Mass Society and Mass Culture: Interdependence or Independence?

Wilensky, Harold L.

doi:10.2307/2092122

Cited by 119 publications

(37 citation statements)

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“…These reevaluations point up the limited normative power of upper-class cultural attitudes and call into question the unity attributed to the culture of the dominant classes in the sociology of Bourdieu. This argument, put forward as early as the 1960s in American sociology (Wilensky, 1964), is at the center of contemporary theses about cultural norm pluralism and eclecticism of tastes (Donnat, 1994;Lahire, 2004), thinking that emphasizes the blurred borders between the world of learned culture and popular or mass culture. In a context where the cultural role of the school is caught between competing prescriptions from the family, the media, and forms of youth sociability, we can expect that the range of cultural tastes and practices of graduates will not be as centered on the world of high culture; that it will be more fully suffused by the influence of the media and mass culture.…”

Section: School Culture and Mass Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Reading and Television-Watching : Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

Coulangeon¹

2009

Revue Française De Sociologie

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What are the cultural effects of generalized access to upper secondary education, which became effective in France in the 1980s and 1990s? Data on reading and television-watching suggest that reading is in decline, a decline concentrated among high school and higher education graduates, and that television occupies a greater place in the lives of generations who attended school in the 1980s and 1990s than in those of the preceding generations. These two developments result from a complex combination of the "net" and structural effects of mass education. Mass education has slowed the decline of reading and mitigated the increase in television-watching: the proportional weight in the population at large of categories most likely to read heavily and least likely to be intensive TV watchers -i.e., high school and higher education graduates-has grown, as reading and television-watching levels among the highest educated have gradually, over the generations, come to resemble those for the less educated. This combined development may be interpreted in two ways that are not necessarily mutually exclusive: 1) both the decline of reading and the increase in television-watching reflect a change in the cultural function of education, a change in turn due to changes in teaching methods and curriculum content reinforced by the sharp rise in influence of the mass media; but 2) these changes also reflect morphological changes in the world of upper secondary and higher education students: with the generalizing of access to the baccalauréat [French high school-leaving degree], the proportion of "inheritors" has considerably fallen. The changes can therefore be read persuasively both as a sign that schooling in France has lost some of its cultural authority and that cultural gaps within the generations who experienced mass education have narrowed.

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Section: School Culture and Mass Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Reading and Television-Watching : Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

Coulangeon¹

2009

Revue Française De Sociologie

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“…El estudio que establece los cimientos de este enfoque fue el desarrollado por Wilensky (1964). En él, el autor argumentaba que las personas con altos niveles educativos no sentían aversión alguna por lo que conocemos como cultura de masas -como defiende el argumento de la homología-, sino que por el contrario, la consumían en alguna de sus formas.…”

Section: Estratificación Social Y Consumo Culturalunclassified

“…Desde la aparición del argumento de la "omnivoridad" (Wilensky 1964;Peterson y Simkus 1992;Peterson y Kern 1996) u "omnivorismo" cultural (Zavisca 2005; Fernández-Rodríguez y Heikkilä 2011), el refuerzo de las tesis sobre la estratificación de los consumos culturales ha experimentado un nuevo empuje. En este sentido, la tesis de la omnivoridad va en dirección opuesta a aquellas que defienden que, en las sociedades contemporáneas, los gustos, prácticas y consumos culturales no están influenciados por procesos de estratificación social.…”

Section: Introducción *unclassified

La transmisión intergeneracional de aptitudes y actitudes culturales. Adaptando el paradigma de la omnivoridad cultural para Andalucía

Herrera-Usagre

2012

Rev. int. sociol.

