Reconceptualizing and Theorizing “Omnivorousness”

Abstract

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.

Do low-brow tastes demonstrate stronger categorical differentiation? An analysis of fiction readership in Russia

“…It is perceived as perverse, and in no way serves as a source of legitimacy (cf. Holt [1997], Lizardo and Skiles [2012] Further research is needed, however, to test expectations concerning the directions of cultural hostility that arise from our three models. Particularly promising avenues for such research may be opened up by the use of Big Data sets that include information on dislikes, as well as likes, of a wide variety of cultural objects (databases of various recommender systems come to mind).…”

Taste and the Logic of Practice in Distinction

“…For a critical assessment of the reception of Distinction in the context of omnivorousness research, see Lizardo and Skiles [2009]; for an empirical attempt to revive the genetic argument in relation to omnivorousness research, see Atkinson [2011]. Lizardo and Skiles [2012] show that a focus on genetic mechanisms not only makes the account laid out in Distinction compatible with omnivorousness research, but actually provides the theoretical bases that this line of work is sorely missing. 4 In what follows, page numbers correspond to Harvard University Press's English translation (by Richard Nice) published in 1984.…”

“…Beyond foundations: mechanisms and phenomena I propose that a more productive route for evaluating Bourdieu's theory of the origins of taste and preferences is one that focuses not on meta-theoretical 'foundations' but on the set of target phenomena that theory is designed to deal with [Woodward 1989], and the set of process-based and socio-cognitive 'mechanisms' that the theory proposes are necessary to illuminate those phenomena [Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2005;Lizardo and Skiles 2012]. I have already mentioned several times that the theory of taste was designed to account for a set of coherent, well-specifi ed phenomena.…”

Cultural sociology and new forms of distinction

“…There is a distinctly knowing and self-conscious aura surrounding Normcore, which does not sit easily with claims that the cultural omnivore is constitutive of a pluralist shift in cultural consumption (VICE, 2015). As Lizardo and Skiles (2012) have forcefully argued, such expressions of omnivorousness are actually entirely compatible with a Bourdieuisian framework, and simply represent the transposability of the aesthetic disposition to cultural objects not originally produced with an aesthetic intention. So while the young, fashionable Berliner and his working-class neighbour may share the same objective 'Normcore' taste, their modes of consumption arguably remain separated by a powerful aesthetic boundary.…”

“…Bourdieu thus certainly saw the aesthetic disposition as potentially transferable to popular culture, suggesting that, for him, the core tension wasn't to be found so much in the opposition between highbrow and lowbrow culture per se but between the possession or otherwise of highbrow aesthetics, which constitute a very particular disposition towards the appreciation of different cultural forms (on this see Lizardo and Skiles 2012). However, Bourdieu failed to provide much empirical evidence as to how this aesthetic was practically applied to popular realms 3 (Prior 2005).…”