Samenvatting CHL20806
Lecture 2: consumption lifestyles and taste
Taste: evaluations, why do we like something?
Something is not necessarily considered good taste and bad taste.
Taste: relative position
Dualism: always a process of imitation: Adoption by a social set which demands mutual imitation from its members.
members of a same class always wear similar clothes. Distinction: oppose against other people of other classes.
Express individual personality and create self-image
These processes work in parallel. The fashion shifts if lower class begins to copy. The upper class turns away from
mass.
Taste and classification
Taste can be understood as principle of classification:
- Consumption reflects social order: rank people. Mensen die duurdere kleren dragen hebben een hogere
rank.
- Goods/services have a significance that goes beyond their utilitarian character and commercial value:
o Social significance through carrying and communication of cultural meaning
o Symbols of class status.
Habitus (Bordieu):
- Milieu with collective (un)consciousness. Being a member of a class, represents an order. People in this set
have similar behavior and beliefs = milieu
- Bounds a set of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors which belong to a group of people.
System of social standing
Social stratification: categorization of its people into rankings based on factors such as wealth, income, ethnicity,
education, power. How people can be categorized in groups. These groups also can be categorized.
Stratification systems:
- Closed stratification system: caste system: no influence on social position. The class where you belong to
where you are born is where you stay in the rest of your life.
- Open stratification system: class system: people belong to certain classes. Based on personal achievement
and social factors. But being a member of a class can be based on your personal achievements. (good
education). It is not easy to move, a lot is determined when you are born.
Class: set of people who share similar status (in wealth, income, education, occupation)
Differences versus inequality
Social inequality: unequal distribution of goods and burdens systematically created through a social process.
Illegimate/structural inequity, unjust. Differences that are unfair. The result of structural differences between
groups. (getting access to education. Certain groups have more accesss to education). Also freedom.
When people frequently receive more of a society’s valuable goods than others owing to their position in the social
network of relationships.
Unjust differences in freedom to achieve life goals and full potential opportunity inequality: inequality in access
to opportunities.
,Samenvatting CHL20806
Social inequality, diet and health
Socio-economic position: placement of persons, families and households and census tracts (regional indicator) or
other aggregates (een geheel, gevormd door elementen) with respect to the capacity to create or consume goods
that are valued in our society.
Measured in different ways:
o Compositional measures: education, income, occupation (beroep). Measure of a person, family or
household.
o Contextual measures: = area-based. neighbourhood, municipality, regions. Says something about
geographical levels.
Explaining SEP differences
- Physical and economic accessibility in food environments:
o Physical (geographical): lack of access to healthy foods, but also easy access to unhealthy foods
(exposed to fast food much often, veel fastfoodketens in de buurt)
o Economic: price and discounts (Ongezonder voedsel is vaak goedkoper dan gezond voedsel, 80-90%
of discounts on unhealthy food products)
- Class and eating practices (zie het verschil tussen middle class en working class in het artikel)
o Types of food and dishes
Increase cultural capital
Rejection of plain food: poor food.
o Different meanings and uses of food practices explain differences between groups
o Preparation: fresh versus prepared
Functionality
Substance versus form
Filling versus self-presentation
o Parent-child relation:
Rite of passage & taste development (middle class)
Autonomy and own concern (working class)
- Cultural capital: refers to tastes and dispositions instilled in privileged positions. how can you express certain
signals through social exclusion?
o High status cultural signals (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods and
credentials) used for social and cultural exclusion
o Cultural capital differences between groups.
Cultural capital associated with lower BMI
- Cultural capital predicts BMI
o Embodied (attending activities) and objectified (possess books)
o Education
o Through engagement in cultural activities/gaining cultural knowledge these protect you to
negative influences to unhealthy food.
o Through asceticism (self-discipline), reflexivity (engagement in deliberation and internal dialogue)
and refinement (taste)
o Favourable SEP creates cultural dispositions that help navigate obesogenic environments (een goede
SEP helpt tegen obesitas mileus)
- Bi-directional relation of poverty-nutrition/food
What you eat affects your social economic position. Unhealty food lower educational performance. With
obesity you might have a lower income. (je wordt minder snel aangenomen als je obesitas hebt). Nutrition
SEP
,Samenvatting CHL20806
Life course perspective
Acknowledges that one’s health status reflects both prior and contemporary conditions, including in utero and
childhood effects.