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-usagre mherrera3@us.es Universidad de Sevilla. España resuMenEl gusto musical ha sido objeto de estudio privilegiado de la sociología, no tanto por la manera en que es adquirido en la escuela, sino por el modo en que los grupos primarios, como la familia o los grupos de pares, han ejercido su influencia. En el presente artículo hemos utilizado la Encuesta sobre la Realidad Social en Andalucía (2009) con el objetivo de mostrar el papel que juegan un conjunto de características sociales de los individuos en su patrón de consumo de música. Nuestros resultados han evidenciado que no existe un patrón de consumo exclusivo de alta cultura ligado a un estrato social. A través de un análisis de clases latentes, hemos encontrado tres patrones de consumo: 'omnívoro', 'moderno' y 'unívoro tradicional', distinguiéndose por el nivel educativo, la edad o el origen social. La voracidad de géneros musicales, por tanto, es fruto de una combinación de factores como el logro educativo, el ciclo de vida y la transmisión intergeneracional de aptitudes y actitudes culturales, pero no así de logro de prestigio o clase social. Palabras ClaveConsumo cultural; Estratificación social; Música; Omnivorismo. abstraCtMusical taste has been a research focus in sociology, not in the way it is acquired in school, but how primary groups, e.g. family or peer groups, have influenced it. In this article we have used the Survey of Social Reality in Andalusia (2009) with the aim of showing the role played by individuals social characteristics on their music consumption patterns. Our results have showed that there is no a exclusive consumption pattern of high culture linked to a social milieu. Through a latent class analysis, we have found three consumption patterns: 'omnivore', 'modern' and 'traditional univore', distinguishing by educational level, age and social origin. Thus, the voraciousness of musical genres is the result of a combination of factors such as educational attainment, life cycle and intergenerational transmission of cultural skills and attitudes, and not by the achievement of prestige or social class.

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“…L'hypothèse « omnivore »/« univore » Avant même la publication de La distinction, certains auteurs ont constaté que les caractéristiques de la consommation culturelle ne vérifiaient pas totalement le modèle de la légitimité culturelle, dans la mesure notamment où la frontière entre culture savante et culture de masse tendait à se brouiller (Gans, 1974(Gans, et 1985, l'univers culturel des classes supérieures apparaissant de plus en plus perméable aux productions de la culture de masse, sous l'influence notamment de la télévision (Wilensky, 1964). De plus, si les membres des classes supérieures conservent à travers le temps une propension plus éle-vée que la moyenne à fréquenter les arts savants, cette fréquentation n'a pour autant jamais cessé d'être minoritaire parmi eux (Peterson et Simkus, 1992;Ethis et Pedler, 1999).…”

Section: L'autonomie Relative Et La Segmentation Des Cultures De Classeunclassified

“…Le développement des industries de la culture de masse a fait l'objet dès les années 1930 d'une abondante littérature critique dont se dégagent deux griefs principaux (Wilensky, 1964). Celui de la standardisation de la production culturelle et de l'inauthenticité des pratiques (Benjamin, 2000(Benjamin, [1938 ; Adorno et Horkheimer, 1974[1944) ; celui du déclin du contrôle social et culturel exercé par les groupes primaires et secondaires relativement au développement des médias 9 .…”

Section: L'industrie De La Culture De Masse Et La Diversitéunclassified

Classes sociales, pratiques culturelles et styles de vie

Coulangeon¹

2004

socsoc

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Résumé Le modèle de la distinction (Bourdieu, 1979), qui postule l’homologie structurale de l’espace des goûts et des pratiques et de l’espace des positions sociales est aujourd’hui perturbé par l’apparition de formes de segmentation qui ne sont pas exclusivement reliées à des variables de classe sociale et par la montée de l’éclectisme des goûts et des pratiques des membres des classes supérieures. Ces évolutions, qui tiennent à la fragilisation du lien entre les classes supérieures et la culture savante ainsi qu’à la massification de l’éducation et de la culture, n’invalident cependant pas totalement le modèle de la distinction. Les goûts et les pratiques demeurent fortement liés aux variables de position sociale, mais la dimension symbolique des rapports de domination tend à perdre de son importance dans une société traversée par de fortes inégalités socioéconomiques qui sont de moins en moins structurées par des cultures de classe.

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Mass Society and Mass Culture: Interdependence or Independence?

Cited by 119 publications

References 0 publications

Reading and Television-Watching : Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

Reading and Television-Watching : Changes in the Cultural Role of the School in the Age of Mass Education

La transmisión intergeneracional de aptitudes y actitudes culturales. Adaptando el paradigma de la omnivoridad cultural para Andalucía

Classes sociales, pratiques culturelles et styles de vie

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