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Poetics 37 (2009) 119–145

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The anatomy of cultural omnivorousness:

The case of the United Kingdom
Alan Warde a,*, Modesto Gayo-Cal b
a
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Arthur Lewis Building,
Manchester M13 9PQ, United Kingdom
b
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile
Available online 8 February 2009
Abstract
The cultural omnivore debate is central to the understanding of contemporary cultural inequality. This
paper offers some new evidence about Britain, some methodological clarification regarding the conse-
quences of using different measures of omnivorousness and some considerations about its role in cultural
reproduction. High quality data from a survey of the UK in 2003–2004 provide relevant evidence about
participation and taste across several cultural domains. We identify omnivorousness in terms of both volume
and composition of preferences. Socio-demographic factors affecting omnivore volume are broadly similar,
but not identical, to those reported for other countries. Concerning the composition of preferences, and
conscious of the controversies about the dissolution of cultural hierarchy, we apply a new procedure for a
tripartite classification of tastes and practices as legitimate, common and unauthorised. Bundles of
preferences are examined. We conclude that there is a section of the population whose preferences span
the categories of the legitimate, the common and the unauthorised, but that the most omnivorous portion of
the population, and also the highest social class, disproportionately embrace legitimate items, suggesting
that an omnivorous orientation is a mark of cultural capital.
Crown Copyright # 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. The omnivore debate
Peterson (1992) coined the term omnivore in recognition of the fact that people of higher socio-
economic status in the USA were not averse to participation in activities of popular culture. Its
principal immediate significance for Peterson was that the evidence contradicted the core
assumption of elite-mass models of cultural consumption which posited that it was ‘incumbent on
members of the cultural elite not only to do the right thing, but as importantly, to absolutely shun all
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 161 275 3630.

E-mail address: Alan.warde@manchester.ac.uk (A. Warde).
0304-422X/$ – see front matter. Crown Copyright # 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2008.12.001
120 A. Warde, M. Gayo-Cal / Poetics 37 (2009) 119–145
other sorts of cultural practices’ (Peterson, 1992, p. 245). Instead, it seemed, high social status was
associated with breath of taste and a tendency to sample widely among cultural products and
practices. A subsequent paper (Peterson and Kern, 1996) identified this as a new trend.
This observation attracted scholarly attention for several reasons. First it seemed to preserve an
understanding of cultural hierarchy as the intellectual tide flowed against the mass culture theses of
both mainstream sociology and the Frankfurt School. Second, it appeared to chart a middle way
between the dominant, if always implausible (see Holt, 1997; Lizardo, 2006), interpretation of
Bourdieu’s Distinction, which posited perfect homology between class and taste, and various
accounts of social and aesthetic individualisation (e.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens,
1991). It offered refuge to sociological interpretations by affirming an association between social
position and aesthetic preference, but without succumbing to a class determinist explanation (e.g.
Chan and Goldthorpe, 2007; Donnat, 1994; Erickson, 1996; Holt, 1997; Katz-Gerro, 2002; Warde
et al., 2000). Subsequently many papers have been written explicitly exploring the nature, extent
and significance of the phenomenon of omnivorousness (see Peterson, 2005, for a comprehensive
bibliography). Such studies present an increasingly coherent body of work, but many unresolved
issues remain. We deal with three. First, it remains uncertain whether there are significant
differences between countries in the form and extent of omnivorousness. Second, it is not
established what difference alternative operational procedures make. Does it matter whether we ask
questions about practices as opposed to tastes? Are effects the same in the fields of television, music
and the fine arts? Is it possible to explore reliably the transgression of symbolic boundaries, which
was a key aspect of Peterson’s original conception of the omnivore, or are we restricted to analysing
merely the socially differentiated basis of the volume of tastes and practices? Third, is not clear
whether cultural boundaries are being effaced (Holbrook et al., 2002) and, if so, what are the
implications for the omnivore thesis. Although there are other outstanding issues,1 we concentrate
on the socio-demographic characteristics of omnivorousness in Britain, the pattern of omnivores’
cultural preferences and the difference that alternative measurement strategies make.
One major objective of this paper is technical, to create optimal indicators of omnivorousness.
Evidence deployed in the debate is sometimes concerned with taste – with what people say they
like and dislike – sometimes with extent of participation, and also sometimes with knowledge.
Evidence about tastes comes largely from the field of music (e.g. Bryson, 1996, 1997; Chan and
Goldthorpe, 2007; Coulangeon, 2003; Coulangeon and Lemel, 2007; Han, 2003; Peterson and
Kern, 1996; Sintas and Álvarez, 2002; Sonnett, 2004; Van Eijck, 2000, 2001), and there are
grounds for thinking that it may be unusual because access to its diverse forms is easier and by
virtue of its capacity to arouse strong partisanship (Bennett et al., 2008: 82ff.). The evidence for
participation is mostly centred on arts participation (e.g. Sintas and Álvarez, 2004; DiMaggio
and Mukhtar, 2004), a legacy of the concern with whether high culture is an exclusive preserve of
the upper middle classes. However, it sometimes spreads over into recreational activities more
generally (e.g. Holbrook et al., 2002; Van Eijck and Bargeman, 2004). One other important study
by Erickson (1996) is solely concerned with knowledge of different cultural items and genres.
1
It is not clear whether it is a historical tendency. In general we do not have the means to establish this systematically
with available quantitative data. Peterson and Kern detected an appreciable increase in omnivore tendencies between
1983 and 1992 in the USA, defined as people with highbrow tastes in music liking more lowbrow genres at the later date,
but others found no trend (e.g. Van Eijck et al., 2002; Warde et al., 2000; Sintas and Katz-Gerro, 2005). Another issue,
particularly hard to determine, as Han (2003) reminds us (see also Holt, 1997), is that the manner of appropriation may be
at least as important as the matter that is appropriated and survey data are not well suited to identifying such phenomena.
In addition, a convincing interpretation of the consequences of the omnivorous orientation for social and cultural
inequality is lacking.
A. Warde, M. Gayo-Cal / Poetics 37 (2009) 119–145 121
Some studies use a combination of participation and taste (e.g. Peterson and Kern, 1996;
Katz-Gerro, 1999). Yet doing and liking are not identical acts and nor do they necessarily have the
same causes or effects. For example, it might be imagined that participation would be more
influenced by material circumstances, personal mobility and social confidence in social situations.
Taste, by contrast, might be thought a more private matter, partly because it is an effect of cognitive
and affective judgment, partly because it might be developed and confirmed through exposure to
mass media accessed domestically. Employing independent measures of both active participation
or expressed preferences we examine whether what is measured makes any significant difference to
the description or explanation of omnivorous tendencies.2
Currently two senses of omnivorousness compete, it being unclear whether the key issue is
breadth of engagements per se, or whether it is the crossing of symbolically significant boundaries
between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ activities which matters. The first we will refer to as omnivorousness
by volume, the second as omnivorousness by composition. Where it is clear which sense is being
referred to we use the annotations OVand OC respectively. However, in many accounts to which we
refer they are not clearly separated and hence the two different senses are not distinguished. The
former instance (OV) acknowledges the fact that some people engage in more activities and express
preferences for a wider range of cultural items than others. It is justifiably a matter of public and
sociological concern who those people are and how large is the gap between the active and the
excluded. The second issue, symbolic boundary-crossing, an element of the initial definition of
Peterson, entails that a profile of hierarchically ordered items can be separately identified. However,
it has become less easily possible and less acceptable to assume that there is a hierarchy of culture.
Many contend, in the wake of postmodernism, that meaningful boundaries, between highbrow and
lowbrow or high and popular culture, can no longer be identified (e.g. Chaney, 1996). In such
circumstances both measurement and interpretation have become highly controversial, resulting in,
as Peterson (2005, p. 264) notes, volume measures becoming more commonly applied. However,
we attempt in this paper to produce not only a volume measure, but also a compositional one
founded on the legitimacy of cultural items.
With respect to volume there is some degree of consensus in previous studies. Everywhere it
appears that a combination of social factors, including education, class, income, age, gender, race
and locale, influences the propensity to omnivorousness. Studies exploring volume of
preferences and activities have shown that the privileged (in terms of education, income and
social class) are most likely to display omnivore tendencies. However, while we now have studies
of probably a dozen countries, the extent of variation in precipitating factors in different countries
has yet to be systematically established. This paper clarifies the parameters of the British case.
Peterson’s early accounts took for granted that an omnivore would have an attachment to high
culture. Peterson and Kern (1996), for example, made it a necessary condition when they selected
a sample from those with a taste for opera and classical music. Their core hypothesis was that the
middle class was abandoning its previously snobbish attitude, by which they meant its outright
rejection of popular culture. Thus all omnivores have both high and popular culture items in their
cultural portfolios. However, an omnivorous portfolio if characterised only by volume does not
necessarily have a significant high culture component. Indeed, Ollivier (2008) identifies a group
of ‘practical’ omnivores, people who are heavily engaged in recreational and craft pursuits but
who have little engagement with legitimate arts culture. Nevertheless, most studies have been
content to demonstrate that a section of a national population is heavily engaged in multiple
cultural pursuits, high and low. Most often this is demonstrated in relation to music, where it is
2
We also have data on cultural knowledge, but due to limited space we make only passing reference in footnotes.
found that an identifiable group likes, for example, opera and musicals and rock music and
schlagers. It is typically concluded that only a tiny minority of people, if any at all, are snobs –
defined as those who like only high culture and shun popular culture. Note that all such claims
presume a hierarchy of cultural forms; and indeed, most quantitative analysis takes the existence
of a hierarchy for granted. However, given arguments to the contrary, the assumption deserves
explicit consideration.
European and American populations certainly used to accord higher value to some forms of
culture than others, familiarity with which had pay-offs in terms of social status. Identifiable
institutions operated to establish hierarchies. DiMaggio (1982), for example, described the
institutional foundations of high culture production in 19th century Boston and the extension of
the high culture model of organisation to theatre, opera and dance in the early 20th. Peterson
(1997) sketched how the classification of ‘highbrow’ emerged as a rejection of popular culture
among those with highest occupational status in the late 19th century in the USA. Bourdieu
(1984, 1993, 1996 [1992]) put at the core of his analysis of the cultural field institutional
‘consecration’ by universities and the state which establish certain cultural forms as legitimate.
However, as DiMaggio and Mukhtar (2004) note, when describing the increasing prestige of
attending jazz concerts and art museums since the early 1990s, what comprises high culture
changes over time. Distinguishing boundary effacement from boundary change is not simple.
Different terminologies have been employed to capture the ranking of tastes – high, middle
and lowbrow, high and popular, legitimate and vulgar – probably reflecting the history of
different national cultural systems. We couch our account of cultural ranking in terms of a notion
of legitimacy, a derivation from the theoretical propositions of Bourdieu. He considered that
those items constituting legitimate culture were sanctioned by dominant institutions, especially
educational institutions, which ensured, through a process of mutual accommodation to powerful
social groups, that the tastes of dominant social groups are recognised as legitimate and as good
taste, items considered simultaneously and consequently as aesthetically the most valuable. For
him, command of legitimate culture confers cultural capital upon individuals, the unequal
distribution of which creates and reproduces wider social inequalities. For us, Bourdieu is
important because he keeps firmly in sight the consequences of taste for power. His account is
perhaps especially fitted to France, but the notion of legitimate culture applies more generally to
the European context where state organisations sponsored a classical ideal of civilisation
(Bildungsideal) and where class distinctions have been recognisable through differential
appropriation of that orthodoxy. As with other approaches, a reliable means to identify more and
less prestigious items is presupposed. Ranking is necessary to detect the compositional aspect of
omnivorousness, to identify the proportion of items of particular rank in order to see whether
omnivores are disproportionately attached to high culture.
Ideally one would have independent criteria for establishing boundaries between high and
popular cultural items. Valued forms are consecrated by specialised institutions responsible for
the reproduction of art culture. DiMaggio and Mukhtar (2004, p. 175) identify high culture thus:
‘artistic genres that are treated by critics as ‘‘serious’’, characterised by a tendency for evaluation
to place greater priority on responses of critics and artists than on responses of the general public,
represented in college and university curricula, likely to receive subvention from private patrons,
foundations, or government agencies based on the perceived aesthetic value of their product, and
often produced and distributed by non-profit organisations.’ An omnivore (OC) would be
someone who likes some of these genres, but also others which are not so well established. Such
institutional analysis has proved valuable in the past (e.g. Bevers, 2005; DiMaggio, 1982) but is
rarely readily available, and was not for the UK in 2003. Yet it remains imperative to avoid using
everyday impressions, or recollections of past circumstances, precisely because the content of

