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Lauding the Leisure Class:

Symbolic Content and
Conspicuous Consumption
Alan Shipman
a
University of Cambridge
Published online: 18 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Alan Shipman (2004) Lauding the Leisure Class: Symbolic Content
and Conspicuous Consumption, Review of Social Economy, 62:3, 277-289, DOI:
10.1080/0034676042000253909

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 REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY, VOL. LXII, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2004

Lauding the Leisure Class: Symbolic Content and

Conspicuous Consumption
Alan Shipman
University of Cambridge
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Abstract Symbolic consumption is assessed as an evolution of previously

identified conspicuous consumption, after this has undergone a ‘‘de-
materialization’’ that is socially, as much as ecologically, driven. As Veblen
observed, the shift of wealth towards new forms of physical and financial
capital with industrialization compels traditional wealth-holders to redefine
privilege in terms of cultural capital. Accompanying social changes enable them
to do so. The limited reproducibility of items consumed for their symbolic
value, and slow transmissibility of the means of symbolic consumption, force
holders of new wealth to compete for status on terms set by the established
leisure class. Conspicuity shifts from quantity to quality, from the
appropriation of materially valued products to the appreciation of culturally
valued products. This paper examines some key implications of a shift from
‘‘waste’’ to ‘‘taste’’ in conspicuous consumption for the social and natural
environment, and for economic development. In particular, it explores the
possibility of branded products representing the mass production of symbolic
goods in high-income economies; and the brand premium’s potentially
beneficial consequences for global income distribution, when branded
production relocates to lower-income economies in conditions of free trade.
Keywords: conspicuous consumption, cultural capital, brands, globalization,
environment, Veblen, Bourdieu

Recognizing consumption’s symbolic dimension rescues large areas of

economic activity from the charge of being unproductive. Marketers,
advertisers, customer advisors and the many others engaged in creating and
preserving commercial imagery cease to represent an accretion of ‘‘transac-
tion cost’’, incurred in the attempt to move more material output. Instead,
these become sources of added value in their own right – creating and
continuing the symbolism that keeps expenditure rising once its purely

Review of Social Economy

ISSN 0034 6764 print/ISSN 1470–1162 online # 2004 The Association for Social Economics
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0034676042000253909
 REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY

functional purposes are achieved. Advertising professionals in mid-nineteenth

century England and America were already proclaiming their active
contribution to progress and prosperity (Turner 1965: 87 – 91). The ranks
of ‘‘new cultural intermediaries’’ (Bourdieu 1984: Ch 2) have since expanded
to include ‘‘those in media, design, fashion, advertising, and ‘para’ intellectual
information occupations, whose jobs entail. . . the production, marketing and
dissemination of symbolic goods’’ (Featherstone 1991: 19).
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By the same (symbolic) token, expenditures that previously looked

extravagant also regain a valid personal and social function. If the acts of
buying and consuming yield utility in themselves, it may not matter if what is
bought and consumed has little or no practical value. We may pay a premium
for the company it puts us in, or rescues us from (Jaramiller et al. 2000). As,
for example, do travellers who prefer a taxi to the (cheaper and equally fast)
bus to their destination, or guardians who send children to a fee-paying school
whose resources and record are matched by publicly provided alternatives. In
a physical sense we are, still, what we eat, though even staple foods contain
increasingly symbolic ingredients. In a cultural sense we are what we wear,
hear, see, and otherwise sense or experience. The times and places at which we
do these things, and the company in which we do them, also count towards an
economic identity whose focus changes from the workplace to the market-
place, from how we earn to how we spend.
Symbolic consumption re-casts the distinction between ‘‘use value’’ and
‘‘exchange value’’, or what a product provides in itself and what it offers
through the procurement of other people’s products and services (Kroker
1986). Whereas Marxists trace the displacement of exchange above use value
to the supply side, as the source of economic profit for holders of physical and
financial capital, later cultural commentators tend to relocate it to the demand
side, as the source of social advantage for holders of cultural and social
capital. This article considers the relationship of symbolic goods to older
debates about ‘‘conspicuous’’ consumption, and the changing nature of
capital. It examines the potential for extension, through mass marketing, of a
symbolic social world previously shaped round elite consumers; and of a
symbolic economic sphere previously confined to ‘‘industrial’’ nations. A
concluding section assesses the contrasting implications of consumption’s
‘‘symbolic shift’’ for the natural and social environment.

