March 2020. Forthcoming in American Sociological Review.
F A O : S M E D *
Sam Friedman† and Aaron Reeves‡
March 13, 2020
Abstract: How do elites signal their superior social position via the consumption of culture? We address this question by drawing on 120 years of “recreations” data (N = 71,393) con- tained within Who’s Who, a unique catalogue of the British elite. Our results reveal three historical phases of elite cultural distinction: first, a mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates, which waned significantly in the late-nineteenth century; second, a highbrow mode dominated by the fine arts, which increased sharply in the early-twentieth century before gently receding in the most re- cent birth cohorts; and, third, a contemporary mode characterized by the blending of highbrow pursuits with everyday forms of cultural participation, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets. These shifts reveal changes not only in the contents of elite culture but also in the nature of elite distinction, in particular, (1) how the applicability of emulation and (mis)recognition theories has changed over time, and (2) the emergence of a contemporary mode that publicly emphasizes everyday cultural practice (to accentu- ate ordinariness, authenticity, and cultural connection) while retaining many tastes that continue to be misrecognized as legitimate.
I How do elites signal their superior social position via consumption of, and participation in, particular types of culture? This question has long been central to sociological thought (Elias 1939; Goffman 1959; Simmel 1957; Weber 1915). Two perspectives dominate: (1) social em- ulation models posit that elites achieve distinction by continually developing ever-more ex- pensive and elaborate tastes to guard against the imitation strategies of aspirational outsiders (Simmel 1957; Veblen 1899), whilst (2) (mis)recognition models posit that distinction pivots on *Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves are joint lead authors of this article, and both contributed equally. †Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, [email protected] ‡Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, [email protected]
1 elites’ ability to impose as legitimate their own arbitrary categories of cultural perception and appreciation (Bourdieu 1984). Either way, the idea that elites use culture to mark themselves off from lower social classes is a foundational assumption motivating scholarship on cultural consumption. Yet despite this theoretical importance, the empirical basis for such claims lags behind. In this article, we identify, and attempt to address, three problems in the voluminous literature on elite distinction.
First, conceptualizations of elites frequently lack precision. Elites are numerically too small to show up on the sample surveys normally used to research cultural consumption and therefore, when invoked, are typically represented by broad proxies such as big-class occupational groups or advanced education (Coulangeon and Lemel 2007; Friedman and Laurison 2019; Peterson and Simkus 1992; Savage et al. 2015). Put simply, we know of no large-scale quantitative investigation of specifically elite cultural taste ever conducted in sociology.1 Second, propo- nents of different theories of elite distinction assume these generalize across time and space. Yet the empirical observations from which concepts such as emulation and (mis)recognition emerged are rooted in snapshots of particular national contexts at particular moments in time (Daloz 2009). To meaningfully unpack the historical specificities of such theories, we there- fore require a longitudinal lens that can examine how elite culture changes over time. Finally, work on elite distinction faces methodological challenges. In particular, the vast majority of empirical analysis proceeds from survey or interview data where people report their cultural preferences anonymously. Yet, as Daloz (2009) notes, a fundamental component of elite dis- tinction is “display”—the presentation of one’s cultural self in a public or interactional setting. This micro-political dimension is difficult to discern using conventional methodological tools.
We address each of these problems by drawing on a novel data source—the cultural “recre- ations” expressed by entrants within Who’s Who, an unrivaled catalogue of the British elite. Who’s Who documents a more precise elite, based on a selection of the .05 percent of the UK population that occupy the highest, most influential, and most prestigious occupational posi- tions. We also have access to the publication’s entire historical database, which provides data on the cultural preferences of around 70,000 entrants born between 1830 and 1969. Finally, as Who’s Who is a public document, these data provide unique insights into how elites present their cultural selves publicly; not necessarily what they actually “do” culturally but how they deploy their tastes in social life to signal their position.
Our analysis begins by identifying a mode of aristocratic elite culture, dominant in the late- nineteenth century, that was forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates (e.g., shooting, hunting, horse riding, polo, sailing). Here elites achieved distinction via the emulation of lower yet aspirational social groups, who largely deferred to their authority as inherent cultural paragons. We then show how this mode was threatened at the turn of the twentieth century. “Nouveau riche” industrialists began to buy their way into high society, and existing aristocratic elites, battling economic upheaval, were unable to guard against this 1Recent quantitative archival analyses by Accominotti, Khan, and Storer (2018) and Hoffman (2019) have fruitfully addressed issues of cultural consumption, although each are limited to just one arena of consumption— opera and literature, respectively. Similarly, Majima and Warde (2008) look at elite consumption in Britain, but their data restricted their ability to examine patterns of cultural taste or cultural participation.
2 pecuniary emulation. Next, we show how a new generation of elites—influenced in particu- lar by the Bloomsbury intellectual collective—adapted to this threat. Positioning itself against the philistinism of aristocratic modes, this new cohort championed a set of emerging “high” cultural forms (e.g., theater, ballet, classical music, abstract art) that went on to define elite cul- ture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This new highbrow mode was successful in delivering distinction, albeit via a different mechanism. Rather than relying on an ascribed cultural legit- imacy, as in the emulation model, highbrow elites instead focused on generating a widespread (mis)recognition, via the state and allied institutions such as the BBC, of the inherent value of their own tastes and recreations. Again, though, this mode of elite culture was eventually ques- tioned. Beginning in the 1950s, the supremacy of highbrow culture was threatened by shifts within the art-world that initially challenged the highbrow aesthetic and later legitimized cer- tain popular cultural forms; generational value change that precipitated a decline in snobbery and deference (to elites); and the emergence of a managerial culture where access to a broad cultural repertoire functioned as a key resource.
The final part of our analysis explains how once again elites adapted to these threats, diversi- fying their cultural profiles and increasingly blending highbrow (and some aristocratic) recre- ations with popular tastes and a range of everyday practices, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets. We interpret this contemporary mode as pursuing dual aims. First, it con- tinues to be distinction-seeking, with popular tastes still tilting toward more legitimate artists. However, the growing expression of everyday recreations, we argue, also signals something beyond distinction, and peculiar to the particular moral threats facing contemporary elites. As elites pull away economically, they face increasing suspicion from wider publics that they lack prosocial motives and, in turn, authenticity and moral character. The public expression of such “ordinary” everyday practices, therefore, with their intrinsic rather than extrinsic reward association, acts as a way to plug this authenticity-insecurity.
Our analysis not only reveals important changes in the contents of elite culture but also shows (1) how the applicability of emulation and (mis)recognition models of elite distinction has changed over time, and (2) the emergence of a contemporary mode of ordinary elite distinction that publicly emphasizes everyday cultural practice (to accentuate ordinariness, authenticity, and cultural connection) while retaining many tastes that continue to be misrecognized as le- gitimate.
T E M Elite distinction, “the necessity for dominant social groups to display cultural signs of supe- riority to signal their upper social position” (Daloz 2009:28), is a foundational concern in the sociology of culture and taste. Many major theorists have addressed the issue in some form, ranging from a focus on conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1899) to fashion (Simmel 1957), court society (Elias 1939), the presentation of self (Goffman 1959), social closure (Weber 1915), and taste (Bourdieu 1984).
3 Two broad theoretical models dominate the conversation. The first, evident in the early soci- ological theorizing of Tarde (1903), Simmel (1957), and particularly Veblen (1899), centers on the role of social emulation. This is premised on the idea that people generally seek to imitate others socially superior to themselves by adopting their cultural tastes and recreations. In re- sponse, elites engage in a process of what Veblen called “invidious distinction,” differentiating themselves by continually developing ever-more expensive and elaborate tastes. This estab- lishes respectability within their own milieu and guards their position from the “pecuniary emulation” of lower, yet aspirational, social classes. At the same time, emulation theorists also point to the limits of this dynamic. Key to this is the scarcity of elite recreations, which tra- ditionally carry strong economic barriers to entry. But, as Tarde and Simmel point out, there are also cultural barriers to entry, and attempts to mimic elites are often categorized as crude. Simmel (1957), for example, argued that as fashion trends “trickle down” to less advantaged groups they are often “vulgarized” and lose their ability to signal eliteness.2 An exemplar of this, discussed in multiple empirical contexts, is the bind experienced by the “nouveau riche.” Although these upwardly mobile individuals may have the economic capital to adopt elite cul- ture, they continually reveal their social origins by the “mistakes” they make in their execution of taste, or the insecurity of their conduct (Harvey and Maclean 2008; Needell 1987; Sampson 1994).
The second model of elite distinction, and significantly more influential in contemporary soci- ology, centers on the role of (mis)recognition (Bourdieu 1984). Here social subordinate groups do not so much emulate elites’ culture as misrecognize their categories of cultural appreciation as legitimate. It is thus not that elites themselves are considered inherent cultural paragons, as in the emulation model; rather, that they have the ability to generate widespread belief in the inherent value of their own tastes and recreations. This is achieved, according to Bourdieu (1984, 1993), by elites occupying pivotal positions in society that allow them to establish and impose the legitimacy of certain forms of culture (DiMaggio 1982; Khan 2012b; Accominotti et al. 2018). Two “agents of legitimation” are particularly important: the state, which plays a cen- tral role in consecrating culture via funding and subsidy but also actively embeds and canonizes certain cultural items in educational curricula, and cultural intermediaries, that is, tastemak- ers in the media, nonprofit sector, and cultural industries who generate belief in the value and prestige of certain cultural goods (English 2008; Purhonen et al. 2018). In this (mis)recognition model, then, elites have the resources at their disposal to imbue their own cultural preferences with widespread legitimacy that can then be used by themselves, and dominant social classes more generally, to demarcate themselves from other groups; elite tastes, in other words, be- come “widely-held high-status cultural signals” that operate as a socially valuable form of cul- tural capital (Lamont and Lareau 1988: 156).
There are important connections between these theoretical strands. Both position elites as arbiters of taste with hegemonic capacities, for example. Yet they are also different in terms of how they see elites realizing distinction from other social groups. For Veblen, the pursuit 2There are some significant differences in how these authors viewed social emulation. For example, Simmel argued that new fashions do not necessarily emanate from elites but can spring from certain sections of the middle classes.
4 of elite cultural distinction is a fairly conscious and intentional process. Groups within a sta- tus hierarchy largely accept the ascribed origins of class division, and therefore distinction and emulation are both logical attempts to either maintain one’s position or achieve upward mobil- ity. In contrast, Bourdieu (1988:783) argued that his conception of elite distinction is mediated by habitus and therefore not necessarily intentional or voluntaristic. Moreover, where emu- lation theory arguably rests on a deference to elites, whatever the contents of their culture, (mis)recognition instead emphasizes how elites mobilize—intentionally or not—a widespread consensus around the intrinsic value of their particular tastes and recreations.
C T S Among the social theorists espousing these two models of elite distinction there has been a striking tendency toward generalization. As Daloz (2009) notes, there is a clear intention in the work of Veblen and Bourdieu, in particular, to offer theories that transcend time and space.
Yet a comparative analysis of elite literature suggests strong limitations to such claims. In terms of place, for example, studies across a number of national contexts have questioned the as- sumption that subordinate groups necessarily imitate the culture of elites (Weatherill 1996). In France, for example, during the ancien régime, Royon (2002; cited in Daloz 2009) argues that the provincial aristocracy accepted that they would never have the financial wealth to mimic their peers in Versailles, so instead built a counter-model of cultural value situated in opposi- tion to the decadence of the Court, emphasizing honor and moral purity. Similarly, Fleming and Roses (2007) show that, in the pursuit of cultural uplift and antiracism, the Boston Black Brahmins carefully imitated the aesthetic sensibilities of the city’s Anglo-American elites, while at the same time working to successfully introduce and normalize black artistry.
Other scholars point to the limitations of emulation and (mis)recognition models in capturing the historical development of elite culture, particularly in terms of how its currency may have shifted at different points or how its specific contents may have changed (Elias 1939). For ex- ample, Hanquinet, Roose, and Savage (2014) note that Bourdieu’s concepts of (mis)recognition and cultural capital rest heavily on a particular modernist reading of highbrow aesthetics that is strongly connected to both the temporal period and the national context in which Bourdieu was writing—France in the 1960s.
E E : E O ? In recent years, some scholars have even questioned whether elite distinction is still taking place at all. Central here have been studies documenting the rise of the elite cultural omnivore, who eschews a purely highbrow cultural palette and instead happily grazes on both highbrow and popular forms of culture (Bennett et al. 2009; Peterson and Kern 1996). Some interpret the coming of the omnivore as evidence of (at least a partial) dissolution of symbolic boundaries, and a signal that elites no longer use culture to pursue distinction from lower-class groups (Bennett et al. 2009; Chan 2019; Erickson 1996; Warde, Wright, and Gayo-Cal 2007). Exam- ining the social and political attitudes of omnivores, Chan (2019), for instance, finds empirical
5 support for the argument that omnivorousness is associated with tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and openness to new cultural styles.
