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In this paper, I provide evidence for the substantive relevance of a phenomenon that has been argued to be crucial in connecting cultural inequalities to stratification outcomes: “ culture talk, ” or the use of popular culture and the arts as conversation subjects with friends and acquaintances. In spite of its theoretical importance, this outcome has not received much empirical attention. To address this gap, I document the socio-demographic correlates of culture talk using survey data from a probability sample of Americans. I report three main findings. First, culture talk frequency across five culture consumption domains is stratified by socioeconomic status, primarily be education and secondarily by income, net of self-reported culture-consumption frequency. Second, the socioeconomic status effect on culture talk is strongest for those who are most culturally active. Finally, engagement in traditionally high status cultural pursuits (e.g. the fine arts) is a better predictor of culture talk across all domains than consumption in less class stratified domains (e.g. movies). I close by elaborating the theoretical and substantive implication of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research and theory at the intersection of cultural sociology and network analysis have converged around the notion of cultural holes: patterns of cultural choice that position the person as a bridge not between other persons but between cultural worlds. This is an approach that promises to open up new vistas in our conceptualization of the relationship between social position and cultural taste, but that so far lacks operational grounding. In this article, I draw on Breiger's () formalization of the idea of the duality of persons and groups along with classical formalizations of brokerage for sociometric networks (Burt ) to suggest that the 'cultural ego network' of a typical survey respondent can be reconstructed from patterns of audience overlap among the cultural items that are chosen by each respondent. This leads to a formalization of the notion of omnivorousness as relatively low levels of clustering in the cultural network: namely, omnivorousness as cultural network efficiency. I show how this metric overcomes the difficulties that have plagued previous attempts to produce ordinal indicators of omnivorousness from simple counts of the number of cultural choices, while providing novel substantive (and sometime counter-intuitive) insights into the relationship between socio-demographic status markers and patterns of cultural choice in the contemporary United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper builds on the general connection between culture consumption and sociability which has been the focus of recent research in the sociology of culture. I propose that cultural variety, as given by the number of cultural activities that the person engages in, is tied not only to static properties of social networks (such as range), but also to the likelihood of having benefited from this connectivity (social capital). Taking the classic example of finding a job via a network contact as the main outcome, I show that persons who have a propensity to engage in a wide variety of cultural activities have a higher likelihood of having found out about their current job via a weak tie and that different types of weak tie activation are selectively correlated with distinct cultural taste profiles. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This essay responds to article 'How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United States,' which appears in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]