Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com/ Cultural Hostility Re-considered

Alan Warde Cultural Sociology 2011 5: 341 originally published online 25 March 2011 DOI: 10.1177/1749975510387755 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cus.sagepub.com/content/5/3/341

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Article

Cultural Hostility Re-considered

Alan Warde

Cultural Sociology 5(3) 341366 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1749975510387755 cus.sagepub.com

University of Manchester, UK

Abstract
It is often remarked that dislikes are more revealing of taste than likes. The evidential basis of this insight, which can be found in the work of Bourdieu (1984) and of Douglas (1996), who called it cultural hostility, is slight. This paper specifies and evaluates the thesis, the cultural hostility thesis, that people share strong, symbolically significant, dislikes which function to demarcate cultural boundaries between antagonistic social groups. I examine progressively more precisely specified versions of the thesis and, using data from a survey of cultural practice in Britain, apply different operationalizations in order to estimate the prevalence of cultural hostility. I show that: expressed dislikes are probably not the primary indicator of meaningful social boundaries; evidence for overt generalized cultural hostility is relatively weak; even the best indicators of hostility suggest limited antagonism; class differences are evident, but more because cultural omnivorousness has become a principle of good taste than as an expression of condescension or resentment. Indications of cultural hostility can be found, but they operate in a restricted manner, revolving around axes not only of class but also generation and gender. I conclude that a strong cultural hostility thesis is not readily applicable to contemporary Britain.

Keywords
cultural capital, cultural classification, cultural hostility, cultural omnivorousness dislikes, social class, social divisions, taste, United Kingdom

Introduction: The Cultural Hostility Thesis

Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (sick-making) of the tastes of others. De gustibus non est disputandum: not because tous les gouts sont dans la nature, but because each taste feels itself to be
Corresponding author: Alan Warde, University of Manchester, UK. Email: alan.warde@manchester.ac.uk

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natural and so it almost is, being a habitus which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different lifestyles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes; class endogamy is evidence of this (Bourdieu, 1984: 56).

Pierre Bourdieus observation is intuitively plausible and sociologically appealing. Everyday conversations include strongly expressed admissions of detestation of goods and behaviours of forms of dress, the foods of other nations, the dietary habits of other classes, manners and morals. Other social scientists have endorsed the claim. For example, Mary Douglas (1996: 81, 104) suggested that Consumption behaviour is continuously and pervasively inspired by cultural hostility, concluding that Shopping is an agonistic struggle to define not what one is, but what one is not. There is here a strong thesis that powerfully held aversions define the most significant boundaries between antagonistic social groups. However, neither author developed the idea substantively or methodologically. Their claims were extrapolations from a few exemplary incidents used to illustrate their general theoretical positions on the cultural origins of social divisions. Yet the thesis is relevant to a wide range of contemporary sociological concerns, including the coherence of cultural preferences, the relationship between lifestyle and identity, the association of social divisions and cultural taste, the capacity for cultural judgments to perpetrate and perpetuate social divisions, the current influence of class in relation to other divisions, sub-cultural formation and the pertinence of cultural omnivorousness. If we are interested in social classification, and to the extent that we believe cultural taste to be central, understanding dislikes is a potentially powerful avenue. Most sociologists would share with Bourdieu a suspicion that judgments about cultural items can conceal evaluations of the people who espouse them. First, dislikes potentially pinpoint group hostility and division. Second, they suggest a technique for sociologists more effectively to identify pertinent boundaries. Finally, they promise to reveal cultural taste as a powerful force for discrimination, discoverable in phenomena which sociologists rarely access. Neither Bourdieu nor Douglas attempted a systematic empirical corroboration of their claims. True, Bourdieus (1984) use of structural oppositions and of multiple correspondence analysis implicitly draw upon a model of mutually opposed preferences. Nevertheless little empirical research has critically evaluated the thesis and few have sought explicitly to prove the importance of dislikes. Two exceptions are Bryson (1996) and Wilk (1997) whose innovative contributions on matters of distaste have, disappointingly, received little subsequent attention. Rick Wilk (1997:175) claimed that distastes, aversions, and dislikes are much more socially diagnostic than positive desires. He made a strong, abstract and plausible case for the predominant importance of aversions and avoidances and showed that they matter empirically with respect to both music and food in Belize. In partial critique of Bourdieu (1997: 184), who, he asserted, was overwhelmingly concerned with patterns of liking, he urged: The key point is that taste and distaste do not form simple complementary pairs; taste cannot be seen simply as the inversion, opposite, or mirror of distaste in forming social boundaries. Wilk continued by saying that in Belize people were not enthused about their likes, which were fairly uniform; it was rare that anyone would pick an unusual favourite. Hence, he found few clear relationships between specific tastes and any of my

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social, income, class or ethnic variables (Wilk 1997: 187). It was only through greater diversity that richer people of higher social classes were distinguished by their likes. But distastes were more distinctive and were associated with socio-demographic position. He noted as typical, that while liking Country and Western music was fairly widespread across all groups, dislikes were concentrated. For example, dislike of classical music was highly concentrated among poorer groups. Consequently, he examined a range of cultural items in terms of both how much they were liked and disliked. On this basis he identified four contrasting bundles of symbolic cultural items, which he described, not entirely transparently, as orthodox, conservative, enclavist and heterodox. Acknowledging that Belize is more heterogeneous and less hierarchical than France in tastes, he found it difficult to corroborate his thesis because there has been almost no systematic empirical work on distastes and dislikes in developed countries (Wilk 1997:191). He concluded that at this point more empirical research on the relationships between tastes and distastes, passions and aversions is urgently needed (Wilk 1997: 193). Bethany Bryson (1996) examined the musical dislikes of the American population. Partly inspired by the debate about the cultural omnivore (cited by Peterson, 1992 and 2005), she was concerned to understand the extent and pattern of cultural tolerance in the USA. She analyzed reported dislikes of 18 musical genres in the US General Social Survey of 1993. She showed that people of higher status had broader tastes: highly educated people in the United States are more musically tolerant, but not indiscriminately so (Bryson 1996: 895). Such people exhibited a patterned tolerance, with a greater dislike of those genres preferred by the least educated (namely rap, heavy metal, country and gospel). Their antagonism, she concluded, was not towards ethnic minorities but towards the working class, a reordering of group boundaries which trades race for class. She thus attributed to them what she called multicultural capital, which was effective as a form of cultural capital, its corollary being greater civic and political tolerance. She also noted that for the educated, exclusion of low-status music genres is stronger than identification with high-status genres (Bryson 1996: 894). Reflecting on her results she noted that the variance explained in the number of musical genres disliked by her regression model was modest and mused that this was almost certainly because dislikes could not be entirely explained by their potential to highlight significant social boundaries. She therefore called for more cross national research (Bryson 1996: 896). Overall she succeeded in showing that dislikes are selective and meaningful; that the middle class have fewer dislikes but still their main dislikes are for predominantly working class genres; that tolerance is itself a principle of cultural selection; and that there is a process of symbolic boundary marking involved. Taste is a form of symbolic message. However, her account dealt solely with musical genres in the US and, as she acknowledged, research on other fields and in other countries was required. Neither Brysons nor Wilks calls for more research have been answered. This is disappointing because both appeared to uncover a general significance in dislikes as a key qualification to the cultural omnivore thesis and a supreme indicator of symbolic boundaries, respectively. Hence, a highly pertinent and powerful thesis about the social role of taste has languished. The strong thesis might run as follows. People exhibit (very) strong and meaningful cultural dislikes, which are apparent in many situations, including when shopping and while assessing the lifestyles of others. These dislikes help form, and allow

