Class and cultural capital in Australia

This chapter presents an overview of the findings of the Australian Cultural Fields project regarding the role of class in shaping Australian cultural consumption practices. There are three main stages to the argument. First, the chapter brings together the patterns of class structuration associated with the project’s six cultural fields – art, literary, music, heritage, television and sport – in order to examine how these interact in the Australian ‘space of lifestyles’. This involves a consideration of the relations between economic and cultural capital in the composition of different classes. Second, the chapter examines the respects in which the composition of these classes is ‘infiltrated’ by other aspects of social position: age, education, gender and so on. The chapter then proposes a distinctive methodological innovation by using the Cluster Analysis of the Australian Cultural Fields survey data to consider the light that the relations between the resulting clusters and ‘cultural capital profiles’ throws on the social trajectories and logics of inheritance of different class fractions. These questions are pursued in the context of recent debates concerning the relations between class and culture in Australia and internationally.