Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Music consumption has been a central topic in music sociology over the past three decades. Pursued through quantitative ( Bourdieu 1984 ) and qualitative ( DiMaggio 1982 ) methods, classic work in the area has highlighted music's role as a medium of status distinction. In more recent years, the links between taste and status have been shown to be, in the American context at least, more complex, the highbrow/lowbrow divide modulating into an omnivore–univore model ( Peterson & Simkus 1992 ). Work produced in the heyday of the Birmingham Cultural Studies tradition shifted the focus from taste and boundary maintenance to social identity construction and to a focus on style, subculture, and self. Most notably, this focus pointed scholarly attention from reception to consumption, from a focus on what meanings were found or attributed to musical works, to a focus on the process of meaning making and its role in the constitution of the life world. In Willis's (1978) work, for example, the investigative lens examined actors themselves as they came to establish connections between music and forms of action and interaction, the links they forged between preferred forms of music and forms of social life and social activity. In this sense, music provided, via its consumption, tools and repertories for action. This shift has been marked by a series of key studies that trace the appropriation ... log in or subscribe to read full text