The Social Basis of Kulturnost’: Do Pierre Bourdieu, Paul DiMaggio and Others Explain Patterns of Arts Participation in a Major Russian City

Abstract

Mikhail Ille – Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy and Communication studies, Saint Petersburg University of Civil Aviation; Editor, “The Telescope: Journal of Sociological and Market Research” Address: of. 508, 14, Izmajlovkij Av., Saint Petersburg, 190005, Russian Federation. E-mail: red_tel@mail.ru

Mikhail Sokolov – PhD in Sociology, Professor, Political Science and Sociology Department, European University at Saint Petersburg. Address: 3a, Gagarinskaya St., Saint Petersburg, 191187, Russian Federation. E-mail: msokolov@eu.spb.ru

Citation: Ille M., Sokolov M. (2018) The Social Basis of Kulturnost’: Do Pierre Bourdieu, Paul DiMaggio and Others Explain Patterns of Arts Participation in a Major Russian City. Mir Rossii, vol. 27, no 2, pp. 163–188 (in Russian). DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2018-27-2-163-188

In spite of animated debates on the applicability of “Western” theorizing to the study of Russian society, so far there have been relatively few attempts to evaluate this applicability empirically. Even fewer studies test several competing theories at once; most studies which address this issue at all, tend to focus on a single theory. In this article, we evaluate the explanatory force of five competing theories of cultural consumption using a dataset from the Saint Petersburg Survey of Cultural Participation 2005–2011. We start by introducing these five theories – conspicuous consumption, cultural reproduction, cultural
mobility, status autonomy, and lifestyle pluralization – and derive testable implications concerning the association between consumption rates and a set of basic demographic and social-structural attributes (age, education, income, parental education) and their interactions. We show that expectations consistent with Bourdieu’s cultural reproduction theory show the poorest fit with the data. The theories of conspicuous consumption and cultural mobility also fail to explain the observed correlations. Our conclusion is that only status autonomy theory is consistent with observations, although some evidence of
pluralization in younger cohorts is also present in the data.