Consumption of culture and lifestyles

Abstract

Cultural preferences, tastes, and lifestyles have been among the most popular concepts in the sociology of consumption in the past decades, giving rise to several theoretical, contextual, and methodological questions. It discusses the main theoretical inspirations of studies on cultural consumption among classical sociologists, and outlines the relationship between lifestyles and contemporary structures of inequality. The main body of cultural consumption research has two main emphases. The first stems from Bourdieu's analysis of how the upper class uses highbrow cultural distinctions to produce and reproduce social boundaries. The second emphasis draws on Peterson's work on the way that the cultural distinction of elite groups in society has shifted from a preference for highbrow culture to embracing omnivorous cultural tastes and activities. A comparative point of view is adopted in lifestyle research mainly to discern similarities and differences between countries or regions in lifestyle patterns and in the association between such patterns and socio-demographic or economic variables.