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self and others to draw, meaningful (and recognizable) social boundaries. The meaning may arise from the nature of the items themselves, or from their association with people and groups with different levels of status. Boundaries drawn upon dislikes will be more meaningful or decisive than those formed from positive preferences. Patterns of dislikes will be socially differentiated, particularly by class, but also by ethnic (and perhaps other) affiliations. Social differentiation may find its expression in a number of ways, for example, through the extent of dislikes, or the disliking of particular items, perhaps interpreted in terms of their legitimacy. Finally, the dislike of cultural products entails disliking, or thinking badly of, other people who do like them, it being the dislike of items to which other opposing groups are particularly attached that serves to mark such boundaries. As Bryson (1996: 885) put it, individuals use cultural taste to reinforce symbolic boundaries between themselves and categories of people they dislike, which is perhaps the most powerful definition of cultural hostility. In this form the thesis proposes that the passing of negative judgements upon aesthetic preferences for cultural can disclose antagonistic social groups aligned on opposite sides of a symbolic boundary. As such it concerns products rather than practices, judgments of value rather than simple empirical associations, and aesthetic rather than moral standards, all in relation to relevant social divisions. Matters of taste have been, and probably still are, mostly considered by sociologists in relation to social class, as with the authors considered above. However, their understandings of the effect of class differ. For Bourdieu, the upper middle and the working classes are equally mutually opposed to each other, disliking those activities and traits which the other class embraces. If not entirely explicitly, because he paid it limited attention, Bourdieu suggested that the working class especially dislikes legitimate items associated with the dominant classes. For Bryson, influenced by the omnivore debate, the middle class is generally tolerant of working class culture, but retains a number of symbolically marked aversions. Wilk observed class differences also, and that the middle class has fewer aversions hence his neat hypothesis that upward social mobility is more a process of eliminating dislikes than acquiring new likes. However, in the context of Belize at least, ethnicity was more important. National and ethnic, and perhaps generational and gender divisions also, are candidates for significant boundary demarcations based upon dislikes.

Examining Dislikes
To progress the debate, this paper first of all presents another comparative case, describing patterns of dislike as revealed in a study of the UK which collected relevant data on the cultural tastes of the population. Conducted in 2003, the study comprised focusgroup discussions, a national survey, face-to-face household interviews with some of the survey respondents and also some personal interviews with members of the British elite.1 The qualitative components of the research design threw up some examples relevant to the cultural hostility thesis. Aesthetic revulsion was expressed in negative sentiments about cultural products. For example, Reality TV brought a Chief Executive Officer of a major multinational corporation to say, Ill walk out of the room if my son has got Big Brother on or any of these bloody things where they vote for people who then get kicked

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off. I literally you know, walk out of the room and go read a book or get away from it, I cant handle it, right. I hate them, right with a vengeance. But expressions of dislike were usually mild, measured and qualified judgments of a kind consistent with the aesthetic disinterestedness said to characterise the dominant cultural groups, and sometimes even apologetic. For instance, a senior university manager said I cant stand soaps and things, I mean I can see their function, and indeed my daughter says theyre absolutely crucial, theyre important socially and I totally accept that. As Bourdieu insisted, because aesthetic disinterest often masks social interest it is difficult empirically to confirm that the reason for an expressed dislike is its association with another social group. Interviews and focus groups proved ineffective instruments for uncovering such connections. People typically do not attribute their distaste for an item to their dislike of the sort of person who does like it. The closest approximation came from a 48 year old female university graduate who, in an interview, said, I hate that kind of hip hop stuff, I really hate it. When asked why by the interviewer, she continued:
Im embarrassed to tell you! I really, really hate it because I really hate those guys in those baseball hats because I really hate baseball hats and if I could have something in Room 101,2 that would be the top of my list, I would ban them from the world. I hate those baseball caps so as soon as those guys come on and theyve got them, they look as though theyre actually thinking of putting one on Im totally appalled by the whole thing.

Her alienation is expressed with respect to the clothing of artists rather than the music or people who like the music. People may dislike items on purely aesthetic and perhaps autobiographical grounds without any necessary consequence for the marking of social boundaries. However, sometimes boundaries were drawn in a way that suggested group antagonism. Tastes may differentiate both within and between groups. According to Bourdieu (1996), struggles for succession within the cultural field operate on the basis of attempts by a rising fraction to find new cultural forms and items which they can establish as legitimate in a challenge to current orthodoxy. Dislikes will often therefore mark symbolic boundaries within the dominant class. One focus group discussion threw up a vivid instance of the same effect within the working class. Asked for examples of bad taste, a group of skilled manual workers in South Wales nominated Mushes, who were described as wearing shell suits, dodgy trainers, 15 years old with kids, big gold chains round their necks, massive earrings, lots of gold, bleached blond hair. Mush is the Welsh term for Chav, a currently maligned section of the working class. The most memorable instance of between-group demarcation occurred when a young skilled working class focus group discussed the theatre:
Wayne:  Yeah there is too much judging you [referring to the moderator] are saying what kind of people would go to the theatre? and we would, like not through any fault of anybodys, but if we went to the theatre and watched them walking out wed be judging them as geeks. And theyd be judging us. Kev: Wayne: Yeah, like, Look at the piss-heads.

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Kate: Yes, theyd be judging. Moderator: Whats your definition of a geek, just roughly? Wayne: Just somebody who doesnt know how to have any fun. Steve: Doesnt seem to have fun like. Just does boring things. Kev: Doesnt like a laugh. Daz: Just someone whos opposite to us. Wayne:  Probably somebody whos quite happy in themselves but wed call them a geek and theyd call us piss-heads or a bum or something.

These were, however, exceptional instances of direct and explicit association between consumption and social status, a couple of instances revealed by more than a hundred hours of recorded discussion. Note also that the first example is as much about embodied appearance as it is about cultural products, while the latter concerns an imagined cultural event, theatre-going, rather than an aesthetic judgment. At the outset, then, we cannot assume, as Bourdieu and Douglas suggested, that all dislikes are motivated by cultural hostility or that they necessarily have a social basis. Probably some are, and others not. Manifestly, cultural hostility does occur, but a key issue, as raised by Wilk and Bryson, is its prevalence. I therefore explore systematically, using survey data, the evidence for the strong cultural hostility thesis, asking whether expressed dislikes of specific cultural products generally symbolise antagonism between social groups. Data and methods are described in section 3. I then successively operationalize alternative versions of the cultural hostility thesis regarding clustering, volume, structure and specificity of dislikes. Section 4 describes the rather nuanced and complex dislikes of the British population. Section 5 asks whether dislikes are strongly structured socially whether some groups have more dislikes than other, and whether social groups defined by socio-demographic characteristics differ in their negative tastes. Section 6 classifies some cultural items in terms of their legitimacy in order to explore whether reciprocal hostility operated around items which Bourdieusian theory would identify as particularly strategic. Section 7 re-sorts the same items in respect of the degree to which they are controversial within the whole population, searching in a different manner for items with specific significance in marking social boundaries.

