This article examines the relationship between different forms of cultural taste and the density of social contacts across alternative types of network relations classified by average tie strength. The author builds on Bourdieu's ([1986] 2001) classic statement on the “forms of capital” (economic, social, and cultural) and the conversion dynamics among them, and on DiMaggio's (1987) connection between cultural tastes and sociability. He hypothesizes that (1) in addition to cultural tastes being determined by network relations, cultural tastes are used to form and sustain those networks. Furthermore he expects that (2) highbrow culture taste will be less likely to be converted into social capital beyond immediate strong-tie circles due to its more restricted, “assetspecific” nature. Because of its generalized appeal, taste for popular culture will be more likely to be associated with weak-tie network density. The results broadly support these hypotheses: a model that specifies an effect of culture on network density provides a better fit to the data than the traditional conception of networks as determining taste. In addition using log-linear models and instrumental-variable methods, I show that popular culture consumption has a positive impact on weak-tie network density but not strong-tie network density, while highbrow culture consumption selectively increases strong-tie density but has no appreciable effect on weak ties, net of standard socioeconomic variables. These findings help to shed light on the mechanisms that translate mastery of different types of cultural knowledge into integration across distant social positions or closure around strong group boundaries. The author also discusses the implications of the results for current models describing the transformation of cultural into social resources.

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fact that, conveniently enough, this arbitrary convention still left the first author slot to be occupied by the more (institutionally) senior member of the group. In spite of that, this paper would never had come to fruition if it was not for Dustin Stoltz's vision, perseverance, and hard work (especially when it comes to assembling the citation data) and as such he deserves special thanks. Dustin was the first one to "see" a paper where the first author just saw a set of smart points usable to impress students in a seminar context. Dustin herded all of the cats, and made the seemingly quixotic attempt to write a seven-authored theory piece seem like a breeze. Of course, it was the intellectual input of all authors that ultimately made the paper more than the sum of its separate parts although we will spare you tired emergence analogies.

While influential across a wide variety of subfields, cultural analysis in sociology continues to be hampered by coarse-grained conceptualizations of the different modes in which culture becomes personal, as well as the process via which persons acquire and use different forms of culture. In this article, I argue that persons acquire and use culture in two analytically and empirically distinct forms, which I label declarative and nondeclarative. The mode of cultural acquisition depends on the dynamics of exposure and encoding, and modulates the process of cultural accessibility, activation, and use. Cultural knowledge about one domain may be redundantly represented in both declarative and nondeclarative forms, each linked via analytically separable pathways to corresponding public cultural forms and ultimately to substantive outcomes. I outline how the new theoretical vocabulary, theoretical model, and analytic distinctions that I propose can be used to resolve contradictions and improve our understanding of outstanding substantive issues in empirically oriented subfields that have recently incorporated cultural processes as a core explanatory resource.

Scores of sociological studies have provided evidence for the association between broad cultural taste, or omnivorousness, and various status characteristics, such as education, occupation, and age. Nevertheless, the literature lacks a consistent theoretical foundation with which to understand and organize these empirical findings. In this paper, we offer such a framework, suggesting that a mechanism-based approach is helpful for the examination of the origins of the omnivore-univore taste pattern as well as its class-based distribution. We re-ground the discussion of this phenomenon in Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), conceptualizing omnivorous taste as a transposable form of the aesthetic disposition available most readily to individuals who convert early aesthetic training into high cultural capital occupational trajectories. After outlining the genetic mechanisms that link the aesthetic disposition to early socialization trajectories, we identify two relational mechanisms that modulate its manifestation (either enhancing or inhibiting it) after early socialization.

The fact that women are more religious than men is one of the most consistent findings in the sociology of religion. Miller and Stark (2002) propose that a gender difference in riskpreference of physiological origin might explain this phenomenon. While acknowledging the utility of their risk-preference mechanism, we believe that their assumption regarding the genesis of this difference is a premature concession to biology. Returning to Miller's original paper on gender, risk, and religiosity (Miller and Hoffmann 1995), we draw on power-control theory (PCT), developed in the work of John Hagan and colleagues, to introduce a plausible socialization account for these differences. PCT attributes the origins of gender differences in risk-preference to class-based differences in the socialization of children, with women raised in more patriarchal families-as indexed by the mother's class position-more likely to be riskaverse than men raised in the same type of households and women raised in more egalitarian households. If religiosity and risk-aversion are related, then the gender difference in religiosity should be strongest among those raised by women of low socioeconomic status. We evaluate these claims using data from the General Social Survey. The results are consistent with a socialization explanation: women raised by high-SES mothers are less religious than women raised by low education mothers, but mother's socioeconomic status has little effect on men's chances of being irreligious and father's socioeconomic status has a negligible effect on the gender difference in religiosity.2