Maku matkailun kentässä: Kulttuurin kulutus ja sosiaalinen erottautuminen matkailussa
Keywords:
matkailijat, kulttuuri, kulutus, erottautuminen, kuluttajakäyttäytyminen, kulttuurimatkailuAbstract
Cultural consumption and distinction among travelers
This article scrutinized cultural consumption among tourists. The aim was to examine tourists' cultural consumption patterns and their association with tourists' socioeconomic characteristics. As a theoretical framework two parallel theories combining cultural taste and social distinction were utilized. The first framework reflected bourdieuan views on the role of legitimate culture and its linkage to social hierarchy and distinction between status groups. The second framework was based on the idea of cultural omnivorousness. This theory associates cultural taste with distinction, too, but questions the exclusiveness of legitimate culture thus redefining the linkage between cultural taste and social hierarchy. Cultural consumption patterns were empirically examined with a survey data produced by the ATLAS Cultural Tourism Research Project. The target group of the article was formed of the European tourists in the data (N=6535). Latent class analysis and logistic regression analysis were used as methods of analysis. The results isolated three distinctive groups based on the cultural consumption patterns: the omnivorous, the high culture univorous and the occasional cultural consumers. Socioeconomically, the last two groups were found to resemble to some extent the bourdieuan concept whereas the first group, the omnivorous, was less in line with the theoretical assumptions. All in all, the effects of socioeconomic variables in all three patterns were weaker than are reported in previous studies on cultural taste outside the tourism context. The results indicate that tourism as a social arena where people can escape the norms and expectations... (see the PDF file).
