A research programme of the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK. It is a macro-sociological study of cultural consumption in Britain, France, the Netherlands and the US. Key questions
- Does a status order still exist in contemporary societies?
- If so, what is its general form, how does it map onto the class structure, and what are the main discrepancies that exist between the two?
- Is there a common status order for both men and women, and for different ethnic groups, or are there gender-specific or ethnic group-specific status orders?
- What is the relationship between the positions individuals hold in the status order and their patterns of cultural consumption and what are the implications in this regard of class--status discrepancies?
- To what extent, and in what ways, do income, age, education, gender and ethnicity modify the relationship between status and cultural consumption?
- To what extent are status orders and the relationship between status and cultural consumption common across national societies and to what extent and in what ways do they differ?
The project is based on the secondary, and primarily quantitative analysis of large-scale and nationally representative data-sets. The surveys identified cover a wide range of both `high' and `popular' cultural activities, allowing consideration of the social bases of, for example, reading tabloids as well as broadsheets, going to the cinema as well as the opera, listerning to pop as well as classical music. The link below goes to a project page that contains a number of papers and presentations that arose out of the research project. Of particular note is the paper by Tak Wing Chan and John H Goldthorpe, Social stratification of cultural consumption across three domains: music, theatre, dance and cinema, and the visual arts.