Bourdieu’s space revisited: the social structuring of lifestyles in Flanders (Belgium)

Abstract

Recently, the use of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in research on cultural tastes and lifestyles has gained momentum. More and more analyses are hooking in on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the social space as a primarily relational construct—depicting a homology between various forms of cultural praxis and relative locations in the space of positions of power. Yet, most lifestyle studies inspired by Bourdieu take a more substantialist approach, in which demarcated social categories are related to specific dependent variables representing—often separately—elements of cultural taste or cultural activity. Even though Bourdieu himself warned that the figures he presented in La Distinction should not be read as descriptions of the various lifestyles of class fractions, a lot of subsequent studies draw on these empirical descriptions for hypotheses rather than on the relations revealed through positions in the social space. Thus, much of the empirically based criticism on Bourdieu’s work does not do justice to his actual project. Our use of MCA has methodological reasons, since we believe using a relational analytical tool is indeed the only way to do justice to Bourdieu’s pioneering work. We also argue that MCA is very suitable for studying lifestyles today because of social changes that have occurred during the past decades. Partly due to the perceived lack of corroboration of Bourdieu’s work in more recent work across the Western world, it has been argued that lifestyles are fragmenting and becoming less closely tied to socio-economic background. Again, such studies tend to take a rather substantialist view where social positions are measured using specific categories of class, status, or education, which are causally linked to cultural tastes or activities using ‘traditional’ multivariate correlational techniques. The emergence of the cultural omnivore has been one of the recurrent findings in these studies—questioning the relevance of Bourdieusian notions such as habitus or homology. We argue that the use of MCA is a very suitable tool for demonstrating that social space is still structured by a limited number of crucial axes, especially when strictly predictable relations between social and cultural positions become more difficult to assess unequivocally or seem to be shifting. MCA maps the social space in a manner that allows us to simultaneously structure a great number of lifestyle items without any assumptions regarding their relation to social positions. This open and extensive approach is essential now that it is becoming more and more problematic to assume the existence of one or two basic or universal structuring principles. In fact, recent studies have found that elements of distinction, omnivorousness, and individualization may all be at play simultaneously in today’s lifestyles and that they may pertain to partly different cultural fields. We therefore need a technique that can deal with many variables to gauge dimensionality and do so in an exploratory manner to point at relevant dimensions. This is exactly what MCA allows us to do. We have used MCA on a sample of 2,849 respondents from Flanders (Belgium), analyzing 63 variables on several cultural domains—including behaviour taste and attitudes (e.g. music, visual arts, theatre, film, fashion, food, sports, and travel). MCA reveals three axes: a first commitment-disengagement axis, a second axis distinguishing traditional highbrow/contemplative taste from practices involving action, adventure and excitement, and a third axis indicating a degree of openness to new things. These axes resonate with work on cultural omnivorousness, with schemes proposed by Gerhard Schulze in Die Erlebnisgesellschaft, and with Bourdieu’s own findings in La Distinction. The axes are related to positions in social space to demonstrate their lasting link to economic and—especially—cultural capital.