Culture, Class, Distinction

Following on the 1960's cultural study by Bourdieu on cultural perceptions in France, Bennett and fellow sociologists at the Economic social Research Council Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change surveyed and interviewed a cross-section of British respondents, including recent immigrants on their cultural tastes and attitudes. The results make interesting reading, especially the verbatim records. The first section of the report covers theory and methodology. The second part outlines the subject matter: music, reading, visual art, films, sport and cuisine. This section is enlivened by quotes from the interviewees. Part four gives conclusions by economic/educational class, gender and age. Rather than using bar graphs to chart results, the researchers use multi-colored dots on an axis. This shows the variety within the responses. The study concludes that, unlike France of forty years ago, Britain today is more fluid in tastes and there is less sense of superiority/inferiority across the board, even though there is still a perception of a cultural gap between, for example, fans of opera and fans of country-western music. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The book is co-authored by Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, David Wright. The book arises out of research conducted at the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), a major international cente for the analysis of socio-cultural change.

Tony Bennett is Research Professor of Social and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Recent publications include Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism; New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris) and Handbook of Cultural Analysis (edited with John Frow).

Mike Savage is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester and Director of the ESRC Centre for Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). His interests are in social stratification, urban, and historical sociology.

Elizabeth Silva is Professor of Sociology at the Open University and a member of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC). Her current research interests include social divisions, gender, cultural sociology, everyday life and qualitative methods.

Alan Warde is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. His current research interest include the sociology of consumption, with particular emphasis on food, cultural sociology, social stratification and economic sociology.

Modesto Gayo-Cal was a research fellow at CRESC and the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester while working on the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project. His areas of interest are: theories of nationalism, political behaviour, middle classes, and cultural consumption. He is also interested in the application of statistical methods in the social sciences. He is now a Profesor Investigador at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile.

David Wright has published extensively in the field of cultural sociology and is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. He was a research fellow on the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), based at the Open University.