high culture changes.
We propose an alternative means to identify legitimate items to create a compositional
measure able to capture legitimacy changing over time. We use survey data to accord items
degrees of legitimacy, estimated as ratios of the preferences of university graduates compared to
those without any qualifications. This assumes that universities are primary agents in the
consecration of cultural forms, and that those who pass through them will reflect their system of
judgment more than other sections of the population. Relative preferences can then be used to
explore associations with socio-demographic features (other than education) of the whole
population, providing that education is not too highly associated statistically with measures of
class, age or gender. This circumvents the most problematic aspect of circularity entailed in a
simple acceptance that those with the greatest volume of social, economic and cultural assets
combined (the dominant class in Bourdieu’s terms, or high socio-economic status in Peterson’s)
by definition exhibit legitimate taste. It thus becomes possible to examine how an omnivore (OC),
identified as someone with many different tastes, combines preferences for legitimate items
(those to which the highly educated have affinity) with more common and popular items.
Investigation of how such combinations of taste are associated with other socio-demographic
variables is thus facilitated.
The description and analysis of our data lends itself to presentation in the form of testing of
several hypotheses.
1.1. Omnivorousness by volume
It can be anticipated that omnivorousness by volume, i.e. through extensive engagement in

cultural activity, is influenced by class, income, education, gender, ethnicity, age and
geographical location. Previous studies suggest that the effects of these factors vary,
depending on where, when and in relation to what cultural items research has been conducted.
All existing studies suggest that it is the highly educated, white, middle class which is most
likely to exhibit omnivorous tendencies. We are particularly interested in examining the effect
of class, since it is integral to the omnivore conjecture and many accounts of contemporary
cultural change see it as diminishing (e.g. Pakulski and Waters, 1996). Britain having typically
exhibited strong class inequalities, we might anticipate significant class effects. Among those
who have considered age in detail, some studies suggest that the young are more omnivorous,
while others disagree (Van Eijck, 2000; Van Eijck et al., 2002). Results from the limited
research on gender are also mixed. Because women are more active in arts participation in
most countries (DiMaggio and Mukhtar, 2004; Katz-Gerro, 2002) we might expect them to be
more omnivorous also. However, Van Eijck (2001) finds Dutch men more omnivorous, Sintas
and Álvarez (2002) report no gender effect in Spain, while Erickson (1996) suggests effects
differ by cultural domain in Canada.
Hypothesis 1. Omnivorousness (OV) is strongly associated with educational qualifications,
higher social class, and identification with a dominant ethnic group.
Hypothesis 2. The professional and managerial middle class are more omnivorous (OV) than
other classes.
Hypothesis 3. Younger cohorts are more omnivorous (OV) than older ones.
Hypothesis 4. Women are more omnivorous (OV) than men.
1.2. Taste and participation
What people like and what they do are clearly different phenomena, and it might be
imagined a priori that they have different determinants and have different effects.
Participation often requires money and company, while taste relies more on knowledge
and collective judgment. Also, however, some people attend events they do not particularly
like because encouraged by friends or partners, and other people do not make visits they would
enjoy because they lack means of access or expense. Because not usually explicitly separated,
previous research has implied that it matters little whether omnivorousness is measured by
participation or by taste and would therefore expect determination to a similar degree by
similar socio-demographic factors.
Hypothesis 5. Similar factors influence omnivorousness (OV) by participation and by taste.
Hypothesis 6. Socio-demographic factors influence omnivorousness (OV) by participation and
by taste to a similar degree.
1.3. Omnivorousness by composition
It is expected that the most omnivorous people will engage in a substantial number of ‘unrefined’
activities. All studies imply this, but have rarely been precise about the degree or quality of
attachment to popular cultural forms. It is unclear whether unrefined items will be strongly liked, or
tolerated as a matter of indifference, or treated with a sceptical aesthetic gaze and thus
comprehended but not valued. The intimation of the majority interpretation, however, is that
popular culture will be as positively regarded as legitimate culture, and that it would meet with wide
engagement and appreciation among people of higher socio-economic status. Consequently,
omnivorous members of the middle class will not exhibit distinction through the stratification of
their cultural preferences, being more tolerant of popular culture and its bearers than their
predecessors. They should show no strongly marked preferences for legitimate, ‘middlebrow’ or
‘unrefined’ items.3
Hypothesis 7. Preferences for legitimate and popular or ‘unrefined’ items will be more evenly
balanced among omnivores (OV) than among others.
Hypothesis 8. Higher class respondents will have more evenly balanced portfolios than
others.
2. The study: cultural capital and social exclusion
This paper arises from a study which systematically explores cultural capital in Britain, using
focus-group discussions, semi-structured household interviews and a questionnaire, applied
nationally on both a random sample basis and to an ethnic boost sample, to explore the cultural
tastes, forms of cultural participation and cultural knowledge of the population (Bennett et al.,
2008). Here, we draw only on the main sample of the survey, which was administered to 1564
3
At the point of Peterson’s first intervention the dominant understanding was that those with a taste for high culture
would particularly distance themselves from the middlebrow (see Peterson and Kern, 1996, p. 901). His evidence showed
otherwise, middlebrow being more popular among omnivores, but with a taste for the lowbrow increasing faster between
1983 and 1992.
respondents. They represent the adult population (age 18 and over) and living in United Kingdom
(England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Data was collected between November 2003
and March 2004 by the National Centre for Social Research (see Thomson, 2004, for technical
details). We focus on responses to a selection of the questions concerning respondents’ cultural
participation and tastes. An important feature of the survey is that it differentiates between these
components of cultural capital: in much of the literature, questions of cultural participation,
cultural taste and cultural knowledge are implicitly equated with the potential consequence that
different relationships to the cultural field are confounded with one another. Questionnaire design
was particularly concerned to distinguish different modes of cultural involvement from one
another by asking questions which distinguished between (i) frequency of participation in
nominated cultural activities, and (ii) cultural taste as measured by expressions of likes regarding
particular writers, composers, film directors, literary genres, etc.4
The questionnaire aimed to identify a range of items for each of several domains, including some
which had been identified in earlier accounts as definitive elements of high and popular culture,
some mainstream majority tastes and some specialised products associated with sub-cultures and
the avant-garde. Items are necessarily highly selective and those chosen could always be otherwise.
Selection drew upon focus-group discussions and the advice of a panel of a dozen sociologists and
arts’ professionals who debated the meaning and likely appeal of potential items in order to obtain a
coverage which was not biased towards particular social groups or interest constituencies. Common
sense, native knowledge, previous survey questions and earlier scholarly studies suggested a broad
spread of cultural products and practices which were symbolically significant and amenable to
social interpretation. No compilation could be immune to criticism, but we would submit that,
within the constraints of an interview lasting an hour, we considered an appropriately broad range of
items.
Our data have several distinctive qualities. The survey was designed with the omnivore
debate in mind and is therefore able to take on directly some issues raised in the debate. First, we
asked questions which would tap separately the areas of participation, knowledge and taste. This
means that we can examine whether expression of preferences and participation are good
proxies for one another, as Peterson (1992) implied, and also whether different social
characteristics and resources impact differently, as might reasonably be anticipated. Second, we
have evidence about a wide range of cultural and leisure activities, so that our analysis is not
focused entirely upon behaviour in the sphere of music or the fine arts. From the point of view of
an extensive notion of omnivorousness we can explore many domains and types of recreation
and culture.
We first compare two alternative ways of measuring omnivorousness by volume. We look at
information about participation and taste in a simple quantitative manner by constructing scales of
the number of practices and likes reported. Regression analysis produces a characterisation of the
social bases of cultural omnivorousness in Britain, by volume. Differences between using measures
of participation and taste are identified and discussed. Then we construct a measure of the
legitimacy of the items included in the scales. Based on the differences in the preferences of the
most and least educationally qualified sections of the sample, taking account of age differences in
preferences, items are ranked as legitimate, common and unauthorised. Thereafter we examine the
association between combinations of items of different rank and socio-demographic
characteristics. The final section discusses what can be learned about the nature of omnivorousness
and its measurement.
4
We also explored knowledge and dislikes, though we have not the space to report on them here.
3. Omnivorousness by volume
3.1. Omnivorousness (OV) as participation
Respondents to the survey reported on activities ranging from watching the television to going
to the opera, playing sport to reading newspapers. We selected 26 for examination, the full list
appearing in Table 1. As can be seen, rates of participation varied considerably: 98% of
respondents watch TV, while only 9% said that they currently belong to any arts or crafts group or
club. Over 90% of the population eat out sometimes, own tapes or CDs, and had heard one or
more of the pieces of music that we asked about. About the same percentage of respondents had
seen a painting by one of the artists we listed. Over 80% of them occasionally went to a pub, had
read a book in the last year, and read a daily newspaper sometimes. Such activities are core
cultural items that a large proportion of the population shares. Other activities on the scale are
very much minority practices. Only 14% of respondents play bingo and only 15% ever go to the
