Tastes and practices in three Australian cultural fields: television, music and sport

Abstract

This article introduces the Themed Section of Media International Australia, ‘Tastes and practices in three Australian cultural fields: television, music and sport’, which presents selected findings of the 2014-2015 survey of Australian cultural practices conducted as part of the Australian Research Council project Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics (DP140101970). It briefly discusses the social organisation of the production of consumption of Australia in the period between the national cultural policies Creative Nation (1994) and Creative Australia (2013). The Introduction then outlines the methodology underlying the Australian Cultural Fields survey that, in building on the approach of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, was developed to assess how far entrenched cultural hierarchies and inequalities have been displaced by broadened patterns of access to arts and culture. Of particular concern is the role of traditional and new forms of cultural capital in differentiating patterns of cultural consumption and participation across relations of class, gender and ethnicity, which the distinctive survey design and administration seek to capture in the Australian context. Bringing together the methods of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Cluster Analysis, each article highlights specific aspects of the relations between cultural tastes, practices, and social positions in contemporary Australia via an engagement with contemporary debates in cultural capital theory. The contributions on television (by Tony Bennett, Modesto Gayo, and David Rowe), music (Ben Dibley and Modesto Gayo) and sport (Modesto Gayo and David Rowe) address the dynamics of these Australian cultural fields, while also indicating the significance of their research findings for studies of other nationally-constituted cultural fields, as well as the contested play of cultural capital within nations and in the transnational/global sphere.