Debates on cultural consumption

The middle class usually use cultural capital to advance their economic wealth. Studies have argued that cultural capital is embedded in education and cultural capital. The studies have also made connections between value-based power and several types of capital. The cultural capital theory has resulted in debates concerning cultural consumption including Bourdieu’s idea on social class and taste and Peterson’s omnivore idea. The cultural capital concept This is a concept that was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu between 1984 and 1986, which he suggested that should be added to the existing types of capital, which are social and economic capital. Bourdieu argued that class cannot be condensed to a position in the sharing out of labor or mere economic relations. It is the sharing of what counts as culture that produces class differences and the unbalances of power.

The family is the key transmission agent of culture with the school playing an essential role in strengthening and legitimizing the culture. The school system tends to acknowledge and support dominant culture and in so doing, it reinforces the mechanisms of reproducing inequality in the society (Saceno 2014). There are three types of cultural capital that need to be distinguished. These patterns of behavior operate as symbolic boundaries between the people that are in different parts in the classified structure. The manner in which the boundaries are established is a antagonistic one and takes the classificatory struggle form, which amounts to one modality through which people exercise their symbolic power (Bourdieu 2011). The occupational division of labor in a society forms a system and the locations in the system are interrelated in terms of what are identified as theoretically meaningful factors.

Within a culture, there are various species of capital that cannot be summed down to a single concept of capital. Within societies, people have different competencies with regards to this cultural capital and the class structure developed by Bourdieu is based on the analysis of survey data that includes various indicators of both cultural and economic capital that individuals in the occupational system posses. The three axes determine the class of individuals. The members of dominant class tend to display unitary lifestyles and they exhibit what Bourdieu calls a sense of distinction. This habit is defined by the aesthetic sensibility which is displayed in various moments of the daily life. The people who belong to the working class display antithetical lifestyles.

They have a taste of necessity and are inclined to assigning priority to function over form. The explorations cultural consumption patterns by gender have suggested that in high cultures, women recognize greater legitimacy than men. This implies that there are various factors that affect tastes such as age, race, and gender. It is also expected that areas with rigid school tracking also influences the tastes of students. Based on the type of educational preparation, it is likely that academic students will value the consumption of cultural items than the professional and occupational students. The sociologist studies that have been conducted to test the applicability of the theory have revealed that Americans tend to prefer moral boundaries instead of cultural boundaries (Kane, 2003).

Even though some studies have found the arguments presented by Bourdieu to be applicable in various parts of the world, others have argued that the extent to which he described educational practices or the bourgeoisie culture in France is weak. The scene that Bourdieu used in his passage is ignorant of the real nature of schooling. Instead, it fabricates a scene to be able to cite the Racinian litotes, which does not fully represent the educational practice or the bourgeoisie conversation (Fowler 1995). Bourdieu created a fantasy that views the school as a place of having leisure where one has the ability to participate in disinterested cultural class exercises and receive reward for the participation. In addition, the theory was developed at the time when France placed greater emphasis on humanities and arts but currently, this has changed as a response to the changing requirements of the economic fields because they are considered the most reliable routes to the growth of economies in the world that is becoming more corporate as days go by (Bennett and Silva 2006).

Bourdieu was reluctant to change is perspective to suit the changing environment and he considered it as a form of populism (Bennett and Silva 2006). The cultural capital concept has entered into cultural policy and arts debates have been modified in four ways. First, the likeliness of Bourdieu to accept of the conventional hierarchies of arts by allocating values and importance to the existing forms of cultural activity has not received strong support. Secondly, the concept has been modified with more attention being given to the manner in which it is related to ethnicity and race. This has been done in two ways. These differences are due to structural and cultural factors and the state and social diversity levels also play different roles in these countries.

Furthermore, there is aristocratic tradition in France, which is absent in America (Christin 2010). The debates on the approaches present a form of ambiguity. One is left wondering whether the core of the analysis is music preferences of the individuals categorized to be of high status, respondents that have preferences for highbrow music, or respondents belonging to the high-status with highbrow tastes. Looking at Bourdieu’s perspective, he focuses on the high-status people that have highbrow tastes. , Gattinger, M. , Jeannotte, M. S. and Straw, W. eds. Bourdieu, P. The forms of capital.  Cultural theory: an anthology, 1, pp. Bryant, L. and Hoon, E. , 2014, September. Do we need capital accounts for culture. In Joint IEA/ISI Strategic Forum 2014 and Workshop of the High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress on Intra-generational and Inter-generational Sustainability, Rome (pp.