opera. Thus the scale comprises some very popular activities, a few minority activities, but most
items are middling common and thus may have a differentiated following. This scale refers to a
wide range of cultural and recreational activities, as required for a test of the omnivore thesis. The
activities are differentiated and without obvious bias from concentration within particular fields
or over-emphasis of minority pursuits.
Table 1 also indicates that there are significant differences in the participation of those with the
most and the least education. In order to allow for mean differences in participation in the various
activities we have calculated what percentages of all participants have degrees and lack any
qualifications. 23.4% of respondents hold a degree and 26.8% have no qualifications. Attending
opera, rock concerts, art galleries and orchestral concerts are disproportionately typical of the
highly educated. Bingo and mass media (newspapers and TV) consumption is skewed towards
the less educated.
The participation scale measured the number of different activities that each respondent to the
survey reported. The scale was almost normally distributed. The mean was 18.04, the median 18.
The lowest quartile were involved in 14 activities or less; the highest quartile in 22 or more.
Cross tabulation of score with gender, occupational class, educational qualifications, ethnic
identity and age produced statistically significant measures of association. In order to explore
these relationships more closely we applied Poisson regression analysis to log scores on the
scale.5 The class variable was created by combining occupational categories into three social
classes (professional-executive, intermediate and working classes), the boundaries determined
through an application of multiple correspondence analysis which is reported at length in
LeRoux et al. (2008).6 Education had five categories identified by highest qualification. Ethnicity
was determined by responses to a question about self-identification. Age was a continuous
variable accompanied by an age squared measure to register potential curvilinear effects
5
This is a procedure or type of regression recommended when we have got ‘‘count data’’ as a dependent variable, that
is, integers with no negative values. This method implies using a Poisson distribution and the log (natural logarithm) as
the link function (Gujarati, 2003).
6
Derived from NS-SeC categories (see Rose and Pevalin, 2003), the multiple correspondence analysis of the
distribution of cultural tastes and preferences (see LeRoux et al., 2008) indicated that the most efficient categorisation
of occupational classes distinguished a professional-executive class (comprising higher managers and employers and
higher and lower professionals (NS-SeC 1–3)), an intermediate class (lower managers, higher supervisory, intermediate
white collar workers, employers in small establishments and own account workers (NS-SeC 4–8)), and a working class
(lower supervisory, lower technical, semi-routine and routine occupations (NS-SeC 9–12)).
Table 1
Participation by level of legitimacy in cultural practices. Participation reported (percentages). Degree of legitimacy, whole
population and age cohorts (ratios). Classification of legitimate, common and unauthorised cultural items, whole
population and age cohorts.
a b c d e f g
Total All 18–39 40–60 61+ Component Cultural
(%) ages profiles rank
Opera: go ever 15.4 5,0 4,3 7,7 6,2 L/LLL Legitimate
Rock concerts: go ever 31.1 3,9 2,8 2,4 1,4 L/LLC Legitimate
Art galleries: go ever 44.7 3,5 3,4 3,9 3,6 L/LLL Legitimate
Orchestral concerts: go ever 32.5 3,4 12,3 3,4 4,0 L/LLL Legitimate
Theatre: go ever 56.4 2,5 4,6 2,3 2,7 L/LLL Legitimate
Night clubs: go ever 36.3 2,5 1,1 1,4 0,5 L/CCU Common
Practice any sport 56.3 2,3 2,1 2,4 1,9 L/LLC Legitimate
Museum: go ever 62.9 2,2 2,8 2,2 2,0 L/LLL Legitimate
Belong to any group or club 9.4 2,1 5,3 1,9 3,9 L/LCL Legitimate
Cinema: go ever 74.6 2,0 1,4 1,7 2,1 L/CCL Common
Receive any arts lessons (a) 43.3 2,0 2,4 2,3 0,7 L/LLU Legitimate
Own paintings 39.4 1,9 3,0 2,1 2,2 C/LLL Legitimate
Have read any of the books 54.3 1,8 3,1 2,4 1,6 C/LLC Legitimate
(e.g. Harry Potter)
Stately homes: go ever 71 1,6 2,7 1,5 1,6 C/LCC Common
Read books 79.6 1,4 1,7 1,5 1,3 C/CCC Common
Pub: go ever 83.5 1,2 1,2 1,1 1,2 C/CCC Common
Have seen any of the painters 89.2 1,2 1,5 1,2 1,2 C/CCC Common
Own videos 90.4 1,1 1,0 1,0 1,1 C/UCC Common
Have listened to any of the 95.4 1,1 1,1 1,1 1,1 C/CCC Common
songs (e.g. Chicago)
Eating out: go ever 96.5 1,1 1,1 1,1 1,1 C/CCC Common
Own CDs 96.9 1,1 1,0 1,1 1,1 C/UCC Common
Watches TV 98.4 1,0 1,0 1,0 1,0 U/CUU Unauthorised
Would make a point of 67 1,0 1,0 1,0 1,1 U/CUC Common
watching TV events
Read a daily newspaper 76 0,9 0,8 1,0 1,1 U/UUC Unauthorised
Would make a point of 59 0,8 0,9 0,8 0,7 U/UUU Unauthorised
watching any of the
film directors
Bingo: go ever 14.2 0,4 0,5 0,3 0,1 U/UUU Unauthorised
N = 1564 37,7 37,6 24,6
Notes: Column ‘‘a’’ shows the total level of participation for the whole sample.
Columns ‘‘b–e’’ are ratios of percentage of university graduates participating divided by the percentage of those with no
qualifications participating.
Column ‘‘f’’ shows the profile for all ages before the slash (/), and after the slash the profile for each age group. U:
unauthorised; C: common; L: legitimate.
Column ‘‘g’’ is the rank we attribute to the item, according to the following rationale. If columns ‘‘c’’, ‘‘d’’ and ‘‘e’’ are the
same, the cultural item concerned is assigned that rank. If two columns are identical and one is different, irrespective of
degree of difference, we accept the cultural legitimacy of the first two. Finally, when three items are assigned a different
cultural value, we consider it ‘‘common’’, as a sort of mean.
(a) These variables when included in the regression model are continuous, but in this table they indicate the percentage of
people who receive at least one lesson.
associated with decrease in participation among the elderly. We also included measures of
population density, income by quartiles, household type in eight categories, and ‘region’
classified by residence in the countries of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and in four regions
of England – North, Midlands, London and the rest of Southern England. Table 2 records the
distribution of the independent variables used in the analysis.
Table 2
Frequencies of socio-demographic variables employed in statistical analysis.
Frequencies Percentage
Education
No educational qualifications 419 26.8
GCSE, CSE, O-level, NVQ/SVQ level 1 or 2 372 23.8
RSA/OCR Higher Diploma, City & Guilds Full T 169 10.8
GCE A-level, Scottish Higher Grades, ONC 210 13.4
University/CNAA Bachelor Degree, Master Degree, Ph.D. 366 23.4
Other qualifications 27 1.7
Age
18–24 144 9.2
25–34 297 19.0
35–44 318 20.3
45–54 266 17.0
55–64 240 15.3
65–74 168 10.7
75+ 130 8.3
Sex
Female 851 54.4
Male 713 45.6
Ethnic origin
White-English 1117 71.4
White-other British/Irish 291 18.6
White-other 46 3
Other origin 109 6.9
Social class
Professional-executive 361 23.1
Intermediate 449 28.7
Working class 710 45.4
Never worked 43 2.7
Income
Low quartile 575 36.8
2nd quartile 221 14.1
3rd quartile 381 24.3
High quartile 212 13.5
Type of household
Single person 283 18.1
Unrelated adults 196 12.5
Couple no children 475 30.4
Couple dependent children 354 22.7
Couple non-dependent children 99 6.4
Lone parent dependent children 63 4
Lone parent non-dependent children 47 3
Multi-family 44 2.8
Table 2 (Continued )
Frequencies Percentage
Region
North 389 24.9
Midlands 285 18.2
Southern England 468 29.9
London 147 9.4
Wales 101 6.4
Scotland 117 7.5
Northern Ireland 57 3.7
Population density
0/1.67 256 16.4
1.68/7.92 315 20.2
7.93/25.26 315 20.2
25.27/41.26 307 19.6
41.27/185.22 313 20
The regression analysis permits interpretation of the influence of those factors (see Table 3,
model 1). Education is the most powerful influence, with a monotonic increase in
omnivorousness for each level of increase in qualification. There is a significant increase in
magnitude in the association among those holding a degree. Higher education is heavily
associated with participation. Age exhibits a curvilinear effect increasing to age 50, but tapering
off among those over 65. Region is insignificant, although living in the countryside reduces
Table 3
Factors influencing respondents’ volume of participation and expressed likes: Poisson regression coefficients.
a (model 1) b (model 2)
B (Participation) B (Taste)
(Constant) 2.57** 1.88**
Education
GCSE, CSE, O-level, NVQ/SVQ level 1 or 2 0.15** 0.11**
RSA/OCR Higher Diploma, City & Guilds Full T 0.21** 0.20**
GCE A-level, Scottish Higher Grades, ONC 0.24** 0.17**
University/CNAA Bachelor Degree, Master Degree/Ph.D./D.Phil. 0.29** 0.24**
Other qualifications 0.11* 0.25**
Age
Age 0.01** 0.01**
Age squared 0.0001** 0.0001**
Region
North 0.1 0.02
Midlands 0.03 0.07
Southern England 0.03 0.08*
Wales 0.07 0.09
Scotland 0.02 0.12*
Northern Ireland 0.04 0.19**
Type of household
Single person household 0.05** 0.03
Unrelated adults household 0.005 0.09**
Couple dependent children 0.08** 0.06*
Table 3 (Continued )
a (model 1) b (model 2)
B (Participation) B (Taste)
Couple non-dependent children 0.03 0.03
Lone parent dependent children 0.04 0.01
Lone parent non-dependent children 0.04 0.10
Multi-family 0.14** 0.22**
Social class
Professional-executive 0.10** 0.13**
Intermediate 0.07** 0.09**
Never worked 0.08* 0.07
Sex
Male 0.06** 0.03
Ethnic origin
White-other British/Irish 0.05* 0.03
White-other 0.03 0.02
Other origin 0.15** 0.19**
Population density
1.68/7.92 0.04* 0.006
7.93/25.26 0.01 0.01
25.27/41.26 0.0001 0.009
41.27/185.22 0.002 0.07*
Income
2nd quartile 0.02 0.06*
3rd quartile 0.04* 0.01
High quartile 0.06** 0.01
Pseudo-R2 0.09 0.05
Number of cases 1564
(a) Dependent variable: scale of participation.
Baseline categories: level of education: no education qualifications; region: London; type of household: couple no
children; social class: working class; sex: female; ethnic origin: white-English; population density: 0/1.67; income: low
quartile.
*
p < 0.05.
**
p < 0.01.
participation marginally. When compared with couples without children, people living in single
person households, couple households with dependent children and in multi-family households
participate significantly less. There is also a monotonic effect of social class. The professional-
executive class participates most heavily, and those who occupy intermediate occupations also
participate significantly more than working class people. The effect of gender is significant, and
indicates a tendency for women to participate more widely. There is a very substantial effect of
ethnic status; belonging to the category ‘Other’, i.e. not white, reduces very much the level of
participation, but interestingly so to a lesser extent does being ‘white Celtic’.7 Finally, income
matters, those above median income, and especially those in the highest quartile, participate
more than the rest.
It is thus clear that level of participation is substantially affected by the socio-demographic
characteristics of individuals. Education, class and income have strong independent effects.
7
‘White Celtic’ combines identification as Scottish, Irish and Welsh.
Ethnic status is also highly significant. Age, location and household structure matter. There is a
significant gender effect even once these other influences are taken into account. Participation is a
function of social position and resources.
3.2. Omnivorousness (OV) as taste: likes
A second possible measure of omnivorousness (OV) refers to taste, to people’s preferences.