Yet the significance of omnivorousness for debates about elite distinction is strongly con- tested. In particular, two alternative interpretations have emerged. The most developed of these counters that omnivorousness simply represents the evolution of elite distinction (based on (mis)recognition), first via the selective consumption of consecrated or legitimate objects of popular culture (Bauman 2007; Johnston and Baumann 2009; Kuipers 2015; Regev 1994; Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood 2008) and, second, via the transposition of the aesthetic disposi- tion to popular cultural forms (Friedman 2014; Jarness, 2015; Khan 2011; Lizardo and Skiles 2012; Flemmen, Jarness and Roselund, 2017).
Other analysts take a different tack, arguing that omnivorousness does indicate a meaningful cultural shift, but one reflecting a wider “meritocratic turn” among elites who are increasingly keen to distance themselves from ascribed advantage and instead play up their “ordinariness” and “normality”—particularly in public settings (Jarness and Friedman 2017; Khan 2012a; Sav- age, Bagnall, and Longhurst 2001; Sherman 2018). Hahl, Zuckerman, and Kim (2017), for ex- ample, focus on the distinctive appeal of lowbrow tastes for elite omnivores. They argue that elites suffer from an inherent insecurity about their moral legitimacy. Tooffset potential public concern that they are only motivated by extrinsic rewards such as status or power, elites de- velop preferences for what they perceive to be more “authentic” low-status culture. Hahl and colleagues (2017:830) argue that as such culture is “produced without any awareness that it might impress elite audiences as aesthetically sophisticated, elites generally assume it was pro- duced in a spirit of disinterestedness with respect to highbrow standards, and thus in pursuit of intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic rewards.” By adopting lowbrow tastes, contemporary elites thus attempt to mitigate their insecurity about perceived inauthenticity by borrowing, and profiting from, the perceived authenticity of lowbrow cultural forms (Reeves 2019).
Yet although multiple scholars have suggested important rejoinders and critiques to theories of elite distinction, such studies contain limited empirical scope. Historical work, for example, has relied largely on secondary sources (Annan 1991; Cannadine 1999), and the voluminous literature on the elite omnivore has been constrained by the fact that, numerically, elites are too small to show up on the kind of standard sample surveys normally used to measure cultural consumption (Savage and Williams 2008).
The reality, therefore, is that we actually know very little about the specific tastes of elites, how these may have changed over time, and the implications of potential shifts for theories of elite distinction. In this article, we draw on a unique data source—120 years of data contained within Who’s Who, an unrivaled catalogue of the British elite—to move forward our under- standing of these questions. Who’s Who not only contains biographical data on its entrants but also, crucially, asks them to input their “recreations,”3 providing us with data on the recreations of around 70,000 entrants born between 1830 and 1969. 3Part A of the online supplement includes an image of a typical Who’s Who entry, including a recreations section.
6 S : T B Before we move to our analysis, it is important to explain both our choice of empirical case and our conceptualization of elites. Britain represents, we argue, a particularly rich site from which to study changes in elite culture. There are two reasons for this. First, elites in Britain were less bruised than other European elites by the political and economic upheavals of the past two centuries, and this comparative stability lends itself to the kind of longitudinal analy- sis we undertake here (Cannadine 1999; Savage and Williams 2008). Britain’s aristocracy were certainly embattled by piecemeal reform and economic shocks in this period, but they did not face the kind of violent revolutions or wholesale expropriation of elite institutions that so pro- foundly altered elite culture in countries like France and Germany (Cannadine 1999). Instead, the structure of the British elite—in terms of both its occupational makeup and the schools and universities from which it has traditionally recruited its members—stayed remarkably stable over time (Reeves et al. 2017). The British case, then, provides a unique lens on elite cultural change that is far less muddied by abrupt ruptures in the ruling classes or by radical reconfig- urations of elite institutions.
Second, Britain’s colonial past means it has played an outsized role in the development of elite culture in many other national contexts (Lange, Mahoney, and vom Hau 2006). Colo- nial power, in particular, exerted a profound influence on the instantiation and development of elite culture throughout the Commonwealth (Potter 2012). And more widely, British elites have played a key role in the spread of arms-length public arts bodies (e.g., the Arts Council model in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore), the proliferation of now global sports (e.g., cricket and rugby), and the dissemination of particular models of education (e.g., exclusive, fee-paying schools) (Mangan 2013; McDevitt 2004; O’Brien 2013). In this way, understand- ing changes in British elite culture offers important insights into how and why shifts in elite culture may have taken place elsewhere (Dooling 2005; Levine 1988).
W ’ W : A - Although elites are frequently invoked in cultural consumption research, they are rarely prop- erly defined and conceptualized. Across the literature, for example, they are variously oper- ationalized as individuals in high-status occupations (Peterson and Simkus 1992), with ad- vanced levels of education (Coulangeon 2017), or with superior stocks of “capital” (Savage et al, 2013). These definitions are broad, sometimes including up to 10 to 20 percent of national populations, and therefore lack the specificity of definitions formulated by elite theorists (Scott 1991).
In this article, we draw on a tighter theoretical conception of elites that represents a powerful cross-fertilization of particularly “positional” but also “reputational” definitions. Mosca (1939) famously argued that elites are best understood as “ruling minorities,” empowered through re- lations of authority and usually occupying formal top positions in organizational hierarchies (Scott 1997, 2008; see also Mills 1956). Other scholars have argued that elites are more use- fully identified in reputational terms as people thought to be powerful by those “in the know” (Hunter 1953) or as individuals occupying some form of centrality in high-status networks
7 (Ellersgaard, Larsen, and Munk 2013).
We base our analyses on Who’s Who, the leading biographical dictionary of “noteworthy and influential” people in the UK, which has been published in its current form every year since 1897. Who’s Who primarily documents a positional elite: 50 percent of entrants are included automatically upon reaching a prominent occupational position. These positions span multiple professional fields (see Part B of the online supplement for a list of automatic appointment positions). For example, Members of Parliament, peers, judges, ambassadors, FTSE100 CEOs, Poet Laureates, and Fellows of the British Academy are all included by virtue of their office.4
The other 50 percent of entrants are selected each year by a board of long-standing advisors. This part of the selection process is shrouded in mystery and the subject of much media specu- lation (Paxman 2007). Toaddress this, we conducted two interviews (in May 2017 and Novem- ber 2019) with Katy McAdam, Head of Yearbooks at Bloomsbury and coordinator of the selec- tion process. McAdam explained that the selection process is not influenced by politicking and entries cannot be purchased:5 “It’s our job to reflect society, not to try and shape it.” McAdam underscored that advisors make decisions at a series of annual board meetings where they are provided with short biographies of a longlist of potential entrants (compiled by Who’s Who editorial staff) who have recently achieved a noteworthy professional appointment or enjoy sustained prestige, influence, or fame. Each potential entrant is discussed in turn by the board and inclusion is based on a majority vote. Individual board members have the power to veto any single decision if they wish. McAdam declined to provide further information about the board, such as their demographic makeup or average tenure, arguing that “the continued integrity of the publication depends on the total anonymity of the advisory board.” This non-automatic component adds an important “reputational” dimension to the selection process, with Who’s Who making assessments of importance based on a person’s perceived impact on British soci- ety (Part C of the online supplement includes details of the changing occupational makeup of Who’s Who).
Although Who’s Who may make selections based on a mix of positional and reputational grounds, all entrants are then united by inclusion itself, which acts as a marker of consecration in its own right. Indeed, Who’s Who does not simply catalogue individuals who attain particularly promi- nent positions or reputations, but it further adds to this recognition by publicly constructing them as important through their inclusion. In this way, Who’s Who plays a uniquely performa- tive role in reflecting and actively constructing a national British elite that is widely recognized throughout British society. This legitimacy has been demonstrated in a number of ways: the book has long been considered the most valid catalogue of the British elite among elite schol- ars (see, e.g., Kelsall, 1955; Stanworth and Giddens, 1974; Heath, 1981; Griffiths, Miles, and Savage 2008; Kirby 2016; Miles and Savage 2012), new entrants continue to be the subject of widespread national media attention (OUP 2017; Fitzwilliam 2010), and the book’s title has 4Who’s Who also includes hereditary members of the aristocracy (Dukes, Marquesses, Earls, Viscounts, and Baronets). 5In certain countries, including the United States, there are long-standing concerns that some entrants pay for inclusion in Who’s Who (Carlson 1999)
8 passed into everyday parlance as a casual byword for eliteness.6
There are three additional reasons why Who’s Who is a particularly useful source for under- standing elite culture. First, it is the only data source we know of that is both specifically focused on elites and provides data on cultural tastes. Second, the recreations data are un- usual because they are based on a free-text question, where entrants are free to input what- ever they like. This means responses are not limited to the normal seven or eight formal cate- gories of taste or participation normally found on standard surveys, and may include usually- neglected everyday forms of cultural participation (Miles and Gibson 2017). Finally, Who’s Who is unique in that it is very much a public document. In this way, the expression of recre- ations within its pages does not necessarily indicate what elites actually do culturally. Instead, it is more powerful as an expression of how they perform their cultural selves, publicly, and especially to the other elites who most likely read the book (Reeves, Gilbert, and Holman 2015).
M In November 2016, after extensive discussions with Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury Publishing—the two publishing companies producing Who’s Who—we successfully brokered access to all data collected by the publication since it began including full biographical details in 1897.
Who’s Who contains two separate but connected data sources: (1) Who’s Who and (2) Who Was Who. Who’s Who is the current directory of every individual included in the published version of the book. Over time its entrants have consistently represented approximately .05 percent of the UK population (or 1 in every 2,000 people).7 When a person included in Who’s Who passes away, their record is transferred into Who Was Who. We combine these datasets and treat them as one data source, referring to it collectively as Who’s Who. Our analysis focuses on the 71,393 individuals8 who describe their recreations (for details of the changing demographic makeup of Who’s Who, see Part D of the online supplement).
We analyze the recreations9 data using two different methods. First, we used dictionary meth- ods to identify the proportion of people born in a given cohort who reported participating in a particular activity by directly counting the number of times certain terms were reported. To do this, we began, inductively, by focusing on words used more than 100 times across all in- 6Who’s Who is widely used as a noun denoting “a group of the most important people involved in a particular subject or activity.” In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the most prominent synonym for the term is “elite” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/who’s%20who). 7The size of Who’s Who, relative to the UK population, has remained remarkably stable over time. The 1905 edition of Who’s Who had around 16,500 entrants, accounting for about .04 percent of the UK population. Who’s Who has expanded in size over this period, but it still only constitutes about .05 percent of the UK population. 8Nearly 80 percent of current entrants report their recreations but, as discussed in the Results section, this has increased significantly over time. The average age that individuals are included in Who’s Who is 50, but this is only available for the past 30 years. 9It is conceivable that our results could be affected by changes in the meaning of the word “recreation” over time. However, as Part E of the online supplement explores, we find only subtle changes in dictionary definitions of the term over time.
9 dividuals. We then looked at the main trends among these commonly cited terms, identifying three large clusters of recreations, or cultural modes (what we call “aristocratic,” “highbrow,” and “ordinary”) which share similar trajectories across time and accord with historical and sociological literature on elite cultural consumption. As discussed in Part F of the online sup- plement, the vast majority of entrants used at least one of the key words coded in this analysis (for more information on our hand-coding procedure, see Part F of the online supplement).
However, there are several limitations to dictionary methods. First, although our analysis cov- ers a high proportion of all words used, it does not categorize every word used in entries. We may thus overlook patterns in the data that exist beyond our hand-coded categories. Second, dictionary methods may struggle to reveal changes in entrants’ combination of recreations be- cause they ignore the relationship between words. That is, by focusing on “shooting” we may fail to capture how this term is used in relation to other activities, such as “sailing” and “golf,” which together may represent a distinct mode of culture.
To address these issues, we use our second method—a semi-automated content analysis pro- cedure (ReadMe) —to re-examine the trends in how Who’s Who entrants report their recre- ations over time (Hopkins and King 2010). Here we initially hand-coded 600 entries, marking whether respondents reported interests in our aristocratic, highbrow, or ordinary categories. We then recorded all possible combinations of these categories; for example, a respondent may blend highbrow activities (“the arts”) and the everyday (“spending time with my family”). Once completed, we plugged the hand-coded entries into a machine learning algorithm that then read the rest of the entries and calculated the proportion of entries (within a margin of error) in each single or combined category. We validated this method by testing how accurately it es- timated our coding framework. To do this, we hand-coded an additional 600 entries and then used the first set of hand-coded entries to predict the second set. Readme is very successful, predicting the right proportions to within a few percentage points of the hand-coded results. We then again used the first set of hand-coded entries to calculate the proportion of all entries in each category for entrants who turned 20 in a given period in Who’s Who (1850 to 1859, 1860 to 1869, . . . , 1980 to 1989).
This supervised approach addresses some of the problems of dictionary methods, but it still proceeds analytically from the investigator’s own hand-coding of recreational categories. In Part G of the online supplement, we therefore use an unsupervised structural topic model to assess whether similar trends can be observed using a totally undirected approach. The advan- tage of this approach is that it means categories or topics emerge inductively from the corre- lational structure of the data. Reassuringly, the unsupervised topic model mirrors closely the results reported in the next section (for more details, see Part G of the online supplement).
