Dick Houtman

Class Is Not Dead—It Has Been Buried Alive: Class Voting and Cultural Voting in Postwar Western Societies (1956–1990)

By means of a reanalysis of the most relevant data source—the International Social Mobility and Politics File—this article criticizes the newly grown consensus in political sociology that class voting has declined since World War II. An increase in crosscutting cultural voting, rooted in educational differences rather than a decline in class voting, proves responsible for the decline of traditional class-party alignments. Moreover, income differences have not become less but more consequential for voting behavior during this period. It is concluded that the new consensus has been built on quicksand. Class is not dead—it has been buried alive under the increasing weight of cultural voting, systematically misinterpreted as a decline in class voting because of the widespread application of the so-called Alford index.

Beyond the spiritual supermarket: The social and public significance of new age spirituality

This article argues that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than todays sociological consensus acknowledges. Firstly, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by sacralisation of the self and demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritual milieu with ideological coherence and paradoxically accounts for its overwhelming diversity. Secondly, participants undergo a process of socialisation, gradually adopting this doctrine of self-spirituality and eventually reinforcing it by means of standardised legitimations. Thirdly, spirituality has entered the public sphere of work, aiming at a reduction of employees’ alienation to increase both their happiness and organisational effectiveness. A radical ‘sociologisation’ of New Age research is called for to document how the doctrinal ideal of self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted, and reinforced and critically to deconstruct rather than reproduce sociologically naive New Age rhetoric about the primacy of personal authenticity.

‘Some are more equal than others’: economic egalitarianism and welfare chauvinism in the Netherlands

Various studies have demonstrated that while the lower educated support economic redistribution more than the higher educated do, they nonetheless dislike welfare support for immigrants more strongly. This paper aims to explain this remarkably particularistic application of the principle of economic egalitarianism (‘welfare chauvinism’) by testing three theories by means of survey data representative of the Dutch population (N = 1972). The first theory asserts that the low level of political competence of the lower educated is responsible, the second focuses on their weak economic position, and the third claims that their limited amount of cultural capital is decisive. Only the latter explanation is confirmed and implications for debates about ethnocentrism, deservingness and welfare state legitimacy, as well as the ideological profile of the lower-educated working class are discussed.

Ideologically Illogical? Why Do the Lower-Educated Dutch Display so Little Value Coherence?

In studies of mass ideology, it is often found that political values are ordered two-dimensionally among the public at large. In a first economic dimension, equality is contested; in a second cultural one, individual freedom is contested. While this general rule of two-dimensionality applies to the public at large, there are large differences between educational categories. While two-dimensionality is found for the lower educated, the higher educated order their values along a single dimension and hence show more value coherence. Using a recent Dutch national survey, we show that these differences between the higher and the lower educated cannot be explained by differences in political competence. Instead, a combination of cultural and economic insecurity is responsible for the lower levels of value coherence among the lower educated.

A Cultural Globalization of Popular Music? American, Dutch, French, and German Popular Music Charts (1965 to 2006)

In this article, the authors address the question of whether and how the appreciation of popular music consumers has globalized in the four decades since the mid-1960s. They use information from American, Dutch, French, and German popular music charts from 1965 through 2006. They find no corroboration for an overall trend toward an internationalization of hits. However, important shifts are noticeable underneath the surface. For the period up until 1989, the authors find increasing international diversity as well as increasing Americanization. From the 1990s onwards, they find a growing popularity of national music in all three European countries in the study.

Game over? Negotiating modern capitalism in virtual game worlds

Johan Huizinga’s claim that commercialization threatens the self-enclosed ‘magic circle’ of free play still permeates many contemporary games studies. Critiquing such generalizing and essentialistic assumptions, this article distinguishes four different ‘orders of commercialization’ that impinge on online game worlds and studies empirically how each of these is evaluated and negotiated by players themselves. Based on an analysis of World of Warcraft and Second Life, it demonstrates that some orders of commercialization — that is, the game itself as a commodity and the construction of its world as a virtual marketplace — are compatible with free play since they enhance players’ in-game agency. Other orders of commercialization — that is, ‘real money trading’ and the colonization of the game world by multinationals — are experienced as commodifying and undermine the spirit of play. Contextualization is called for: while some orders of commercialization threaten the ‘magic circle’ of free play, others stimulate or facilitate it.

