Seppo Suominen Essays on cultural economics
Literature review and model
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5.2Literature review and modelThis paper is closely related to the sociological literature of performing arts participation. The classical work is Bourdieu (1979). The relation of social positions to cultural tastes and practices is structurally invariable. There are two interrelated spaces: the space of social space (positions) and the space of lifestyles. The social space has three dimensions: economic, social and cultural capital. Bourdieu argued that there is a structural correspondence between social space and cultural practices and the habitus serves as a mediating mechanism. Therefore the tastes, knowledge and practices are class-based. The “highbrow” cultural consumption is typical for the dominant classes. Bourdieu argued that cultural capital or social statuses are symptoms of social exclusion, cultural dominance and inequality. Bourdieu’s claims have been criticized substantially, since the taste of the dominant class has lost its exclusiveness (Purhonen, Gronow and Rahkonen 2010). The dominant class has changed its cultural participation pattern. They are more omnivore. The audience segmentation has changed from elite and mass to omnivore and univore (Peterson 1992, Peterson and Kern 1996). In the European context Finland and the Nordic countries in general are the leading countries in the proportion of omnivores in the population (Virtanen 2007). The omnivorousness in cultural taste has been measured according to the number of cultural participation areas and/or by number of genres in one specific area. A person is omnivore if she has seen a ballet, a theatre performance, a movie at the cinema, reads books, goes to a sport event and so on. Correspondingly, she is univore If she prefers e.g. only sport events and is active in that field but not in the other areas of culture (Sintas and Álvarez 2004, Chan and Goldthorpe 2005). On the other hand, she is omnivore if she reads books of different genres: thrillers, scifi, fantasy, romances, biographies, modern literature, classical literature, poetry, plays, religious books, leisure books (Purhonen, Gronow and Rahkonen 2010). Omnivores have a high probability of participating in everything, from the unpopular (e.g. classical music) to the popular (e.g. cinema attendance), whereas paucivores engage in intermediate levels of cultural consumption across a range of activities, and inactives have a low probability of participating in any of the activities (Alderson, Junisbai and Heacock 2007). Omnivores have usually higher levels of education and higher incomes than univores (Chan and Goldthorpe 2005). Using a multinomial logit analysis, Alderson, Junisbai and Heacock (2007) show that social status, having a bachelor’s degree and family incomes significantly classify inactive and the two other groups (omnivore and paucivore), while having a graduate degree classifies omnivores and the other groups (paucivore and inanctive). Age is important to categorize paucivore from omnivore and inactive. Unexpectedly gender is not a significant variable to classify. The omnivore consumption pattern is typical among the upper social classes, univore among the upper-middle and middle classes and fragmental consumption among the lower social classes (Sintas and Álvarez 2004). The sociology of cultural participation has shown than consumers can be classified into three groups: omnivore, paucivore and inactive (Alderson, Junisbai and Heacock 2007). The omnivore group is active in all cultural consumption, from cinema to classical music. The concept of cultural capital is associated with the lowbrow/highbrow consumption styles. Arts consumption is a form of cultural capital (DiMaggio 1987). Cultural capital is the accumulated amount of past consumption of cultural goods and the initial endowment of cultural capital (Stigler and Becker 1977). The accumulation function is related to human capital, i.e. formal education. The human capital argument is based on the idea that cultural behavior is constrained somehow, i.e. differences in cultural consumption are related to differences in cultural capital endowments, differences in budget, time, social and physical constraints (Frey 2000). Since cultural capital endowment is related both to formal education and age, these are proper explanatory variables. Moreover, it has been shown that gender and marital status are important to explain cultural consumption. Time constraints are related to place of residence (province) and finally budget constraints are measured by incomes (c.f. Ateca-Amestoy 2008). However, there is some evidence showing that economic wealth (net incomes, material wealth) is not a significant variable explaining cultural participation (c.f. Vander Stichele and Laermans 2006). Alderson, Junisbai and Heacock (2007) argue that gender is not a significant variable to classify cultural consumption pattern classes (in the USA, 2002), but Bihagen and Katz-Gerro (2000) show with Swedish data (1993) that gender is important. Women are more active in highbrow consumption (opera, dance performance, theatrical performance) and men in lowbrow television (entertainment, sport) watching. Highbrow television (documentary, culture, news) and lowbrow culture (movies, rent a video) are less connected to gender, class and education, but these are strongly related to age. Younger seem to favour lowbrow culture and older highbrow television watching. Lizardo (2006) shows using cluster analysis with pooled data from the 1998 and 2002 United States General Social Survey that four genres fall on to the highbrow cluster: arts consumption, going to the ballet, going to a theater and attending a classical music or opera concert. The lowbrow cluster consists of going to a popular music live concert, going to see a movie in cinema or reading a novel, poem or play. Gender matters but only with those that are active in the labour force. Among those that are not active in labour force, there is no gender difference in highbrow cultural consumption. Purhonen, Gronow and Rahkonen (2009) present similar results with Finnish data. Warde and Gayo-Cal (2009) find also mixed evidence concerning the gender effect on omnivorousness with British 2002-2003 survey data. Women seem to be more active in ‘legitimate’ culture. Different terminologies have been used to rank tastes, like: highbrow – middlebrow – lowbrow, or high – popular, or legitimate – vulgar. Bourdieu defines legitimate as being connected with dominant classes, powerful social groups and being aesthetically the most valuable. The top quartile omnivores are associated with legitimate taste, while the lowest quartile in omnivorousness is least related with legitimate cultural consumption. Omnivorousness increases with age up to around 50 and strongly diminishes among those over 70 (Warde and Gayo-Cal 2009). Family background as a whole matters, since parents’ cultural participation seems to be related with cultural consumption (van Eijck 1997), while participating in a culturally orientated course at school does not have any or only slight impact on cultural consumption (Nagel, Damen and Haanstra 2010). Download 2.66 Mb. Share with your friends:
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