Objective vs relative status
Relative status (= subjective status): where you rank yourself comparing other people. (social ladder)
Personal relative deprivation (PRD): the sense that one is unfairly deprived of a deserved outcome relative to
others.
Dynamics in social position & consumption
- Status-consumption relation is dynamic
o Micro & meso level: perceptions
o Macro level: global shifts
Growing consumption from growing population
Dynamics in class memberships
Particularly middle class in emerging economies
Wrapping up
- Classification and social distinction
- Consumption driven by class
o Not just economically, but underpinned through social processes
- Social inequality
o Relation to diet and health
o Complexities in this relation
- Dynamics in social positioning
Artikel college 2: The framing of social class distinctions through family food and eating practices
Eating is a socially constructed practice.
Social relations within families have received some attention from sociologists in terms of the ways that food and
eating reflect and help to (re)construct family ideologies, processes and everyday practices. The foods chosen and
the eating practices enacted help to create social order and boundaries within families, strengthening bonds and
producing group identities. Conflict and tension can also be enacted and expressed by family member (wanneer
kinderen weigeren te eten wat hun ouders hebben gekookt)
Children and young people become actively involved in creating a family’s identity and are not merely the passive
receivers of food or care.
Moeders spelen een rol in de sociale relaties doordat zij het eten koken en bereiden. Vaders spelen een rol doordat
zij zorgen dat het eten op tafel kan komen (geld).
, Samenvatting CHL20806
Family food and eating practices are not reproduced in a social vacuum, but they occur as part of a network of social
relationships which goes beyond the family.
Social class can be defined by the structural, economic or cultural components which lead to the unequal or
‘unnatural’ divisions and dispositions that exist within society (Crompton and Scott, 2006).
Habitus provides a ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu, 1984), an overarching system for classifying practices, the
‘generative principle’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 173) behind the conditions of all lifestyles. Class becomes enacted and
embodied through habitus and therefore it offers a useful lens through which to analyze classed actions relating to
food and eating.
The habitus bounds a set of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors which belong to a particular group of people. It is the
imprint of social and cultural contexts played out through and by individuals without any conscious thought required
by the actors themselves. Enacted without thought, but with feel for the game.
Bourdieu has often been criticised for not extensively exploring to what extent individuals reflect on their actions or
their social position. Mensen doen niet steeds exact hetzelfde als de vorige keer (reflexive = wederkerend).
Bourdieu stressed that individuals or groups could alter their practices; their dispositions could ‘move on’
throughout the lifecourse, although never in a random fashion.
Individuals have at their disposal a ‘field of possibles’ built on their personal and collective history and the
cumulative force of previous class dispositions. Bourdieu argued that habitus shapes everything, including new
trajectories of behaviour.
Lash: reflexitivity operates as a hermeneutic (considering interpretation) system. It provides rules of thumb for
members of communities. Communities still rely on shared meanings and practices.
Warde (Warde, 1994) has argued that those who are more anxious about making socially ‘wrong’ consumption
choices are those who have the least flexibility within a highly valued and embedded system.
So, in summary, reflexivity might mediate the habitus, for some people some of the time, but we will use our
analysis to argue that the habitus creates the conditions for action within everyday life.
Resultaten uit het onderzoek:
- Middle class eats more dishes like fajitas, different types of salads, risotto and enchiladas, but not by the
working class.
- Middle class goes on regular holiday and more frequent eating out in restaurants and other families homes
cultural distinctions in consumption.
- Middle class buy into culturally richer food by providing a diverse range of foods at home increase
cultural capital.
- Middle class makes clear when they find some foods distasteful. They make sure that other people of their
family get to know that they don’t like these kind of foods.
- Working class: vissticks uit de diepvries
Middle class: prepare fish fresh at home
- Middle class expects from teenagers that they develop a liking for a wide variety of foods. Wheres younger
children were able to refuse foods. Developing a taste for spicy and exotic foods is seen as a rise towards an
adult taste.
In the working class getting older children to make autonomous choices in relation to food and eating
seemed to be given a high priority in these families.
- So does having more money mean easier access to better quality, more nutritious or more highly desirable
foods or are choices more directly driven by a social or cultural desire to consume or to not consume
particular items? There is a complex fusion and interplay here between these forms of capital, self-identity
and the use-value of specific consumption practices.
