KEY POINTS:
The "cultural elite" brought up on opera and the higher arts, which supposedly turns up its nose at anything as vulgar as a pop song or mainstream television, does not exist, according to research published by Oxford University academics.
Researchers have used data from Britain and six other
countries to test a theory that people born to posh families absorb only "high culture" while "popular" or "mass" culture is strictly for those from ordinary to humble beginnings.
They found that in truth Billy Elliott - the fictional working-class boy from a northern mining village with a passion for ballet - is not the social freak he might seem to be. Equally, someone with an impressive ancestry and blue blood in his veins is not necessarily any more cultured than the rest of us.
"We find little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume 'high' culture while shunning more 'popular' cultural forms," the two Oxford academics said, when their results were published this week. "There are certain individuals who fit this description, but they are too few in number to figure in any survey-based analysis."
Tak Wing Chan, from Oxford's sociology department, and John Goldthorpe, of Nuffield College, Oxford, have spent years trying to analyse whether "social status" still exists in Britain, and how it operates.
For this exercise, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, they divided people into four groups - univores, who only like popular culture; omnivores, who like everything from opera to soap opera; paucivores, who absorb very little culture; and inactives, who absorb practically none.
People's education, income and social class were all taken into account but this study, unlike others of its kind, differentiated between "class" and "status". An out-of-work aristocrat has class, without status, while there are bright people from poor backgrounds who have "status" but not "class".
In previous studies, they have concluded that status is now determined more by the work someone does than by their birth or their wealth. Office workers consider that they have a higher status than manual workers; professionals think themselves a cut above works managers, and so on.
The newspaper a person chooses, and the forms of entertainment that person enjoys are all tied up with ideas about social status. That does not mean that professionals in elite jobs restrict themselves to "elite" arts, but it does mean that the opera houses and specialist art galleries are likely to be filled with people who have "status".
Class, as opposed to status, does not seem to have much effect on cultural tastes. "A substantial minority of members of the most advantaged social groups are univores or inactives," the researchers found.
Dr Chan said: "Our work shows it's education and social status, not social class that predict cultural consumption in the UK, and broadly comparable results were obtained from other countries too."
Data from Britain, Chile, France, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands and the US were analysed in the study.
- INDEPENDENT