Data and Method

This paper focuses on responses to a selection of questions in a national random sample survey of the UK in 2003 about respondents cultural tastes.3 Some questions intentionally tapped both likes and dislikes regarding particular artists, works and genres.4 The survey covered in some detail various domains across and beyond the fine arts so was not restricted, as were Bryson and Wilk, to material on music and food, allowing a broader estimation of how much dislikes reveal. Some of the questions about taste preferences asked about dislikes in ways which did not require a positive response, respondents being able to register indifference or lack of familiarity with items. These questions, 40 in all, had three different formats. The first invited people to rank genres of music and books on a scale of 1 to 7. The second asked if a named painter or musical work was known and liked or disliked. In the third, the respondent was asked whether s/he would make a point of listening to a named TV

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programme or watching a film by a particular director. Respondents were not forced to record any dislikes among their answers to these 40 questions. The responses coded to indicate dislikes were as follows: 1) book genres: score on 6 or 7 on a seven point scale from like to dislike for seven genres of writing 2) music genres: score on 6 or 7 on a seven point scale from like to dislike for eight genres of music named musical works; have listened to and did not like eight pieces of music 3) named artists: have seen works by seven painters, which were disliked 4) national TV: would not make a point of watching four specific programmes 5) film directors: would not make a point of watching the work of six film directors. Thus genres, works and producers were addressed. For the sake of clarity, because responses to questions about genre differ systematically from the other two, I refer to the second and third as products and use the term cultural items when referring to all three. For purposes of statistical analysis, the independent variables employed were age, gender, region, household type, population density and income (quartiles). Also included is self-identified ethnic group, which owing to relatively small sample size was categorised as White-English, White-Celtic (Irish, Scottish or Welsh), White-Other and notWhite. Education comprises five levels: no qualifications; GCSE (school examination at age 16); A-level (school examination at age 18); technical college and professional qualifications; and university degree. An earlier analysis using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (see Le Roux et al., 2008) determined, at least with respect to cultural participation and taste, that the clearest class boundaries lay between the professional-executive class (NS-SeC 13, i.e. excluding lower managerial workers), an intermediate class (NS-SeC 48), and a working class (NS-SeC 912) comprising lower technical and lower supervisory workers, semi-routine workers and routine workers.5

The Pattern of Dislikes The range of dislikes

Table 1 lists responses to the 40 questions posed about dislikes. The items range from the very common to the comparatively rare.6 Column A indicates the percentage of people who recognized a given item. Column B shows the percentage who disliked it, column C the percentage positively disposed towards it. Column D is the difference between B and C. Only two products were disliked by more than half the respondents (Table1, column B): 58 % said that they would definitely not make a point of watching the Queens Christmas broadcast and 51% would not watch general election coverage. A number of products were disliked by less than 10% of the population. Some of these are arcane items; if people do not know of them they are unlikely to record dislike. These include

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Table 1. Knowledge, likes and dislikes of 40 cultural items A Know % Film directors Spielberg Hitchcock Bergman Campion Almodvar Rathnam Musical works Chicago Four Seasons Oops Wonderwall Stan Mahler Symphony No.5 Kind of Blue Einstein on the Beach TV programmes World Cup Grand National General Election Queens Christmas Broadcast Artists Van Gogh Lowry Turner Picasso Warhol Kahlo Emin Musical genres Classical Rock Country and Western Urban Modern jazz World Electronic Heavy Metal Literary genres Biography Detective, thrillers Romance Self Help Science Fiction Modern Literature Religious 95 95 57 17 8 6 92 80 77 74 65 47 30 17 99 97 98 98 81 68 57 77 55 6 21 100 96 99 95 99 97 93 97 99 98 99 99 99 97 99 B Dislike % 12 24 26 8 3 4 17 6 39 14 18 6 3 3 34 47 51 58 14 13 7 28 34 2 18 33 38 35 43 48 48 58 67 23 27 45 49 61 42 66

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C Like % 44 34 7 2 3 1 65 56 26 47 31 19 13 3 44 26 24 17 67 55 50 49 21 4 3 29 27 25 18 12 12 11 11 39 30 21 16 14 14 9

B-C

-32 -10 +19 +6 0 +3 -48 -50 +13 -33 -13 -13 -10 0 -10 +21 +27 +41 -53 -42 -43 -21 +13 -2 +15 +4 +11 +10 +25 +36 +36 +47 +56 -16 -3 +24 +33 +47 +28 +57

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the painting of Frida Kahlo (2 per cent dislike), films of Pedro Almodvar (2 per cent), Phillip Glasss Einstein on the Beach (3 per cent), Miles Daviss Kind of Blue (3 per cent), films of Mani Rathnam (4 per cent), and Mahlers Fifth Symphony (6 per cent). However, Vivaldis The Four Seasons (6 per cent) and the painting of J.S.Turner (7 per cent) were also very little disliked despite being widely known, suggesting that they are particularly inoffensive. Many more dislikes of genres were recorded: religious books (66 per cent), science fiction (61 per cent) and self-help (49 per cent) among literature, and among musical genres heavy metal (67 per cent disliked), electronic (58 per cent), modern jazz and world music (48 per cent each) and urban (43 per cent). Note that one reason for this difference between named product and genre was that very few respondents failed to recognise the genres whereas, for example, since only 8 % of respondents had heard of Almodvar, no more than that proportion could express dislike. Clearly, Britons are not shy about expressing dislike of cultural items.

Patterns of dislikes
In order to discover whether there were any strong patterns to the dislikes a Principal Components Analysis of the 40 items was conducted (See Table 2). If the items on the scale had fallen into a small number of mutually exclusive groups we might conclude that there were some widely shared combinations of dislikes which might form the boundaries between hostile parties. However, 13 factors had an Eigenvalue greater than 1 and together they explained only 51 % of the variance. The most powerful explained a mere 5.3 % of the variance. This result could be the effect of the heterogeneity of the items included in the analysis.7 However, most components were primarily characterized by dislike of items restricted to a particular category TV, film, visual art and reading. The implication is that some people are averse to complete fields of activity and probably do not engage in the practice. Occasionally, a factor gave some inkling of class hostility, between middle class fractions and between middle and working classes. The third factor drew together dislike of biographies and modern literature, classical music, and the general election broadcast on TV with a liking for the modern art of Emin and Warhol and for modern jazz. Such a pattern might be thought to fit a rebellious or youthful section of the middle class hostile to older, established and traditional middle class preferences. The fifth factor exhibited a dislike of Oops, country and western music, the Queens Christmas broadcast and Eminems Stan, and also showed, at a slightly lower level of significance, likings for reading biographies and for Mahler. This might represent middle class rejection of lower-class tastes. Overall, however, the patterns do nothing to corroborate a claim that distastes cluster clearly around recognizable symbolic boundaries.