Finally, to provide a more granular analysis of elite musical taste, we combine Who’s Who with another unique historical data source—the archive of Desert Island Discs, a radio show broad- cast on the BBC since 1942 (Brown, Cook, and Cottrell 2017; Dean et al. 2018; Thurman 2012). The format of the show is straightforward. Each week a “castaway”—usually a noteworthy and influential elite person—is asked to choose eight songs or pieces of music they would take with them if they were to be stranded on a desert island. As over 60 percent of the people who have
10 appeared on Desert Island Discs are also in Who’s Who, we are able to merge the two datasets to provide a more granular analysis of the music tastes of around 1,200 Who’s Who entrants.
R T E A E : Our analysis explores the changing recreations of Who’s Who entrants transitioning into adult- hood between 1850 and 1989. We display entrants’ preferences according to the decades in which they turned 20, as we know that people’s cultural tastes tend to mature and stabilize in early adulthood (ter Bogt et al. 2011; Holbrook and Schindler 1989; Smith 1994). As we will show, we see three major shifts in the contents and dominant mode of elite culture over this time period. First, we observe the initial ascendancy but swift decline of what we call “aristo- cratic” culture. As Figure 1 shows, early entrants show a high propensity for hunting, shooting, fishing, sailing, yachting, rowing, horse-related activities (e.g., horse riding, horse racing, polo, dressage, eventing), and golf. This reflects the fact that throughout the nineteenth century “[t]he foundations of elite social life were firmly laid in the country” (Henry 2007:320). Domi- nant groups would congregate at the landscaped estates of the landowning aristocracy and take part in activities like hunting, shooting, and fishing (Cannadine 1999). These activities were also institutionalized via the “Season,”10 a set of regularized events in the elite social calendar that dominated the leisure time of the aristocracy and the landed gentry (Horn 1992; Scott 1991). Participating in the Season required vast economic resources and therefore through- out most of the nineteenth century these economic barriers ensured that aristocratic practices remained the preserve of the traditional landowning elite.
But, as Figure 1 shows, at the turn of the century the dominance of this aristocratic culture began to wane. Two processes are central in understanding this decline. First, American (and to a lesser extent British) industrialists, who had amassed fortunes often surpassing even the wealthiest landowners, gradually began to buy their way into high society. They purchased country estates, rented townhouses in central London, acquired the libraries and art collec- tions of bankrupt aristocrats, and married the children of the landed gentry (Rubinstein 1981). Many traditional landowners certainly complained about these parvenus, dismissing them as “social scum and nouveaux riches” (Cannadine 1999). Yet they lacked the means to prevent their gradual infiltration. For example, the proportion of women from outside the landown- ing classes presented at court11 grew from 10 percent in 1841 to over 50 percent by the end of the nineteenth century, and by 1914 there were 50 American peeresses,12 up from four just a 10The Season began in May with the Royal Military Tournament (shooting) and continued with the Epsom Derby (horse racing), Ascot (horse racing), and the Fourth of June events at Eton (Cricket). In July, there would be Polo at Hurlingham and the Henley Regatta. From August onward, events would move toward the country, with hunting becoming the focus until the Oxford-Cambridge boat race (Scott 1991). 11Young women were presented at court when they reached what was commonly regarded as marriageable age. Only those young women who were nominated by someone who had previously kissed the hand of the King/Queen were eligible, and this occurred when you were presented at court. Nomination was not enough, however, you also had to be regarded as “pure,” and this reflected the social status of the nominee (MacCarthy 2006). 12A peeress is the wife of a peer and therefore a wife of a member of the House of Lords (Scott 1991).
11 Figure 1: The Ascendancy and Decline of Aristocratic Culture
80
70 Crisis in the Aristocracy 60
50 Any Aristocratic tastes 40 Golf 30 Hunt
20 Fishing
10 Sail
Proportion of entrants reporting these recreations Horses 0
1850/1859 1860/1869 1870/1879 1880/1889 1890/1899 1900/1909 1910/1919 1920/1929 1930/1939 1940/1949 1950/1959 1960/1969 1970/1979 1980/1989 Decade in which they turned 20
few decades earlier (Cannadine 1999).
The nouveaux riches entered aristocratic social circles in part because of their superior wealth. But their ascent was also facilitated by a concomitant process of economic decline among the British aristocracy. From the 1880s onward, a series of economic and social shocks weakened the position of the landed elite, leaving them vulnerable to interlopers and making it harder for them to participate in the Season (Horn 1992). In particular, the cost of labor combined with falling agricultural prices left many of the great estates bankrupt, forcing aristocratic families to sell off large sections of their land (Beckett 1986).13 The upwardly mobile only deepened this crisis. Very soon after the “foreign” invasion, for example, the popularity of the Season declined precipitously (Scott 1991). The old elite found the extravagance of the arrivistes distasteful, and many pravenus found aristocratic practices “rigid” and “intolerably stuffy” (Cannadine 1999). A reconfiguration of elite social and cultural life began to take place, with the social and cultural centers of Britain moving from the counties to the cities, and London in particular. 13Between 1876 and 1976, for example, Lord Leconfield sold off 90 percent of his 110,000 acres, and the Earl of Carlisle was left with only 3,000 acres, after previously owning nearly 80,000. These are not anomalies, according to Cannadine (1999). Almost all Britain’s major families suffered under the same economic pressures.
12 Figure 2: The Rise of Highbrow Culture
80
70
60 Any Highbrow taste
50 The rise of the Highbrow
40 Music 30 Hike 20 Read Theatre 10 The Arts Opera Proportion of entrants reporting these recreations 0
1850/1859 1860/1869 1870/1879 1880/1889 1890/1899 1900/1909 1910/1919 1920/1929 1930/1939 1940/1949 1950/1959 1960/1969 1970/1979 1980/1989 Decade in which they turned 20
T R H C : At the turn of the twentieth century, at the same time as the hold of aristocratic culture began to wane, we begin to see in our data the increasing importance of “highbrow” cultural activities. As Figure 2 illustrates, starting around 1920, before slowing down after 1950, we see a marked increase in preferences for theater, classical music,14 literature, opera, and the arts. Alongside these more formal types of cultural participation, we also see a greater proclivity for certain outdoor recreations, such as hiking.
Particularly influential in understanding this shift is a generation born between 1900 and 1929 who were heavily influenced by the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual collective that came to define a new mode of elite culture (Annan 1991; Griffiths et al. 2008; Savage 2010). Many of this new elite cohort were educated at the same institutions as earlier generations, such as elite public schools and Oxbridge, but they were strongly critical of the “philistinism”15 of leisured aristocratic culture, where one “plays cricket, is scratch at golf and has a fine seat on a horse” 14Although music is largely expressed as a generic preference in Who’s Who, follow-up analyses of music taste in Desert Island Discs (as we will detail) reveal that, in this period, entrants’ music tastes were overwhelmingly dominated by classical music. 15This was often expressed in terms of a disdain for middlebrow culture, which was generally (at least implic- itly) connected to the nouveau riche. As Virginia Woolf (1942) said, the middlebrow pursues “rather nastily . . . money, fame, power or prestige” (p. 199).
13 but is also likely to be suspicious of “anyone who knows about art, music or literature” (An- nan 1991). Instead, they embraced a set of emerging high and metropolitan cultural forms— abstract art, theater, and ballet—promulgated by prominent Bloomsberries such as Virginia Woolf,16 D. H. Lawrence, and Roger Fry. As poet Ezra Pound proclaimed in 1918: “the old aristocracies of blood and business are about to be supplanted by the aristocracy of the arts” (Rose 2001:435).
What united these new elite cultural practices was arguably a particular modernist aesthetic premised on a “disinterested” privileging of artistic form over emotional function (Kant 1987 [1790]). Highly influential in disseminating this was the philosopher G. E. Moore (1903) and particularly his book Principia Ethica. Moore emphasized the importance of “beauty” in prop- erly realizing “the good life,” and came to have a profound influence on the Bloomsberries and other tastemakers (Skidelsky 2013). However, the Bloomsberries were not snobs in the classic exclusionary sense. In fact, their vision was that elite culture should play a “civilizing” role in society. They believed art had the ability to change the human character, but to do so, to bring about human flourishing, people needed to adopt the “right” kind of stance. Under the influ- ence of Moore’s work, the Bloomsberries and others began to institutionalize this vision. In particular, they had an enormous influence on the ethos of a number of emerging cultural insti- tutions. For example, one of the most prominent Bloomsberries, the economist John Maynard Keynes, was the first head of what is now known as the Arts Council (the main public body responsible for administering state funding to the arts). In this role, Keynes reduced support for local cultural activities and argued stridently that “it was standards that mattered” when it came to the state-sponsored promotion of culture17 (Mulgan 1996; Skidelsky 2013).
The influence of the Bloomsberries can also be seen in the early ethos of the BBC, and particu- larly its first director, John Reith. Reith explicitly rejected the lowbrow populism of American broadcasting and instead, like Keynes, turned his focus to “standards.” He aired classical music, theater, poetry,18 and elite sports, while shunning football, and argued that the BBC’s core mis- sion should be to share “all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement” (Potter 2012:23; see also Mulgan 1996).
This belief in the civilizing force of high culture also informed efforts to standardize educa- tional curricula. By 1950, for example, students were required to pass a humanities subject to receive their School Certificate (the first generalized, pre-university qualification). The hu- manities had long been valued in elite schools, but this formalised and expanded the impor- tance of certain subjects, such as English literature and History of Art, and in so doing explicitly connected knowledge of high culture to educational attainment (Elliott 2011; Hewison 1995). 16Virginia Woolf (1942) outlined the stratification of “brows.” At the top is the “highbrow,” “he is a man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea” (p. 196). At the bottom, conversely, “lowbrow is of course a man or woman of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life” (p. 197). 17As a later Chairman of the Arts Council, Lord Goodman, remarked, “a dose of culture could turn hooligans into citizens” (Mulgan 1996: 207). 18Key here was the BBC’s Third Programme (1946 to 1967), which broadcast for six hours every evening on BBC Radio and was dedicated to disseminating the highbrow arts (Annan 1991; Rose 2001).
14 Figure 3: The Rise of Popular and Everyday Recreations
80
70
60 Threats to the Highbrow and the rise of the Popular/Everyday 50
40 Highbrow tastes only 30
20
10 Any Popular or Everyday activity
0 Proportion of entrants reporting these recreations
1850/1859 1860/1869 1870/1879 1880/1889 1890/1899 1900/1909 1910/1919 1920/1929 1930/1939 1940/1949 1950/1959 1960/1969 1970/1979 1980/1989 Decade in which they turned 20
Football Cinema Relationships Friends Pets
One further striking finding emerges from this highbrow period. Among Who’s Who entrants who turned 20 between 1900 and 1950, the propensity to report one’s recreations increased dramatically, from around 40 percent to about 80 percent of entrants.19 Clearly, as the institu- tionalization of highbrow culture gathered pace, so too did the propensity of elites to express their own, increasingly highbrow, tastes in public.20
T D D R E O , P Although highbrow tastes and recreations appear to dominate elite culture in the early to mid- dle part of the twentieth century, our data also show an intriguing break in their supremacy in the 1950s and 1960s. Figure 3, for example, shows that the proportion of entrants who expressed only highbrow recreations began to fall in the 1950s. 19This rise is not merely an artefact of the changing composition of Who’s Who. As explained in Part H of the online supplement, a detailed matching analysis comparing people born in different periods but who were otherwise similar (i.e., they were the same sex, attended the same school and university, came from similar family backgrounds, and worked in the same field) still shows a significant difference in likelihood to volunteer recre- ational information over time. 20This trend is illustrated in Part H of the online supplement.
15 Historical accounts emphasize several factors in understanding this decline, including shifts within the cultural and creative industries that initially challenged the disinterested aesthetic and later legitimized certain popular cultural forms (Bauman 2007; Featherstone 2007; Lena 2019; Peterson and Kern 1996; Regev 1994);21 generational value change that precipitated a decline in snobbery and deference to elites22 (Morgan 2018; Savage et al. 2015; Sayer 2015); and the emergence of a managerial culture where access to a broad cultural repertoire func- tioned as a key management tool23 (DiMaggio 1987; Lizardo 2006; Scott 1991). Certainly, the decline coincided with important shifts within many of the institutions that had previously been so instrumental in generating belief in the supremacy of highbrow culture. The BBC, for example, and to a lesser extent the Arts Council, began to change aesthetic course, increasingly promoting, programming, and funding more popular cultural content (Hewison 1995).
