Recent sociological work shows that culture is an important causal variable in labor market outcomes. Does the same hold for product markets? To answer this question, we study a product market in which selection decisions occur absent face-to-face interaction between intermediaries and short-term contract workers. We find evidence of “product-based” cultural matching operating as a pathway to inequality. Relying on quantitative and qualitative observational data and semi-structured interviews with intermediaries in trade fiction publishing, we show intermediaries culturally match themselves to manuscripts as a normal feature of doing “good work.” We propose three organizational conditions under which “encultured biases” come to the fore in product selection, and a fourth resulting in inequalities along demographic lines and other markers of perceived cultural proximity and distance. We close with a discussion of other settings in which product-based cultural matching is likely to occur, call for the investigation of cultural matching beyond previously theorized conditions, and argue for the inclusion of cultural products in the broader movement toward reconsidering culture as a causal factor.

Are contemporary higher-status tastes inclusive, exclusive, or both? Recent work suggests that the answer likely is both. And yet, little is known concerning how configurations of such tastes are learned, upheld, and expressed without contradiction. We resolve this puzzle by showing the affordances of different levels of culture (i.e., genres and objects) in the expression of tastes. We rely on original survey data to show that people of higher status taste differently at different levels of culture: more inclusively for genres and more exclusively for objects. Inclusivity at the level of genres is fostered through familial socialization, and exclusivity at the level of objects is fostered through formal schooling. Individuals' taste configurations are mirrored in and presumably reinforce their adult social-structural positions. The results have important implications for understanding the subtle maintenance of status in an increasingly diverse and putatively meritocratic society.

Are higher status cultural tastes in the modern United States better described as being inclusive and broad or exclusive and narrow? We construct an original dataset in response to conflicting answers to this question. We fill a major gap in the literature on cultural tastes by simultaneously considering taste for both musical genres and artists within genres. By examining the compositional balance of respondents’ taste portfolios, we reconcile seemingly incommensurate theoretical frameworks of class homology and omnivorousness. The results indicate that an omnivorous disposition to music is a relatively middle-status position in the social structure. In contrast, positions characterized by higher levels of cultural capital map onto exclusive and narrower tastes for consecrated culture.

Since the Quiet Revolution, Quebec has significantly transformed its relationship to Catholicism. Some commentators have even gone as far as discussing an increasingly important secularization within the province. Yet, an examination of the main indicators of religiosity in Quebec provides evidence for the permanence of a certain cultural Catholicism. However, this cultural Catholicism is tending to gradually fade over time, giving place to the reconfiguration of the regime of religiosity. Meanwhile, in the rest of Canada, Catholicism tends to grow, primarily due to the immigrant population in recent years. In this general context, is Quebec still a “Catholically distinct” society? To answer this question, the authors use a series of logistic models to examine the main determinants of Catholic affiliation and Mass attendance. Age, place of birth and mother tongue emerge as principal determinants of religious affiliation and practice. Based on the findings from these models, the authors show that Quebec remains a Catholically distinct society in comparison with other Canadian regions. However, the gap between this province and the rest of Canada seems to have been increasingly fading, at least over the last thirty years.

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