The measure of a fan: Social patterns of voracious sports following in Canada

Abstract

Sociological studies on the manifestations and reproduction of inequality through cultural consumption have focused on few domains of culture and have mostly neglected intensity in consumption. Using largescale survey data about professional sports following in Canada, we investigate how socioeconomic position is associated with intensity of professional sports following ("voraciousness"). Our multinomial logistic regression analyses suggest that social class, gender, and geography are predictors of voraciousness in each of the major professional sports leagues. Our latent class analysis (LCA) reveals seven sports following profiles marked by differences in range and intensity of following. We find that the most voracious sport followers are also the most omnivorous but are not distinctively the most privileged group. Findings suggest a distinct sport following profile of the predominantly male and economically dominant group in the field of social classes and point toward groups of sport followers with different styles of aversion and passing knowledge, perhaps in a type of deployment of Bourdieu's (1984) disinterested aesthetic. Overall, however, gender and region appear to be stronger predictors of voraciousness in sports following than social class in the Canadian context.

Cultural stratification in the UK: Persistent gender and class differences in cultural voraciousness

“…The concept of cultural voraciousness has become widely used in the literature on leisure participation and cultural consumption in general (e.g. recently, Cutts and Widdop, 2017; Gemar and Vanzella-Yang, 2022; Lefèvre et al, 2020; Michael, 2015; Quidu, 2022; Segre and Morelli, 2021; Weingartner and Rössel, 2019), and in relation to gender (Erel, 2012; Gemar and Pope, 2021; Molinillo and Japutra, 2017) and class (Weingartner and Rössel, 2019). Yet much had changed in the UK in respect of the occupational/gender distribution of employment between the time of the original data collection in 1998, and 2015, the date of the most recent UK Time Use Survey.…”