Yet Figure 3 not only details a move away from the dominance of highbrow culture, it also shows, from the 1950s onward, a rise in preferences for more “popular” cultural forms, such as football and cinema, and ordinary or everyday cultural practices, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets. These ordinary recreations may not be superseding more conven- tional elite pursuits (with the exception of relationships, they are not challenging highbrow ac- tivities in terms of popularity), but their significance to our analysis is rooted more in their inte- gration with traditionally dominant modes of elite culture. Figure 4, using the semi-automated content analysis described in the Methods section, shows how emerging modes increasingly involved retaining a penchant for more traditional forms of elite culture and, at the same time, combining these with more popular and ordinary forms. The British elite, in other words, appears to have become increasingly omnivorous over the past 50 years. 21Postmodern, pop art, and, in a British context, social realist movements began to question disinterestedness, instead championing a more playful or socially engaged aesthetic (Featherstone 2007; Hanquinet et al. 2014; Huyssen 1986; Lena 2019). At the same time, the legitimacy of previously lowbrow art forms such as cinema and rock music began to grow. Emerging cultural intermediaries worked to define and consecrate objects and artists and establish an intellectualizing discourse that allowed emerging generations of elites to adopt an aestheticized appreciation (Bauman 2007; Lena 2019; Regev 1994). 22The Nazi brutalities of WWII initiated a widespread reappraisal of multiple forms of group prejudice, and in this context the classist connotations of highbrow cultural snobbery became increasingly taboo (Hewison 1995; Morgan 2018; Savage et al. 2015; Sayer 2015). New generations of elites were keen to differentiate themselves from the elitism and prejudice of their parents’ generation and instead espoused, at least in public, a more inclusive cultural ethos (Lena 2019). There was also a broader opening up of class boundaries, with significant increases in cross-class marriages (Henz and Mills 2018), absolute upward mobility (Goldthorpe 1987), and access to elite occupations (Heath 1981). 23The post-war period saw the rise of large bureaucratic organizations across the public and private sectors (Freeguard et al. 2017). Who’s Who entrants coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s increasingly reached elite positions by rising up the managerial ranks, rather than via the accelerated old-boy pathways associated with earlier periods (Scott 1991). Such middle-managerial roles required new skills, particularly the capacity to build relationships with staff at different rungs of the organizational hierarchy. In this context, a more omnivorous taste palette functioned as an important management tool. Highbrow tastes may aid and strengthen relationships with senior staff, who are often from privileged backgrounds, but popular tastes provide an important interactional device—“fodder for least common denominator talk” (DiMaggio 1987)—for making “bridging” social ties with lower-tier staff from less privileged backgrounds (Erickson 1996; Lizardo 2006).
16 Figure 4: The Rise of the Elite Omnivore
50 Aristocratic only Highbrow only
40 Popular/Everyday & Highbrow
30 Aristocratic, Aristocratic & Highbrow & Highbrow Popular/ 20 Everyday
Popular/ Everyday 10 only Proportion of the entrants in Who's Who
0
1820-1869 1870-1879 1880-1889 1890-1899 1900-1909 1910-1919 1920-1929 1930-1939 1940-1949 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1999 Decade in which they turned 20
Notes: These estimates were calculated using ReadMe after both authors hand-coded 600 responses. The solid black line with hollow circles at the bottom of the graph is the proportion of people who reported participating in ambiguous activities, such as gardening. The dashed grey line with + signs measures the combination of the aristocratic and the ordinary, but this never really reaches above 10 percent of responses.
U E O The question, of course, is what does this omnivorousness mean for contemporary debates about elite distinction? Although this is difficult to definitively answer with quantitative data, the unique nature of the way recreations are expressed in Who’s Who can provide some clues. In particular, many people in Who’s Who choose to report their recreations in ways that go be- yond simply listing types of recreations: they actively “play with form” of their entry, describ- ing their interests in a knowing, humorous, or slightly ironic way. Salient examples include “sailing, opera, gardening, perfecting espresso coffee” (Professor Azriel Zuckerman, academic), “applying Wittgenstein” (Anthony Ash, senior civil servant), “tennis, guitar, cycling, skipping, herb-surfing, dendron-leaping, portacenare” (Richard Addis, journalist), “loud music, strong cider” (Jonathan Ashley-Smith, senior civil servant), and simply “[the] usual” (Admiral Sir Ed- ward Ashmore, Chief of Naval Staff). Such entries represent subtle acts of distinction, with entrants demonstrating their aesthetic confidence to knowingly play with form. In Figure 5, using the same semi-automated content analysis described earlier, we estimate the proportion
17 Figure 5: The Rise of Who’s Who Entrants “Playing with Form” in the Recreations Entry
40
30 Threats to the Highbrow and the rise of the Popular/Everyday
20
10 Proportion of the entrants in Who's Who
0
1870-1879 1880-1889 1890-1899 1900-1909 1910-1919 1920-1929 1930-1939 1940-1949 1950-1959 1960-1969 1970-1979 1980-1999 Decade in which they turned 20
Notes: These estimates were calculated using ReadMe after both authors hand-coded 600 responses. of people in each cohort expressing their recreations in this way over time. Strikingly, such playing with form is largely nonexistent among entrants who came of age before the 1950s, but in more recent cohorts it has become far more common.
Although significant, this practice is only ever evident among a minority of Who’s Who en- trants; the reporting norm remains whole art forms or cultural practices. This makes analysis of omnivorousness difficult. Many cultural forms, such as music , are ambiguous and need further specification to interpret in terms of legitimacy. To address this, we merge Who’s Who with data from Desert Island Discs (described in the Methods section) to provide a more gran- ular analysis of the music tastes of 1,200 Who’s Who entrants. Two findings emerge.
First, we code artists into genres and examine how the songs played on Desert Island Discs changed over time and by birth cohort. This genre-based analysis echoes the trend toward omnivorousness shown in Figure 4. Specifically, the vast majority of entrants play at least one piece of highbrow classical music, but the percentage who play classical music and tracks from less legitimate genres, such as pop, rock, folk, electronic, world, and country, grows signifi- cantly over time. For example, among entrants who turned 20 between 1896 and 1939, 10 percent combined classical music with other genres. In contrast, among entrants who turned
18 20 after the 1960s, over 40 percent combined tracks from classical and more popular genres.
Second, we go further to examine the legitimacy of the popular music being played. Specifi- cally, we examined the critical-acclaim of musical artists by analyzing their average score on the music website, Metacritic, which aggregates reviews of albums. Figure 6 shows that the artists played by Who’s Who entrants are consistently more legitimate, in terms of their mean Meta- critic score, than the average musical artist.24 Indeed, they are consistently in the top quartile. This indicates that although contemporary elites may be increasingly integrating popular cul- tural forms into their cultural repertoires, the individual artists they prefer still tilt toward the legitimate and consecrated.
The omnivorousness we identify may be partly explained by elites adopting tastes for more legitimate popular artists. However, it is important to recall that many of the non-highbrow recreations that emerge in Figure 3 are not forms of conventional cultural consumption. In fact, most are more ordinary or everyday forms of cultural participation, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets, that are not normally considered in debates about cultural omnivorousness (Miles and Gibson 2017). It is also striking that among the most recent en- trants to Who’s Who it is these everyday recreations that are rising most significantly, and much faster than tastes for popular culture. Figure 7 unpacks this rise to look at the role of both co- hort and period effects. Two patterns emerge. Younger cohorts are far more likely than older cohorts to report these everyday recreations, but such reporting increases for all cohorts over time—particularly among entrants who were added to Who’s Who after 2000. This suggests the rising expression of these distinctly ordinary recreations is not just about the generation in which elites grew up, but also the distinct period in which they enter Who’s Who and are asked to present their cultural selves in this very public way. Our results thus point to an intriguing period effect in the foregrounding of ordinariness that affects all entrants to Who’s Who from the 1990s onward.25
L R C It is important to acknowledge that our results raise a number of theoretical and methodolog- ical questions that our data do not allow us to fully address. First, we lack systematically col- lected data that would allow us to compare the recreations of Who’s Who entrants to the wider 24There are limitations of using Metacritic to judge critical legitimacy. The aggregation of reviews is only available for reviews posted online, and this influences scores in various ways. First, it means we likely underes- timate the critical legitimacy of many artists, such as the Beatles and Bob Dylan, whose earlier acclaimed albums do not have a score. Instead, these artists’ scores are based on their more recent albums, which are often reviewed less favorably. Second, Metacritic only allows us to see the critical legitimacy of artists in the present rather than their legitimacy when entrants on Desert Island Discs were playing their works. This may upwardly bias artists who experienced a significant lag between releasing early albums and receiving acclaim for them (e.g., Radiohead, Velvet Underground, and The Stone Roses). However, this concern is mitigated by the absence of Metacritic scores for most such earlier albums. In short, although Metacritic may not be an ideal source for assessing the temporality of critical legitimacy, it likely provides a conservative estimate of the legitimacy of artists played on Desert Island Discs. 25Significantly, this trend does not appear to reflect wider shifts in the UK. For example, time-use research conducted in Britain over a similar period illustrates that UK residents are generally not spending more time with friends and family than in the past (Gershuny and Sullivan 2019).
19 Figure 6: The Critical Acclaim of Music Chosen by Who’s Who Entrants Appearing on Desert Island Discs
90
80 75th percentile of scores
70 Average Metacritic Score
60 Desert Island Discs
50 Average Metacritic score of artists played on 40
1951/1975 1976/1990 1991/2004 2006/2017 Date of interview for Desert Island Discs
Notes: The average Metacritic scores were collected by hand and represent the average rating across all of an artist’s albums.
UK population, or to see how this relationship may have changed over time. This has clear implications for discussions about elite distinction, which rest on both the demonstration of class-structured differences in lifestyle as well as evidence that lower social classes emulate, or recognize the value of, elite tastes.
Although data on cultural consumption in the UK before the start of the twenty-first century are rare, here we draw on two studies—carried out at the beginning (Mass Observation 1939) and the end (Young and Willmott 1973) of our second “highbrow” stage of elite culture—to partially address these issues.26 We then compare these early analyses with two datasets from our third period: Bennett and colleagues’ (2009) mixed-methods study of class and culture and official statistics collected as part of the Taking-Part Survey (Reeves 2015). As Figure 8 shows, throughout much of the twentieth century clear differences exist between the cultural 26The first study, carried out by the social research organization Mass Observation in 1939, asked 379 respon- dents a series of open-ended questions about class, including their views on their own and others’ recreations (Hinton 2008). The second study was part of Young and Willmott’s (1973) classic analysis of “The Symmetrical Family.”
20 Figure 7: The Rise of Everyday Recreations since 1986
30
Turned 20 after 1979
20 Turned 20 between 1970-1979
Turned 20 between 1960-1969
10 Turned 20 between 1950-1959 friends, or pets as recreations
Turned 20 before 1950 Proportion of entrants reporting relationships, 0
1986/1900 1991/1995 1996/2000 2001/2005 2006/2010 2011/2017 Year first added to Who's Who
Notes: The year Who’s Who entrants were added to the volume is only available for individuals added after 1986.
preferences of Who’s Who entrants and other social class groups. In particular, highbrow taste was far more prevalent in Who’s Who than in other groups, including even the professional middle classes (a finding also confirmed by Bennett et al. 2009:251–3).27
The second limitation of our results concerns the possible gap between what elites say they do in a public document like Who’s Who and what they actually do in practice (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). For example, Holmqvist’s (2017) ethnographic work confirms that elites of- ten publicly emphasize investment in friends and family, yet in practice actually spend less time cultivating such relationships, due to busy work schedules and reliance on paid childcare. However, we should reiterate that our primary focus is not so much changes in elite cultural practice but changes in elite cultural distinction; in other words, how elites deploy their recre- ations in public to signal social position or, in this case, moral legitimacy. In this regard, we 27The qualitative components of Mass Observation’s and Bennett and colleagues’ studies also reveal an inter- esting shift in attitudes. For example, Hinton (2008) demonstrates that in 1939 a clear reverence for highbrow culture pervaded narratives across the class spectrum. By 2005, such popular belief in the value of highbrow culture had clearly declined substantially. Bennett and colleagues’ (2009:252–3) interviews indicate that famil- iarity with high culture is still strongly valued by the upper-middle classes, but they argue that it is “not obviously recognised elsewhere.”
21 Figure 8: Elite Highbrow Consumption Compared to Other Social Class Groups
80 Proportion of entrants 70 from Who's Who reporting highbrow recreations 60 Professional in 2005
50
40 Routine non-manual in 2005
30
Routine manual 20 Professional in 1970
reporting Highbrow activities in 2005 Proportion of different samples 10 Routine non-manual in 1970
0 Routine manual in 1970
1850/18591860/18691870/18791880/18891890/18991900/19091910/19191920/19291930/19391940/19491950/19591960/19691970/19791980/19891990/19992000/2006 Decade in which they turned 20
Notes: The solid line is taken from Figure 2 and captures the proportion of people in Who’s Who who reported participating in highbrow culture. The dark gray lines are the proportion of people in each social class/cohort combination in the 1970 London survey (n = 1,928) conducted by Young and Willmott that reported their “best” recreation activity as something highbrow (e.g., theater, painting, or sculpture). The light gray lines are the pro- portion of people in each social class/cohort combination in the 2005 Taking-Part Survey (n = 28,117) conducted by the Arts Council that reported consuming highbrow activities (e.g., art exhibitions, theater, opera). believe the public-facing dimension of Who’s Who provides unique insights into the perfor- mative dimension of distinction.