In their own image?: Catholic, protestant, and holistic spiritual appropriations of the internet

This article relies on in-depth qualitative interviews with 21 web designers, active in the fields of Catholicism, Protestantism and holistic spirituality in the Netherlands, to study religious appropriations of the Internet. The authors found that these different religious groups embraced the medium of the Internet motivated by a common desire to make oneself heard in the cacophony of voices that has resulted from processes of secularization and religious change. In doing so, Catholic web designers struggle with the dilemma of either following Roman orthodoxy or creating room for dialogue and diversity, whereas their Protestant counterparts feel forced to either let a thousand flowers bloom or surrender to a highly compromised image of their faith. Holistic spirituality, finally, struggles with neither of these problems and appropriates the Internet as its virtually natural habitat for sharing and connecting. The authors conclude that, consistent with theories about cultured technology and spiritualizing of the Internet, offline religious heritages matter a lot when religions seek to appropriate the Internet through web design. These appropriations tend not to be smooth transpositions of coherent and conflict-free offline religious heritages to online environments, however, but conflict-ridden processes stirring long-standing struggles over authority and identity.

Citizenship and social justice

Discussions on the problems of the welfare state are increasingly framed in terms of citizenship rather than social justice. The popularity of the concept of citizenship raises the question of its implications for social justice theory and research. In this article it is argued that whereas the dominant approach in social justice is essentially individualistic, the concept of citizenship focuses rather on individuals as members of a societal community, from which both rights and obligations are derived. This focus on communal membership suggests three important topics for social justice theory and research: (i) the need to distinguish between a civic and a justice motive for human behavior, (ii) the need to specify the frame of reference respondents should use when they make their justice judgments, and (iii) the need to recognize the fact that justice judgments may result from both adhering to criteria of justice and considering the consequences of their application.

Advertising real beer authenticity claims beyond truth and falsity

It is a mainstay in the literature on consumer culture that the romantic, countercultural value of authenticity has become a core asset in mainstream marketing. Since there is little research on the particular ways in which commodities are endowed with auras of authenticity, this study analyses registers of authenticity in 153 beer commercials from eight countries. The content analysis distinguishes four strategies of authentication: beer is related to pre-industrial craftsmanship, naturalness, concrete locations and historical roots. Surprisingly, however, such claims are often openly exposed by the advertisers themselves as mass-produced illusions. It is concluded that the appeal of authenticity in consumer culture should not be explained by the fact that people actually believe in the ‘authenticity hoax’. Quite the contrary, the acknowledgement that narratives about a more authentic world are myths provides an alibi for consumers to fully indulge in their meaning without the risk of making naive and dupable fools of themselves.

THE CONTENTIOUS GAP: From digital divide to cultural beliefs about online interactions

With the rise and widespread application of the internet, social scientists rapidly emphasized that some people were better able to gain control over these technologies than others. This so-called digital divide between the haves and the have-nots was seen as a new feature of contemporary inequality – as a reproduction or transformation of existing social disparities. Motivated by these concerns about social inequality, it is argued in this paper, research on the digital divide has been theoretically and empirically blinkered. Even though the focus changed from simplistic questions of having access or not, towards the more informative dimension of usage and skills, the same socio-economic bias was maintained. In this paper, we therefore theorize that appropriating the internet (or not) is less related to socio-economic position or usage and skills, and is more culturally informed than theories about a digital divide allow for. To empirically test our assumptions, we used the internet-based community project ‘Telebrink’ as a case study for our quantitative and qualitative research. Based on a survey among Dutch citizens involved in this project (N = 251), we studied the explanations for (not) using these applications by testing hypotheses about the influence of skills and knowledge on the one hand and culture, i.e. moral evaluations of online social life, on the other. Our statistical analyses show that cultural attitudes, i.e. moral beliefs regarding social interaction, are most strongly explaining the appropriation of social internet technologies. Enriched with our qualitative data confirming those results, it is concluded that how people feel and think about this technology in social life is of major importance. In short: culture matters!