Here we are not looking at what they do but at what they say they like. The questionnaire
contained two types of questions about preferences. The first asked whether the respondent
‘would make a point of’ watching a TV programme or a film by a particular director. The second
asked people to rank items or genres on a scale of 1–7, a particularly satisfactory question for
examining issues of likes and dislikes. The topics were named musical works, named artists,
book genres and music genres. Thus the questions ranged across six domains. The responses that
we coded to indicate liking were as follows:
national TV: would make a point of watching four programmes

film directors: would make a point of watching the work of six film directors
named musical works: have listened to and liked eight pieces of music
named artists: have seen works, which were liked, by seven painters
book genres: score of 1 or 2 on a seven-point scale from like to dislike for seven genres of
writing
music genres: score of 1 or 2 on a seven-point scale from like to dislike for eight genres of
music
In sum, we asked whether people liked 40 different items, some by name, some by genre.8
As Table 4 (column a) indicates, there are few items which a majority of people claimed to
like. Only five were liked by more than half the population; in order of preference, the work of
Van Gogh (67%), Chicago (65%), The Four Seasons (56%), and the paintings of Lowry (55%)
and Turner (51%). The presence of three artists and two pieces of music suggests that it is easier
to recognise and like named works than it is genres, and that art and music circulate widely. By
contrast, less than one person in twenty said that they liked the works of Kahlo (3.8%), Emin
(2.9%), Almodóvar (2.6%), Campion (2.2%), or Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (3.3%). These
represent specialised and rare or arcane tastes and might perhaps qualify as indicators of avant-
garde tendencies. Other items that were liked by less than 20% of the population were: the films
of Bergman (7%), religious books (9%) electronic and heavy metal music (both 11%), modern
jazz and world music (both 12%), Kind of Blue (13%), modern literature and science-fiction
books (both 14%), self-help books (16%), the Queen’s Christmas broadcast (17%), Mahler’s fifth
symphony and urban music (both 19%).
As can be seen from Table 4 some items are very much more appreciated by the highly
educated than the unqualified. Some of the ratios are very large (compare Table 1), with avant-
garde and contemporary artists, painters and film makers especially favoured by those with high
levels of institutionalised cultural capital.
Considering all six domains together, the maximum possible score on this simple additive
scale was 40. The lowest recorded score was zero; eight people liked none of the items offered.
8
For all items of taste respondents could record that they did not know or recognise the category. When calculating the
scale for Table 3, model 2 and the ratios in Table 4, the ‘don’t know’ response was disregarded.
Table 4
Taste and legitimacy. Mean of likes reported for whole sample (percentage). Legitimate, common and unauthorised
cultural items, whole population and age cohorts. Profiles of legitimacy.
a b c d e f g
Total All 18–39 40–60 61+ Component Cultural
(%) ages profiles rank
Art of Kahlo 3.8 49,0 129,0 94,0 3,6 L/LLL Legitimate
Films of Almodóvar 2.6 16,4 3,2 58,0 35,0 L/LLL Legitimate
Art of Warhol 21.8 5,7 5,5 5,1 4,1 L/LLL Legitimate
Films of Campion 2.2 4,3 36,0 4,2 3,5 L/LLL Legitimate
Modern literature 13.5 4,3 2,1 5,0 2,9 L/LLL Legitimate
Art of Emin 2.9 4,2 1,4 4,5 3,6 L/CLL Legitimate
Einstein on the Beach (Glass) 3.3 3,3 3,7 5,0 1,8 L/LLC Legitimate
Symphony no. 5 (Mahler) 19.3 3,0 4,4 4,7 3,5 L/LLL Legitimate
Kind of Blue (Miles Davis) 12.7 2,9 4,2 3,3 2,2 L/LLL Legitimate
Heavy metal 10.8 2,9 1,9 2,0 1,3 L/CLC Common
Rock, including Indie 26.7 2,5 2,3 1,7 0,7 L/LCU Common
Wonderwall (Oasis) 46.6 2,3 1,0 1,9 1,1 L/CCC Common
Stan (Eminem) 31.1 2,3 0,9 1,8 0,4 L/UCU Unauthorised
Science-fiction, fantasy 14.4 2,3 1,2 1,6 1,3 L/CCC Common
and horror books
Urban, including Hip 18.8 2,2 0,7 2,2 0,8 L/ULU Unauthorised
Hop and R&B
Art of Picasso 48.8 2,2 2,4 2,0 2,1 L/LLL Legitimate
Four Seasons (Vivaldi) 55.7 2,0 4,6 2,0 2,0 L/LLL Legitimate
Biographies & autobiographies 38.6 1,9 3,8 1,5 2,0 C/LCC Common
Art of Van Gogh 67.3 1,7 2,1 1,7 1,8 C/LCC Common
Self-help books 16.2 1,6 2,9 0,8 1,1 C/LUC Common
Art of Turner 50.5 1,6 3,8 1,9 1,9 C/LCC Common
Films of Rathnam 0.6 1,5 6,0 0,0 1,0 C/LUC Common
Classical music, including opera 29 1,5 2,5 1,9 2,2 C/LCL Legitimate
Watch General election TV 24.3 1,4 2,2 2,1 1,3 C/LLC Legitimate
World music, including 12 1,4 0,6 1,1 1,8 C/UCC Common
Reggae and Bhangra
Modern jazz 12 1,3 1,8 1,7 1,2 C/CCC Common
Electronic dance music, 10.9 1,3 0,5 1,7 0,0 C/UCU Unauthorised
including techno and house
Art of Lowry 54.5 1,2 1,6 1,4 1,5 C/CCC Common
Oops (Britney Spears) 26.4 1,1 1,0 0,6 0,0 C/UUU Unauthorised
Thrillers, who-dunnits and 29.7 1,1 1,4 1,0 0,9 C/CUU Unauthorised
detective stories
Religious books 8.5 1,1 1,1 0,8 1,5 C/CUC Common
Chicago (Sinatra) 64.7 1,0 2,0 1,1 1,0 C/CCU Common
Watch Football World Cup 44.4 0,9 0,9 0,7 1,1 U/UUC Unauthorised
Films of Spielberg 43.5 0,7 0,6 0,6 0,6 U/UUU Unauthorised
Films of Bergman 6.7 0,7 18,0 1,4 0,9 U/LCU Common
Watch Grand National TV 25.6 0,6 0,6 0,4 1,2 U/UUC Unauthorised
Films of Hitchcock 33.8 0,6 2,0 0,6 0,6 U/LUU Unauthorised
Romances 20.5 0,6 1,0 0,5 0,4 U/UUU Unauthorised
Watch Queen’s Christmas 16.9 0,5 1,4 0,6 0,9 U/CUU Unauthorised
TV broadcast
Country and western 25.3 0,3 0,8 0,2 0,5 U/UUU Unauthorised
N = 1564 37,7 37,6 24,6
For key, see notes to Table 1.
The highest score was 27. The lowest quartile liked six or less items. The highest quartile liked 14
or more items. Both mean and median scores were 10, suggesting that the scale is approximately
normally distributed.
We repeated the procedures described in section 3.1. In general there were almost as many
significant relationships between the independent variables and the scale scores for liking, but
with some interesting differences. Again, all measures of education proved significant. Having
technical qualifications rather than A-levels made a respondent favourable to more items. As
before, the most highly educated, those with a degree, score very highly. Educational
qualifications always matter, usually more than any other variable in our models. However, the
effect of education varies between different domains. Graduates like the greatest number of
musical works and painters, but they do not like the most genres of books, nor the most film
directors, nor the most televised events.
Social class is also an independent determinant, with the intermediate and the professional-
executive classes more omnivorous than the working class, although the effect was pronounced
only in relation to painters and musical works. Income, however, has very little interpretable
effect. Age was correlated in the same way as with participation; volume of likes grew with age to