Normally, performative or interactional aspects of distinction are thought to be best tapped using ethnographic methods (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). Yet ethnographic observations tend to be rooted in specific sets of interactions between particular people located in particular set- tings (see, e.g., Khan 2011). What distinguishes our data is that elites are communicating their cultural tastes not to specific interlocutors, with all the contextual idiosyncrasies that flank such interactions, but to an audience of generalized others. This context, we argue, provides an important vantage point from which to understand elite distinction as a communicative process. Specifically, it may compel elites to foreground their “honorable” (Pugh 2013) cul- tural selves, that is, to curate their recreations in such a way that presents them in an admirable
22 light or “which incorporate and exemplify the official accredited values” (Goffman 1959:19).28
A third limitation of our analysis is that its focus on all entrants runs the risk of masking recre- ational heterogeneity within the British elite. Yet, as we explore in Part I of the online sup- plement, there is a surprising degree of homogeneity across potentially important subsamples. For example, we find only very small differences in cultural practice between individuals who enter Who’s Who by virtue of their position and those who enter through the selection panel, or between those who attended an elite private school and those who did not. There are, how- ever, potentially important differences by occupation. For example, members of the military are consistently more likely to participate in aristocratic practices, whereas people from the cultural industries are much more likely to participate in highbrow activities. Importantly, however, although there are occupational differences in the popularity of cultural modes, the patterns of change between these modes are similar across all fields. Finally, we also see im- portant differences between men and women. Women in earlier cohorts were far less likely to participate in aristocratic activities but were far more likely to participate in highbrow ac- tivities. Men eventually catch up with women, but this suggests women may have acted as first-movers in terms of the highbrow mode.29
These distinct patterns of cultural practice among certain social groups suggest that the rise and fall of different modes of elite culture may be connected to changes in the social compo- sition of Who’s Who. We examine this in Part J of the online supplement. First, we conducted a matching analysis, using coarsened exact matching, to identify a subset of people in Who’s Who that possess a similar set of characteristics across different cohorts; we then reweighted these matched groups to smooth differences in the size of the groups over time. Following the patterns of heterogeneity mentioned earlier, we matched on gender, social origin occupation, selection type, and a range of other variables (for more details, see Part J of the online supple- ment). Second, we conducted a counterfactual analysis that focuses more precisely on changes in occupational structure by estimating what the recreations of those in Who’s Who would have been had the amount of entrants from different occupational fields remained unchanged (see Part C of the online supplement). Reassuringly, both the matching and counterfactual analyses indicate that accounting for changes in the composition of Who’s Who over time leads to only very minor differences in our results.
Finally, Who’s Who only details entrants’ recreations in the last year they provided data, and therefore it may neglect changes in taste that occurred over the life course. To partially address this uncertainty, we explore the degree to which recreation entries changed over time by hand- coding the recreations data for 1,761 records that were included in both the 1988 and 2016 28There remain limits to our understanding of how elites curate their cultural identities in public. For example, it is impossible to know the demographic coordinates of the audience for Who’s Who. Similarly, our results also raise questions about what aspects of cultural identity may be withheld in such public declarations, particularly the more visceral sentiments of judgment that elites often express in less public settings (Jarness and Friedman 2017; Pugh 2013). 29These results should be viewed with some caution, however, because the women included in this earlier period were often skewed to particular occupational fields, such as literature, and may not be representative of other elite women in the period whose occupational positions would later guarantee entry.
23 versions of Who’s Who. As shown in Part K of the online supplement, there is little change in the recreations reported by individuals over time, suggesting tastes largely stabilize by this point in the life course, and so any bias introduced by this aspect of the data is negligible.30
D In this study, we have used a combination of dictionary methods and computational text anal- ysis to examine patterns of elite cultural consumption over time. These methods are not un- usual in sociology, but they have only rarely been used to analyze historical sources containing unstructured text. In this way, we hope our analysis may act as a blueprint for researchers in- terested in interrogating the multitude of other unstructured historical documents where elites may have left distinct textual traces (Khan 2012b). We believe such methodological tools may also be useful to cultural consumption scholars, who have hitherto largely relied on survey or interview data to uncover patterns of practice. Here we hope our use of Who’s Who illustrates the gains that flow from investigating more fine-grained sources that are now more accessible in the digital era. Not only can such sources help fill empirical gaps in our understanding of the tastes of specific groups, such as elites, but they may also begin to shed light, as we do here, on the elusive but pivotal “display” dimensions of cultural distinction.
Our results reveal three distinct stages of elite culture in the UK over the past 120 years. First, we see a dominant mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates (e.g., shooting, hunting, horse riding, polo, sailing), but which waned signif- icantly in the late nineteenth century. Second, we find a highbrow culture dominated by the fine arts (opera, classical music, theater, literature) that increased sharply in the early twen- tieth century before beginning to gently recede in the most recent cohorts. Third, we find a contemporary mode increasingly characterized by the blending of aristocratic and particularly highbrow pursuits with more everyday forms of cultural participation. These shifts not only suggest important changes in the nature and content of elite culture but they also chart, as we go on to argue here, important shifts in the nature of elite distinction.
W H M E D Two theoretical concepts dominate sociological analysis of elite distinction; emulation and (mis)recognition. In this article, rather than adjudicate between these approaches, we show that both have operated in the UK context. To understand this we argue that history is key. Al- though both concepts were purported, by their architects Veblen and Bourdieu, to transcend time and space, our analysis indicates that their capacity to explain the sociological signifi- cance of elite recreations in a UK context depends very clearly on the temporal period being examined.
At the end of the nineteenth century, when our analysis begins, elites exercised distinction via 30It is also worth acknowledging that the semi-automated method used to estimate the proportion of entrants who play with the form may contain some measurement error. The algorithmic procedures underlying these estimates are, unsurprisingly, limited in their capacity to capture the subtleties of irony and humor.
24 the practice of an overtly aristocratic mode. Key to this was the scarcity of such recreations, whereby strong economic barriers to entry endowed activities like hunting or polo with a sense of rarity that set elites apart and acted as grounds on which they enacted social closure. At the same time, notions of ascribed class position prevailed in Britain, with the aristocratic elite enjoying a widespread, although not complete, deference in the eyes of other social groups31 (Cannadine 1999; Scott 1991). Entry to elite circles in the first period of our analysis, then, largely rested on what Veblen called “pecuniary emulation,” that is, one’s economic capacity to take part in, and ape, the cultural practices of existing elites. Yet this model of elite distinc- tion, premised on exclusivity and deference, was threatened by the wide-scale influx of nou- veau riche industrialists at the end of the nineteenth century. Many traditional landowners resented these parvenus, but there was no formal way to exclude them. Economic capital was the only real barrier to entry, and with the landed estates increasingly struggling economically, the old aristocratic elite lacked the economic means to enact the kind of “invidious distinction” documented by Veblen in the nineteenth-century United States.
What followed this decline was not just a new elite culture but also a new mode of elite distinc- tion. To understand the strong rise in preferences for high culture in the early twentieth cen- tury, it is thus imperative to consider the processes of legitimation, institutionalization, and ul- timately (mis)recognition that flanked the adoption of this highbrow mode (Levine 1988). This is not to say there was not some (mis)recognition of aristocratic culture, or that highbrow cul- ture did not feature at all in the lifestyles of earlier elites. But what is distinct about this period were the concerted efforts of a distinct set of elites, operating in the fields of politics, education, and the cultural industries, who not only acted as early adopters and first movers32 in relation to this new, more joined-up, highbrow cultural repertoire but were also central in institution- alizing its value,33 establishing the Arts Council (Upchurch 2004),34 consecrating high culture through the education system,35 and acting as tastemaking cultural intermediaries36—critics, 31Although we do not have primary empirical data demonstrating that lower social groups emulated elite cul- ture, it is a reoccurring theme in a range of historical sources (Annan 1991; Cannadine 1999; McKibbin 2000; Scott 1991). Note, too, that notions of deference were augmented by tabloid media preoccupations with docu- menting and glamorizing “the Season” (McKibbin 2000). 32If the rise of cultural institutions, such as the BBC, school curricula, universities, and the Arts Council, were crucial in the dissemination of this new highbrow mode, we would expect there to be especially high levels of highbrow practice among individuals working in the education and culture sectors. This is what we see in Part L of the online supplement. These “cultural leaders” have a much higher likelihood of expressing highbrow prefer- ences and, at least to some extent, acted as early adopters. For example, individuals born in the 1880s and 1890s (like Keynes, born 1883) adopted highbrow practices much more rapidly than other elites, who subsequently re- sponded by following suit in later 1890 to 1920 cohorts. 33Ideas about the curative power of high culture were more actively institutionalized during this period, but they already had a long history, dating back to the creation of the British Museum and the 1845 Libraries Act. 34As Mulgan (1996:197) notes, the aim for architects of cultural policy in the 1930s and 1940s was to “wean the public away” from popular culture and “widen their horizons” through high culture. 35Here arts and humanities subjects, such as English literature, music, drama, and art history, not only pro- moted high-art forms to the general population, but they more generally encouraged students to use the critical aesthetic lens of disinterestedness. 36The art critic, Roger Fry, for example, was a key tastemaker. In 1910, Fry organized an exhibition titled “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” bringing together Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, and Van Gogh (Annan 1991). So important was the exhibition that Virginia Woolf later proclaimed: “On or about December 1910 human character changed.”
25 journalists, publishers, scouts, agents, marketers, and so on—invested with the ability, through newspaper reviews and awards, to control the public discourse on culture (English 2008).37
The point to underline here is that together these agents of legitimation were successful in producing an unprecedented (mis)recognition of the inherent value of highbrow elite culture.38 It is also telling that this move toward a distinctly highbrow elite culture dovetailed with a marked increase in the proclivity of elites to report their recreations in Who’s Who. As the legitimacy of elite culture grew, it became more important to the way elites presented their biographies in public.
By combining our results with a range of historical sources it is therefore possible to discern elite distinction based on both emulation and (mis)recognition at different points in recent Britain history. It is also worth noting that the periods in which each of these models dominated coincide with the periods in which Veblen and Bourdieu staged their own interventions. In this way, our analysis not only underlines the importance of history for understanding elite distinction, but it more broadly stresses the importance of considering the historical context from which theoretical concepts emerge.
T C T “O ” E D Although we find evidence of both emulation and (mis)recognition at different points in the twentieth century, which is more useful for understanding the contemporary recreations of the British elite? Here we would begin by acknowledging that we detect at least a residue of both theoretical modes today. For example, aristocratic recreations continue to be practiced by nearly 40 percent of current Who’s Who entrants (see Figure 1), and an enduring nostalgia and reverence for the leisured aristocracy, and the attendant “gentry aesthetic,” remains strong in sections of the British population (Smith 2016).
Having said this, we would argue that (mis)recognition remains the more useful of the two models for understanding contemporary modes of elite distinction. At first glance this may seem at odds with our findings, particularly the gentle decline in highbrow recreations we observe among individuals coming of age from the 1950s onward, and the concomitant rise in more popular and everyday forms of cultural participation. This of course connects strongly with a wider literature on the rise of the “cultural omnivore” (Peterson and Kern 1996; Peterson and Simkus 1992) and the argument that such eclecticism threatens Bourdieusian processes of (mis)recognition (Chan 2019; Erickson 1996; Warde and Gayo-Cal 2009). 37In Part M of the online supplement, we explore the articles in the review sections of major British news- papers (i.e., Financial Times, The Times, The Economist, and the Telegraph) over time, and the proportion of these articles that cover highbrow culture (e.g., theater, opera) and popular culture (e.g., comedy, television). The size of review sections increases fairly steadily throughout the twentieth century, except during WWI and WWII, but the cultural forms covered changes. Initially, the review section is dominated by highbrow culture, but from the 1950s forward we see the rise of more popular forms (Purhonen et al. 2018). These data broadly reflect the general trend we see in the Who’s Who data. 38See note 27 and Hinton (2008), which demonstrates a clear reverence for highbrow culture pervaded nar- ratives across the class spectrum in 1939.
26 Yet many other scholars have refuted that the cultural omnivore is constitutive of a pluralist shift in cultural consumption. As Lizardo and Skiles (2012) forcefully argue, omnivorous con- sumption of popular culture is entirely compatible with a Bourdieusian framework, as in most cases the actual mode of consumption simply represents the transposability of the aesthetic dis- position to cultural objects not originally produced with an aesthetic intention (see also Jarness 2015), or a highly selective consumption of “quality” popular culture (Bauman 2007; Entwistle and Rocamora 2006; Johnston and Baumann 2009; Kuipers 2015; Regev 1994; Skeggs et al. 2008).
One theme that emerges from this literature, however, is that the aesthetic mode of cultural distinction may be changing. Whereas the traditional aesthetic disposition—notably through the model of the Kantian aesthetic—celebrates withdrawal, distance, and discernment, and classically places audiences in a relatively passive and distant position, emerging modes of consuming popular culture often use a more performative, knowing expression of cultural aptitude—an aesthetic of engagement, exhibition, and ease rather than absorption and intro- spection (Hanquinet et al. 2014). (Mis)recognition, in other words, may still be taking place, but it now rests on conceptions of legitimacy that have been extended to many popular cultural objects and artists, and new “ways of seeing.”
