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Introduction
"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier" according to Pierre Bourdieu (1984, p. 16). In his seminal work Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste (originally published in French, Bourdieu, 1979), Bourdieu rejects Immanuel Kant's view that there is an independent, objective validity and judgement of taste. Instead, he argues that our cultural preferences are socially shaped, and in the course of everyday life, we classify ourselves through our tastes. As consumers, we make choices, and in the very act of choosing, we often give away our position within the social structure of society. In this paper, we consider some of Bourdieu's (1984) ideas relating to the "the taste for necessity" (p. 374), which, he argued, governs many aspects of working-class life. Continued empirical testing of Bourdieu's theory of cultural production, set out in a series of works dating from 1968 (Bourdieu, 1993), remains important in the face of reflexive social theory which contends that "class" is now "too soft a category" for understanding life in the twenty-first century (Beck, 2012, p. 7, original emphasis).
Attitudinal data are taken from a national British social survey conducted by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) lends itself to the study of "class fractions" (an important part of Bourdieu's cultural theory that likes and dislikes mirror social class divisions and reveals proximity to necessity). According to Bourdieu, a working-class "habitus", constitutive of structuring structures that produce and reproduce dispositions, generates analogous preferences for social necessity whatever the social field - food, clothes, home interiors, holidays and leisure activities - which, for the most part, are not consciously chosen but are unconsciously generated by the habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). Before describing the study methods and results and discussing their implications, we consider Bourdieu's theory of cultural consumption, particularly his notion that working-class tastes are shaped out of social necessity.
Distinction and the taste for necessity
In La Distinction , Pierre Bourdieu examines the role and function of social necessity in shaping working-class culture: an important aspect of Bourdieu's more general theory of class and culture. Bourdieu argues that the real principle of our preferences is taste; for working-class families, this is a virtue made out of social necessity. Working-class lifestyles and taste follow the aesthetics of necessity, as...