The Structure of Dislikes Volume of dislikes

We would anticipate that some people will have more dislikes than others. The omnivorousness thesis, invoked by Bryson for instance, suggests that people of higher socioeconomic status, and with more education and income, will tend to have a wider range of likes and, as a corollary, a smaller range of dislikes. Omnivores are said to be more

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Table 2. Patterns of dislikes. Principal components analysis (Varimax with Kaiser Normalization). Components with Eigenvalue greater than 1. Indicating items loading at .30 or greater
Components

1 Activity Queens Christmas broadcast General election Grand National World Cup Bergman Hitchcock Spielberg Campion Rathnam Almodvar Wonderwall Oops Stan Chicago Four Seasons Symphony no 5 Kind of blue Einstein Religious books Science-fiction Self-help books Romances Modern literature Thrillers, Biographies Heavy metal Electronic dance World music Modern jazz Urban, R&B Rock, inc Indie Country and Western Classical music Warhol Picasso Emin Van Gogh Lowry Turner Kahlo

5 .50

10

11

12

13

.50

.31 .75 .69 .33 .59 .47 .70 .69 .65 .63 .58 .40 .44 .40 .70 .52 .66 .74

.61 .47 .50 .60 .63 .40 .36 .50 .41 .66 .64 .31 .71 .40 .50 .47 -.39 -.68 .67 .66 .68 .40
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.55 .38 .62

.31 .50 -.29 .36 .76 .33

.34

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tolerant than the middle class of earlier periods who would have rejected popular cultural forms associated with lower social classes. However, most explorations of the omnivore thesis have had to rely on information about what people like, rather than what they dislike (Bryson, 1996, is the exception). And since likes and dislikes are not necessarily socially symmetrical it remained possible that omnivores have both more dislikes as well as more likes. A simple additive scale of all 40 items was created to calculate variation in the volume of individual dislikes. Again, the heterogeneity of the items means that the scale should be treated cautiously.8 One person had not a single dislike. The maximum number of dislikes was 33. There was a normal distribution of scores. The mean number of dislikes was 15, the median 16. The lowest quartile scored 11 or less; the highest quartile 20 or more. Note that, in response to the same set of items, people recorded more dislikes than likes; the mean number of likes was nine compared with 15 dislikes. Cross-tabulation of respondents scores on this scale with some socio-demographic variables showed that: 1) 2) 3) 4) the higher the social class, the fewer dislikes were expressed; men had fewer dislikes than women; the group self-identifying as non-white had fewer dislikes than any white group; the more education a respondent had, the more likely they were to have few dislikes; 5) and the young had fewer dislikes than the elderly. In order to explore these relationships more closely we applied Poisson regression analysis to log scores on the scale.9 Much less variance in the volume of aversions could be explained statistically than for equivalent scales for cultural participation or likes (see Gayo-Cal and Warde, 2009). The overall power of the explanation was weak, implying that the extent of aversions is only lightly grounded in social group memberships of any sort. The model showed a significant effect for higher education. Those with a university degree have fewer dislikes than the rest; those with A-level or technical qualifications have fewer than the less qualified, but significance level is only .10. Age was insignificant, as was class, income and population density. There were weak relationships with region, people living outside London having more dislikes, an effect statistically significant for the north and south of England and Scotland. Other effects reducing dislikes, significant at the .10 level, included belonging to the highest income quartile and being a man. The most significant relationship was that the least privileged ethnic groups, those identifying themselves as other than white, have significantly fewer dislikes than others. This might just possibly be the phenomenon of cultural goodwill, described by Bourdieu (1984: 318372) as characteristic of the petit bourgeois in France, but perhaps more likely shows some commitment to the values of multiculturalism. However, it is also an artefact of the survey instrument. The questions asked, for reasons of space, did not target in detail particular ethnic minority cultural traditions and presumably, therefore, items about which members felt most strongly. The Other group recognised significantly fewer products and since recognition is a pre-condition for expressing dislike, this, rather than tolerance per se, probably explains their answers. The tolerance of the

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Table 3. Factors influencing respondents volume of expressed dislikes: Poisson regression coefficients (Constant) Education GCSE, CSE, O-level, NVQ/SVQ level 1 or 2 RSA/OCR Higher Diploma, City and Guilds Full T GCE A-level, Scottish Higher Grades, ONC University/ CNAA Bachelor Degr., Master Deg/ PhD/ D.Phil Other qualifications Age Age Age squared Region North Midlands Southern England Wales Scotland Northern Ireland Type of household Single person household Unrelated adults household Couple dependent children Couple non-dependent children Lone parent dependent children Lone parent non-dependent children Multi-family Social class Professional-executive Intermediate Never worked Sex Male Ethnic origin White-other British/Irish White-other Other origin Population density 1.68/7.92 7.93/25.26 25.27/41.26 41.27/185.22 Income 2nd quartile 3rd quartile High quartile Number of cases B -.032 -.065* -.051 -.097*** -.134* .003 .005 .093** .059 .081* .124** .129** .076 .019 -.067* -.020 .078* -.061 .048 .064 -.004 .024 -.057 -.032* -.036 -.045 -.208*** -.030 .033 .025 .010 -.030 -.012 -.048 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, ***p < 0.001
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educated (expressed as fewer dislikes, without prejudice to the question of whether they nevertheless despise some exceptionally symbolically significant items) is probably better attributed to an omnivorous orientation, an openness to diversity.10 On balance, Wilks findings about dislikes being more strongly associated with social position than likes are probably not valid for the UK.

Social distribution of specific dislikes

So far, the analysis of dislikes has provided little support for the cultural hostility thesis. However, it is essential to examine whether effective cultural hostility occurs in more contextually specific locations. Despite the absence of strong overall patterns in relation to volume of dislikes, the thesis might still be valid if cultural hostility were expressed primarily in relation to a limited number of items of exceptional symbolic significance. This section therefore examines the distribution of dislikes among specific social groups, examining three socio-demographic factors, class, gender and cohort. Table 4 shows the distribution of distastes across classes. There are very few items which a majority of any class dislikes, five in the professional-executive class and nine in the working class. Note that many items exhibit no class marking whatsoever. There is no general class hostility reflected by distastes. Nevertheless, some cultural items discriminate between classes, marking class boundaries and therefore potentially performing a function of social classification. There are a number of items which the professionals and executives dislike much less than the working class the General Election broadcast, modern literature, biographies, modern jazz, rock music and classical music. These items are mostly genres of music and literature. There are three widely recognized items which the professional-executive class dislike more country and western music, and the art of Warhol and Emin. They also dislike other more rare items the films of Campion, Rathman and Almodovar, and Mahlers 5th symphony and Glasss Einstein on the Beach. While these items are more widely distributed across fields they are, with the exception of country and western music, specific products rather than genres. Thus, the professional-executive class, consistent with the omnivore thesis, rarely condemns entire genres, tending to find in most some redeeming items (Warde et al, 2007). Nevertheless, class differences do concentrate on particular items. There are fewer differences by gender than by class (see Table 5). There are no significant differences regarding film directors, musical works or artists, and only one for musical genres, women disliking heavy metal much more than do men. However, three of the TV programmes are more disliked by women, the two sports events and general election coverage. Women also dislike science fiction writing more. Only two forms are more disliked by men than women self-help books and, by a huge proportion, romantic fiction. It is, however, worth speculating whether, and in what sense, these indicate cultural hostility. There is little doubt that, in Britain in the 21st century, football, horse racing, heavy metal and science fiction are coded masculine, and that romantic fiction is coded feminine. A small number of items thus correspond with gender boundaries. However, whether womens dislike of heavy metal, or mens of romantic novels, is best understood as hostility to the other sex is debatable. It would be even less likely that such a claim could be advanced in relation to general election broadcasts or self-help books.

