Vegard Jarness

Cultural vs Economic Capital: Symbolic Boundaries within the Middle Class

This article concerns an insufficiently studied link in cultural class analysis, namely that between class-structured lifestyle differences and social closure. It employs a modified version of Michèle Lamont’s promising, yet under-theorised approach to the study of symbolic boundaries – the conceptual distinctions made by social actors in categorising people, practices, tastes, attitudes and manners in everyday life. Drawing on 46 qualitative interviews with people from the city of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis focuses particularly on a horizontal boundary-drawing dynamic between middle-class interviewees. It is argued that entanglements of different types of status judgements work both to construct and reinforce social boundaries between class fractions. The findings draw attention to what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the capital composition principle of social differentiation. Though fundamental to Bourdieu’s model of the social space, such systematic intra-class divisions have seldom been discussed in detail in contemporary cultural-stratification research.

Class, Culture and Culinary Tastes: Cultural Distinctions and Social Class Divisions in Contemporary Norway:

In this article we analyse class cultures by mapping out differences in ‘original taste’; that is, respondents’ classed preferences for food and drink. By employing Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we produce a relational model of tastes. Using three indicators of social class – occupational class, income and education – we find clear class divisions. The upper and middle classes exhibit diverse and what are typically regarded as ‘healthy’ tastes; this contrasts with the more restricted and what are typically regarded as ‘less healthy’ tastes found among the working classes. Our findings challenge ongoing debates within cultural stratification research where it has become almost usual to demonstrate that the contemporary upper and middle classes exhibit playful tastes for the ‘cosmopolitan’ and the ‘exotic’. We find that upper- and middle-class households also enjoy very traditional foodstuffs. We argue that this illustrates a need for a relational understanding of taste: even the consumption of the traditional peasant food of pre-capitalist Norway can be refashioned as a badge of distinction in the 21st century.

Viewpoints and points of view: situating symbolic boundary drawing in social space

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social space and Michèle Lamont’s concept of symbolic boundaries can be fruitfully combined in cultural-stratification research. Focusing on the case of Stavanger, Norway, the analysis also shows how Multiple Correspondence Analysis is compatible with other research techniques, such as qualitative in-depth interviews. The approach adopted provides a practical application of Bourdieu’s double reading of social relations. It combines the first, objective moment of situating 46 individuals subjected to qualitative interviews in the local social space (i.e. a system of relations between individuals’ possessions of cultural and economic capital) with the second, subjective moment of mapping the interviewees’ evaluations and classifications of other people’s lifestyles. It is shown how intertwinements of various discursive repertoires of evaluation (cultural-aesthetical, moral-political and socio-economic) work in both contradictive and reinforcing ways to construct symbolic boundaries between classes and class fractions. The findings draw attention to both the capital volume and the capital composition dimensions of social space in that symbolic boundary drawing takes on different forms along these dimensions.