Our results compel us more toward this interpretation. In particular, we see the apparent om- nivorousness of elites not so much as evidence of the dissolution of cultural boundaries but of two quite different processes. First, we see evidence of the kind of “knowing” orientation to culture. As Figure 5 shows, we see a marked increase in the number of entrants “playing with the form” of the recreations’ entry, using humor and wordplay. This may partly reflect broader cultural shifts toward self-expression and individualism (Buchmann and Eisner 1997; De Keere 2014), but we read it more as an example of the transposal of the aesthetic disposition—a self-conscious and knowing attempt to distance oneself from highbrow modes of distinction- signaling, yet still conducted to showcase a certain aesthetic ease (Khan 2011). Second, we find that legitimacy still plays an important role in understanding the popular preferences of elites. By connecting Who’s Who entrants to their more granular musical preferences, as expressed on Desert Island Discs, we see that their tastes are significantly more consecrated than the average pop artist. This suggests further support for the argument that contemporary elites continue to pursue distinction via careful expression of the “right” cultural tastes.
Yet although we interpret contemporary British elites as distinction-seeking, we also follow the recent work of Hahl and colleagues (2017) in arguing that contemporary expressions of elite cultural identity fulfill another function: authenticity-seeking. Hahl and colleagues make this argument in relation to elite cultural tastes that are not necessarily legitimate but are con- sidered to be produced with an intrinsic, and therefore authentic, motivation. We extend this beyond popular culture to show its relevance to a wider set of everyday cultural preferences— most notably spending time with friends, family, and pets. Such everyday cultural participation is almost always absent from cultural consumption survey data, yet as illustrated in Sherman’s (2017) ethnographic work, it is pivotal to provide a richer, more complete understanding of elite lifestyles (or, in this case, how elites wish to present them in public).
27 The everyday recreations we identify here also share important properties with the popular culture analyzed by Hahl and colleagues (2017). In particular, they are activities widely per- ceived to be prosocial, pursued for intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards, and not associated with the highbrow aesthetics synonymous with Bourdieusian processes of (mis)recognition. We thus argue that elites’ increasing proclivity to register these everyday recreations in public represents another means through which they seek to establish their authenticity, normality, and ordinariness (Savage et al. 2015; Sherman 2018), and ward off moral suspicions that their highbrow or aristocratic tastes may position them as snobbish, status-seeking, and aloof.39
We would thus summarize the contemporary mode of “ordinary elite distinction” in the fol- lowing way. First, it relies on the public display of some cultural forms, objects, artists, or recreations that are misrecognized as legitimate. However, such legitimate preferences are rarely articulated in isolation. In fact, they are knowingly positioned alongside more everyday cultural practices that are largely unrelated to hierarchies of legitimacy. This combination, however, is distinct from dominant interpretations of cultural omnivorousness, which tend to posit such blending as indicating either a dissolution of cultural boundaries or the trans- posal of the aesthetic disposition. Instead, we argue that the expression of everyday cultural preferences performs an important signaling function for elites. This is partly, as Hahl and col- leagues (2017), Ljunggren (2017) and Sherman (2017) note, about establishing individual moral worth and plugging an authenticity-insecurity that elites feel vis a vis the wider public. Yet we would extend this to argue that the pursuit of such authenticity is still ultimately connected to securing distinction. As many studies demonstrate, non-elites, and working-class groups in particular, often distinguish between elites whom they see as “decent” and “accommodating towards others” and elites they see as “snobbish” and “look down on others,” with the former clearly valued over the latter (Friedman 2014; Jarness 2015; McKenzie 2015).
It is thus not so much that elites are viewed with suspicion because they are elite; rather, it is their perceived smugness, elitism, and contemptuousness that rouses negative reactions. In this way, it is possible to see the public expression of everyday preferences as a means of accentuat- ing cultural connection and ordinariness while retaining the cultural differences traditionally tied to elite distinction. In other words, the careful manufacture of ordinary self-presentation is effective in securing distinction because it means actual cultural boundaries between elites and others—as well as the potential privileges and advantages that accrue from practicing lifestyles that continue to be misrecognized as legitimate—are not questioned, as individuals in lower class positions no longer see the highbrow elements of the elite taste palette as status-seeking (Jarness and Friedman 2017). This is what Bourdieu (1991:68) called ‘strategies of condescen- sion’: in downplaying difference, elites can “derive profit from the objective relations of power” in the very act of obfuscating the relation.
One additional point is worth making. Our analysis indicates that the rise of ordinary elite distinction—marked by the twin pursuits of distinction and ordinariness—is most clear cut 39Sherman (2017:92–96) terms this the “cultural logic of legitimate entitlement,” that is, elites downplay os- tentatious public displays of eliteness and instead emphasize investment in family and domesticity to establish a connection to the ordinary and normal habits of the middle-class.
28 from the 1990s onward. This coincides neatly with the pulling away of the top 1 percent of the income distribution in Britain, which continued to rise following the more general increase in inequality through the 1980s (Piketty 2014). Of course, this is only an association and it is unlikely that all entrants in Who’s Who are members of the 1 percent. Yet we would speculate that these patterns may be plausibly connected. Put simply, as elites have pulled away econom- ically from other social groups, there is evidence that they have become increasingly insecure about their moral legitimacy, and increasingly sensitive to public concern that they are only motivated by extrinsic rewards (Hecht 2017; Sherman 2018). In this context, the connotations of ordinariness that accompany practices such as spending time with family, friends, and pets may act as an effective means to shore up moral legitimacy and signal authenticity in an era of rising inequality.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Dave O’Brien, Maren Toft, Charles Ra- hal, and Mike Savage for their useful comments on early drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank Rachel Pye for her research assistance. Finally, part of this research was funded by a European Research Council project (CHANGINGELITES 849960) and we would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of this grant.
29 Sam Friedman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on class, culture, elites and social mobility and he recently published The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged (with Daniel Laurison). He is also the author of Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour (Routledge, 2014) and co-author of Social Class in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2015). He is currently working with Aaron Reeves on a European Research Council-funded Project (2020-2025) examining how elites have changed over the last 200 years.
Aaron Reeves is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Green Templeton College, and a Visiting Senior Fellow in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. He is a sociologist with interests in public health and political economy. His work involves examining the causes and consequences of social and economic inequity, primarily in Europe and North America. He is currently working with Sam Friedman on a European Research Council-funded Project (2020-2025) examining how elites have changed over the last 200 years.
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39 S Part A: Image of a Typical Who’s Who Entry, Including a List of Recreations
Part B: List of Automatic Appointments to Who’s Who
Part C: Occupational Make Up of Who’s Who by Birth Cohort
Part D: Descriptive Statistics of the Sample by Cohort
Part E: Continuities in Dictionary Meanings of the Term “Recreation”
Part F: Word Selection and Unreported Recreations
Part G: Unsupervised Content Analysis
Part H: The Proportion of Respondents Who Enter Some Data into the Recreations Field in Who’s Who Over Time
Part I: Recreational Heterogeneity within the Elite
Part J: Elite Recreations and Compositional Change
Part K: Change in the Recreations Reported between the 1988 and 2016 Editions of Who’s Who by Birth Cohort
Part L: Cultural Leaders as Enthusiastic Consumers and Early Adopters of Highbrow Culture
Part M: The Size of the Review Section in Four Major National Newspapers and the Cultural Forms They Cover
40 Part A: Image of a Typical Who’s Who Entry, Including a List of Recreations
Source: http://www.print.ukwhoswho.com/?id=-1180
41 Part B: List of Automatic Appointments to Who’s Who
The authors requested a list of automatic appointments to Who’s Who from Bloomsbury Press but they did not provide a fully exhaustive list. Instead, they offered an indicative guide to the types of appointments that warrant automatic inclusion. These are listed below:
• Members of Parliament • Members of the devolved assemblies for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland • Heads of local government authorities • Judges • Queen’s Counsels • Senior civil servants (e.g., Head, Permanent Secretaries, Permanent Under Secretaries) • Top level military appointments (e.g., Major, Colonel, Admiral) • Top level religious appointments (e.g., Archbishop, Bishops, Chief Rabbi) • Ambassadors • Chairmen and chief executives of FTSE 100 companies • Chancellors and vice chancellors of British universities • Heads of subsidiary university bodies such as Oxbridge colleges (e.g., Christchurch) or schools within the University of London (e.g., Imperial College) • Heads of public bodies (NHS England, UK Statistics Authority) • Heads of arts, culture, and heritage organizations (British Museum, Science Museum, National Trust, Royal Opera House, RSC) • Heads of science, medical, and technology organizations (British Medical Association) • Members of the peerage and baronetage • Heads of sports bodies (All Lawn Tennis Association, Football Association, MCC) • Heads of certain secondary schools (e.g., Clarendon schools) • Heads of media organizations (e.g., News Corporation, BBC, Channel 4) • Winners of specific prizes (e.g., Booker Prize, Nobel, Turner Prize) • Fellows of key professional bodies or institutions (e.g., British Academy, Royal Society) • Dames and Knights
42 Part C: Fields of Occupation by Cohort
Cohort Education Military Law Politics Business Creative Celebrity Religion Aristocracy Industries 1830/1834 5.53 28.17 24.25 12.43 8.52 7.98 .15 11.51 1.46 1835/1839 6.37 27.19 24.53 11.24 9.63 7.14 .17 11.18 2.55 1840/1844 7.12 22.53 24.82 13.72 8.81 8.17 .51 12.41 1.91 1845/1849 7.27 19.86 27.37 12.95 11.22 8.96 .04 9.84 2.50 1850/1854 7.33 22.12 25.43 12.84 11.17 8.66 .34 9.72 2.38 1855/1859 6.80 28.10 21.94 11.08 11.86 9.53 .34 8.20 2.14 1860/1864 8.39 29.67 19.19 11.65 11.15 9.74 .27 7.64 2.30 1865/1869 7.06 32.06 18.21 11.40 13.16 8.97 .31 6.64 2.18 1870/1874 7.44 34.12 16.23 11.42 14.07 8.36 .27 6.12 1.96
43 1875/1879 7.60 35.73 14.91 12.16 15.45 8.18 .39 3.52 2.05 1880/1884 8.04 34.56 13.74 12.12 15.40 8.44 .28 5.66 1.77 1885/1889 9.24 31.11 14.78 12.65 16.05 8.99 .35 4.93 1.90 1890/1894 8.48 33.52 14.10 12.19 17.51 9.10 .07 3.33 1.69 1895/1899 10.32 30.95 14.02 12.73 17.48 9.08 .26 3.35 1.80 1900/1904 13.02 20.96 15.34 12.34 20.13 10.92 .17 4.81 2.32 1905/1909 13.44 17.97 14.80 15.49 20.05 10.28 .27 4.76 2.93 1910/1914 14.77 16.26 14.46 15.87 20.67 10.58 .52 4.86 2.00 1915/1919 17.79 14.40 13.20 19.71 19.52 8.65 .79 3.97 1.97 1920/1924 21.90 9.63 12.53 17.63 22.40 9.54 .85 3.82 1.69 1925/1929 21.72 6.22 13.18 14.88 23.68 12.66 1.12 4.72 1.82 1930/1934 22.03 5.13 12.57 14.41 24.54 12.42 1.14 5.06 2.71 1935/1939 25.19 3.75 11.20 13.82 24.35 13.03 1.34 4.74 2.58 1940/1944 27.81 2.36 13.17 15.22 21.09 12.41 1.46 3.94 2.54 1945/1949 28.30 1.98 15.60 15.69 18.45 13.07 1.21 3.21 2.50 1950/1954 27.30 2.44 17.01 16.79 15.38 13.19 1.07 3.90 2.92 1955/1959 22.07 3.24 18.19 16.81 15.27 15.72 1.17 4.14 3.40 1960/1964 18.23 2.92 19.91 17.87 14.77 18.42 1.39 3.17 3.32 1965/1969 13.92 1.48 21.62 21.15 11.26 21.03 1.66 2.25 5.63
Note: Rows may not equal 100 due to rounding. Who’s Who categorizes individuals into 25 fields. Many of these fields are quite small, so we created nine larger aggregate categories to document the broad patterns over time. Education contains ‘Education and learning,’ ‘Medicine,’ ‘Scholarship and research,’ and ‘Science.’ Military contains ‘Armed forces and intelligence.’ Law contains ‘Law and crime.’ Politics contains ‘Politics and government’ and ‘Social welfare and reform.’ Business contains ‘Business and finance,’ ‘Trade and retailing,’ ‘Agriculture and food,’ ‘Building and heavy engineering,’ ‘Manufacture and industry,’ ‘Technology,’ and ‘Transport and Communication.’ Creative industries contains ‘Art,’ ‘Film, broadcasting, publishing,’ ‘Music,’ ‘Theatre and entertainment,’ and ‘Literature and journalism.’ Celebrity contains ‘Individuals,’ ‘Travel and exploration,’ and ‘Sports and games.’ Religion contains ‘Religion and belief.’ Aristocracy contains ‘Royalty and aristocracy.’ 44 Part D: Descriptive Statistics of the Sample by Cohort
% Who Was % Respond to Cohort N % Female % Succession % Foreign Who Recreation Field 1850/1859 3,354 1.61 100.00 9.15 4.77 32.17 1860/1869 5,633 2.15 100.00 7.67 5.33 34.40 1870/1879 7,951 1.96 100.00 6.97 4.99 36.25 1880/1889 10,539 2.14 100.00 5.94 4.70 37.01 1890/1899 10,706 2.26 100.00 5.77 3.73 38.06 1900/1909 9,840 2.63 100.00 6.45 3.55 42.24 1910/1919 8,551 4.48 100.00 7.11 3.39 48.45 1920/1929 9,199 4.61 100.00 8.16 3.38 56.46 1930/1939 9,177 4.59 98.61 7.75 6.57 66.14 1940/1949 9,732 5.09 75.45 6.57 10.55 72.78 45 1950/1959 9,363 7.02 31.58 6.35 12.12 78.43 1960/1969 11,096 12.35 8.54 5.20 10.28 80.21 1970/1979 8,872 19.23 2.67 5.42 8.44 79.63 1980/1989 4,872 24.08 0.64 5.11 7.74 76.91 Part E: Dictionary Definitions of Term “Recreation” Over Time
We address this question through considering multiple additions of the Oxford English Dic- tionary, including the first edition of volume VIII (published in 1914), which includes the word “recreation.” The entries are recorded below. The definitions are listed in order of historical priority. Entries in italics are considered obsolete; entries in bold are still considered part of active usage.
