Australian cultural fields: social relations and dynamics

The articles in this themed section report on aspects of the survey component of the Australian Research Council-funded Discovery project Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics (DP140101970). Critically engaging with Bourdieusian field theory, this project investigated the shaping of, and relations between, art, literary, media, sport, music and heritage fields. It considered the effects on these fields of national and transnational factors including cultural policy-making, digitization and globalization probing, in particular, the role of cultural capital in mediating the relationship between education and occupational class. Particular attention was also paid to the multicultural composition of Australia’s population and the distinctive position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders both within and across the six cultural fields encompassed by the project.

Of the 1461 survey respondents, a main sample of 1202 drawn from the general population was augmented by a boost sample of 259 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian Australians. The boost samples are addressed in two articles by Bennett, Dibley and Kelly and by Ang and Noble. Quota sizes were developed for the main sample using proportional allocation by age and gender based on Australian Bureau of Statistics population estimates. While the achieved gender sample was statistically representative, 25–39-year olds were under-represented and 40–59-year olds over-represented, as were the over 60s (albeit less so). The main sample data-set was compensatorily weighted.

The questionnaire, designed in accordance with the protocols initiated by Bourdieu, was limited to cultural items with a strong association with the project fields. Respondents were probed on patterns of participation as well as generic tastes and digital practices, while reactions to 20 named cultural items allowed for a more fine-grained examination of taste. Each field included examples of Indigenous cultural production. Also explored were the socio-demographic characteristics of respondents, their spouses and parents.

Articles by Waterton and Gayo, and Kelly, Gayo and Carter deploy multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a geometric data analytical technique innovatively applied to cultural data by Bourdieu. Rather than isolating independent and dependent variables in order to identify one-to-one connections between them, MCA explores multiple cross-cutting connections between variables and presents these on a geometric plane in order to make visible relations that would otherwise be imperceptible. Both papers complement MCA by using the techniques of cluster analysis to identify specific groupings of related cultural tastes and practices associated with particular combinations of socio-demographic characteristics.¹ Taking a different approach, Bennett, Dibley and Kelly, and Ang and Noble, utilize regional scales for the items named in the questionnaire as points of entry to examine the cultural tastes and practices of the boost samples.

This collection of articles provides important insights into the social relations and dynamics informing the shaping of cultural tastes in contemporary Australia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Deborah Stevenson is a professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her publications include the books: Cities of Culture: A Global Perspective (2017); The City (2013); Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place and the Traveller (2010, with Stephen Wearing and Tamara Young); Cities and Urban Cultures (2003); and Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy (2000). In addition, she is the co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture (2013, with Greg Young), Culture and the City: Creativity, Tourism, Leisure (2012, with Amie Matthews) and the in-progress Routledge Urban Media and Communication Companion (with Zlatan Krajina).

Tony Bennett is a research professor in Social and Cultural Theory in Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society, and a fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the UK Academy of the Social Sciences. His books include Formalism and Marxism (1979), Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987, with Janet Woollacott), Outside Literature (1991), The Birth of the Museum (1995), Culture: A Reformer’s Science (1998), Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004), Making Culture, Changing Society (2013) and Museums, Power, Knowledge (2018). He is the lead co-author of Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (1999), Culture, Class, Distinction (2009) and Collecting, Organising, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government (2017).

Notes

1. For an accessible introduction to the underlying principles of MCA and its use in combination with clustering techniques, see (Roose, 2016).