A life course perspective on cultural capital acquisition: How the timing and duration of musical socialization affect the taste for classical music and opera^✰

Highlights

• We introduce the insights of the life course perspective into the study of the formation of cultural capital, as a corrective to the heavy emphasis in past research on early childhood experiences.

• We take tastes in classical music and opera as a case for understanding the formation of legitimate tastes.

• We analyze survey data on tastes in the arts and on the timing and duration of musical socialization periods that occur from childhood to adulthood.

• Our findings strongly support the predictions of the life course perspective.

• Timing of musical socialization is important for understanding adulthood tastes, but childhood does not hold more influence than other points in the life course.

• Duration of musical socialization is crucial to examine in order to understand adulthood tastes.

Abstract

We analyze survey data on liking to listen to and attendance at classical music concerts and opera, as well as music lessons at different points in the life course, to advance our understanding of cultural capital acquisition. We assess a series of hypotheses based on insights from Bourdieu's perspective on habitus formation and on insights from a life course perspective. By drawing on a life course perspective, we are able to specify how adult highbrow music tastes might be influenced by the timing and duration of musical socialization after childhood. Moreover, we assess how these influences are mediated by achieved SES in adulthood. Using data from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (N=4925), we find that adult highbrow music tastes are influenced by the timing and duration of musical socialization, including during adolescence and early adulthood. We argue that this finding supports an important complement to a Bourdieusian perspective and that a life course perspective offers greater specificity and explanatory power than a perspective that heavily weights childhood experiences. A key implication of our findings is that cultural capital scholarship should broaden its undue focus on early childhood experiences of esthetic socialization.

Introduction

Taste socialization is the process of implicitly and explicitly learning and developing esthetic preferences. How is the process of taste socialization structured? One prominent sociological paradigm for understanding taste socialization is rooted in Bourdieu's (1984) theory of cultural capital. Bourdieu (1984:63–65) argues that the acquisition of cultural capital is most strongly conditioned by childhood experiences within the family, and this time-bound process influences esthetic tastes that will endure for the rest of one's life. Focusing on highbrow music, he claims that early exposure to this genre among bourgeois¹ children tends to lead to a lifelong preference for it.

A number of empirical studies have examined this link between childhood socialization and cultural capital, finding that childhood is indeed a crucial time for cultural capital acquisition, specifically with respect to esthetic tastes, but also more broadly in educational attainment (Boal-Palheiros & Hargreaves, 2001; Dumais, 2006; Lareau, 2011; DiMaggio and Mohr, 1985; van Eijck, 1997). At the same time, other researchers have found that tastes are also influenced by post-childhood and extra-familial factors (Katz-Gerro & Jaeger, 2015), such as social networks (Erickson, 1996), domestic partner's education, occupation and income (Kraaykamp, van Eijck, Ultee, & van Rees, 2007; Upright, 2004), socialization within a class of destination after social mobility (Coulangeon, 2015), and individuals’ educational trajectories (DiMaggio & Useem, 1978; Willekens & Lievens, 2014).

Prior research, then, shows that taste influences are varied and dispersed over time. Significantly, past research has not yet theorized the importance of the timing of esthetic socialization; i.e., it can start, end, and restart at any time. In this paper, we test principles from the life course perspective (Elder, 2003) to propose a framework for understanding the relative influence of esthetic socialization at different ages. We focus on how the timing and duration of musical socialization influence later-life orientation towards highbrow music. Although others have shown that taste in music can change over an individual's life course (e.g., Belk & Andreasen, 1982; Benzecry, 2009; Sloboda, 2001), no research has systematically investigated the effect of differences in timing of exposure from childhood through adulthood for taste socialization, or the distinct roles of the duration vs. timing of these exposures. To our knowledge, research has yet to use the life course perspective to illuminate the development of tastes.

Although past research leaves unclear the importance of timing of taste socialization, the findings show a strong influence of class on taste. Using data from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (1997), a large-scale survey administered to adults in the continental U.S., we examine how parental social class and the life history – including timing and duration – of musical socialization affect the likelihood of having attended classical music concerts and opera in the last year, while controlling for respondents’ achieved SES. We find clear effects for the timing and duration of esthetic socialization on tastes, often beyond childhood exposures. Our findings suggest that research on taste formation would be improved by incorporating some of the basic concepts used in the life course perspective, which takes a more balanced approach to the importance of life stage and thus naturally allows for life long changes in taste formation. In demonstrating the utility of the life course perspective for understanding taste formation, we advance our understanding of a key cultural phenomenon – taste – implicated in contemporary research on culture and inequality.