Showing papers by "Alan Warde published in 2006"

Cultural Capital and the Place of Sport

Abstract: It is not unusual now to talk about the culture of the body, or to see routine and organized physical activity, as well as sport, as part and parcel of cultural life. In recent decades body management techniques have become a very conspicuous aspect of self-presentation and have been served by the expansion of the supply of commercial services to deal with diet and health, physical training and cosmetic improvement to appearances. The professionalization and commercialization of sport have also accelerated. Bourdieu interpreted measures for body management and maintenance in terms of the accumulation and display of cultural capital. He distinguished three types of cultural capital: institutionalized, objectified and embodied. This article considers some of the elements of the very complex and extensive property, embodied cultural capital. The Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) survey included questions on sporting activity, sports spectatorship and physical exercise routines, important elements ...

A cultural map of the United Kingdom, 2003

Abstract: This paper employs Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to map cultural participation and taste in the UK. It constructs what Bourdieu calls a space of lifestyles from evidence collected in a national random sample survey of the British population in 2003. MCA constructs the space relationally on the basis of similarities and differences in responses to questions about a large number of cultural items in several sub‐fields including music, reading, TV and recreational activity. These items are mapped along two axes and their clustering indicates affinities between tastes and practices across sub‐fields. The cultural patterns are described. We then superimpose socio‐demographic variables, including class, educational qualifications and age, the distribution of which indicates tendencies for certain categories of person to have shared tastes. The analysis reveals meaningful, socially differentiated patterns of taste. The space of lifestyles proves to be structured primarily by the total volume of capital ...

Media culture: the social organisation of media practices in contemporary Britain

Abstract: This BFI report highlights how class, ethnicity and education influence the way British viewers relate to film and television and how these differences can exclude large groups of the population. It suggests we need to rethink how we communicate across our different communities as audiences are divided in their taste and understanding of British cultural programming and film. The study was carried out by the Open University and the University of Manchester for the BFI and it says culture has always divided people as much as it has provided a basis for shared values - and film and television are no exception. The problem is not one of minority groups failing to integrate with the national culture, rather key aspects of national film and television culture offer little space for ethnic interests or identities.

Politicising consumer trust in food: A socio-institutional explanation to variations in trust

Abstract: The topic for this paper is the role and foundations for trust in food in modern societies. Trust in food is often analysed as a matter of individual risk perception and trustworthy risk communication. Generally overlooked by individual level explanations are observations of rapid macro level shifts and large and consistent cross-national variations. Such variations and shifts are not easily explained within these perspectives, which focus mainly on individual strategies and communication efforts. The paper will argue that trust is social and relational, meaning that we should seek to understand the dynamics of 'who trust whom in regard to what'. By this expression we do not suggest rational decision-making processes. The approach assumes that trust in food is influenced by long-term cultural factors as well as responses to the performance of central institutional actors. We are first of all looking for aggregate effects in terms of variations in institutionalisation processes, what we call 'triangular affairs' between provisioning systems, regulations as well as consumption. We therefore concentrate on macro-level interrelations between three poles: the food market, public regulation, and the consumers. The paper will present some findings from a comparative study in six European countries, Trust in Food, including public opinion surveys and institutional studies in Denmark, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, and Portugal. It will focus particularly on some key issues related to trust in various institutional actors. While there is relative consensus across Europe that civil society actors can be trusted most, followed by public authorities, and market actors and politicians the least, there is considerable national variation in the overall levels of institutional trust and also in the degrees of differentiation across the various actors.