Comparative evidence of inequality in cultural preferences: Gender, class, and family status

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Abstract

In a recent work, Erik Olin Wright proposed using the word clender to designate the interaction term between class and gender, emphasizing that class and gender interact in generating effects that are supplemental to their independent effects. This article reports the application of Wright's suggestion to the empirical example of cultural consumption in estimating the interactive effect of class and gender on cultural consumption in five countries. The empirical application presented here also considered interactions between gender and family status. The findings revealed three interesting variants in the way clender works: (1) a disadvantaged consumption score for women of the lower classes in Italy and Sweden; (2) an advantage in cultural consumption for women of the upper classes in West Germany and the United States; (3) no cultural consumption differences between men and women of different classes in Israel. The interaction between gender and family status was also manifested in different ways in the different cases. This article adds to the literature that juxtaposes gender and class within the sociology of consumption and draws new connections between social and cultural boundaries based on an international comparison.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)63-83
Number of pages21
JournalSociological Spectrum
Volume26
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2006

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
7The data have been made available to me by the Swedish Social Science Data Services (SSD). The data-set SOM (Samhälle, Opinion, Medier)-UNDERSÖKNINGEN 1993 (The SOM—society, opinion, media—survey 1993) was originally collected for a research project at the statsvetenskapliga institutionen, institutionen für journalistik och masskommunikation and fürvaltningshügskolan at the University of Gothenburg. The principal investigators are Süren Holmberg, Lennart Nilsson, and Lennart Weibull. Neither SSD nor the principal investigators are responsible for the analyses presented in this article.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Sociology and Political Science

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