from Peterson and Simkus (1992), and arguments relating occupation and cultural capital are found in Collins (1975). The education scale is adapted from Bourdieu (1984) and Lamont (1992), calibrating the scale downward for parents given the tremendous status inflation in education over the past several decades (Bourdieu 1984). Although the two resulting groups of informants approximately resemble the upper-middle “New Class” of symbolic manipulators, who derive labor market leverage primarily from cultural capital assets, and the working class, whose social conditions rarely facilitate cultural capital formation, they are not identical. A significant percentage of the middle class with upwardly mobile trajectories out of the working class, particularly those who have entered managerial and entrepreneurial occupations that emphasize economic capital, will still have low cultural capital resources. Similarly, newly minted New Class members whose parents

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.