THE SYMBOLIC SHIFT IN CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

Social signalling through consumption, detached from any usefulness of the
item consumed, begins almost as soon as subsistence is surmounted (Veblen

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(1899) 1994: Ch 4). Accomplishment’s showground quickly shifts onto means

of consumption, because of a shared interest in distancing and concealing
means of production – old aristocrats because they no longer have any, new
plutocrats because they do not want their wealth to be seen to depend on
them, and rarely visit them once control is entrusted to specialist managers.
Consumption need not be material to be visible, and visibility can serve social
purposes other than ostentatious display (Douglas and Isherwood 1980: Ch 3,
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4). But when affluence’s accents and graces take time to acquire, its material
basis must be seen to be believed. Denied respect for its origins, new fortune
wins social status through its destinations, the shiniest of which are those
where most can be blown without breaking the bank. Conspicuous waste
becomes the instant measure of relative social standing. ‘‘The need of
conspicuous waste, therefore, stands ready to absorb any increase in the
community’s efficiency or output of goods, after the most elementary physical
wants are provided for’’ (Veblen 1994: 68).
When first observed, Conspicuous Consumption’s (CC) main practitioners
were new tycoons seeking to match the refinement of the longer-established
rich. Veblen’s account dwells ironically on the double sense of culture being
wasted on materialistic consumers, and wasted by the act of purchasing purely
for display. Those who have got rich quick have an understandably low
tolerance for the time and tuition needed to gain cultural accomplishment. So
they aim to let depth of pocket prevail over depth of discernment, and shift the
battleground from unearned income to unashamed expenditure. However,
‘‘creative destruction’’ ensures that for every self-made magnate with a new
fortune to flaunt, there are several whose flagging endowment gives them an
interest in shifting battle from the showroom to the salon. When consumption
moves to the symbolic realm, equally distinctive display can be made with less
material requirement. Because it is detachable from, and more durable than,
volatile market valuations of wealth, different vintages of rich find shared
interest in shifting the contest to conspicuous taste.
Those long socialized into non-immediate preferences and pleasures try
equally hard to retain these as criteria of accomplishment, emphasising
culture’s detachment from supporting wealth as this diminishes. Their
continued ability to reverse the direction of conspicuous ‘‘consumer
sovereignty’’, with inherited wisdom rather than acquired wealth setting the
standard, has attracted three main explanations. The ‘‘positionality’’ of
symbolic products – their devaluation by multiplication – means that buying
more means enjoying less. Early acquirers have a lasting first-mover
advantage, which they can prolong by simple refusal to sell. Options for
shifting demand onto equally valuable, more easily reproducible goods are

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limited because of the ‘‘U-shaped’’ trend in their ascribed valuation: initially

rapid depreciation tends later to be reversed, for those versions that survive,
because of increased rarity and the cultural revaluation over time, for
everything from vintage cars to 1950s soup tins. Inheriting a standard of
refinement from the elite they wish to join, the newly rich are forced to do
battle on the cultural home ground of the old.
In consumption, no less than in production, new industrializers must play
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their way into the market by the old rules before these can change in their
direction. Success in so doing makes them beneficiaries of those rules,
reducing their incentive to change them. By adding to the abstraction and
complexity of cultural products, and discussion about them, those with taste
but no money can still keep a superior distance from those with money but (as
yet) no matching taste. ‘‘High’’ culture involves waste only in the vague sense
that it lacks the lower cultures’ immediate connection to life and its everyday
concerns. The distancing of art from life is just one among many facets of
‘‘bourgeois politeness, whose impeccable formalism is a permanent warning
against the temptation of familiarity’’ (Bourdieu 1984: 34). The eclipse of
‘‘waste’’ by ‘‘taste’’ as the basis for CC is reinforced by three other features of
economic growth and corresponding social structural change.
First, material excess has declining legitimacy. The desire to signal wealth
through consumption depends on that wealth being viewed as legitimately
held, admiration of the display requiring acceptance that effort and ability
made it possible. Conspicuous consumption has traditionally been identified
with the deservingly upwardly mobile (Veblen 1994). So shopping’s symbolic
value is greatest in societies where wealth and power inequalities are seen as
justified, either by aristocracy that assigns high status by ‘‘natural’’ right, or
by meritocracy that assigns it by effort and achievement. Where superior
wealth is not so easily regarded as legitimate – through the sheer extent of its
superiority, or perception of theft, luck or inheritance in its acquisition – the
urge to display it can quickly subside. Luxury apartments lurk behind
crumbling tenement facades, and smart cars are kept for moonlit spins on
private roads.
Second, governments have taken over the worthier objects of individual
indulgence – notably the patronage of arts and scientific research, and the
duty of poverty relief. The state has also (with ‘‘Keynesian’’ help) usurped the
idle rich’s macroeconomic role, of stabilizing activity by consuming without
producing when an over-thrifty populace stays too far within its means to
furnish full-employment demand. Keynes (1936: 358), quoting Heckscher on
mercantilism, shows that economists as far back as the late sixteenth century
were finding intellectual justifications for ‘‘the deep-rooted belief in the utility

