Reimagining omnivorousness in the context of place

Abstract

Place is a key driver in the formation and maintenance of cultural lifestyles. Yet, place remains largely ignored in scholarly studies of cultural omnivorousness. After establishing whether there are different modes of omnivorousness as well as distinguishing between other cultural lifestyles, this article then takes a first step in readdressing this anomaly by examining whether clustering exists at the regional level in England. Using a methodologically innovative approach to simultaneously capture latent class typologies and between-group heterogeneity at the area scale, our findings illustrate how place is vital to consumption habits, particularly to voracious omnivores. We argue that the underlying mechanism behind these cultural patterns at the area level is contextual in nature, and in the case of voracious omnivores, primarily due to the supply of cultural items and the importance of likeminded individuals in active networks.

Fields of participation and lifestyle in England: revealing the regional dimension from a reanalysis of the Taking Part Survey using Multiple Factor Analysis

“…8-10) have, nevertheless, drawn attention to the ways in which Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, through the interplay of "field" and an embodied "habitus", rooted in everyday life, is fundamentally territorial; social situations, they propose, are simultaneously physical situations and place therefore plays an important role in defining the "stakes" that attach to the cultural field. Following a similar line of argument, and drawing on the work Ernste (2004) and Agnew (1987), Widdop and Cutts, (2012) and Cutts and Widdop (2016) have recently suggested that the social interactions which form participation habits are geographically grounded in ways which include and combine the influence of local socio-demographic composition, the supply of cultural opportunities, and discourses of place and belonging, working at different spatial scales. The multi-level models they employ to investigate the factors accounting for variations in museum attendance, and subsequently participation in five other cultural activities, using TPS data from 2005, indicate a significant effect of place above and beyond the force of traditional stratification variables and individual demographic characteristics.…”

The coming crisis of cultural engagement? Measurement, methods, and the nuances of niche activities

“…Until recently, little work investigated spatial dynamics, in spite of the major differences in cultural venues and programming in different parts of the country (with some significant exceptions in recent years, e.g. Brook, 2017;Cutts & Widdop, 2016;Delrieu & Gibson, 2017). This more recent work has been illuminating in addressing supply-side accounts: inequalities in cultural participation are not simply due to what is on offer nearby.…”

Class, culture, and structure: Stratification and mechanisms of omnivorousness

“…In addition, two recent studies, by Cutts and Widdop (), and Fishman and Lizardo (), indicate finer mechanisms by looking at specific elements of cultural production, spatial scales within the nation‐state, and periods of macrostructural change. In the United Kingdom, at the regional level, the mechanisms that shape omnivorousness (conceptualized as cultural diversity, specifically, voraciousness) are the quantity and diversity of cultural production, as well as social networks constituted by likeminded people (Cutts & Widdop, ). Portugal and Spain both moved from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1970s.…”