Culinary Taste: Consumer Behaviour in the International Restaurant Sector

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 production as in Marxist materialistic conceptions of class. He draws on the work of Weber, which allows him to identify different classes and fractions of classes in a hierarchical schema rather than to see class in terms of two classes in opposition to one another, although he retains the notion of struggle between the classes (to be considered further later). Bourdieu sees class as determined by the possession of differing amounts of different forms of capital. In simple economic terms, capital is what results from production, and in turn it goes towards feeding more production. For example, a restaurant is a form of economic capital. Once built, it is used to make other things (meals). The raw materials used and the money to buy them with are also forms of capital. Capital thus comes from production and in turn feeds more production; capital reproduces production. However, Bourdieu, in contrast to Marx, who only considered economic capital, extends the idea of capital to other aspects of the social, which he argues are themselves social products which are circulated and which can be used to produce further capital. Of these, cultural capital and symbolic capital are the most significant for our purposes, and are discussed further below. [1]

[1]The four forms of capital are economic, social,...

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