Where Do Cultural Omnivores Come from? The Implications of Educational Mobility for Cultural Consumption

Abstract

Many scholars see social mobility as a key factor that contributes to the emergence of cultural omnivores. In this paper, we discuss three versions of the social mobility argument and assess their empirical validity using recent survey data on music and visual arts consumption in the UK. By applying diagonal reference models to our data, we show that none of these three arguments receives empirical support. Both parents' and respondent's educational level affect music/visual arts consumption, with the weight of the former being about a third in magnitude of the latter. There is no difference between the upwardly mobile and the downwardly mobile in the relative weights of origin and destination. Finally, socially mobile individuals are actually less omnivorous than those who are intergenerationally stable in advantaged positions. In light of these findings, we argue that social mobility does not explain the emergence of music/visual arts omnivores in the UK.

Understanding cultural omnivores: social and political attitudes

“…The binary response to these indicators form an 8‐way contingency table with 256 (i.e., 2 8 ) cells. Chan and Turner () analyse this table with latent class models and report three latent classes (see Online Appendix A for details). To elaborate, members of the largest latent class (comprising 58 per cent of the sample) are least likely of all to attend music or visual art events.…”

“…Their cultural consumption is largely restricted to one non‐highbrow item in each domain, namely, ‘rock, pop and jazz’ for music and ‘museum’ for visual arts. Given this, Chan and Turner () call this latent class univores (U). In contrast, members of the smallest latent class (14 per cent of the sample) are, in relative terms at least, avid consumers of music and visual arts of all kinds.…”

“…Finally, there is a third latent class that is in‐between the other two classes both in terms of its size (28 per cent) and the probability of cultural consumption. Accordingly, Chan and Turner () refer to this latent class as paucivores (P) because ‘pauci’, meaning few, is an apt description of the modest amount and limited range of cultural consumption of those in the second latent class. In the analyses that follow, I use this threefold latent class distinction as the key independent variable.…”

More science, less exegesis, please: a rejoinder

“…So the confounding between age and education is not as problematic as he suggests. I have explored the implications of intergenerational educational mobility for cultural omnivorousness elsewhere (Chan and Turner ). As regards whether class and status are analytically and empirically separable, please see my reply to Flemmen, Jarness, and Rosenlund (FJR) in this issue (Chan ).…”

Cultural omnivorousness and status inconsistency in Chile: the role of objective and subjective social status

“…Moreover, the empirical literature on status inconsistency has suffered from methodological and conceptual shortcomings (Miranda et al, 2009;Zhao, Jin, Song, Cui, & Ding, 2018). Following recent studies (Chan & Turner, 2017;Jin et al, 2019), we seek to overcome these limitations by using multinomial diagonal reference models.…”