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of luxury and the evil of thrift’’. But Keynes shows earlier that involuntary
mass unemployment arises when those who can afford to save are too socially
detached from those who wish to accumulate (1936: Ch 6, 7); and is best cured
by public consumption or a ‘‘somewhat comprehensive’’ socialization of
investment. Such public cures restore the traditionally negative connotation
to private extravagance: as the squandering by the rich of resources which, if
invested instead, could expand productive capacity to the benefit of the poor.
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Third, as well as losing economic effectiveness and social acceptability,

conspicuous consumption is increasingly vulnerable to financial attack. There
have always been fiscal as well as social attractions in taxing products whose
utility lies in ‘status’. It could improve social justice, to the extent that only
affluent consumers are taxed. It could preserve economic efficiency, to the
extent of deterring wasteful expenditures, especially those that spiral upwards
as the rich compete for attention (Mason 2000, Fernando and Moizeau 2003).
It should become easier to enforce, as elite spending shifts to items that are
purely for display, more easily distinguished from those the less advantaged
might still be buying for their intrinsic utility. Nor should a tax excite undue
resistance from conspicuous consumers, whose purpose is served by any
widening of the wedge between generic capabilities and purchase price
(Leibenstein 1950).
Social preference and public policy thus tend to drive a reorientation of
conspicuous consumption, from the physicality of consumption to the
conspicuity of preferences. This moves it from the world of material to that of
symbolic goods consumption, in both its main interpretations. Consumption
of symbolic goods expands, with growing focus on the value of other people’s
knowledge, talent and time being purchased, over and above (or instead of)
any physical inputs. And symbolic consumption of goods expands, with the
ability to appreciate and enjoy taking priority over outright possession and
ownership. While the ‘‘industrial’’ phase of CC was the golden age of
collecting physical items, containing anything from rare books to rare beetles
bedecking the town-house walls, its post-industrial phase shifts collection’s
emphasis from exhibits to experiences (Pine et al. 1999). The cultured elite still
travels the world, but to watch the whales and camcord the marbles rather
than carry them back home.

CAPITALIZING THE SYMBOLIC SHIFT

The shift of symbolism from waste to taste entails a relocation of capital from
the supply to the demand side. Whereas anyone can detect and form an
opinion on excess, it may take much sensory refinement and research to

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appreciate the exquisite. There is a ‘‘correlation between educational capital

and the propensity or at least the aspiration to appreciate a work
‘independently of its content’’’ (Bourdieu 1984: 53). So, elites that lose their
commercial capital, through misfortune or structural change in the economy,
can still retain their cultural capital. As this is passed on through the tacit
knowledge of the drawing room and sports ground, as well as the explicit
knowledge of the classroom and playground, newly acquired economic
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capital does not translate easily into cultural capital. Entrepreneurs have little
hope of becoming instant connoisseurs, when the very fact of having acquired
one’s wealth in the marketplace tends to deny it the authenticity of the
established elite.
The cultural capital held by ‘‘liberal arts’’ educated individuals, and the
social capital contained within their networks (Putnam 1995), form a
‘‘means of consumption’’ every bit as class-divided as the means of
production in more materialistic phases of capitalism. It is initially confined
to a small group with the financial resources and leisure-time to acquire
literacy, numeracy and the knowledge advantages that build on these. By
the time the wider community gains ownership of or access to the capital, it
has generally been drained of the characteristics or context which give it
value, and new forms have emerged over which the elite retains a near
monopoly. Accelerated accumulation of cultural capital, like that of the
commercial variety, leads to a drop in its rate of return. The value of
cultural products is largely determined beyond the authority of those who
consume them, just as that of commercial products is set beyond the
authority of those who produce them. Unavailability or inaccessibility to
the majority tends to raise the value assigned. ‘‘The symbolic profit arising
from material or symbolic appropriation of a work of art is measured by
the distinctive value which the work derives from the rarity of the
disposition and competence which it demands and which determines its
class distribution’’ (Bourdieu 1984: 229).
Conspicuous cultural consumers guard their privileged means of con-
sumption through the treatment of education and other appreciative aids as
‘‘merit goods’’, rationed by ability to use them: education to those with
‘‘academic’’ backgrounds, healthcare by existing ‘‘quality of life’’. Access
advantage can then be further reinforced by subsidizing merit goods
consumption. Even where cultural products become available and affordable
to all, sophisticated users can maintain their exclusivity by getting a better
view, or claiming to appreciate on a deeper level. Millions see world-touring
rock bands in concert, but only a subsection self-certifies its ability to grasp
the philosophy behind the lyrics, or classical allusions in the tune.

