Cultural Capital

The analysis of consumer culture is premised on both the top-down understanding of the emergence and effects of large-scale systems for the production and market-mediated dissemination of cultural objects, performances, and experiences and the bottom-up theorizing of the process through which people select and appropriate particular offerings (while, by implication, excluding others) as part of their own active attempt to build a “lifestyle.” The concept of cultural capital has recently come to acquire a central place in our understanding of lifestyle choices in consumer societies (Holt 1998) by allowing us to, on the one hand, better conceptualize the usually hard-to-appreciate systematicity to be found in otherwise seemingly arbitrary choices across putatively disconnected consumption domains and, on the other hand, allowing us to link these choice ...