a peak at 49, but decreased among the elderly.9 Gender was not significant. Household type is
important. Those living with other unrelated adults are likely to have significantly more likes (a
result of the presence of three or more adults with diverse experience which contrasts with a
tendency for tastes to converge within couples). Multi-family households and couples with
dependent children had significantly fewer likes. Region was significant in this model, with
people in Southern England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland expressing fewer likes than the
inhabitants of London. Metropolitan life increases the range of items which a person regards
favourably as, marginally, does living in a densely populated area. Once again, not being white
significantly reduced the range of likes, though there was no difference within white groups.
To sum up, class, education, age and ethnic origin are associated with taste in ways similar to
those apparent for participation. The regional effect, by contrast, is different, suggesting perhaps
that greater publicity and a larger variety of cultural goods and services available produce a
particular London taste profile. Gender and income are unimportant.
3.3. Omnivorousness (OV) dissected, measures compared
Hypothesis 1 is clearly supported. In Britain, as elsewhere, volume of cultural engagement

and interest is associated with socio-demographic characteristics. Almost all measured socio-
demographic variables have some association with volume measures. Educational qualifications,
social class and being white are strong influences, as predicted, as is age. In addition, for one or
other of our measures of participation or taste, region, household type, income, gender and place
of residence are also independent predictors. Hypothesis 2 is thus also supported. For both
participation and taste there are social class effects. The professional-executive class is more
omnivorous than the intermediate class, which in turn is more omnivorous than the working class,
even after having controlled for education and income. Hypothesis 3 is not simply confirmed. In
fact, in Britain, it is the middle aged who are most omnivorous by these measures, those under 25,
and those over 65 are more restricted in their attachments. Inspection of Table 4 also shows,
however, some significant differences between the tastes of the under and the over 40s.
9
Cross-tabulations indicated that 25–34 and 55–64 year olds had more omnivorous tastes than those aged 35–54, but
they too had more preferences than the under 25s and over 65s.
Hypothesis 4 has mixed results. Gender is significant for participation: women participate more.
However, there is no gender effect on volume of taste.
Hypothesis 5 is largely corroborated as the variables with the strongest effects are associated
in a similar fashion with both participation and taste. However, the important categories are not
always the same, and neither gender nor income appreciably affects volume of tastes. Hypothesis
6, by contrast, is not supported. Overall the pattern for taste is weaker than for participation, as
judged by the value of pseudo-R2.10 Taste, at least as measured by asking people directly to
identify items that they like, is less strongly influenced by socio-demographic features. There are
several possible reasons for this.
It might be a result of the fact that ideal preferences are less constrained by material factors
than is participation, which requires some resources for their achievement. The part played by
income in predicting participation is pertinent. Social circumstance, family obligations to
dependent children and absence of companions for outings, as indicated by household type, also
play a role. Perhaps taste, by contrast, constitutes an arena wherein there are simply fewer
constraints and more choice, being therefore more prone to the centrifugal effects of individual or
sub-cultural attachments.11 What one does is constrained, a function of material resources and
social network, while what one likes is more whimsical. However, if this were so, then we might
expect the differences in value of the R2 measure in the two models to be even greater than they
are. Moreover, if expression of likes was relatively free and socially inconsequential, one would
expect to see people liking rather more items because the threshold for saying one likes
something is low.12 But, in fact, people are comparatively reserved when identifying what they
like. Indeed, people claimed to dislike almost twice as many items as they liked. Perhaps people
prefer to restrict their likes because they consider them precious, a means of indicating
individuality and statement of self-identity. Alternatively, perhaps it is those who are culturally
most confident – the educated middle class – who are in the best position to affirm a liking for
different items (they know more, they perhaps have a greater sense of the symbolic significance
of the items that they profess to like, and they feel more able to defend their opinion). People may
feel much is at stake in terms of social classification and sense of self when saying that they like
something.
An alternative reason might have been technical. One possibility is that the effect is weakened
because the 40-item scale conflates items with genres. Checking for this, the effect is marginal
but interesting. We divided the scale into two parts, the first containing the 25 named items, the
second containing 15 genres. The Poisson regression equation for the first part was very similar to
that for the whole scale, with a slightly better adjustment to the data (pseudo-R2 = 0.054).
Educated, white, older males had most likes. The class effects were marginally stronger. The
second variant, regarding genres, shows a poorer fit to the data (pseudo-R2 = 0.029). Age and
class effects disappeared, regional effects attenuated and the direction of association for sex was
reversed. Men expressed fewer likes for the listed genres than did women, although they claimed
10
There are difficulties of interpreting pseudo-R2 (Powers and Xie, 2000). In our case, this measure is taken as an
indicator of goodness of fit of both (participation and taste) models. This does not imply that a perfect comparison is
possible, but it indicates that the former model better predicts the outcome. Besides, other measures (e.g. deviance/
degrees of freedom) show that the model that refers to taste has a poorer adjustment to the data than the one that refers to
participation.
11
Note that if that were the case, the role of tastes in the process of strictly social classification will, arguably, be limited.
12
Note, though, that some of our questions about liking also effectively specify knowing, so they are not purely a matter
of opinion.
to like more named items. Thus, expressions of tastes for genres seem less susceptible to the
influence of social position than those for particular items.
4. Omnivorousness by composition
To explore omnivorousness further we designed a measure of legitimacy to capture the second

