Mapping Shared Understandings Using Relational Class Analysis: The Case of the Cultural Omnivore Reexamined

Sociologists often describe culture as a repertoire of shared understandings. But because the meanings that social actors attribute to symbols and actions emerge from the multiple associations they make between them, delineating collectively shared understandings is not a straightforward task. Standard quantitative sociological practice, which relies on the assumptions of what Abbott (1988) calls ‘general linear reality’, falls short of addressing such complexity in two significant ways: first, it overlooks the multivocality of cultural objects by presupposing that the effects that social attributes have on cultural interpretations are consistent across individuals, and second, it fails to acknowledge that people may have different behaviors or opinions on particular issues, but still agree on the structures of relevance and opposition that make symbols and actions meaningful. In this paper, I introduce a new method—Relational Class Analysis—that simultaneously compares differences between individuals, and within their sets of attitudes, as a means to detect groups with underlying shared understandings of a particular social domain. To demonstrate the utility of this method, I use it to revisit the cultural omnivore thesis by reexamining Americans’ attitudes toward musical genres. I find further support for the claim that high-status individuals have replaced cultural snobbism with inclusiveness, but also demonstrate the existence of two competing and systematically overlooked logics of distinction: one that continues to distinguish between highand low-brow music, the other which distinguishes between traditional and contemporary musical preferences. These findings complicate, and in some ways challenge, contemporary understandings of cultural omnivorousness. † The author would like to thank, first and foremost, Paul DiMaggio for his guidance and support, as well as Matthew Salganik, Delia Baldassarri, Martin Ruef, Hana Shepherd, Scott Lynch, participants of the Theorodolgy Workshop, Sociology Department, Princeton University, and participants of the Social Network Analysis Seminar, Oxford University, for their valuable comments.