A culture in common : the cultural consumption of the UK managerial elite

Historical analysis offers a number of different visions of the role of cultural consumption in the operation of social relations of power in modern western societies. Cultural participation provides a platform on which to acquire and use social capital; meeting the right people lubricates the social life of members of the upper echelons of society. To be sure, this is a rather truncated functionalist schematization of processes that are complex and often ambivalent, and ones which moreover operated rather differently from country to country (Coulangeon, 2004).1 Nevertheless, it is possible to see in this sketch a role for cultural consumption in the service of dominant groups in class societies. All these accounts assume that classes with disproportionate power in society can be identified and that they are able to define and sustain a shared cultural universe, albeit sometimes contested, with consequences for other classes. What is unclear among the competing accounts are: "¢ whether the concept of cultural capital any longer has purchase in understanding the operation and distribution of cultural practices; "¢ whether there is any longer a legitimate culture whose boundaries can be determined, the command of which delivers social distinction; "¢ whether cultural taste has become a much more individualized property whose distribution no longer follows the contours of social class; "¢ whether the relationship between the elite fractions of the managerial class and the rest of the population has altered. In order to explore these issues we conducted a small number of interviews exploring the cultural practices of people occupying powerful positions in British society as part of a larger study of the whole population, 'Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion' (for preliminary results see Cultural Trends, 2006). The aim of the chapter is to report on the general content and tenor of those interviews and thereby to describe the nature and distribution of cultural tastes among the managerial elite in prestigious positions in British business, politics and administration. This allowed identification of rarely addressed social and cultural differences. The chapter uses this evidence to analyse the distinctiveness of elite consumption and the role of people in powerful positions in the cultural field at the beginning of the 21st century. In the first section of this chapter, we describe the study, our interviewees and the strategy of data collection. In section two, we explore the extent to which these people could be said to share a definite set of cultural tastes and commitments. In section three, we examine their reactions to 'popular' culture to explore the contemporary provenance of distinction. In section four, we describe the extent of their investments in cultural activity with a view to estimating the value of cultural capital. In section five we attempt to draw some conclusions about the implications of these features for the extent to which this managerial elite forms a cohesive and integrated group in relation to the rest of the professional and managerial classes and the wider population. When compared to other parts of the population this is a culturally highly active group, playing a significant role in the organization of, usually rather traditional, types of cultural activity. Their interests are wide-ranging and there is a good deal of variety in their leisure and cultural attachments, particularly in relation to gender. Nonetheless, these people have enough in common in terms of their preoccupations and tastes to justify seeing them as members of a shared culture. We also find a powerful role for social connections in determining the rhythms of their cultural practice, and show how their cultural life is embedded within work and social milieu.