1914 1989 2009 (with 1933 supplement) 1. Refreshment by partaking 1. Refreshment by partaking 1. Refreshment by eating; of food; a refection; of food; a refection; nourishment; a meal. nourishment nourishment. 2. Refreshment or comfort 2a. Refreshment or comfort 2a. Physical refreshment or produced by something produced by something comfort produced by affecting the sense or body affecting the senses or body. something affecting the senses or body. 3. The action of 2b. Comfort or consolation of 2b. Mental or spiritual recreating (oneself or the mind; that which comfort or consolation; a another) or fact of being comforts or consoles. comfort, a consolation recreated by some pleasant occupation, pastime or amusement 3a. An instance of this; a 3a. The action of 3a. The action or fact of means of recreating recreating (oneself or refreshing or oneself; a pleasurable another), or fact of being entertaining oneself exercise of employment recreated, by some through a pleasurable or pleasant occupation, interesting pastime, pastime or amusement. amusement, activity, etc. (esp. habitually); amusement, entertainment. 3b. One who or that 3b. An instance of this; a 3b. An activity or which supplies means of recreating pastime which is recreation oneself; a pleasurable pursued for the pleasure exercise or employment. or interest it provides. 4. A place of refreshment or 3c. One who or that 3c. A person who or thing recreation which supplies which provides entertainment recreation. or enjoyment for others; a source of recreation.
46 The 1933 supplement 4. A place of refreshment or 3d. An educational added a number of recreation exercise, lesson, or compounds with which the problem intended to be word was commonly used, both instructive and including recreation area, enjoyable. Chiefly in centre, ground, hall. plural, esp. in the titles of collections of such exercises or problems. 4. A place of refreshment or for recreation.
Over the period we are examining, it seems there has been little change in the meaning of the word. In the earlier periods, the word seems to have possessed a slightly more existential di- mension in which recreational activity was seen to, in a sense, re-create the self; that is, the practice was refreshing who the person was/is and perhaps even playing a constitutive role in who the person’s being. This aspect of the word becomes less prominent in the most recent dictionary entry. Rather than “re-creating oneself,” the activities refresh or entertain, suggest- ing a weaker connection between the pastimes and amusements one pursues and the identity of the person practices them.
One definition falls away entirely: this concerns the usage of recreation as someone or some object that provides enjoyment. This was always uncommon, as the sparse entries under this entry suggest, but there was an instance from 1863 and so seems to have been retained for that reason.
Notwithstanding these subtle variations in meaning, there seems to have been more continuity than change in how the term recreation was defined, suggesting that the effect of potentially shifting semantics on how people respond to the request for “recreations” in Who’s Who is rather minimal.
47 Part F: Word Selection and Unreported Recreations
We initially began our analysis by focusing on words used more than 100 times. Our initial interpretation was that a large number of the most commonly used words could be categorized into two main categories that reflect modes of cultural practice already well-established in the historical literature on British elite cultural practice (Annan 1991; Cannadine 1999): the aristocratic and the highbrow. The key words for these modes of cultural practice are listed below.
1. Aristocratic: shoot, hunt, gun, stalk, polo, riding, fencing, yacht, golf, rowing, sailing, boat, dinghy, horse, dressage, equest, fishing, angling, trout, bird, ornith.
2. Highbrow: music, opera, theatre, drama, jazz, architecture, poetry, archaeology, photo, art, wine, whisky, classic, ballet, writing, literature, paint, antique, walk, reading, concert, organ, chamber, bass, bassoon, clarinet, guitar, cello, piano, jazz, violin, folk, blues, classical, drums, saxophone, bluegrass, banjo, mandolin, harp, singing, choral, mozart, choir, bach, countryside, fell-, fellw, hike, hill-walk, mountain, climb, trek, hiking, rambling, woodland, the art, paint, galler, watercolour, arts, culture, drawing, sketching, sculpt.
Note that the highbrow mode includes many more words. This is partly because highbrow activities arguably have many more variants. For example, music includes not only the word “music” but also a variety of instruments, composers, and even genres.
While exploring the data, we noted a series of words that did not fit within these two categories and were rooted in more everyday or popular modes of cultural practice. The key words for this category are listed below.
3. Ordinary/Popular: family, kids, children, grandc, grandf, grandm, grandson, niece, nephew, cousin, parent, daughter, son, mum, dad, father, mother, husband, wife, spouse, dog, cooking, radio, gossip, children, family, friends, house, talking, friend, entertain, socialis, socializ, parties, chum, cats, pet, pets, cat, animals, running, jogging, marathon, film, cinema, movies, football, fc, soccer, united, arsenal, hotspur, chelsea, liverpool, television.
The vast majority of commonly used words were coded and categorized into one of these three groupings. Over 80 percent of entrants used at least one of the key words above that were categorized into these groups.
The majority of commonly used words can be placed into one of our three elite cultural modes, but some are more ambiguous. For example, Table F1 shows the most popular words by cohort, with “aristocratic” activities in blue, “highbrow” activities in green, “ordinary or everyday” in yellow, and a set of more “ambiguous” activities in white. In most cases, we code such activities as “ambiguous” because their meaning is highly dependent on the mode in which they are con- sumed or practiced. For example, activities like gardening or travel could easily be categorized in any of our three cultural modes, depending on the scale, budget, and aesthetic orientation of the individual entrant. We also omit a number of sporting recreations, as most of these have
48 complex social histories that traverse more than one of our three cultural modes.
Table F1. The Most Commonly Used Words by Key Birth Cohorts
1860s words 1880s words 1900s words 1920s words 1940s words 1960s words 1980s words shooting golf golf gardening music music walking Golf shooting fishing golf gardening walking reading fishing fishing shooting fishing reading reading family cricket tennis gardening music golf gardening music cycling gardening tennis reading walking golf travel gardening motoring walking shooting travel travel theatre hunting hunting motoring walking fishing theatre ski walking cricket music travel sailing tennis cycling music walking cricket tennis theatre sailing running reading music travel cricket tennis ski football riding reading reading sailing photography opera tennis tennis travel hunting swimming cricket history golf travel riding riding photography history family cricket rowing yachting swimming painting shooting cricket cooking travelling travelling photography football swimming photography cinema
It is important to acknowledge that omitting such ambiguous recreations could have implica- tions for our analysis, particularly if the popularity of such activities moves in a direction that either clearly tracks one or more of our dominant modes or clearly runs counter to any. How- ever, as illustrated in Figure F2, the popularity of these terms does not move in a direction that undermines our analysis in any straightforward manner.
Figure F2. Trends in Usage of Commonly Used “Ambiguous” Recreations
49 Finally, it is worth acknowledging that two of the recreations in Figure F2—tennis and travel— are arguably less ambiguous and might be placed into one of our three categories. Tennis, for example, was historically closely associated with the aristocracy. Indeed, it was only in the early part of the twentieth century, when lawn tennis moved from private gardens (often on aristocratic estates) into tennis clubs, that the social composition of recreational tennis players opened up to the middle classes and subsequently became a mass spectator sport. Tennis could thus be included in our analysis as an aristocratic practice.
Travel too may be a less ambiguous cultural practice. For example, if we follow Adler’s (2001) classic paper on the aesthetic dimensions of travel as a “performed art,” it may be more accurate to categorize elite engagement with travel as following a distinctly highbrow logic.
Recognizing these alternative readings of tennis and travel, in Figure F3 we recalculate the aris- tocratic and highbrow trends in our analysis to see if they are substantially altered by treating them as ambiguous. Figure F3 shows no major changes in our previously reported trends, even though the levels of consumption change slightly. In other words, the results of our dictionary methods are not significantly altered if we add tennis and travel into their most approximate categories.
Figure F3. Adjusting the Major Trend Lines by Assigning Tennis to the Aristocratic and Travel to the Highbrow
50 References
Annan, Noel. 1991. Our Age: English Intellectuals Between the World Wars: A Group Portrait. New York: Random House.
Cannadine, David. 1999. The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. New York: Vintage Books.
Adler, Judith. 1989. ‘Travel as Performed Art’. American Journal of Sociology 94, no. 6: 1366– 91.
51 Part G: Unsupervised Content Analysis
In the main text we use a supervised approach to automate the coding procedure of all the texts. This runs the risk that the trends we observe are constructed by us through our categorization process. Here, we use an unsupervised approach to observe whether similar trends can be observed using this undirected mode of clustering data.
Specifically, we use a structural topic model where the structuring variable is time. We run a model with eight topics for two reasons. First, an eight-topic model is similar to the number of categories we used in our supervised approach. Second, the eight-topic model fits the data well (i.e., it maintains a high semantic coherence and a held-out likelihood) and the additional gains in model fit (e.g., reduction in residuals) from including additional topics are small.
We also explored the sensitivity of our model to alternative specifications. For example, we ran the unsupervised model on words mentioned more than 100 times, but we also tried a higher and a lower exclusion threshold and found largely similar results. We also estimated a 20-topic model (the point at which a number of the fit statistics start to degrade; the residuals begin to increase, the lower bound starts to fall, and the held-out likelihood starts to decline), and we obtained similar results, although the main topics are broken down into more precise categories.
Eight-Topic Model
Once the exclusions have been implemented, the analytical corpus has 67,604 documents that contain 213,598 tokens based on 302 terms.
The words (terms) with the highest probability of being included in each topic are shown in Table G1. Note that individual recreations often recur in different topics and many topics are highly correlated with each other. We visualize this in Figure G1. These correlations reinforce the basic clustering of our analysis in the main text. Specifically, they appear to indicate three dominant modes of cultural practice and one isolated ambiguous category.
First, Topics 8 and 4 are highly correlated with one another and are dominated by recreations we categorize as part of the aristocratic mode. The key difference is that Topic4 is more focused on enjoying the natural world on its own terms, whereas Topic 8 is more concerned with using the land as a source of entertainment.
Second, Topics 2, 3, and 6 are all correlated with each other. Significantly, certain highbrow activities such as art, music, writing, and reading recur across all three. However, we also see noteworthy differences between these topics. Topic 6 mingles the aristocratic with the highbrow, Topic 2 focuses more on art and literature, and Topic 3 is more concerned with listening to music and attending the theater. This may point toward important distinctions within the highbrow mode that are not discernible in our main dictionary analysis.
Finally, Topic 1 blends the highbrow with the ordinary and the popular. In particular, this is
52 the only topic that includes family—despite it being one of the most commonly used words— but significantly places it alongside theater, opera, music, reading, and food. Similarly, Topic 5 also blends the highbrow (literature and theatre) and the ordinary (friend and cinema).
Topic7 is an ambiguous category and is primarily dominated by different kinds of sports, many of which, as described earlier, we do not include in the main part of our analysis.
Table G1. Words with the Highest Probability of Being Included in Each Topic for an Eight- Topic Model
Topic Highest probability words 1 – Highbrow, ordinary, popular Sport, family, theatre, opera, travel, music, wine, history, watch, read, food 2 – Highbrow (Art and literature) Garden, photography, art, collect, music, write, walk, cook, work, hill, book 3 – Highbrow (Music and Theatre) Read, garden, music, swim, listen, walk, travel, theatre, tennis, run, church 4 – Aristocratic (natural world) Golf, tennis, motor, fish, bridge, ski, garden, boat, bowl, travel, yacht, farm 5 – Highbrow and Ordinary Walk, music, cycle, travel, read, theatre, mountain, literature, cinema, friend 6 – Highbrow and Aristocratic Travel, sail, garden, paint, walk, history, music, read, art, architecture, book 7 - Ambiguous Football, Rugby, play, club, row, cricket, game, squash, country pursuit 8 – Aristocratic (country pursuits) Shoot, fish, cricket, hunt, ride, golf, race, tennis, chess, yacht, horse, lawn
Figure G1. Correlation between Topics
The unsupervised topic model seems to replicate quite faithfully the main results from the analyses reported in the main text. However, do these clusters of topics follow the same trends as observed in the main results? In Figure G2 we report the changes in the size of these topics over time.
