Omar Lizardo

How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks

This article examines the relationship between different forms of cultural taste and the density of social contacts across alternative types of network relations classified by average tie strength. The author builds on Bourdieus ([1986] 2001) classic statement on the “forms of capital” (economic, social, and cultural) and the conversion dynamics among them, and on DiMaggios (1987) connection between cultural tastes and sociability. He hypothesizes that (1) in addition to cultural tastes being determined by network relations, cultural tastes are used to form and sustain those networks. Furthermore he expects that (2) highbrow culture taste will be less likely to be converted into social capital beyond immediate strong-tie circles due to its more restricted, “assetspecific” nature. Because of its generalized appeal, taste for popular culture will be more likely to be associated with weak-tie network density. The results broadly support these hypotheses: a model that specifies an effect of culture on network density provides a better fit to the data than the traditional conception of networks as determining taste. In addition using log-linear models and instrumental-variable methods, I show that popular culture consumption has a positive impact on weak-tie network density but not strong-tie network density, while highbrow culture consumption selectively increases strong-tie density but has no appreciable effect on weak ties, net of standard socioeconomic variables. These findings help to shed light on the mechanisms that translate mastery of different types of cultural knowledge into integration across distant social positions or closure around strong group boundaries. The author also discusses the implications of the results for current models describing the transformation of cultural into social resources.

Can Cultural Worldviews Influence Network Composition

Most sociological research assumes that social network composition shapes individual beliefs. Network theory and research has not adequately considered that internalized cultural worldviews might affect network composition. Drawing on a synthetic, dual-process theory of culture and two waves of nationally-representative panel data, this article shows that worldviews are strong predictors of changes in network composition among U.S. youth. These effects are robust to the influence of other structural factors, including prior network composition and behavioral homophily. By contrast, there is little evidence that networks play a strong proximate role in shaping worldviews. This suggests that internalized cultural dispositions play an important role in shaping the interpersonal environment and that the dynamic link between culture and social structure needs to be reconsidered.

Reconceptualizing and Theorizing “Omnivorousness” Genetic and Relational Mechanisms

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 its manifestation (either enhancing or inhibiting it) after early socialization.

Predictors of short-term decay of cell phone contacts in a large scale communication network☆☆☆

Under what conditions is an edge present in a social network at time t likely to decay or persist by some future time t + Delta(t)? Previous research addressing this issue suggests that the network range of the people involved in the edge, the extent to which the edge is embedded in a surrounding structure, and the age of the edge all play a role in edge decay. This paper uses weighted data from a large-scale social network built from cell-phone calls in an 8-week period to determine the importance of edge weight for the decay/persistence process. In particular, we study the relative predictive power of directed weight, embeddedness, newness, and range (measured as outdegree) with respect to edge decay and assess the effectiveness with which a simple decision tree and logistic regression classifier can accurately predict whether an edge that was active in one time period continues to be so in a future time period. We find that directed edge weight, weighted reciprocity and time-dependent measures of edge longevity are highly predictive of whether we classify an edge as persistent or decayed, relative to the other types of factors at the dyad and neighborhood level.

How Macro-Historical Change Shapes Cultural Taste Legacies of Democratization in Spain and Portugal

In this article, we show that large-scale macro-political change can powerfully condition how institutional practices shape individual cultural choice. We study the paired comparison of Portugal and Spain, two long-similar societies that moved from authoritarianism to democracy through divergent pathways in the 1970s. Data from the 2001 Eurobarometer indicate that while the cultural choices of persons born before democratic transition are comparable across the two cases, Portuguese youth born under democracy are substantially more omnivorous than their Spanish counterparts. We shed light on this puzzle through a structured, focused comparison. Our argument is that whereas revolution in Portugal overturned hierarchies in numerous social institutions and unleashed an ambitious program of cultural transformation, Spain’s consensus-oriented transition was largely limited to remaking political institutions. We show that this macro-political divergence resulted in a key cross-case difference at the institutional level. Whereas pedagogical practices in Portugal encourage young people to adopt the post-canonical, anti-hierarchical orientation toward aesthetics constitutive of the omnivorous orientation, corresponding practices in Spain restrict omnivorousness by instilling a hierarchical, largely canonical attitude toward cultural works.

