From Culinary Taste: Consumer Behaviour in the International Restaurant Sector
Strategies of distinction
The fiercest struggles for cultural legitimacy are conducted between the social groups which border one another. In this way, cultural capital contests the dominance of economic capital through strategies of distinction. These strategies focus on issues of taste. Tastes make distinctions between things and practices and endow those who adopt them with distinction. In addition tastes, which are in fact socially constructed, are identified through apparently individual attributes (e.g. the ability to appreciate quality). It follows then, that the working classes do not take part in these struggles but they nevertheless play a role for the classes above them. These classes, especially the middle classes, seek to demonstrate through their practices and judgements of taste a distance from the vulgarity and tastelessness (as defined by the dominant classes) of the working classes.
High cultural capital is relatively rare, and those who possess it battle to protect its exclusivity. After all, if a group"s distinction is challenged by more and more people acquiring the objects, skills or knowledge peculiar to it, then its position is threatened. When the class fraction possessing high cultural capital is threatened in this way, for example, by wider educational opportunities, a drop in price of previously expensive goods, etc. then it changes its signifying objects and tastes in order to retain the distinguishing distance from other class fractions. Thus the signs and symbols which signify distinction and the practices which demonstrate taste, are open to constant change and redefinition. This...
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Topics of Interest
The construction of culinary taste Let us now turn to how Bourdieu uses this theoretical framework to explain the ways in which culinary taste is socially constructed through habitus. He observes,...
Diane Seymour This chapter examines the argument that taste is socially constructed and that the food tastes we have and the choices we make about what to eat are determined by social factors. For...
Standardization The notion of standardization is linked to the concept of massification. This derives from a critique of mass culture where distinction of taste and culture are said to be lost in...
Habitus and social class This brings us to a consideration of the class-based source of habitus. For Bourdieu, class position is not based crudely on the possession or non-possession of the means of...
Hiroo Iwata 9.1 NATURE OF THE INTERFACE Taste is an important sense that is seldom used in traditional displays. It is the fundamental nature of the underlying sense and the difficulty of...
