Culture and stratification

Canonical treatments of the link between culture and stratification in sociology typically focus on the role of culture as a resource for the formation and differentiation of status groups (Bourdieu 1984; Beisel 1997). The classical differentiation between status situation and class situation (Weber 1946: 300-01) provides the analytic foundation and the point of departure for current work on the subject. While often conflated, the terms class and status must remain analytically distinct in order for their empirical interrelationship to be meaningfully examined (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007). The class situation is best characterized by “opportunities to gain sustenance and income” (Weber 1946: 301). The status situation, on the other hand, entails “every typical component of the fate of … individuals determined by means of a specific positive or negative social estimation” (Weber 1994: 113). Status, in Weber’s analysis, thus “expresses itself in the specifically stylized way of life

to which all aspiring members [of the relevant group] are expected to adhere” (1994: 114, emphasis added). This way of conceptualizing the status situation implies that membership in status groups can only be sustained and temporally reproduced through the “monopolization of [access to] ideal and material goods” (Weber 1994: 117). Accordingly, whereas “classes stratify themselves according to their relation to the production and acquisition of goods,” status groups do so according to “the principles of their consumption of goods” (Weber 1994: 119). It is therefore by molding the criteria of selection into status groups, as well as by providing the symbolic coordinates that differentiate lifestyles across the social landscape, that culture (and cultural goods) comes to be involved in the stratification process. At the level of everyday experiential reality, status situations manifest mainly in indi-

viduals’ differential ability to acquire informal entry into symbolically (and sometimes spatially) delimited arenas of association. The primary role of these circles of acquaintance is to provide a sense of membership and to serve as sites of “sociability” (Simmel 1949), that is-as Simmel defined it-sites of social intercourse explicitly dissociated from direct instrumental pursuits. This is a characteristic form of association “which does not have a strictly economic or business purpose” (Weber 1994: 114). In contemporary posttraditional, market-dominated societies with very little “formal” apparatus of social

differentiation based on collectively defined “status orders” (Collins 1975), the primary way in which Weberian social honor is bestowed by members of one group to members of another is mainly through acceptance into informal networks of intimacy, friendship, and kinship (DiMaggio 1987). After the analytical distinction between class and status has been made, the key

question that emerges pertains to their relative causal priority. Most analysts agree with the general proposition that “[a] status situation can be the cause as well as the result of a class situation but it need be neither” (Weber 1946: 301). Accordingly, the relationship between class and status becomes a matter of empirical adjudication rather than a priori theoretical speculation. However, most American and European sociologists who theorize the culture-stratification link are not neutral on the question of whether status situations impact class situations. If some relation were not presumed to exist (especially going from status situation to class situation), it would diminish the warrant for being concerned with the culture-stratification link. The key question thus turns on specifying the concrete mechanisms through which status situations come to infiltrate or modify market-mediated systems for the determination of life-chances.