The Australian space of lifestyles in comparative perspective

Abstract

This article (1) examines the social distribution of cultural practices in Australia, and (2) compares this with similar data for the UK in order to identify where and in what respects the social articulations of Australian cultural practices are distinctive. The article draws on the statistical data produced by the Australian Research Council-funded inquiry into Australian Everyday Cultures in the late 1990s and the data produced by the UK’s 2003–6 Economic and Social Research Council inquiry into the relations between cultural capital and social exclusion in Britain. It reports the findings of a comparison of multiple correspondence analyses of the survey data for these two projects. The two spaces of lifestyle produced by these procedures show strong similarities with regard to their relations to class, age and gender as the three most significant axes of differentiation. There are, however, differences in the roles that specific cultural fields (the music, literary and media fields, for example) play relative to one another in the two national contexts. Class culture divisions also appear more attenuated in the Australian than in the British case, with a significant clustering of classes in the middle of the space of lifestyles. However, working-class tastes and those of professionals appear strongly polarised in Australia while managers and professionals are more distinctive in their cultural practices than are their British counterparts.