1. Seminar Week 5 – Chavs: Social
Class and Taste
Taste, Classification, Social Structure
2. Karl Marx – Social Class Theory
• Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) developed the Social
Class Theory
• Influenced by the Industrial Revolution
• According to Marx, the structure of society
depends on the way production is organised
(technology, division of labour)
• The dominant class directs and owns the
means of production while the other class
produces and serves the dominant class
3. Your opinion
• On a piece of paper or
your laptop, write down
a few words that you
associate with the
people in this picture.
4. Pierre Bourdieu: Practice, Habitus and
Field
• Tools to explain social structure and interaction
• Social Practice – happens in space and time (context),
not conscious (game), is often improvised according to
individual goals (no written rules; adaptation)
• Habitus – an acquired system of values, shaped by
one’s context and conditions; Hexis – the habitus
embodied and practiced socially (ways of talking,
dressing, etc.)
• Field – ‘Structured system of social positions *...+ which
defines the situation of their occupants. It is also a
system of forces which exist between these positions’
(Jenkins 1996: 85)
5. Distinction
• Published in France, 1979
• There is nothing individual about taste: it is
socially produced
• ‘Cultural classification systems are rooted in
the class system’ (138)
• Taste and preferences correspond to
education level and social class – class as
lifestyle
6. Distinction: Habitus and Social Class
• ‘Social class is not defined solely by a position
in the relations of production, but by the class
habitus which is ‘normally’ (i.e., with a high
statistical probability) associated with that
position. (Bourdieu, 1996: 372)
7. Distinction: Power Relations
• Within this cultural taste model, the working-
class aesthetic is dominated and it has to
define itself in relation to the dominant one
• ‘Taste unites all those who are the product of
similar conditions while distinguishing them
from all others’ (101)
9. Questions
How do these videos classify ‘chav’ taste?
What power relations do you observe in the
taste judgements expressed?
How are these views different or similar to the
views you expressed earlier?
Finally, is Bourdieu’s theory still valid?
10. References
• Jenkins, R 1992 Pierre Bourdieu. London, New
York: Routledge
• Bourdieu, P. 1996 Distinction: A social critique
of the judgement of taste. Paris, London:
Routledge