sense of omnivorousness (OC), that involving transgression of boundaries. With it we can ask
whether the items in the volume scales exhibit significant patterns of dispersion across
hierarchically ordered symbolic boundaries. Laying aside controversies over nomenclature, we
constructed from the data in the survey, rather than by fiat, a tripartite classification of items
which we call legitimate, common and unauthorised.
4.1. Calibrating legitimacy
A hierarchical ranking of the legitimacy of items measuring participation and taste appear in
Tables 1 and 4. This is a continuous measure, constructed by comparing the preferences of those
who hold degrees with those having no qualifications. For convenience of discussion, items are
partitioned into three groups. Legitimate items are those which are more than twice as often
preferred by graduates. Those which are unauthorised are less frequently liked by graduates
than the unqualified. The remainder are common. The exact point at which these divisions are
drawn is somewhat arbitrary, but not greatly problematic for the purpose in hand. For this is a
means to identify a hierarchy of legitimacy which is not simply the adoption of conventional or
historic notions, but rather has a theoretical rationale related to institutions of ‘consecration’. We
reason that items disproportionately preferred by those who have had most exposure to
educational institutions have greatest legitimacy. Inter alia, this procedure takes account of
recent changes in the contents of the hierarchy. Looking, for example, at the column (b) for all
ages in Table 4, it can be seen that liking classical music or biographies was not in 2003 highly
legitimate for the population as a whole, even though they might perhaps have been thirty years
earlier.
This procedure does not circumvent all objections. However, it is a precise and transparent
operationalisation. It escapes the vicious circularity entailed in asserting that the tastes of the
dominant class define what is legitimate, and it avoids simply using an author’s personal
intuitions about the prestige of cultural items. Because it uses the same survey, it ensures a
temporal fit between observations of behaviour and judgments about cultural rank. Of course, it
could be confounded as an indicator if education was very highly correlated with other
demographic variables of interest. However, with our data, this is not prohibitive. According to
Cramer’s V, the levels of association between education and those variables are as follows:
sex = 0.12; age (seven categories) = 0.23; and social class (three categories) = 0.34. Thus, even
the maximum level of association is moderate. Sociologically this should be expected since it is
not remotely likely that the only factor determining a taste for those items which the highly
educated prefer is their experience within the education system. As a simple and sound
complementary measure to that of total volume, as required for a test of the omnivore thesis, this
measure is economical and meets the criterion of contemporaneity.
In practice, classifying items in accordance with the ratios for the whole population
(Table 4, column b) produced some intuitively surprising results. For example, rock, urban and
heavy metal music all appear (see Table 4, first identified in column f, ‘component profiles’,
as’ legitimate for the population as a whole, while classical music and jazz are common items.
We therefore also calculated ratios by age group. When we consider three age groups
separately (final three columns of ‘component profiles’) we see that rock is legitimate among
the under 40s, common among the 40–60 group, and unauthorised for the over 60s, while
classical music is legitimate among young and old but common for the middle aged. It would
appear that many of those who came to maturity in the early years of rock music continue to
like it, but that it is a specialised taste of the younger highly educated cohort. Preferences for
classical music perhaps indicate that it was a key form of legitimate culture for the elderly, held
less status among those growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, but is becoming now a
distinguishing feature in the cultural repertoires of the young as few except the highly educated
of that generation favour it. These results are important in themselves, indicating different
tastes by cohort, dis-aggregation showing that for some items degree of cultural legitimacy
varies with age. Also they suggest that age effects complicate profiles most in the domain of
music. Many items exhibit inconsistent legitimacy rankings between the under 40s and the 40–
60 year olds: 17 of the 40 items, or 43%, are ranked differently by these cohorts; however, less
than 20% of the participation items were discrepant. The pattern of discrepancy varies, items
legitimate only for the under-40s include Bergman, Van Gogh, Turner, biographies and self-
help books as well as classical and rock music. Items legitimate for the middle aged, which are
not so for the young, include heavy metal and urban music and Tracy Emin’s work. Here we
see glimpses of the generational ebb and flow in the consecration process and a plausible way
to incorporate variation by cohort into operationalisation of legitimacy. Since age has a strong
impact on the appreciation of cultural practices and tastes not taking it into account might be
misleading.
The penultimate columns of Tables 1 and 4, ‘component profiles’, show the level of legitimacy
for each item for each of the three age groups. The final column offers a synthetic rank for each
item according to the formula in the note to Table 1 and it is this classification which is deployed
in subsequent statistical calculations.
Table 4 offers a classification of taste. Legitimate taste incorporates watching the general
election, Almodóvar, Campion, Four Seasons, Einstein on the Beach, Mahler’s Symphony no. 5,
Kind of Blue, modern literature, classical music, Picasso, Kahlo, Emin, and Warhol. The many
common items include Rathnam, Wonderwall, Chicago, science-fiction (including fantasy and
horror), biographies and autobiographies, religious books, rock, modern jazz, world music
(including Reggae and Bhangra), heavy metal, Van Gogh and Lowry. Unauthorised likes were
identified as watching the Grand National, the Football World Cup and the Queen’s Christmas
broadcast, Spielberg, Hitchcock, Stan, Oops, thrillers, romances, country and western, electronic
dance music and urban music.
Table 1, on participation, identifies as legitimate opera, rock concerts, art galleries, orchestral
concerts, theatre, practicing a sport, museum, belonging to a group or club, owning paintings,
having read any of the named books, and receiving lessons associated with cultural activity. The
common cultural items include cinema, stately homes/historic sites, reading books, pub, having
seen a picture by any of the painters and eating out. Finally, four items, watching TV, reading a
daily newspaper, making a point of watching any of the film directors, and playing bingo, form
the units of the unauthorised scale.
This classification of practices and tastes allows us to construct a pattern for the legitimacy of
each respondent’s preferences and thus to explore the differences between social groups. We
calculated the mean number of items liked at each level of legitimacy as reported by members of
different social groups – social class, gender, and for the most and least omnivorous (OV)
quartiles in the sample – for both participation and taste (see Tables 5–10). We also calculated the
Table 5
Number and proportion of items reported as liked, by degree of legitimacy, for three social classes.
Salariat Intermediate Working class
N % N % N %
Items
Legitimate 1288 30.8 1123 24 1269 19.8
Common 1847 44.2 2076 44.4 2689 41.9
Unauthorised 1044 25 1480 31.6 2462 38.3
Number respondents 361 449 710
Total choices 4179 4679 6420
Choices per person 11.6 10.4 9
T-test for means comparisona
Salariat vs. intermediate p < 0.000
Salariat vs. working class p < 0.000
Intermediate vs. working class p < 0.000
a
The means for ‘‘choices per person’’ are compared. The test does not assume equal variances.
proportions of legitimate to common to unauthorised items for these social groups. This permits
exploration of composition (OC) and its determinants.
4.2. Patterns of taste and participation
Examining tastes first, consider the impact of class. Table 5 shows that the professional-
executive class has most positive tastes per person, and that these are distributed in a different
way than for the other classes. They like the highest percentage of legitimate items; they like