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Table 4. Taste (dislikes). Mean levels (percentages) of expressed dislike for 40 items and by social classes: professional-executive, intermediate and working class Activity Queens Christmas broadcast General election Grand National Football World Cup Bergman Hitchcock Spielberg Campion Rathnam Almodvar Wonderwall Oops Stan Chicago Four Seasons Mahler, Symphony no 5 Kind of Blue Einstein on the Beach Religious books Science-fiction, fantasy and horror Self-help books Romances Modern literature Thrillers, who-dunnits and detective stories Biographies and autobiographies Heavy metal Electronic dance music, including techno and house World music, including Reggae and Bhangra Modern jazz Urban, including Hip Hop and R&B Rock, including Indie Country and Western Classical music, including Opera Warhol Picasso Emin Van Gogh Lowry Turner Kahlo N= Mean 58.3 50.6 47.4 34.3 26.3 24.1 12.4 7.7 3.6 3.3 13.8 39.1 17.8 17 6.1 6.1 3.3 2.7 66.4 60.8 49.3 45.1 42.2 27.2 23.2 66.9 57.9 48.3 48.1 42.8 37.5 35.3 33.3 34.1 27.9 17.8 14.2 12.9 6.7 1.8 1520 Professional-executive 57 34 49 34 30 25 11 11 5 5 13 43 19 14 7 9 4 5 67 60 49 50 27 20 11 62 66 44 37 42 32 42 19 41 25 32 12 17 9 361 23.1 % intermediate 56 48 46 30 31 25 13 8 3 4 13 38 16 19 7 7 2 1 65 63 47 41 37 26 18 64 58 53 47 45 35 35 30 37 33 23 15 13 6 2 449 28.7 % working 61 61 47 38 22 24 12 5 2 1 15 39 18 18 5 4 4 2 69 61 52 46 53 32 33 72 55 49 54 43 42 31 42 30 27 7 16 11 6 1 710 45.4 % Sig. *** * ** ** ***

* * *

* *** *** *** ** ** * *** * * ** *** *** *** *** ***

Chi-Square: *** < 0.001, ** < 0.01, * < 0.05

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Table 5. Taste (dislikes). Mean levels of disliking (percentages) of 40 items, and for men and women Items Queens Christmas broadcast General election Grand National Football World Cup Bergman Hitchcock Spielberg Campion Rathnam Almodvar Wonderwall Oops Stan Chicago Four Seasons Mahler, Symphony no 5 Kind of Blue Einstein Religious books Science-fiction, fantasy, horror Self-help books Romances Modern literature Thrillers, detective stories Biographies and autobiographies Heavy metal Electronic dance music, including techno and house World music, inc. Reggae and Bhangra Modern jazz Urban, inc. Hip Hop and R&B Rock, including Indie Country and Western Classical music, including Opera Warhol Picasso Emin Van Gogh Lowry Turner Kahlo N=
Chi-Square: *** < 0.001, ** < 0.01, * < 0.05

355

Mean 58.3 50.6 47.4 34.3 26.3 24.1 12.4 7.7 3.6 3.3 13.8 39.1 17.8 17 6.1 6.1 3.3 2.7 66.4 60.8 49.3 45.1 42.2 27.2 23.2 66.9 57.9 48.3 48.1 42.8 37.5 35.3 33.3 34.1 27.9 17.8 14.2 12.9 6.7 1.8 1564

Men 60 44 40 16 29 19 10 10 5 3 13 42 16 17 7 5 4 4 69 49 54 71 45 25 25 59 58 45 45 45 34 34 32 36 28 17 14 14 5 1 713 45.6%

Women 57 56 54 50 24 28 15 6 3 4 14 37 19 17 5 7 3 2 65 70 45 23 40 29 22 74 58 51 51 41 40 36 35 33 28 18 15 13 8 2 851 54.4%

Sig. *** *** *** *** ** * *

*** *** *** * *** * * **

Table 6 records responses by three age cohorts. Compared to the average, the under40s exhibit substantially greater dislike of four items watching the Queens Christmas broadcast, Oops, country and western music and classical music. They show much less dislike of science-fiction, of four genres of contemporary music and the paintings of
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Table 6. Taste (dislikes). Mean levels of disliking (percentages) of 40 items for three cohorts: aged 18-39, 40-60 and 61+ Activity Queens Christmas broadcast General election Grand National Football World Cup Bergman Hitchcock Spielberg Campion Rathnam Almodvar Wonderwall Oops Stan Chicago Four Seasons Symphony no 5 Kind of Blue Einstein Religious books Science-fiction, fantasy and horror Self-help books Romances Modern literature Thrillers, who-dunnits and detective stories Biographies and autobiographies Heavy metal Electronic dance music, including techno and house World music, including Reggae and Bhangra Modern jazz Urban, including Hip Hop and R&B Rock, including Indie Country and Western Classical music, including Opera Warhol Picasso Emin Van Gogh Lowry Turner Kahlo N=
Chi-Square: *** < 0.001, ** < 0.01, * < 0.05

Mean 58.3 50.6 47.4 34.3 26.3 24.1 12.4 7.7 3.6 3.3 13.8 39.1 17.8 17 6.1 6.1 3.3 2.7 66.4 60.8 49.3 45.1 42.2 27.2 23.2 66.9 57.9 48.3 48.1 42.8 37.5 35.3 33.3 34.1 27.9 17.8 14.2 12.9 6.7 1.8 1563

18-39 69 56 54 30 24 30 6 9 4 4 14 53 20 17 7 5 4 3 70 46 45 44 36 22 21 58 41 36 44 20 25 53 47 18 15 16 14 11 9 2 590 37.7%

40-60 61 53 48 36 32 23 11 8 4 3 18 40 22 21 6 7 3 2 65 63 45 44 42 28 23 64 68 44 49 49 32 30 29 42 32 19 14 16 6 1 588 37.7%

61+ 38 39 37 38 24 17 25 6 3 3 7 17 7 11 5 7 3 3 63 81 62 49 52 33 27 86 69 74 53 68 65 17 19 47 41 18 14 11 3 3 385 24.6%

Sig. *** *** *** * ** *** ***

*** *** *** **

* *** *** *** ** *** *** *** * *** *** *** *** *** *** * **

Warhol and Picasso. For almost all of these items the over-60s register a significant and opposite taste. The differences between cohorts are substantial, although again there are items for which age makes no difference i.e. most of the painters, most of the film makers, most genres of literature and most of the classical music products. Music in
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Table 7.Taste (likes). Mean levels of liking 40 items and genres. Persons with degrees and no qualifications as a percentage of those who express positive preference Activity Mean Those with degrees as a % of all who like the activity (b) 59 73.2 42.5 45 54.3 56.5 43.4 41.1 40.7 29.6 32.8 26.4 27.5 28 23.8 33.1 32.8 28.2 29.3 32 26.9 33.9 32.5 27.5 21.2 27.1 26.5 10 26.5 24.8 24.4 20.5 21.4 16.7 24 17.1 19.3 17.6 16.3 12.6 366 23.4% Those with no qualifications as a % of all who like the activity (c) 1.6 4.9 8.5 11.8 14.3 15.2 15.1 15.9 16.1 11.8 14.8 13 13.7 14.2 12.2 17 18.8 17.2 20.1 22.4 19.4 25.3 26.2 22.8 18.2 23.9 25.5 10 27.3 26.7 27.9 22.2 26 26.7 41.3 30.2 38 35.6 39.8 47.9 419 26.8% Ratio (b/c)

Legitimate Kahlo Almodvar Warhol Modern literature Campion Emin Einstein Symphony no 5 Kind of Blue Heavy metal Rock, including Indie Stan Wonderwall Common  Science-fiction, fantasy and horror  Urban, including Hip Hop and R&B Picasso Four Seasons Biographies and autobiographies Van Gogh Turner Self-help books Classical music, including Opera General election  World music, including Reggae and Bhangra  Electronic dance music, including techno and house Modern jazz Lowry Rathnam Unauthorised Religious books  Thrillers, who-dunnits and detective stories Chicago Oops Football World Cup Spielberg Bergman Romances Grand National Hitchcock Queens Christmas broadcast Country and Western N=

