The Trajectory of Cultural Taste: Influence of Intergenerational Educational and Class Mobility on Cultural Taste

Over the past two decades, Taiwan has undergone considerable industrial and social transformation. However, few studies have examined the relationship between cultural taste and social mobility from the perspective of social change. This study adopted Bourdieu's perspectives on habitus, cultural taste, and social trajectory as the theoretical framework and used the 1997 and 2007 data from the Taiwan Social Change Survey to investigate the effects of changes in cultural taste influenced by intergenerational social mobility. The results show that an extensive variety of cultural taste permeated cultural consumption behaviors in both survey years, a finding that contradicts the logic of class distinction proposed by Bourdieu; cultural taste can be used to effectively distinguish groups according to educational level and social class. In addition, the results of this study support the argument that social mobility trajectories affect cultural taste variety. The trajectories of intergenerational educational and class mobility were the key factors shaping variety in cultural taste. People whose class had been elevated intergenerationally exhibited more diverse cultural tastes than did those without upward mobility. Moreover, the number of strata crossed through upward mobility is positively and significantly related to cultural taste variety; people who experienced intergenerational educational upward mobility and those who crossed more strata through upward mobility exhibited greater variety in cultural taste than did those whose educational level was identical to that of their fathers. However, notably, people who experienced intergenerational downward educational mobility also exhibited greater variety in cultural taste than did those with no mobility. This observation deviates from observations among people who experienced downward mobility in class. Therefore, the trajectories of intergenerational educational and class mobility differ in their influences on cultural taste variety.