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CONSPICUOUS MASS CONSUMPTION: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF

BRANDS
A refocusing of conspicuous consumption from ‘‘waste’’ to ‘‘taste’’ may,
against the expectations of its earlier chroniclers, have helped the rich remain
conspicuous by their affluence. But it also reinforces their vulnerability to
vulgarity. The ranks of those who can distinguish themselves by waste are
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restricted by physical scarcity, which markets can price-in so that affordability

rations access. There is a less certain limit on the numbers who can distinguish
themselves by taste. ‘‘Branding’’, the creation of an image that adds
informational or impressionistic content to the products it is applied to,
allows premium-priced symbolic content to be brought to the mass market.
Through brands, CC is brought within reach of a marketplace majority, who
can be seen to pay more, than is necessary, for a product and any practical
need it may serve.
There may be ‘‘objective’’ reasons for paying a brand premium, even on a
product that turns out to be identical to lower-priced alternatives. The
consumer may believe a branded product to be of superior quality, even if
fuller information would disprove this. Brands’ appeal is often traceable to an
original superiority in its design, production or delivery, and the difficulty of
knowing when cheaper imitators have caught up. Even where (as increasingly)
the branded product is made in the same plant that turns out cheaper generic
versions, its quality may be higher due to assignment of better materials. A
branded product may promise lower variation in quality even if it is no better
in average quality, so that the premium serves as an insurance against the risk
of surprise irregularities or faults. Variability can be lowered over space as
well as over time: buying a brand reduces the risk of substandard product
when buying in an unfamiliar place or through an unknown intermediary.
Those who buy brands may therefore be displaying their ability to pay for
extra quality, and thus engaging in conspicuous consumption of the
traditional variety. But beyond these ‘‘objective’’ cases, there remains a
significant number in which the premium is knowingly paid for a branded
product that is no better than cheaper generics. The premium is then one of
exclusivity, distinguishing a privileged or sophisticated minority by their
consumption of products from which a majority is excluded. They pay extra
to associate with co-consumer, and differentiate from non-consumers, in the
way of traditional conspicuous consumers, once their means of display moves
from having money to burn, to having knowledge to discern.
Once a product’s utility moves from discrete experience to ongoing
lifestyle, a product’s price becomes a subscription fee, luring consumers into

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paying for more than what they objectively receive. Critics complain at
prominent producers ‘‘thirstily soaking up cultural ideas and iconography
that their brands could reflect by projecting these ideas and images back
onto the culture as ‘extensions’ of their brands’’ (Klein 2000: 29). But paying
extra for the status associations woven round a brand is only what the
richest in society have always done. Once the consumption’s wider social
function is acknowledged, as not wholly negative, there is less clear ‘‘global
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justice’’ in denying such external effects to the wider population. Achieving

status through consumption need be no less important for those struggling
out of subsistence than those steeped in affluence (Jaramillo et al. 2000, Ro
2001).

BRANDS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Global neo-liberalism’s strongest advocates and harshest critics unite in
condemning the brand. To ‘‘anti-capitalists’’, it adds demand-side cultural to
supply-side commercial exploitation. Living standards are held down by
multinationals’ monopsony hiring of labor and premium pricing of products,
while underpayment of primary producers also causes resource depletion and
pollution, as marked-up merchandise for inflated wants displaces cheap
generics meeting basic needs (Klein 2000, Hertz 2002). Inducement of
consumers to pay the premium by marketing propaganda parallels, and
promotes, voters’ susceptibility to political propaganda (Chomsky 2002).
To many pro-capitalists, branding is a cause or consequence of market
failure. Made possible by information imperfection, it is a barrier that free-
trade agreements cannot breach, and a source of customer inertia that slows
the efficient reallocation and concentration of resources (Paba 1991).
Competition is curtailed when producers who exactly replicate a branded
product still cannot reproduce the image that makes people pay more for it.
Although a temporary mark-up may promote efficiency by rewarding
innovation, any permanence – continued after generic replication – suggests
misinformation of buyers and constraint on other sellers, reducing efficiency
on neoclassical terms.
From a developmental perspective, branding barriers may mean that even
where a newly industrializing country (NIC) can lift its products to ‘‘western’’
standards, these continue to command a substantially lower price, because
they lack the branding that commands a price premium. After acquiring the
technology, skills and management to match rich economies’ productivity,
NIC companies can still be denied matching profitability. Remaining ‘‘added
value’’ lies in a marketing dimension that stays firmly in first-world hands.