3.8 2.6 21.8 13.5 2.2 2.9 3.3 19.3 12.7 10.8 26.7 31.1 46.6 14.4 18.8 48.8 55.7 38.6 67.3 50.5 16.2 29 24.3 12 10.9 12 54.5 0.6 8.5 29.7 64.7 26.4 44.4 43.5 6.7 20.5 25.6 33.8 16.9 25.3 1564

36.87 14.93 5 3.81 3.79 3.71 2.87 2.58 2.52 2.50 2.21 2.03 2.01 1.97 1.95 1.94 1.74 1.63 1.45 1.42 1.38 1.33 1.24 1.20 1.16 1.13 1.03 1 0.97 0.92 0.87 0.92 0.82 0.62 0.58 0.56 0.50 0.49 0.40 0.26

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Legitimate Kahlo Almodvar Warhol Modern literature Campion Emin Einstein on the Beach Symphony no 5 Kind of blue Heavy metal Rock Stan Wonderwall Common Science-fiction, fantasy and horror Urban, including Hip Hop and R&B Picasso Four Seasons Biographies and autobiographies Van Gogh Turner Self-help books Classical music, including Opera General election World music, Reggae and Bhangra Electronic dance music, techno and house Modern jazz Lowry Rathnam

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Unauthorised Religious books Thrillers, who-dunnits, detective stories Oops Chicago Football World Cup Spielberg Bergman Romances Grand National Hitchcock Queens Christmas broadcast Country and Western

Figure 1. Controversy, legitimacy and class

Items in bold are significantly more disliked by the professional-executive class than the working class Items in bold italics are significantly more disliked by the working class than the professional-executive class

particular separates out generations, as do tastes in television. Analysts of generational conflict have often alighted on cultural preferences as central, so this may be some corroborating indication of cultural hostility. That patterns of association are often non-existent and in most instances relatively weak is not yet sufficient to dismiss the cultural hostility thesis. Though not explicitly proposed by advocates of the thesis, cultural hostility could be a central social mechanism even if only a small number of items, of high symbolic significance, were strategically marked. Bryson postulated this about heavy metal music and middle class distaste for white working class musical genres in the US. Indeed, on reflection, it would be surprising if every item performed a significant symbolic and classificatory function. To identify such critical markers entails isolating items about which opposed groups have strongly contrary feelings. In the next two sections I devise alternative techniques to examine the reciprocal relationship between likes and dislikes.

Legitimacy and Class

A contested relationship to legitimate, or high, culture has been central to sociological analysis of taste. The notion of legitimate culture was critical for Bourdieu because it is
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the fount of cultural capital, capital arising from sharing in taste communities accredited by cultural institutions, foremost among them universities. A bowdlerized version of his position, nevertheless fairly widely canvassed, anticipates that those attached to a dominant culture, a dominant class, will like legitimate and dislike vulgar items, while the working class, having a taste for the necessary, will explicitly dislike, or perhaps be indifferent to, the legitimate and favour the vulgar. In this scenario reciprocal hostility is expressed directly across a social boundary the dominant class dislikes what the working class likes, and vice versa. Schematically, however, four possible conditions are consistent with the basic premise that legitimate items cause social division: the dominant group like the legitimate and dislike the unauthorized (condescension); the dominant group like the legitimate but also like the unauthorized (omnivorousness); the subordinate group likes the unauthorized and dislikes the legitimate (resentment); the subordinate group likes the unauthorized, but is indifferent to, the legitimate (accommodation).11 The first and third conditions are ones which might generate overt antagonism, producing or structuring cultural hostility. In order to explore the relational properties of likes and dislikes the 40 items were resorted hierarchically in terms of their legitimacy. I reason that it is those items disproportionately preferred by people with greatest exposure to educational institutions which have greatest legitimacy. This is a conventional understanding of legitimacy based on the positive preferences of the custodians of cultural taste. Table 7 describes differences between graduates and the unqualified with respect to the items that they say they like. It emphasizes the meaning of the items, expressing the views of the most and least educated as a ratio relative to the opinions of the whole sample.12 Items can thus be placed on a continuum of legitimacy based upon the relative preferences of people with university degrees when compared with those without any educational qualifications a practicable and defensible way of constructing a measure of legitimacy (see further, Gayo-Cal and Warde, 2009).13 So, for example, Table 7 column D shows that liking classical music or biographies were not marked as highly legitimate in 2004, irrespective of their status thirty years earlier. For convenience of discussion, I have partitioned items into three groups. Legitimate items are those which are more than twice as often preferred by graduates. Those which are unauthorised are less likely to be liked by graduates than the unqualified. Those which are common are the remainder. To estimate the role of class, consider Figure 1, which identifies items, ranked in terms of their legitimacy, which are disproportionately disliked by the professional-executive and the working classes. The working class expresses more dislikes. They also register more dislikes of legitimate items than do the professional-executive class of unauthorised ones. If dislike by a subordinate group of those legitimate items which are liked by a dominant group indicates class resentment, then there is more resentment than condescension. Working class members may be drawing boundaries between themselves and others by attributing preferences14 for example for classical music and modern literature to people who, without warrant, claim superior status. This pattern may indeed represent cultural hostility. However, half of the disputed items are from popular music. We might guess that this is some measure of the existence of class boundaries among younger people. The only unauthorised item disliked by the professional-executive class, country and western music, might be interpreted as a marker of a reviled taste, although actually only 11 % more of the professional-executive class dislike it than do
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the working class. All the other legitimate items disliked by the professionals are ones known to only a small minority and apparently reflect internal divisions or competition within the professional-executive class. Thus the evidence for class condescension is weak and, consequently, that for the prevalence of an omnivorous orientation among the professional-executive class commensurately stronger.

Culture and controversy

The previous section implies that reciprocal class antagonism along an axis of legitimacy is not great. Indeed, most controversy occurs over items within the legitimate category. One might therefore be tempted to conclude that taste has little significant impact on social relations. However, a final redoubt for the cultural hostility thesis remains. Perhaps a more complicated pattern of reciprocal antagonisms exists. According to Wilk, likes and dislikes are not necessarily symmetrical. Knowing what an individual in Belize liked did not effectively predict what they would dislike. It was only from a joint pattern of both likes and dislikes, asymmetrically ordered, that Wilk could identify social boundaries.
Orthodox GT 15% like LT 25% dislike MANY LIKE Few Dislike Turner Van Gogh Lowry Four Seasons Chicago Wonderwall Spielberg Mahler 5th Stan Biography Hitchcock Contested GT 15% like GT 25% dislike MANY LIKE Many Dislike Picasso World Cup Who Dunnits Classical Rock Country and Western Oops Grand National Romance Warhol Urban General Election Self Help Queens Broadcast Non-Contentious LT 15% like LT 25% dislike FEW LIKE Few Dislike Kahlo Kind of Blue Einstein on the Beach Almodvar Campion Rathnam Emin Stigmatised LT 15% like GT 25% dislike FEW LIKE Many Dislike Modern literature Bergman Modern jazz World Science Fiction Electronic Heavy Metal Religious

Figure 2. Controversy and legitimacy. Items classified by type and extent of controversy
Legitimate items in bold.

