In current sociological literature the relationship between social inequality and patterns of cultural taste and consumption is the subject of a large and complex debate. In this paper the primary aim is to examine, in the light of empirical results from a research project in which the authors are presently engaged, three main, and rival, positions that have been taken up in this debate, here labelled as the ‘homology’, the ‘individualization’ and the ‘omnivore–univore ’ arguments. Elsewhere, we have concentrated on musical consumption in England, and find evidence that is broadly supportive of the omnivore–univore argument. Here we ask whether such findings are confirmed in the case of theatre, dance and cinema attendance. A secondary aim of the paper is to bring to the attention of practitioners in the field of cultural policy and administration the need to address the issues that arise through the use of more powerful methods of data analysis than those often applied in the past. We explain how indicators of theatre, dance and cinema attendance derived from the Arts in England survey of 2001 can be subject to analysis so as to reveal two distinctive patterns of attendance and, in turn, two distinctive types of consumer—who can, it turns out, be regarded as omnivores

In this article we use recent survey data to test three arguments on the relationship between social stratification and cultural consumption: i.e. what we label as the homology, individualization and omnivore–univore arguments. We note various conceptual and methodological problems in the ways these arguments have been advanced, and stress in particular the importance of maintaining the Weberian distinction between class and status. We concentrate on musical consumption and apply latent class models to identify types of musical consumer. We then examine the social character of these types through a regression analysis that includes a range of demographic and stratification variables. As would be anticipated from a Weberian standpoint, type of musical consumption proves to be more closely associated with status, and also with education, than with class. In general, our results provide little support for the homology or individualisation arguments. They are more consonant with the omnivore–univore argument, although a number of qualifications to this are also suggested. Introduction—The Three

In this paper, we return to Max Weber’s distinction between class and status as related but different forms of social stratification. We argue that this distinction is not only conceptually cogent, but that class and status do have differing explanatory power in different areas of social life. Consistent with Weber’s argument, we show that economic security and prospects are stratified more by class than by status, while the opposite is true for outcomes in the domain of cultural consumption. As for politics, we show that it is class rather than status which predicts the choice between voting Conservative or Labour in British general elections. Class also predicts ‘Left–Right’ political attitudes. But it is status rather than class which predicts ‘Libertarian–Authoritarian ’ attitudes. 1

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and seminar audience at Oxford. A substantial part of the analysis reported in this paper was carried out with the free statistical software R. We are grateful to the many contributors of R for making this wonderful program available to us, and others, for free. Social Status and Newspaper Readership In this paper, we seek to further validate the status order identified in Chan and Goldthorpe (2002) by examining the association between newspaper readership and social status. Drawing on data from the British Household Panel Survey, we distinguish three ordered categories of newspapers: broadsheets, middlebrow tabloids and redtop tabloids, plus a residual category of regional and local newspapers. We report a strong and systematic association between status and newpaper readership which is consistent with the expected link between status in the classical Weberian sense, on the one hand, and cultural level and lifestyle, on the other. This association persists in a multinomial logistic regression model in which we take into account,