Valuation as rational decision-making: a critique of Bourdieu's analysis of cultural value

Abstract

According to Bourdieu, cultural tastes are group-specific in nature. Members of a given social class are supposed to acquire a habitus which coordinates their cultural preferences at an unconscious level. Bourdieu's approach leaves little room for the idea that in adjudicating value to cultural products social agents follow a specific procedure requiring some form of rational thought. We argue that in his analysis of valuation Bourdieu sometimes minimizes the role of conscious (rational) thought on inconclusive grounds. Furthermore, we propound that the theory of the habitus embodies the risk of overestimating the similarities between tastes manifested by social agents. In our view, this risk is reduced by admitting that factors other than the habitus shape cultural preferences. Finally, we contend that Bourdieu's notion of ‘cultural legitimacy’ denotes the conditions under which cultural values become binding, and that, for this reason, it should not be conceptualized as being scalable in nature. We present an event history analysis of the positions held by fiction titles on the New York Times bestseller lists. The aim of this analysis is to make a case for an approach that conceives valuation as involving the use of a comparative procedure and as a form of rational decision making. Cultural value was found to vary in the course of time and also according to the individual items which function as terms of comparison.