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Finally, therefore, I examine the proposition that dislikes are symbolically significant when they refer to items to which a potentially opposed group, not necessarily a class, is very attached. To do this items are sorted, after the fashion of Wilk (1997), in terms of their capacity to arouse controversy. I classify items in terms of the proportions of the population who like and dislike them (see Figure 2). Some items are liked by many and disliked by few. I call these orthodox items, an example being the painting of Turner. Second, some items are liked by many people and also disliked by many. These I call contested items, ones which seem to induce both positive and negative sentiments in large degree. Examples include rock music, classical music, Picassos painting, and the Queens Christmas broadcast. Contested items have the greatest capacity to represent symbolic hostility between substantial sections of the population. Third, some items are liked by few people, and equally disliked by few, ones we might call non-contentious, examples being the paintings of Kahlo and Kind of Blue. Finally, there are items which few like and many dislike. These I call stigmatised items, and among them are modern literature, modern jazz and religious literature. The classification of items can be seen in Figure 2. It might be expected that the items most germane to the cultural hostility thesis would belong to the contested and the stigmatized categories. These are ones where a substantial number of respondents have pronounced negatively upon an item, providing opportunity to define social boundaries through cultural rejection. By contrast, since few dislike the orthodox or the non-contentious items, their capacity to arouse or mark social antagonism is limited. Figure 2 shows that few legitimate items, represented in bold type, are contested. Rock music and the art of Warhol are the only two of the 13 items dividing large sections
Orthodox Turner Van Gogh Lowry Four Seasons Chicago Wonderwall Spielberg Mahler 5th Stan Biography Hitchcock Contested Picasso World Cup Who Dunnits Classical Rock Country and Western Oops Grand National Romances Warhol Urban General Election Self Help Queens Broadcast Non-Contentious Kahlo Kind of Blue Einstein on the Beach Almodvar Campion Rathnam Emin Stigmatised Modern literature Bergman Modern jazz World Science Fiction Electronic Heavy Metal Religious books

Figure 3. Controversy and the unauthorised. Items classified by type and extent of controversy
Bold italics for unauthorised items

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of the population to be coded as legitimate. Neither was significant in understanding class differences. Two other legitimate items are widely disliked, examples of stigmatized taste modern literature and heavy metal. The former did appear symbolically significant in relation to class, but the latter is coded as a preference of male graduates, apparently without class baggage. Generally, it is difficult to interpret the significance of most items, for each category except the non-contentious, has heterogeneous component elements. Ironically, greatest controversy over legitimate items occurs among the societally non-contentious, a matter of internal, within-class dispute among those most committed to high culture. Figure 3 offers further clarification about the symbolic significance of particular items and why they happen to be more or less controversial. The most controversial items, those in the contested category, are actually unauthorized ones; seven of the 11 items that are least legitimate divide the population most sharply. There is no simple interpretation, for the items are heterogeneous, but they probably reflect several different lines of social cleavage. Controversy over whether to read romances or watch the world cup reflects gender differences. The three television programmes probably reflect generational differences. So probably does the liking for country and western, though we know that it is also coded by class. The stigmatized items which we hypothesized might arouse mutual hostility seem to capture a difference between those with religious interests and the rest, a division rarely considered in most studies of cultural taste. Thus, finally, we find some stronger evidence of cultural hostility, but mostly revolving around non-legitimate items, and structured not by a single, but by multiple social cleavages. This gives some support to the general thesis of Wilk, who charted crosscutting patterns of likes and dislikes which marked social divisions. However, given how difficult it has proved to track down the social significance of dislikes we might pause before agreeing that dislikes are a superior diagnostic tool upon which future research should concentrate. We might pause even longer before agreeing with Bourdieu that all determination is negative.

Conclusions
This paper has demonstrated that people have a wide range of dislikes. More dislikes than likes are reported. Respondents proved more likely to register dislike of genres than of specific products. There were no strong overall patterns to dislikes. Nevertheless, some categories of person had more dislikes than others. People with degrees had the fewest dislikes, giving some support to the omnivorousness thesis. Those identifying as non-white also had fewer dislikes, perhaps suggesting commitment to multi-culturalism. Living in London also increases tolerance. But in general the patterns were statistically weak. Dislikes are associated with social divisions. Two sorts of class mechanism operate. The most powerful makes distinctions within classes. The instances are mostly within the professional-executive class where certain, usually rare and consecrated, items are subject to contested evaluation. These may represent struggles for control of the cultural field among different fractions of the dominant class: they may even be minor evidence of the existence of an avant-garde fraction, interested in relatively arcane cultural

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products and inclined to express dislike of legitimate but orthodox items, as with the paintings of Lowry and Turner. The second mechanism distinguishes the professional from the working class. A few items are significantly differently valued, the most telling ones, which might perhaps denote inter-class hostility, being watching the general election, classical music, Country and Western, serious literature, and the work of controversial artists. To the extent that these are objects of mutual and reciprocal antagonism, they are putative sources of hostility, of condescension and resentment. However, evidence for intense class hostility is sparse. While class matters, other divisions are probably equally important. Dislikes are differentially distributed by gender and generation as well as by class. However, symbolic items are still rather few and they are not the same for each social category. It therefore seems that dislikes are not as crucial, strategic and telling in Britain in 2003 as was thought by Bourdieu or Douglas. Dislikes, certainly if they are to play an important part in the process of social classification, should be strongly correlated to social position. In general, they are not. Moreover, the majority of distastes are not socially marked. Many cultural products are valued more or less equally by all, thus not a source of social discrimination. This is revealing, since it was initially anticipated that items included in the questionnaire would reveal social distinctions. If cultural hostility means one group disparaging another through their distaste for a broad set of cultural products, then it is not very prevalent in the UK. Dislikes are not, in themselves, evidence of intense or widespread hostility between social groups or categories. If Douglas was referring to general processes of social classification she appears to have exaggerated the role of socially structured dislikes. However, cultural hostility may yet be more complicated and more contextual. Potentially a small number of symbolically very significant items could provide a nexus of hostility. Controversial items were identified by considering simultaneously the juxtaposition of likes and dislikes across various social boundaries. Modifying Wilks terminology, four groups of items were distinguished the orthodox, the contested, the non-contentious and the stigmatized. Some items are more likely sources of controversy than others and some engage much larger proportions of the population than others. The expectation that disagreement over legitimate items organizes boundaries, particularly boundaries of class, was not well supported. In Britain, legitimacy is not as significant as in Bourdieus France. Re-examination of legitimate and unauthorized items with reference to the differential dislikes of the professional and the working classes, and men and women, identified some likely candidate items for expressing class and gender hostility, but these tend to revolve around unauthorized rather than legitimate items. To sum up, no doubt dislikes sometimes signify cultural hostility. Dislikes do parallel social divisions; class, gender and generational boundaries are marked in some instances. However, expressed dislikes are not such powerful indicators of meaningful social boundaries that they should be preferred over others as an analytic tool or practical guide for social classification. Dislikes do not obviously play the same pronounced role in Britain as in Belize. Even when considered in tandem with likes they are not highly symbolic markers of lines of social cleavage. The situation is more as described by Bryson for the USA, where a small, though not insignificant, role is played by aversions which belie universal tolerance of diversity of cultural taste. One reason that they are not

