Cultural Omnivorousness (original) (raw)

Cultural omnivore thesis: Methodological aspects of the debate

implied with an ideal-typical picture of the past when the middle class espoused high culture and denigrated popular culturefor which they were sometimes deemed 'snobs' by members of other classes. These issues were explored against a background of great turbulence in the production of culture which led some, of postmodernist persuasion, to argue that cultural boundaries had dissolved (e.g. Firat & Venkatesh 1995).

Making tastes for everything: Omnivorousness and cultural abundance

This paper offers some speculative discussion about the current state of the “omnivore” debate, instigated by Richard A. Peterson. It argues that debates about the social patterning of tastes need to take greater account of changed practices of cultural production as well as consumption through the identification of two “stories of abundance” in the cultural realm. The first relates to accounts of the changing and expanding cultural industries, whilst the second considers the rich variety of widely available culture enabled by various technologies of distribution. Taking these stories into account, the paper argues that sociological analyses of cultural hierarchy might lag behind those that are mundane and everyday to both cultural producers and consumers and that an orientation to culture that ranges across established hierarchies is increasingly unremarkable. Such a change is related to the structural and discursive means through which culture is circulated. The paper concludes that cultural analysts need to modify their theoretical models and their methodological approaches to better reflect a variegated field of culture and a more fluid cultural hierarchy. In the tradition of both Peterson and Bourdieu, contemporary analyses of patterns of cultural consumption and taste need to take fuller account of the ways in which culture is produced, circulated and valued if they are to maintain their explanatory power

Cultural Consumption and Cultural Omnivorousness

The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology

This chapter uses debates about the figure of the cultural omnivore to reflect on how scholars within the sociology of culture have approached the problem of ‘cultural consumption’. Briefly introducing the concept of omnivorousness, and placing it in the context of longer sociological debates about the role of cultural consumption in social organisation, the chapter summarises and critiques the claims of ‘the omnivore thesis’ as reflected in the weight of empirical evidence for the presence of the figure of omnivore in late modern Western societies. It explores the ways in which this figure has been constructed methodologically and considers how a variety of sociological techniques have established and also helped to complicate the meaning of omnivorousness. It concludes by suggesting that the figure of the omnivore might be increasingly unremarkable, and that empirical research into cultural consumption might need to adapt its methods to capture the continued significance of cultural preferences and practices in social life.

Omnivorousness as the bridging of cultural holes: A measurement strategy

Theory and Society, 2014

Recent research and theory at the intersection of cultural sociology and network analysis have converged around the notion of cultural holes: patterns of cultural choice that position the person as a bridge not between other persons but between cultural worlds. This is an approach that promises to open up new vistas in our conceptualization of the relationship between social position and cultural taste, but that so far lacks operational grounding. In this article, I draw on Breiger’s (1974) formalization of the idea of the duality of persons and groups along with classical formalizations of brokerage for sociometric networks (Burt 1992) to suggest that the “cultural ego network” of a typical survey respondent can be reconstructed from patterns of audience overlap among the cultural items that are chosen by each respondent. This leads to a formalization of the notion of omnivorousness as relatively low levels of clustering in the cultural network: namely, omnivorousness as cultural network efficiency. I show how this metric overcomes the difficulties that have plagued previous attempts to produce ordinal indicators of omnivorousness from simple counts of the number of cultural choices, while providing novel substantive (and sometime counter-intuitive) insights into the relationship between socio-demographic status markers and patterns of cultural choice in the contemporary United States.

Reconceptualizing and Theorizing “Omnivorousness”

Sociological Theory, 2012

Scores of sociological studies have provided evidence for the association between broad cultural taste, or omnivorousness, and various status characteristics, such as education, occupation, and age. Nevertheless, the literature lacks a consistent theoretical foundation with which to understand and organize these empirical findings. In this article, we offer such a framework, suggesting that a mechanism-based approach is helpful for examination of the origins of the omnivore-univore taste pattern as well as its class-based distribution. We reground the discussion of this phenomenon in Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), conceptualizing omnivorous taste as a transposable form of the aesthetic disposition available most readily to individuals who convert early aesthetic training into high cultural capital occupational trajectories. After outlining the genetic mechanisms that link the aesthetic disposition to early socialization trajectories, we identify two relational mechanisms that modulate...

The Rise of the Cultural Omnivore 1964-2004

2010

Abstract In their seminal work Peterson and Kern (1996) reported that the system of cultural stratification in the USA was characterized by omnivorous cultural consumers in 1982, a pattern that grew stronger in 1992. Subsequent research has shown that an omnivorous consumer also existed in many other countries.

Pierre Bourdieu Distinction A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Harvard University Press, 1984

As a social critique of the judgements of taste, Distinction (1979) proposes that people with much cultural capital — education and intellect, style of speech and style of dress, etc. — participate in determining what distinct aesthetic values constitute good taste within their society. Circumstantially, people with less cultural capital accept as natural and legitimate that ruling-class definition of taste, the consequent distinctions between high culture and low culture, and their restrictions upon the social conversion of the types of economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital. The social inequality created by the limitations of their habitus (mental attitudes, personal habits, and skills) renders people with little cultural capital the social inferiors of the ruling class. Because they lack the superior education (cultural knowledge) needed to describe, appreciate, and enjoy the aesthetics of a work of art, ‘working-class people expect objects to fulfil a function’ as practical entertainment and mental diversion, whilst middle-class and upper-class people passively enjoy an objet d’art as a work of art, by way of the gaze of aesthetic appreciation.[2] The acceptance of socially dominant forms of taste is a type of symbolic violence between social classes, made manifest in the power differential that allows the ruling class to define, impose, and endorse norms of good taste upon all of society.[3] Hence, the naturalization of the distinction of taste and its misrepresentation as socially necessary, deny the dominated classes the cultural capital with which to define their own world. Moreover, despite the dominated classes producing their own definitions of good taste and of bad taste, "the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated aesthetic, which is constantly obliged to define itself in [the] terms of the dominant aesthetics" of the ruling class.

The omnivore thesis revisited: Voracious cultural consumers

2007

Abstract We augment measures of cultural omnivorousness, based theoretically on the breadth of cultural tastes, with a new but related dimension of voraciousness. This reflects a 'quantitative'dimension of leisure consumption based upon both the range and the frequency of leisure participation. Voraciousness is theoretically interpreted in relation to notions of cultural repertoires, to the changing pace of work and leisure in late modernity, and to the 'insatiable'quality of contemporary consumption.

Understanding Cultural Omnivorousness, or the myth of the cultural omnivore

The concept of omnivorousness has become influential in the sociologies of culture and consumption, cited variously as evidence of altered hierarchies in cultural participation and as indicative of broader socio-cultural changes. The ‘omnivore thesis’ contends that there is a sector of the population of western countries who do and like a greater variety of forms of culture than previously, and that this broad engagement reflects emerging values of tolerance and undermines snobbery. This article draws on the findings of a study of cultural participation in the UK to explore the coherence of the omnivore thesis. It uses a survey to identify and isolate omnivores, and then proceeds to explore the meanings of omnivorousness through the analysis of in-depth, qualitative interviews with them. It concludes that, while there is evidence of wide cultural participation within the UK, the figure of the omnivore is less singularly distinctive than some studies have suggested.