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The relative cheapening of developing economies’ raw material exports, as

productivity and income grow, has long been viewed as a serious development
constraint (e.g. Prebisch 1950, Amin 1976). Intermediate and final products
exported from the developing world may also be underpriced, due to low
wages on the supply side (Emmanuel 1972) or buying concentration on the
demand side (Singer 1950). So lower income may contribute to continued
adversity in terms-of-trade, even if originally a consequence of structural focus
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on commodities with low price- and income-elasticity of demand. Where

countries or commodities escape this low-level trap, it is generally by adopting
a brand-building strategy and associated marketing tactics. Among surpris-
ingly many examples, diamond exporters legitimize their price-fixing through
a brand, allowing buyers to pay extra for avoiding fakes, or genuine articles
sold from war zones. Timber growers underpin their premium with
sustainable logging certificates, and fair-trade foodprocessors through the
synthesis of conscience and indulgence, via perception that directly paying
growers gets a better (or excuses a worse) tasting fare.
Branding’s spread across the world’s retail networks, powered by global
extension of industrial networks (Dicken 1998), has the potential to redress
the pricing-power imbalances linked to earlier, commodity-focused multi-
national activity. The premium their brands command in rich-country
markets enables multinationals to pay above market rates for host-country
labor and materials, which they often do (Legrain 2002). Generic producers,
unable to price so high, must be correspondingly more cautious on input
payments. Poorer countries’ production of branded goods they cannot afford
to buy, often viewed as a symptom of global injustice, could equally be part of
the solution. The brand marks up identical goods by ability to pay and,
because the differentiation is voluntary, stops this two-tier pricing being
undermined by parallel import.
The multinational company (MNC), long accused of focusing the
exploitation in production by underpaying for labor and raw materials,
incurs the additional charge of exploitation in consumption once it moves
along the supply chain from natural resources and intermediate inputs to
finished goods and services. It is an ambiguous accusation once the realisation
of profit shifts to higher-income target markets, through branding, even if the
source of profit is still located in lower-income source economies. One pioneer
of unequal exchange theory later identified MNCs as potential vehicles for
overcoming it, mainly through their power to mark-up prices over host-
country costs (Emmanuel 1982). Left to themselves, MNCs would sooner use
their brand premium to benefit rich-country shareholders than poor-country
employees, and any use of their marketplace advantage to improve workplace

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conditions generally requires significant customer and employee pressure (e.g.

Bircham and Charlton 2001). But the openness to such pressure forces global
players to respond to their anti-capitalist assailants, where local generic
counterparts can hide from the spotlight. Problems in one product line or
region can contaminate all branches of a brand, whose reputation relies on
imagery that sweatshop revelations easily sink.
Even these suffer periodic lapse from price-fixing arrangements, as
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producers cut prices to eliminate unsold stock. Branding has shown its
potential for wider and longer-lasting price stabilization than cartels, which
have only ever worked for a limited number of commodities whose
production and wholesaling can be kept highly concentrated. Instead of
trying to ban brands, fair trade protagonists might do better to help lower-
income producers acquire equity in them, as the more perceptive are already
working to do.
The virtues of thrift, identified when growth required investment out of
nations’ own saving, can be inverted when capital markets integrate
internationally. While lower-income nations must generally still finance their
own investment, as risks offset potentially higher returns (Hoogvelt 2001: 84 –
9), higher-income nations can spend all they earn and still accumulate. When
the resultant domestic market strength spurs and attracts capital inflows that
foot their investment bill, globalization further privileges indulgence over
abstinence. For at least the past two decades, new industrializers’ capital
surpluses have flowed abroad to finance twin American deficits. U.S. private
and public consumption, fuelled by widening household and federal budget
overstretch, may have staved off global overproduction, by offering both a
product market the new industrializers can profitably sell to and a capital
market they can safely invest the proceeds in (Eatwell and Taylor 2000: 131 –
5). Global underconsumption might be more fairly tackled by putting extra
money where hungry mouths are. But increased spending by the already
affluent, financed by increased self-denial by the still deprived, has always
been easier to justify economically than to modify politically. If the higher-
income hemisphere will not help narrow the global income gap by paying
taxes to fund public transfers, voluntary payment of a price premium that
funds private transfers may constitute the next best alternative.