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currently strongly marked is probably because cultural omnivorousness, an openness to diversity, has become a principal principle of good taste (Fridman and Ollivier, 2004; Ollivier, 2008). Consequently, middle class expression of distaste for, or condescension towards, the aesthetic preferences of others is muted. Finally, the current evidence cannot dispel all suspicion that there exists a subterranean basis of deep cultural hostility. Perhaps the limited and heterogeneous items considered above are inadequate to the task; future research might usefully consider a larger and wider range. Alternatively, it may be less judgments of taste focused on aesthetic products, like painting and film, than embodied characteristics, possessions or cultural practice that incite cultural hostility. Indeed, quantitative methods general may not be best fitted because context often matters greatly. Certainly qualitative evidence from the same study threw up a few instances of vehement rejection of symbolically-loaded products, though such judgments rarely led to condemnation, implicit or explicit, of other social groups. Tastes differ, but with very little indication of condescension, and only a little more of resentment. Moreover, few items are class or gender specific, as a compelling sociological account might require. Thus the survey results imply rejection of a strong cultural hostility thesis in respect of expressions of taste in contemporary Britain. Acknowledgements
This paper draws on data produced by the research team for the ESRC project Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation (Award no R000239801). The team comprised Tony Bennett (Principal Applicant), Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde (Co-Applicants), David Wright and Modesto Gayo-Cal (Research Fellows). The applicants were jointly responsible for the design of the national survey and the focus groups and household interviews that generated the quantitative and qualitative date for the project. Elizabeth Silva, assisted by David Wright, coordinated the analyses of the qualitative data from the focus groups and household interviews. Mike Savage and Alan Warde, assisted by Modesto Gayo-Cal, co-ordinated the analyses of the quantitative data produced by the survey. Tony Bennett was responsible for the overall coordination of the project. I am particularly indebted to Modesto Gayo-Cal for having prepared the principal component and regression analyses included in this paper. I am grateful also for comments on the paper from Modesto, Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva and David Wright. They do not necessarily share the interpretations offered in this paper.

Notes
1. The focus groups, totalling 25, comprised between two and eight participants per group, involving a total of 143 participants, including 74 women and 69 men. The groups were conducted in six areas in the UK in 2003. Household interviews were conducted with 30 respondents from the survey and 14 of their partners in 2005. Interviews were conducted with 11 members of the British elite members of parliament, senior civil servants, landowners and corporate executives. 2. Room 101 is the place to which, in a popular TV show, participants banish despised objects. 3. The main survey was administered to a stratified, clustered sample from 111 postcode sectors and achieved a response rate of 52 % with a final sample of 1564 respondents aged 18 plus. Data was collected between November 2003 and March 2004 by the National Centre for Social Research. See Thomson (2004) for the technical report. 4. The questionnaire aimed to include a range of items for each of several domains which earlier accounts had identified as definitive elements of high and popular culture, some mainstream

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

majority tastes and some specialised products associated with sub-cultures and the avant-garde. Choice of items drew on focus group discussions and the advice of a panel of a dozen sociologists and arts professionals in order to obtain a coverage which was not biased towards particular social groups or interest constituencies. Selection was guided by common sense, previous survey questions and earlier scholarly studies to compile a broad spread of cultural products and practices which were symbolically significant and amenable to social interpretation. For NS-SeC classification, see Pevalin and Rose, 2003. The 40 items are necessarily highly selective and thus potentially open to criticism. (One referee viewed the array as too general, another thought some of them too obscure.) Since the survey was required to capture data relevant to many additional theoretical questions, the materials available may be sub-optimal for the current specific objective. Arguably, nevertheless, they are fit for purpose, covering several different fields music, painting, cinema, television and literature and varying in their popularity and accessibility. Although some problems arise in interpretation of the statistical analysis because very few people like some of the items, it would be theoretically perverse to exclude rare items. For instance, the types of question were not identical; it is a moot point whether ranking heavy metal as 6 on a scale of 17 is an equivalent expression of dislike as saying that one would not make a point of watching the Queens Christmas broadcast. Because genres were much more readily disliked than were named items this might have somewhat reduced the reliability of constructing a scale which includes both. While certainly dislikes of genres much augmented scores on this scale, other exercises on products and genres separately provided even less interpretable solutions. This is a procedure or type of regression recommended for 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). That omnivorousness is not the explanation for the small number of aversions among the nonwhite ethnic category is suggested by the fact that they also reported many fewer likes. Further possibilities include that the dominant group likes legitimate items and is indifferent to all else, and that the subordinate groups likes very few legitimate or unauthorized items (univorousness). It is not possible that the subordinate group should like both legitimate and unauthorised items for then they would be indistinguishable from omnivores. So, 225 respondents reported liking science fiction books. 102 of the 366 with degrees (28 per cent) expressed a liking, as did 59 of the 419 without qualifications (14.2 per cent). I.e. of all who liked science fiction 28 % held degrees, while 14.2% had no qualifications, a ratio of 1.97. (It follows that 58 per cent of those liking science fiction had intermediate qualifications.) Although this procedure does not circumvent all objections, it escapes circularity (insofar as a respondents qualifications are not subsequently introduced to explain preferences for legitimate items) and also avoids simply using personal prejudices or out-of-date understandings about the prestige of cultural items. Recall that legitimacy is defined by likes.

References
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Douglas, M. (1996) On not being seen dead: Shopping as protest, in Douglas, M., Thought Styles, pp. 77105. London: Sage. Fridman, V. and Ollivier M. (2004) Ouverture ostentatoire la diversit et cosmopolitisme: vers une nouvelle configuration discursive? Sociologie et Socits, 36: 105126. Gujarati, D. N. (2003): Basic Econometrics, New York: McGraw-Hill. Lamont, M. (2000) The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Le Roux, B., Rouanen, H., Savage, M. and Warde, A. (2008), The cultures of class: Britain 2003, Sociology, 42:104971. Ollivier, M. (2008) Models of openness to cultural diversity: Humanist, populist, practical and indifferent omnivores, Poetics, 36: 120147 Peterson, R.A. (1992) Understanding Audience Segmentation: from elite and mass to omnivore and univore, Poetics, 21: 243258. Peterson, R.A. (2005) Problems in comparative research: The example of omnivorousness, Poetics, 33: 257282. Peterson, R. A. and Kern R. (1996) Changing Highbrow Taste: from Snob to Omnivore, American Sociological Review. 61: 900907. Rose, D. and Pevalin, D. (2003) A Researchers Guide to the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification, London: Sage. Thomson, K. (2004) Cultural capital and social exclusion survey: Technical Report. London: National Centre for Social Research. Warde, A. (2008) Does taste still serve power?, Sociologica: Italian Online Sociological Review, 3: 126. http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/journal/article/index/Article/Journal:ARTICLE112 Warde, A and Gayo-Cal M. (2009) The anatomy of cultural omnivorousness; the case of Britain, Poetics. Warde, A., Wright, D. and Gayo-Cal, M. (2007) Understanding cultural omnivorousness, or the myth of the cultural omnivore, Cultural Sociology, 1: 143164. Warde A., Wright D. and Gayo-Cal M. (2008) The omnivorousness orientation in the UK, Poetics, 36: 148165. Wilk, R. (1997) A critique of desire: distaste and dislike in consumer behaviour, Consumption, Markets & Culture, 1: 175196. Woodward, I. and Emmison, M. (2001) From aesthetic principles to collective sentiments: the logics of everyday judgements of taste, Poetics, 29: 295316. Alan Warde is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. His research interests include the sociologies of consumption, culture and stratification. Recent publications include Culture, Class, Distinction (Routledge, 2009), written with Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright, and Cultural Analysis and the Legacy of Bourdieu: settling accounts and developing alternatives, (Routledge, 2010), co-edited with Elizabeth Silva.

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