Lessons learned from the netsense smartphone study

Over the past few years, smartphones have emerged as one of the most popular mechanisms for accessing content across the Internet driving considerable research to improve wireless performance. A key foundation for such research efforts is the proper understanding of user behavior. However, the gathering of live smartphone data at scale is often difficult and expensive. The focus of this paper is to explore the lessons learned from a two year study of two hundred smart phone users at the University of Notre Dame. In this paper, we offer commentary with regards to the entire process of the study covering aspects including funding considerations, technical architecture design, lessons learned, and recommendations for future efforts gathering live user data.

Pierre Bourdieu as a Post-cultural Theorist

Pierre Bourdieu is without doubt one of the main figures in the sociological study of culture today. Yet, for a theorist so central to the subject matter of cultural studies, it is clear that there is no coherent account of Bourdieu stance in relation to the ‘concept of culture’ among current commentators. More importantly, in the sister-discipline of anthropology, Bourdieu is thought of as a central figure precisely because he helped move contemporary anthropological theory away from the centrality of the culture concept. This paper reviews this peculiar double reception of Bourdieu’s anthropological and sociological work, closely examining these unacknowledged strands of Bourdieu’s thinking on culture. The basic argument is that the anthropological reception of Bourdieu’s work is more faithful to the outlines of his late-career intellectual development while the sociological portrayal — Bourdieu as a Sausserean culture theorist with a ‘Weberian power twist’— is fundamentally misleading. I close by outlining how Bourdieu’s work points towards a yet-to-be developed ‘post-cultural’ stance — one that takes cognition, experience and the body seriously — in the sociological study of culture.

Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes

While influential across a wide variety of subfields, cultural analysis in sociology continues to be hampered by coarse-grained conceptualizations of the different modes in which culture becomes personal, as well as the process via which persons acquire and use different forms of culture. In this article, I argue that persons acquire and use culture in two analytically and empirically distinct forms, which I label declarative and nondeclarative. The mode of cultural acquisition depends on the dynamics of exposure and encoding, and modulates the process of cultural accessibility, activation, and use. Cultural knowledge about one domain may be redundantly represented in both declarative and nondeclarative forms, each linked via analytically separable pathways to corresponding public cultural forms and ultimately to substantive outcomes. I outline how the new theoretical vocabulary, theoretical model, and analytic distinctions that I propose can be used to resolve contradictions and improve our understanding of outstanding substantive issues in empirically oriented subfields that have recently incorporated cultural processes as a core explanatory resource.

What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology:

In this paper we introduce the idea of the dual process framework (DPF), an interdisciplinary approach to the study of learning, memory, thinking, and action. Departing from the successful reception of Vaisey (2009), we suggest that intradisciplinary debates in sociology regarding the merits of “dual process” formulations can benefit from a better understanding of the theoretical foundations of these models in cognitive and social psychology. We argue that the key is to distinguish the general DPF from more specific applications to particular domains, which we refer to as dual process models (DPMs). We show how different DPMs can be applied to a variety of analytically distinct issues of interest to cultural sociologists beyond specific issues related to morality, such as culture in learning, culture in memory, culture in thinking, and culture in acting processes. We close by outlining the implications of our argument for relevant work in cultural sociology.

A dyadic reciprocity index for repeated interaction networks

A wide variety of networked systems in human societies are composed of repeated communications between actors. A dyadic relationship made up of repeated interactions may be reciprocal (both actors have the same probability of directing a communication attempt to the other) or non-reciprocal (one actor has a higher probability of initiating a communication attempt than the other). In this paper we propose a theoretically motivated index of reciprocity appropriate for networks formed from repeated interactions based on these probabilities. We go on to examine the distribution of reciprocity in a large-scale social network built from trace-logs of over a billion cell-phone communication events across millions of actors in a large industrialized country. We find that while most relationships tend toward reciprocity, a substantial minority of relationships exhibit large levels of non-reciprocity. This is puzzling because behavioral theories in social science predict that persons will selectively terminate non-reciprocal relationships, keeping only those that approach reciprocity. We point to two structural features of human communication behavior and relationship formation—the division of contacts into strong and weak ties and degree-based assortativity—that either help or hinder the ability of persons to obtain communicative balance in their relationships. We examine the extent to which deviations from reciprocity in the observed network are partially traceable to the operation of these countervailing tendencies.