The U.S. Space of Lifestyles and Its Homologies

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu’s influence on the study of lifestyles in the United States has been profound, yet the vast majority of relevant research operates with methods and assumptions at odds with Bourdieu’s own. His specifically relational or geometric understanding of social structures, and lifestyles, has been overlooked, meaning that no one has yet done for the contemporary United States what Bourdieu did for France, that is, construct a model of the “space of lifestyles” and its homologies. This paper does precisely that, deploying Bourdieu’s own favored technique of multiple correspondence analysis on survey data from 2017 to 2018. It finds a remarkable continuity between 1970s France and the contemporary United States, specifically in the existence of axes relating to economic and cultural capital. The paper also explores the correspondence of sociodemographic factors with the space, and importantly, it unveils associated patterns of symbolic domination.

The German space of lifestyles: A multidetermined structure

“…The similarity with 1970s' France is evident, for example, but so too are the parallels with lifestyle spaces mapped in similar fashion elsewhere (esp. by Atkinson, 2017Atkinson, , 2021bAtkinson, , 2022aFlemmen et al, 2019). The internal polarisation of dominant culture and the fact that educational discipline rather than level, as well as refined measures of occupation and inherited cultural capital, were necessary to map correspondences with capital holdings signal the danger of drawing erroneous conclusionsfor example 'the dominant class are omnivorous'if social class is reduced to one dimension.…”

“…Use of MCA to test or update Bourdieu’s thesis has proliferated in the last 15 years, with many constructing models of spaces of lifestyles for territories as diverse as Sweden (Börjesson, 2015), Switzerland (Weingartner and Rössel, 2019), Flanders (Roose et al, 2012), Australia (Bennett et al, 2020), Mexico (Bustamante and Garcia, 2015), Poland (Marzec, 2019), the UK (Bennett et al, 2009) and the US (Atkinson, 2022a). Many of these are constrained by the limitations of secondary data, including reliance on unidimensional measures of social position, making a break with the omnivore thesis difficult.…”