53 Topics 4 and 8: those topics most closely associated with our aristocratic mode are clearly dominant at the start of the period but then fall away from the start of the twentieth century onward.
Topics 2, 3, and 6: those topics most closely associated with the highbrow mode all rise during the early part of the twentieth century, reaching their peak among entrants turning 20 in 1940 to 1949, before declining. This too is very similar to the trends we see in the main results. One caveat here is that the proportion of entrants in Who’s Who participating in these activities is not as high as the trend in the main results. In part this is because this single highbrow line is now split between three lines. For example, if we add together Topics 2, 3, and 6 in 1940 to 1949, they account for around 43 percent of the texts (or entrants) turning 20 in that cohort. Our supervised approach (using Readme) suggested around about 42 percent of the texts (or entrants) were highbrow in that same cohort.
Topics 1 and 5: the topics most closely linked with our suggestion that recent entrants are blending highbrow activities with ordinary and everyday practices becomes far more promi- nent among those cohorts born after WWII. This too reflects the results from the main analysis.
Figure G2. Trends Over Time by Topic
54 Part H: The Proportion of Respondents Who Enter Some Data into the Recreations Field in Who’s Who Over Time
First we explore whether the probability that an entrant to Who’s Who reports any recreations across men and women. We find no clear difference over time.
Figure H1.
Next we explore the propensity to report any recreations more formally using matching meth- ods (see Figure H2). Initially we plot the probability that an entrant to Who’s Who reports recreations by birth cohort. The dashed line represents the unmatched data, that is, the raw probability for any given birth cohort. There is a substantial rise from around .4 (or approxi- mately 40 percent) to around .8 (or approximately 80 percent).
This may be explained by compositional shifts in who gets included in Who’s Who, so we con- ducted a matching analysis that seeks to ensure the sample of people who determine the results are balanced across a range of covariates. These include whether entrants attended a Claren- don school, whether entrants attended a public school (a school from the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference), whether entrants attended Oxbridge, whether they attended a London University, whether entrants were the child of an Aristocrat, the number of private clubs entrants listed in their profile, whether they listed an elite London club, whether en- trants were born outside the UK, the main field of occupation, whether entrants’ parents had a
55 honorific title, the gender of entrants, and whether they were automatically included in Who’s Who because of their occupational position. The treatment variable was birth cohort, which was allowed to vary across respondents. This procedure reduced the sample from over 100,000 people to just over 15,000 people, yet the matched line is almost exactly the same as the un- matched line (the raw data). This suggests composition differences do not explain the change in the likelihood of reporting recreations over time.
Figure H2.
56 Part I: Recreational Heterogeneity within the Elite
One limitation of focusing on general trends in elite cultural taste is that it has a tendency to mask heterogeneity within the elite. Here we explore elite cultural practices across a number of subgroups within Who’s Who. Our strategy is simple. We calculate the probability that people from a given cohort report participating in aristocratic, highbrow, or ordinary/popular activ- ities, and we estimate these probabilities across four potentially significant subgroups within the data; those selected automatically versus those selected on reputation; those who attended elite private schools and those who did not; those from different occupational fields; and men versus women.
Automatic vs Reputational Selection
A major cleavage within Who’s Who is the mechanism through which people are included in the volume; some are included automatically by virtue of their occupational position, and others are included through a selection mechanism managed by the publisher and a board of advisors. Using information provided by the publisher on automatic appointments (see Part B), in Figure I1 we examine trends in cultural practice between these entrants and those who entered through a selection process. Notably, we do not find any clear differences between these two groups.
Figure I1. Recreational Trends by Mode of Selection
57 Elite Private vs Non-elite Schooling
We also consider whether there are differences in reported cultural practices between entrants who attended one of Britain’s elite HMC private schools and those who did not. These are a network of around 209 prestigious and expensive public schools that make up the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (and constitute 2.5 percent of all UK school pupils). This is our best proxy for examining whether trends vary by social origin. As Figure I2 demonstrates, educationally privileged entrants were slightly more likely to participate in aristocratic activi- ties and slightly less likely to participate in highbrow activities. However, the differences here are relatively small and the trends are similar across both groups. There is little meaningful dif- ference between the alumni of these schools and other entrants in terms of their likelihood of reporting everyday or ordinary activities, the mode that might be presumed to be most closely associated with social origin.
Figure I2. Recreational Trends by Schooling Type
Occupational Differences
Another potential source of heterogeneity within Who’s Who is the occupation of entrants. This is because dominant cultural modes may vary considerably across different occupational fields. We explore this by splitting Who’s Who into six broad occupational fields (education, military, law, politics, business, and culture) and then tracing the probability that people within
58 these fields, and within specific birth cohorts, reported participating in our three main modes of elite cultural practice.
Figures I3, I4, and I5 show important differences in the intensity with which entrants from dif- ferent occupational fields engage with each of our first two modes of elite culture. For example, members of the military are consistently more likely to participate in aristocratic practices than those who work in the cultural industries. Conversely, people from the cultural industries are far more likely to participate in highbrow activities than members of the military. Yet sig- nificantly, although intensity varies by occupation, the trends over time are largely consistent across fields. Moreover, more recently for the ordinary mode, not only is the trend the same for all occupational fields but so too is the level. Overall, these patterns suggest that irrespec- tive of occupational field there were common shifts in how different factions of the British elite presented their cultural identities over time.
Figure I3. Aristocratic Tastes by Occupational Field
59 Figure I4. Highbrow Tastes by Occupational Field
Figure I5. Ordinary and Popular Recreations by Occupational Field
60 Women vs Men
Finally, we consider the different cultural profiles of men and women. Significantly, here we do observe meaningful differences, particularly in earlier cohorts. As Figure I6 shows, women were far less likely to report aristocratic tastes and far more likely to report highbrow activities. Men eventually catch up with women as the highbrow becomes more dominant. These results suggest women may have potentially played an important role in wider elite shifts toward the ascendancy of highbrow culture in Britain. Two caveats should be noted here. First, women only constituted a very small number of entrants (<5 percent) between 1900 and 1930 when highbrow culture began to become ascendant in the UK (see Part D). Second, and connected to this, the distinct cultural practices of these early female entrants should also be viewed with some caution, because it is unclear whether these women were reflective of other elite women (broadly conceived) in this period. For example, women in this earlier period may have found a smoother route into Who’s Who through the cultural industries (such as writing). How- ever, these fields are strongly associated with highbrow consumption, regardless of gender, and therefore this may skew a gendered reading of these results.
61 Figure I6. Recreational Trends by Gender
62 Part J: Elite Recreations and Compositional Change
Although there is a surprising degree of cultural homogeneity between different factions of the elite, the degree of difference across some social cleavages suggests that shifts in composition may play an important role in explaining our results. We adopt two strategies to explore this issue.
1. A Matching Approach
The first strategy is a general approach that attempts to deal with all of these possible sources of variation over time simultaneously by using a matching procedure to create a subset of people in Who’s Who that have similar characteristics. We use coarsened exact matching to conduct this part of our analysis. The procedure moves in two steps:
1. First, it effectively creates categories that represent complex combinations of covariates (the full list of covariates is described below). For example, one category would include only peo- ple who attended an elite private school (HMC school), who went to Oxbridge for university, and who worked in the military. The algorithm then searches for people who fit within this category in every birth cohort. a. If it can find someone in every birth cohort then that com- bination gets included in the analysis. b. If it cannot find that combination it is dropped from the analysis. 2. Second, once all the categories with data in every birth cohort have been de- termined, the software reweights the categories so that categories with more people in them are treated the same as categories with fewer people in them. In short, it rebalances highly populated categories from one period, and categories with fewer people in another period, so they are consistent over time.
The following variables are included in our matching model:
• Whether you listed a recreation at all; • Measures of social origin – Whether you attended a public school; – Whether you come from an elite family (parents who have a postnomial); – The type of university you attended; – Whether you were an heir of a peerage; – Whether you attended a Clarendon school; • Your occupational field; • Sex; • Whether you were born abroad; • Whether you were in a field that was automatically included; • The number of clubs you listed being a member of.
63 In figure J1 we examine the three main periods of cultural practice and compare the results from the dictionary methods used in the main text with the trend lines estimated using our matching procedure.
The results suggest that changes in the composition of Who’s Who do not explain changes in reported recreations. That is, the trend lines using the dictionary methods and the matching methods are very similar for each of our three main modes of cultural practice.
It is important to note that this does not necessarily rule out that compositional shifts are im- plicated in our results. Our matching model may simply be missing an important variable that is not available in our dataset. For example, attending an elite private school is a fairly good proxy for economic or social origins, but it is far from ideal; other, more granular, changes in the class origins of entrants could be more important. However, this is unlikely, as our results do not change much even after we adjust for a range of variables (for the list see above) that are correlated with class origins and that are also changing over time.
Figure J1. Recreational Trends Using Dictionary versus Matched Methods
2. A Counterfactual Approach to Changes in the Occupational Structure
As explained in Part I, arguably the most significant differences in elite cultural consumption are by occupation, and the relative size of different occupational fields within Who’s Who also
64 varies considerably (see Part C). For example, the proportion of military entrants falls dra- matically over this period, as the size of the military fell and the power of the British Empire shrank. To provide an additional and more specific analysis of whether changes in the occu- pational structure affects our results, we conducted a counterfactual analysis. Specifically, we estimated what Who’s Who would look like if the relative size of difference occupations—as a proportion of Who’s Who—had remained constant. This calculation is based on the following procedure, using the military as a running example:
1. In the 1940/1949 cohort there were 175 people in Who’s Who in the military field who reported aristocratic tastes. These 175 people constituted around 38 percent of all mil- itary people. There were 466 military entrants in Who’s Who (around 7 percent of all Who’s Who members born in that cohort). 2. In the 1880/1889 cohort, 14 percent of all Who’s Who members were military entrants. 3. We then estimate the number of people with aristocratic tastes there would have been in Who’s Who if 14 percent of Who’s Who (the proportion of military people in Who’s Who from the military in the 1880/1889 cohort) rather than 7 percent of Who’s Who were in the military field (the proportion of military people in Who’s Who from the military in the 1940/1949 cohort). 4. In making this adjustment, we also account for the implied fluctuations in the size of the other occupational fields by assuming the remaining people in these other fields have the average level of aristocratic consumption in that cohort. 5. We also assume that the proportion of military entrants in Who’s Who that reported aristocratic tastes is the same as in the actual data (175/466 = 37.6 percent). 6. If 14 percent of those in Who’s Who in the 1940/1949 cohort were in the military (985 people) and 38 percent of this military elite had aristocratic tastes, we can estimate there would have been 370 military people in Who’s Who that would have reported aristocratic tastes. After accounting for the implied reduction in the size of other occupations, this is 106 more people with aristocratic tastes than we actually observe. 7. If we then assume these 106 people are in fact people with aristocratic tastes, then people with aristocratic tastes comprise 20.1 percent of Who’s Who in that cohort rather than 18.5 percent, which is what we actually observe in these data. 8. In the final step, we subtract the difference between the counterfactual and the actual percentage (20.1 – 18.5 = 1.5 percent) and then plot this difference in the figure below. 9. We repeat this procedure for each cohort and for every field of occupation to produce the data in the figure below.
Figure J2 suggests that changes in the occupational composition of Who’s Who have made only minimal differences to the level of aristocratic cultural practice. For example, it would only be 1.5 percent higher if the military had stayed the same size. Moreover, this is only a fraction of the total change we observe (a fall of 44 percentage points). In other words, almost all of the change we see is driven by people doing less aristocratic things, irrespective of their occupation. As Figures J3 and J4 illustrate, this is also the case for the highbrow and ordinary mode.
65 Figure J2. Difference in the Size of the Aristocratic Mode If Occupation Fields Remained the Same Proportion of All Occupations in Who’s Who Over Time
Figure J3. Difference in the Size of the Highbrow Mode If Occupation Fields Remained the Same Proportion of All Occupations in Who’s Who Over Time
66 Figure J4. Difference in the Size of the Ordinary/Popular Mode If Occupation Fields Remained the Same Proportion of All Occupations in Who’s Who Over Time
67 Part K: Change in the Recreations Reported between the 1988 and 2016 Editions of Who’s Who by Birth Cohort
68 Part L: Cultural Leaders as Enthusiastic Consumers and Early Adopters of Highbrow Culture
Note: The occupational fields that make up the cultural leaders group include entrants from Education, Politics, Art, and Individuals (which are noteworthy individuals who have achieved influence but are not easily located in a particular occupational field).
69 Part M: The Size of the Review Section in Four Major National Newspapers Over Time and the Cultural Forms They Cover
Notes: The data in this graph comes LexisNexis. We have scaled the graph the proportion of all articles published in these newspapers because we want to uncover two phenomena that are occurring over this period. The first is the increase in the review section as a proportion of all articles published. The second is the increase in coverage of everyday practices in the review section. It is important to note that coverage of highbrow activities in the review section does not increase over this period –approximately 50%-60% of all reviews cover highbrow topics – but the amount of space dedicated to highbrow material does rise because of the increase in the review section generally.
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