Distinction

"Bourdieu is very much foundational in terms of understanding consumer culture. In contrast to many accounts that focus on advertising and marketing as somehow beaming desire into people, Bourdieu shows how the patterns of consumption that dominate in a society come out of structures of social inequality. He groups the consumer realm with the economic. I think that is very important because the ideology of consumption in the second half of the 20th century was that consumption is individualised and natural. Your taste is just who you are and it represents you as a person. That we would consider a sort of crude status model which comes from Thorstein Veblen, who argued that the pattern of consumption is based on people’s economic resources so it is how wealthy you are that determines what you consume and everyone wants to consume the same thing. It is just that some people don’t have enough money for it. But what Bourdieu shows is that there is a whole other structure at work, in addition to economic capital, which he calls cultural capital. Foodie culture is a great example. This is a kind of cultural capital that people develop, even if they don’t have a lot of money, and they develop tastes which go along with it. Cultural producers, for example, have very finely honed tastes. They often set taste patterns for others to follow and yet they may not be particularly wealthy. And so it is a second dimension for understanding consumer culture, which is related in many ways to economic capital but in other ways operates in opposite ways. One of the things that we have to understand is that certain types of ideas about what is sustainable have got caught in that net of culture and class in complicated ways. So it was thought that to be green you needed the latest generation solar house or you needed a greywater system or you needed an expensive hybrid car. The high cultural capital folks were a group taking up green consumption and sustainability. Exactly."

"This is a really important book. Bourdieu argues that people’s preferences are socially constructed in several ways. He doesn’t see consumption as something we do to satisfy needs; he sees consumption as a function of social status. We consume to become the person that we want to be. So if I’m interested in being ecological then I purchase green products. The things I consume are who I am. Bourdieu offers us a couple of ideas about how that works. One is our socialisation in childhood. He evokes the idea that people in different social classes will be socialised to want certain kinds of things. The other factors are the amount of actual capital you have and what he calls cultural capital, which is sophistication. So if we have a lot of money but no cultural capital we’ll consume conspicuously. If we have a lot of cultural capital but little actual capital we’ll live in Brooklyn. Bourdieu mobilises a survey that was done in France, which shows these variables across a wide variety of lifestyle factors. The book shows consumption is an expression of self by analysing this data. Bourdieu’s language – social capital and cultural capital – seeped into sociology and everyday life. But economics has remained by and large impervious to most sociological ideas. Every so often economists pick one up – they picked up social capital and they’ve picked up network analysis a little bit. What they do is usually separate it from its roots and fail to cite its original source. I’d be shocked if any economist of any stature ever cited Bourdieu. When they do pick up and deploy ideas they use their own grammar and act as if they made the ideas up."