relatively and absolutely more legitimate items than the other social classes. In a
complementary way, they like proportionately fewer unauthorised items, though in absolute
terms they like more than of these than does the working class. In other words, the
professional-executive class is relatively conspicuous by its attachment to cultural legitimacy.
The intermediate class, true to its name, lies in the middle in every respect, by volume and
composition. Finally, the average working class respondent has relatively few legitimate
tastes, and the proportion of legitimate to other tastes is much lower than among the
professionals. In addition we note that the proportion of common items liked is more or less the
same for each social class, while unauthorised items comprise a substantial share of the
working class portfolio.
Differences in tastes between men and women are not strong (see Table 6). The percentage for
each category is almost identical and, although the mean is a little higher for males (10.2 rather
than 9.8), the difference is small.
Comparison of those with high and low omnivore scores by volume for tastes reveals a much
stronger pattern (see Table 7). By definition, as the mean of choices per person records, the
omnivores like many more items of every kind. However, they like not only more cultural items
but a more heterogeneous combination of them. Recall that omnivorousness by volume is a
simple arithmetic scale, assuming nothing about patterns of cultural preference or individual
attributes of respondents.13 The top quartile concentrates its preferences equally among
13
Cramer’s V for the relationship between education (the most sensitive variable) and quartiles of volume (OV) of
participation and taste are, respectively, 0.31 and 0.16.
Table 6
Number and proportion of items reported as liked, by degree of legitimacy, by gender.
Male Female
N % N %
Items
Legitimate 1749 24 2007 24.1
Common 3179 43.6 3549 42.7
Unauthorised 2355 32.3 2758 33.2
Number respondents 713 851
Total choices 7283 8314
Choices per person 10.2 9.8
T-test for means comparisona p < 0.036
a
Table 7
Number and proportion of items reported as liked, by degree of legitimacy, by most and least omnivorous sections of the
population.
Omnivorea: top quartile Omnivore: bottom
quartile
N % N %
Items
Legitimate 1485 28.8 312 14.1
Common 2167 42 936 42.3
Unauthorised 1509 29.2 965 43.6
Choices per person 16.1 5
T-test for means comparisonb p < 0.000
a
Omnivore is someone who has scored high in the scale of likes.
b
legitimate and unauthorised items, 29% of each. This is twice the proportion of legitimate items
than for the bottom quartile, indicating an association between omnivorousness and legitimate
taste. The bottom quartile likes few legitimate items (14%) and considerably more unauthorised
(44%) ones. This asymmetry between the top group liking 29% of unauthorised items and the
bottom group liking only 14% of legitimate ones suggests the existence of a distinct group in the
population with omnivorous tendencies as predicted by the omnivore thesis. However, the same
proportion of common items is revealed for each group (42%).
As regards participation, we made three equivalent calculations. It is important to bear in mind
that proportionately fewer unauthorised practices than unauthorised tastes were available. As
with taste, classes exhibit significant differences, the professional-executive class being most
prone to legitimate cultural practices, the working class the least (see Table 8). Legitimate items
constituted 35% of the professional-executive package, compared to 23% for the working class.
Conversely, 12% of professional practices were unauthorised, compared to 17% of the working
class. The same pattern is found in choices per person: the professionals participate more than the
Table 8
Number and proportion of practices reported, by degree of legitimacy, for three social classes.
Salariat Intermediate Working class
N % N % N %
Items
Legitimate 2449 34.5 2329 29.3 2495 22.7
Common 3792 53.4 4542 57.1 6650 60.6
Unauthorised 859 12.1 1085 13.6 1835 16.7
Number respondents 361 449 710
Total choices 7100 7956 10980
Choices per person 19.7 17.7 15.5
T-test for means comparisona
Salariat vs. intermediate p < 0.000
Salariat vs. working class p < 0.000
Intermediate vs. working class p < 0.000
a
others (19.7 choices) intermediates choosing 17.7 items on average, while the working class are
least involved (15.5 items).
There are weak gender effects with women having more involvements and favouring
legitimate practices more than men (see Table 9). Women selected 0.6 items more than men and
their portfolios contain 3% more legitimate items. This repeats the pattern found in other
countries regarding women participating more in high culture (e.g. Bihagen and Katz-Gerro,
2000; Kane, 2004; DiMaggio and Mukhtar, 2004), but the strength of the effect is not great.
The least omnivorous (OV) with respect to participation barely engage in legitimate practices,
only 12.5% of activity reported, and are mostly involved in ‘common’ activities (Table 10). An
omnivorous orientation, by contrast, entails much legitimate activity. Most striking is the extent
of legitimate activity among the omnivorous, with a full 40% – over three times the proportion for
the other group. Hence their portfolios contain proportionately fewer unauthorised items than the
less omnivorous. The skew towards legitimate items is greater among the omnivores than among
the professional-executive class. Absolute number of choices per person, as we would expect, are
Table 9
Number and proportion by degree of legitimacy of practices reported, by gender.
Male Female
N % N %
ITEMS
Legitimate 3107 26.1 4304 29.3
Common 7048 59.2 8283 56.3
Unauthorised 1750 14.7 2121 14.4
T-test for means comparisona p < 0.008
a
Table 10
Number and proportion, by degree of legitimacy, of practices reported, by most and least omnivorous sections of the
population.
Omnivorea: top quartile Omnivore: bottom quartile
N % N %
Items
Legitimate 2639 40.1 666 12.5
Common 3205 48.7 3614 68
Unauthorised 738 11.2 1037 19.5
T-test for means comparisonb p < 0.000
a
Omnivore is someone who has scored high in the scale of participation.
b
higher, indeed almost twice as high, for the omnivores, 22.8 against 11.8. In both groups,
however, common practices predominate.
In the light of the evidence in this section we accept Hypothesis 7 with respect to taste;
omnivore (OV) portfolios contain an equal proportion of legitimate and unauthorised items and
are, in this respect, evenly balanced. As a result, legitimate culture has a much more prominent
place, absolutely and relatively, for them than it has for the least omnivorous. In relation to
participation, however, the hypothesis is rejected; the more omnivorous (OV) engage in many
more legitimate than unauthorised practices. This is partly a statistical artefact, since few
unauthorised practices were examined. However, it is clear from Table 10 that the omnivores
have limited enthusiasm for unauthorised practices. Similar tendencies are apparent among
professionals and executives, though they have somewhat smaller proportion of unauthorised
tastes in their package and there is a lesser skew towards extensive legitimate participation.
Hypothesis 8 is not confirmed. Omnivorousness is not, therefore, merely a re-description of the
tastes of the professional-executive class, whose cultural portfolio in Britain actually comprises a
majority of ‘common’ items. As Peterson and Kern (1996) found, omnivores and those of high
socio-economic status were more likely to engage with, in their terms, middlebrow than lowbrow
items. While our category of ‘common’ items has a different rationale for its construction,
omnivores share many of their tastes with the rest of the population. Hence, cultural consumption
provides both distinguishing and integrating features.
5. Discussion and conclusions
5.1. Issues of measurement
How and what one measures is a critical issue with respect to studies of omnivorousness.
Previous studies have been largely pragmatic in their selection of measures of participation and
taste, employing the data to hand. This paper shows that there are significant differences in the
strength of effects depending on which measure is chosen. Regression models using identical
independent variables describing respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics fit better the
data for participation than for taste. Therefore, we should be wary of using these measures
interchangeably.
Level of participation, probably because it is more thoroughly dependent upon material

