Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Michele Lamont New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2000. 391 pp.

The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration.

Acknowledgements List of figures List of tables List of boxes 1. The study and its rationale Part I. Modes of Provision: 2. The development of the habit of eating out in the UK 3. The meanings of eating out Part II. Access: 4. Patterns of eating out 5. Domestic organisation, family meals and eating out Part III. Delivery: 6. Personal service in public and private places 7. Last suppers Part IV. Enjoyment: The Attractions of Eating Out: 8. Eating out and its gratifications 9. The enjoyment of meal events Part V. Conclusion: 10. Eating out and the theories of consumption Methodological appendix: data collection and analysis References.

Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure

The moral significance of class

Three-Way Multidimensional Scaling

Modes of consumption: From ‘what’ to ‘how’ in cultural stratification research

In this article, we address whether and how contemporary social classes are marked by distinct lifestyles. We assess the model of the social space, a novel approach to class analysis pioneered by Bourdieu's Distinction. Although pivotal in Bourdieu's work, this model is too often overlooked in later research, making its contemporary relevance difficult to assess. We redress this by using the social space as a framework through which to study the cultural manifestation of class divisions in lifestyle differences in contemporary Norwegian society. Through a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of unusually rich survey data, we reveal a structure strikingly similar to the model in Distinction, with a primary dimension of the volume of capital, and a secondary dimension of the composition of capital. While avoiding the substantialist fallacy of predefined notions of 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' tastes, we explore how 168 lifestyle items map onto this social space. This reveals distinct classed lifestyles according to both dimensions of the social space. The lifestyles of the upper classes are distinctly demanding in terms of resources. Among those rich in economic capital, this manifests itself in a lifestyle which involves a quest for excitement, and which is bodily oriented and expensive. For their counterparts rich in cultural capital, a more ascetic and intellectually oriented lifestyle manifests itself, demanding of resources in the sense of requiring symbolic mastery, combining a taste for canonized, legitimate culture with more cosmopolitan and 'popular' items. In contrast to many studies' descriptions of the lower classes as 'disengaged' and 'inactive', we find evidence of distinct tastes on their part. Our analysis thus affirms the validity of Bourdieu's model of social class and the contention that classes tend to take the form of status groups. We challenge dominant positions in cultural stratification research, while questioning the aptness of the metaphor of the 'omnivore', as well as recent analyses of 'emerging cultural capital'.

Social space and cultural class divisions: the forms of capital and contemporary lifestyle differentiation.

This article concerns an insufficiently studied link in cultural class analysis, namely that between class-structured lifestyle differences and social closure It employs a modified version of Michele Lamont’s promising, yet under-theorised approach to the study of symbolic boundaries – the conceptual distinctions made by social actors in categorising people, practices, tastes, attitudes and manners in everyday life Drawing on 46 qualitative interviews with people from the city of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis focuses particularly on a horizontal boundary-drawing dynamic between middle-class interviewees It is argued that entanglements of different types of status judgements work both to construct and reinforce social boundaries between class fractions The findings draw attention to what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the capital composition principle of social differentiation Though fundamental to Bourdieu’s model of the social space, such systematic intra-class divisions have seldom been discussed in 

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0038038515596909

Cultural vs Economic Capital: Symbolic Boundaries within the Middle Class:

‘I’m not a snob, but…’: Class boundaries and the downplaying of difference

In this article we use qualitative interviews to examine how Norwegians possessing low volumes of cultural and economic capital demarcate themselves symbolically from the lifestyles of those above and below them in social space. In downward boundary drawing, a range of types of people are regarded as inferior because of perceived moral and aesthetic deficiencies. In upward boundary drawing, anti-elitist sentiments are strong: people practising resource-demanding lifestyles are viewed as harbouring ‘snobbish’ and ‘elitist’ attitudes. However, our analysis suggests that contemporary forms of anti-elitism are far from absolute, as symbolic expressions of privilege are markedly less challenged if they are parcelled in a ‘down-to-earth’ attitude. Previous studies have shown attempts by the privileged to downplay differences in cross-class encounters, accompanied by displays of openness and down-to-earthness. Our findings suggest that there is in fact a symbolic ‘market’ for such performances in the lower region of social space. This cross-class sympathy, we argue, helps naturalize, and thereby legitimize, class inequalities. The implications of this finding are outlined with reference to current scholarly debates about politics and populism, status and recognition and intersections between class and gender in the structuring of social inequalities. The article also contributes key methodological insights into the mapping of symbolic boundaries. Challenging Lamont's influential framework, we demonstrate that there is a need for a more complex analytical strategy rather than simply measuring the ‘relative salience’ of various boundaries in terms of their occurrence in qualitative interview data. In distinguishing analytically between usurpationary and exclusionary boundary strategies, we show that moral boundaries in particular can take on qualitatively different forms and that subtypes of boundaries are sometimes so tightly intertwined that separating them to measure their relative salience would neglect the complex ways in which they combine to engender both aversion to and sympathies for others.

Vegard Jarness

Papers

Modes of consumption: From ‘what’ to ‘how’ in cultural stratification research

Social space and cultural class divisions: the forms of capital and contemporary lifestyle differentiation.

Cultural vs Economic Capital: Symbolic Boundaries within the Middle Class:

‘I’m not a snob, but…’: Class boundaries and the downplaying of difference

A struggle on two fronts: boundary drawing in the lower region of the social space and the symbolic market for ‘down‐to‐earthness’