Bennett Tony - Culture, Class, Distinction

Culture, Class, Distinction

The book draws on the research conducted for a major ESRC-funded project on Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) to offer the first systematic assessment of how far Pierre Bourdieus (1984) account of the role played by cultural capital in processes of social differentiation can be applied to Britain.

The book examines the cultural dimensions of class on the basis of a survey administered to a national sample. It also engages with the cultural turn that now accounts for so much of the focus of new work in class analysis and of the importance of gender and ethnicity in relation to class processes.

In doing so, it takes account of the wide-ranging perspectives from which Bourdieus work has been extended and/or critically engaged with, including those of feminist scholarship, American sociological research, debates within cultural studies, the French literature on the sociology of individuals, and work on the relations between ethnicity and cultural capital.

The book is co-authored by Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, David Wright. All are researchers at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) a 3.7 million Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)funded major international Research Centre analysing socio-cultural change.

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, a Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change, and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Recent publications include Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism; New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris) and Handbook of Cultural Analysis (edited with John Frow).

Mike Savage is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester and Director of the ESRC Centre for Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). His interests are in social stratification, urban, and historical sociology.

Elizabeth Silva is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University, a member of the Economic and Social Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change and of the Centre for Citizenship, Identity and Governance in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University. Recent publications include Cultural Analysis: Bourdieus Legacy (edited with Alan Warde, forthcoming), Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life (edited with Tony Bennett) and various journal articles on Bourdieu, cultural capital, gender, visual art and qualitative methods.

Dr. Alan Warde is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. His current research interest include the sociology of consumption, with particular emphasis on food, cultural sociology, social stratification and economic sociology.

Modesto Gayo-Cal was a research fellow at CRESC and the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester while working on the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project. His areas of interest are: theories of nationalism, political behaviour, middle classes, and cultural consumption. He is also interested in the application of statistical methods in the social sciences. He is now a Profesor Investigador at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile.

David Wright was a Research Fellow on the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Project, surveying taste in the contemporary UK. He was subsequently appointed to a Research Fellowship in the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change at the Open University to develop his work on the contemporary literary field and cultural policy. He has published extensively in the field of cultural sociology and is currently teaching social science for the Open University in the East Midlands.