resources and institutional experience, but also perhaps because activities require coordination
with others, is better predicted by socio-demographic variables. Taste appears fragmented, by
contrast. If our independent variables are measuring important aspects of individuals’ positions
in social space, then the comparatively weak statistical relationships with likes imply a looser
tendency for taste to follow social contours. As an economist might well observe, participation is
expensive but expressing likes is cheap. An inference might be that participation provides the
principal site for maintaining social inequalities. However, that probably would underestimate
the symbolic role of taste in consumption and lifestyle in contemporary Britain. The results might
therefore be held to support the view that taste offers greater discretion in the creation of
individual identity, and is less a matter of social identification and membership than is
participation, and vice versa. Given the extent to which omnivores disproportionately engage in
legitimate practices it would seem that they might especially benefit from the social networking
opportunities provided by public participation.
The other measurement issue concerns ranking of the legitimacy of cultural items. To
abandon such attempts would be tantamount to ceasing to explore the role of cultural practice
and taste in the reproduction of social power. It is of course possible that cultural practice no
longer plays any such role. The likelihood of that seems to us low, but without techniques for
constructing cultural hierarchy we could never test hypotheses about social reproduction. We
therefore recommend our new tool. It makes possible recognition of malleable and changing
boundaries, the breakdown by age capturing nicely some aspects of the change over time in
hierarchy. It is important not to confuse change with collapse. As Bevers (2005) shows, change
in the school and university curricula make it very likely that the connotations of items will alter
in different ways and at different speeds in different countries. In addition, a substantial
proportion of the British population still suspect the persistence of a cultural hierarchy with
relevance for judgments of social worth (see Warde, 2008). Here the ranking method supplies
evidence about the composition of the preferences of those with omnivorous orientations,
affirming one central insight of cultural sociology, that legitimate forms of cultural engagement
are not exclusive to, but are heavily over-represented in, the portfolios of privileged social
groups. Certainly an omnivorous orientation is not inconsistent with holding a large amount of
cultural capital. To the contrary, those high in credentialed cultural capital are particularly likely
to be omnivorous.
5.2. The distribution of omnivorousness in Britain
The debate about the omnivore was driven initially by a concern with the cultural effects of
class position. Class, measured using groupings of occupational class categories, does have a
statistically significant effect on participation and taste, by volume and composition. Its effect
on volume is additional to educational qualification and income. The working class is
significantly less omnivorous in respect of participation and taste than the professional-
executive class. In addition, the latter embraces a greater proportion of legitimate items than the
other classes.
Why does occupation matter, as it does seem to, given that we have controlled for both income
and education? It may be that contact with colleagues or work mates, with whom respondents
have to interact, provides sources of information and stimulation. Certainly some occupations are
likely to bring people more into contact with cultural items than others; the ambience of
workplaces varies, as does their social mix, bringing different cultural items into view or earshot.
That work is a space for broadening of cultural horizons is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that
people who had never been employed were least omnivorous on both measures.
The patterns of gender differentiation are more complicated. Women participate more than men
and are marginally, but significantly, more attached to legitimate culture.14 The differences,
however, are negligible in relation to taste. Evidence of gender differences, as Erickson (1996)
suggests, is particularly dependent upon the domains of activity selected for analysis (see Bennett
et al., 2008).
Omnivorousness increases with age up to around 50 and tapers away strongly among those
over 70. It is not the young who are most omnivorous, in general. Thus activity and positive
preferences are at their broadest among those in the middle of the age spectrum. This could be
simply an expression of the probability that longer social experience increases contact with a
wider variety of cultural practices and products. But it could yet mask generational effects insofar
as the items that are preferred by the under-40s and the over-40s are different. The indications of
variation in legitimacy among age cohorts suggested that 40 was a more significant threshold
regarding taste than participation. Legitimate taste differs between those under 40 and those aged
40–60, and the younger cohort is more internally differentiated.
Household structure, region, ethnicity and educational qualifications also contribute to
explaining omnivorousness by volume. Couples with dependant children are restricted in their
activities, as are multi-family and single person households. The range of a person’s web of social
connections, mediated through household membership, plays a part in determining their
participation and tastes. Region is occasionally significant. Living in London increases the
number of items that respondents like, especially fine arts items. Geographical effects are
probably a function of regional differences in provisioning systems which alter degree of
awareness and access to cultural variety. Sample size restricts our capacity to examine in detail
the effect of ethnic identification. However it often makes a considerable difference, the non-
white population being very distinct from those identifying as ‘white English’. This is almost
certainly indication of cultural compartmentalisation – activity, awareness and preferences differ
significantly.15 Finally, and overall the most powerful, is the effect of education. Level of
qualifications is associated significantly with scores on both scales. The causes are several. What
is taught in educational institutions probably broadens relevant knowledge and awareness of the
diversity of cultural pursuits. Opportunities are afforded by extra-curricular activities in post-
elementary institutions. There is also the effect of social capital amassed by participation with
others of higher status in more advanced education. Clearly, omnivorousness is a corollary of
what Bourdieu calls institutionalised cultural capital. As various qualitative studies have argued,
openness to diversity is now positively valued among most people, but especially among those in
higher social positions (Bellavance et al., 2004; Bellavance, 2008; Fridman and Ollivier, 2004;
Ollivier, 2008; Warde et al., 2008). Rather than signifying its demise, openness to diversity is
itself a modality of cultural capital.
Although lack of strictly comparable data makes international comparison hazardous, the
social base of omnivorousness by volume in Britain seems not radically different from that
established for other countries. Class is probably more important than in the USA;
omnivorousness is probably more normal and more widely diffused an orientation than in
Spain; and perhaps gender differences are somewhat weaker than in North America. Comparison
of the compositional aspect awaits further research on how cultural hierarchies differ.
14
There was no difference whatsoever between men and women regarding their cultural knowledge.
15
This was revealed clearly in focus group interviews.
5.3. Compositional aspects of the omnivorous orientation
One major innovation in our investigation was to construct a variable to comprehend the
degree of legitimacy of the component cultural items in the profiles of omnivores. The analysis
uncovered a section of the population heavily engaged in cultural activity and whose preferences
span the categories of the legitimate, the common and the unauthorised. By this criterion we find
a group of omnivores who do not shun popular culture. The average person in the highest quartile
by volume of participation or taste will have a greater number of preferences among the
unauthorised items than does a respondent in the bottom quartile. However, the most omnivorous
portion of the population, and also the highest social class, embrace far more legitimate items,
absolutely and relatively, than the rest. This is particularly so regarding participation where the
profile of the most omnivorous comprises 40% legitimate items, but it is also true of taste (28%).
Relatively, they avoid participation in unauthorised practices and strongly favour the legitimate.
They are, then, the principal inheritors and custodians of preferences for legitimate culture. This
suggests that an omnivorous orientation still operates as a cloak for the accumulation of cultural
capital and that it might yet play the sort of role in the reproduction of class-based cultural
inequalities envisaged by Bourdieu. Yet they draw most heavily in their portfolios on common,
middle of the range items. A ‘common’ culture provides shared ground for the whole population,
though this probably to some extent obscures the existence of different types of omnivorousness.
5.4. Final remarks
The omnivore thesis remains important because it prompts continued investigation of the
consequences of differential cultural consumption for social stratification. Blurred boundaries
arising from changes in the nature of cultural production (Crane, 1992; Chaney, 1996; Gans, 1999)
and more complex connections than earlier between social position and cultural preferences
complicate the task of assessment. But boundaries, hierarchy and connections remain. We have
conceptualised rank in terms of degree of legitimacy, to reflect its institutional origins and thereby
retain the possibility of recording the impact of cultural capabilities on life chances.
The omnivore thesis contends that people may relatively easily and without penalty span
cultural boundaries. Our study finds no evidence of snobbishness of the sort that exercised
Peterson. But we resist interpreting the evidence as indication of a growth of cosmopolitan
tolerance. Omnivores have cultural portfolios weighted towards preferences for more legitimate
items, and the orientation that they bring to their consumption is itself a contemporary mark of
refinement. Certainly some sections of the population are still made to feel very uncomfortable
when obliged to reflect on the value, or symbolic meaning, of their own cultural competences.
Now that most of the educated British middle class have tastes which span hierarchical
boundaries, those boundaries might be expected to become less stable and less symbolically
meaningful. However, the evidence of generational differences implies that boundaries are
shifting rather than dissolving. In matters of taste, different items are legitimate for the under 40s
than for the preceding generation and, perhaps more important, there is greater polarisation of
taste within the younger generation. That is partly the consequence of the increased proportion of
the younger cohort obtaining higher educational qualifications, what Coulangeon and Lemel
(2007) call ‘school massification’. Cohort polarisation is much less evident for measures of
participation which, because socio-economic resources are stronger determinants of
participation, is probably the core mechanism through which cultural engagement reproduces
inequality.
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Alan Warde is Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester. He works on the sociology of consumption, cultural
sociology and social stratification. His books include: Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antinomies and
Commodity Culture (Sage, 1997); Eating Out: social differentiation, consumption and pleasure (Cambridge University
Press, 2000) with Lydia Martens; Trust in Food: an institutional and comparative analysis (Palgrave, 2007) with Unni
Kjaernes and Mark Harvey; and Culture, Class, Distinction (Routledge, 2008) with Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth
Silva, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright.
Modesto Gayo-Cal was a Research Fellow at CRESC and the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester
while working on the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project. He is currently Profesor Investigador at Universidad
Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. His areas of interest are: theories of nationalism, national identity, political behaviour,
middle classes, and cultural consumption. He is also interested in the application of statistical methods in the social
sciences. He is a joint author of Culture, Class, Distinction (Routledge, 2008) with Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth
Silva, Alan Warde and David Wright.

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Poetics 37 (2009) 119–145

The anatomy of cultural omnivorousness:

1. The omnivore debate

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 161 275 3630.

everyday impressions, or recollections of past circumstances, precisely because the content of

1.1. Omnivorousness by volume

It can be anticipated that omnivorousness by volume, i.e. through extensive engagement in

1.2. Taste and participation

1.3. Omnivorousness by composition

2. The study: cultural capital and social exclusion

3.1. Omnivorousness (OV) as participation

3.2. Omnivorousness (OV) as taste: likes

A second possible measure of omnivorousness (OV) refers to taste, to people’s preferences.

 national TV: would make a point of watching four programmes

3.3. Omnivorousness (OV) dissected, measures compared

Hypothesis 1 is clearly supported. In Britain, as elsewhere, volume of cultural engagement

To explore omnivorousness further we designed a measure of legitimacy to capture the second

4.1. Calibrating legitimacy

4.2. Patterns of taste and participation

5. Discussion and conclusions

5.1. Issues of measurement

Level of participation, probably because it is more thoroughly dependent upon material

5.2. The distribution of omnivorousness in Britain

5.3. Compositional aspects of the omnivorous orientation

5.4. Final remarks

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national TV: would make a point of watching four programmes