The social space, the symbolic space and masculine domination: the gendered correspondence between class and lifestyles in the UK

ABSTRACT

There have been countless efforts to test and ‘update’ Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis that there is a correspondence between the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. The best known of these targeting the UK are the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project and, more recently, the Great British Class Survey, but their conceptual and methodological limitations mean their findings are questionable and hinder closer investigation of an oft-sidelined piece of the puzzle one of the projects specifically highlighted: the significance of gender in structuring taste. Drawing on the 2012 wave of the British Cohort Study, which included a battery of questions on cultural consumption, and deploying a logic and measure of class closer to Bourdieu’s own, I thus seek to offer an alternative examination of not only the nature and degree of correspondence between the social space and lifestyles but its entwinement with masculinity and femininity.

KEYWORDS:

• Bourdieu
• class
• cultural capital
• gender
• lifestyles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Will Atkinson is Reader in Sociology in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Class, Individualization and Late Modernity (2010, Palgrave Macmillan), Class (Polity, 2015), Beyond Bourdieu (Polity, 2016) and Class in the New Millennium (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of Class Inequality in Austerity Britain (2012, Palgrave Macmillan).

Notes

1 Vandebroeck (2016) offers the exception to the muted or compartmentalised treatment of gender to be found among Bourdieu-inspired analysts of consumption, but he focusses on the narrower field of bodily practices, and with it (though he does not put it as such) the intersection of class practices with the sexual field.

2 For more background information on the BCS and its various waves, see the survey website: http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/BCS70.

3 The remaining lifestyle variables are set as passive in order to maintain balance in the model in two senses: first, following LeRoux and Rouanet’s (2004) advice, to neutralise modalities otherwise registering an excessive contribution on a major axis, usually on account of rarity; and second, transposing Rosenlund’s (2015) guidance on constructing a robust model of social space using MCA, to maintain relative parity between modalities hypothesised to correspond with high cultural capital – overrepresented in surveys like the BCS which take them alone to represent ‘culture’ – and those conjectured to correspond more with high economic capital.

4 This is confirmed if the model is rerun excluding the dominated class and again excluding the dominated and intermediate classes. In both cases the general structure of the model is the same as that of the full model, but in the first case the relative strength of the two major axes shifts to 57 per cent and 21 per cent, and in the second case to 50 per cent and 25 per cent. The full models cannot be reported here for lack of space but details can be supplied on request.