SYMBOLISM, SUSTAINABILITY AND SOCIAL SCARCITY

If widespread, consumption’s symbolic shift should advantage the natural
environment. A move to consumption of symbolic goods implies ‘‘de-
materialization’’ of production, allowing its value to continue expanding

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while its physical volume (of inputs and by-products) levels or even declines.
A move to symbolic consumption of goods suggests the refocusing on the
experience of scarce resources which respects the finitude of their stock, away
from expenditure which inevitably (and exhaustingly) treats them as a
continuous flow (Fromm 1979, Deffeyes 2001).
The potential for de-materialized production to defuse any conflict
between growth and the natural environment has been popularly outlined
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in recent characterizations of the knowledge-driven economy as ‘‘weightless’’

(Coyle 1997) or ‘‘living on thin air’’ (Leadbeater 2000). Growing possibilities
for possession without ownership, and their positive implications for
conservation, are also central to predictions of a culturally reoriented
‘‘experience economy’’ (Rifkin 2000). ‘‘Weightlessness’’ emphasizes the
intangible bias of people’s next big expenditures (on education, leisure
pursuits, travel, direct and online social interaction, non-pharmaceutical
health improvement), and the degree to which even physical products are
becoming lighter on materials, and heavier on information content. ‘‘Access’’
highlights the declining importance of physically owning and consuming
resources, once value relocates to experiences. ‘‘De-materialization’’ could
ensure that benefits enjoyed by a minority eventually reach the majority,
avoiding the wrath of later climbers who find the ladder kicked away by
physical scarcity. Instead of a trickle-down of elite material consumption,
which could exhaust resource stocks and overfill pollution sinks once
extended to the masses, the promise is of a lifting-up to elite symbolic
consumption, healing social disparity without courting ecological disaster.
However, accounts of the transition to a knowledge economy tend to
understate the degree to which material production and pollution have
migrated round the planet, rather than disappearing from it. To the extent
that they have averted their own non-renewable resource exhaustion crises,
and cleaned up their own pollution records, rich countries have frequently
done so by exporting rather than solving their environmental problems.
Industry’s by-products have so far followed its products around the globe,
from mature to newly industrializing economies. High-growth Asia’s ‘‘brown
cloud’’ and emerging energy problems (Nolan et al. 2004) specially suggest
that the West’s cleaner air and lower fuel bills are due more to heavy
industry’s migration than its de-materialization.
Even if a symbolic shift in consumption stops from threatening the natural
environment, it can still impoverish the social environment, as a rising volume
of production drains enjoyment from what is produced. The range of
‘‘positional’’ goods which lose value as their ownership or use becomes
generalized, goes beyond the time, urban space and educational qualifications

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originally highlighted by Hirsch (1977). Positional elements are now identified

in most ‘‘cultural’’ production, with the perception of sharply diminishing
returns to connoisseurs when either their own or other people’s intake rises.
Higher value may indeed be signalled by lower volume of consumption, as
when a small glass of spirits substitutes a dozen pints of lager, or the live opera
once a month is preferred to continuous canned pop. To the positionality in
space of city cars and mountain villas must be added the positionality through
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time of wine drunk too copiously or symphonies heard too frequently.

Greater appreciation of ‘‘highbrow’’ products, whose appeal does not arise
from their immediate sensations, is assumed to go with greater ability to limit
consumption and prevent familiarity breeding contempt.
Such aesthetic abstemiousness might be lost if the doors of consumption
are opened too wide. But the perpetuation of privilege through cultural
distinction, although generalized by Bourdieu from exhaustive 1960s French
research, may not be sustained across borders or time; more recent studies
suggest the ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ brow becoming furrowed (Trigg 2001, Turner
and Edmunds 2002). Conspicuous consumers who preserve their distinction
through culture, when this is shielded from the market, may see that
distinction dissolve as culture gets commercialized. This dissolution deserves
no regret if it democratizes a previously elitist culture, and replaces its
expedient display with art for art’s own sake.

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