Socialization, education, and lifestyle: How social mobility increases the cultural heterogeneity of status groups

In this paper, we will report on our study of how social mobility affects patterns of cultural consumption. The main questions concern the extent to which social mobility leads to more heterogenous consumption patterns within status groups, and the manner in which the consumption of culture, both popular and highbrow, is shaped by the joint impact of a person's current status and his or her status of origin. Since consumption is indeed determined by both parental schooling and respondent's level of education, the results show that, with respect to legitimate culture (reading literature, visiting museums and attending performing arts), cultural heterogeneity among the higher educated can be explained to a substantial degree by differences in family background. For popular culture (reading romantic fiction, attending soccer games and watching commercial television) the consequences of parental background are less clear-cut. The results strongly suggest that the influx of upwardly mobile persons among the higher educated diminishes the association between social status and cultural consumption. © 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.