Where Do Cultural Omnivores Come From? The Implications of Educational Mobility For Cultural Consumption

We use data from a large-scale and nationally representative survey from the UK to investigate the association between social mobility and cultural omnivorousness. By applying diagonal reference models to our data, we show that both parents’ and respondent’s educational level affect visual arts consumption, with the weight of the former being about a third in magnitude as the latter. This is inconsistent with Bourdieu’s view that habitus is largely determined by primary socialisation at parental home. We also show that there is no difference in the relative weights of origin and destination between the upwardly mobile and the downwardly mobile. Finally, upwardly mobile individuals are less omnivorous than those who are intergenerationally stable in higher educational levels. These results challenge various views which attribute the emergence of cultural omnivores in contemporary society to social mobility. 1 Background and research question Recent research on the social stratification of cultural consumption has consistently shown that although individuals in advantaged social positions are ∗Early versions of this paper were presented at the Spring 2014 meeting of ISA RC28 in Budapest and in a seminar at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin. We thank audiences of those meetings, and David Firth, Sam Friedman, John Goldthorpe, Lorraine Waller for helpful comments. The research reported in this paper is supported by a British Academy Research Development Award.