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This article seeks to identify the internal divisions within the 'upper class' of Norway, defined as comprising different types of property owners, top executives and business managers. Bourdieu's concepts of social space and forms of capital are applied to construct a social space of the Norwegian economic upper class by subjecting 12 indicators of capital to Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Central issues in the sociology of elites and upper classes are addressed, including the role of educational credentials in upper class reproduction, and the salience of divisions by social origin. The article reveals a maintained division between owners and employees (managers, executives, business professionals) in an age of 'financialisation'. Furthermore, the divisions established are related to the segmentation of the upper class by occupation and industry.

Questions of political conflict have always been central to class analysis; changing political fault lines were a key argument in the debates about the 'death of class'. The ensuing 'cultural turn' in class analysis has shown how class continues to shape lives and experience, though often in new ways. In this article, we bring this mode of analysis to the political domain by unpacking how a multidimensional concept of class – based on the ideas of Bourdieu – can help make sense of contemporary political divisions. We demonstrate that there is a homological relation between the social space and the political space: pronounced political divisions between 'old' politics related to economic issues and 'new' politics related to 'post-material values' follow the volume and composition of capital. Importantly, the left/right divide seems more clearly related to the divide between cultural and economic capital than to the class hierarchy itself. ; This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. ; acceptedVersion

In recent scholarly debates about cultural stratification, some have argued that 'openness' and 'omnivorous' lifestyles constitute a new form of distinction. Using qualitative interviews, we address this by focusing on adolescents from backgrounds particularly rich in cultural capital, namely students at Schola Osloensis, the most prestigious upper-secondary school in Norway. Our findings reveal that (i) these students value academic merit; although they embrace selected forms of pop culture, and are self-reflexively reluctant to describe themselves as 'elite', their lifestyle is characterized by preferences for classical cultural canons. They regard this as necessary to understand contemporary avant-garde culture and achieve academic success. They also exhibit (ii) a distinctive fashion style that does not only emphasize aesthetics but also involves moral-political aspects. 'Hipster' style is criticized for being too commercial, whereas a 'nerdy' position is embraced as compatible with a quest for knowledge and insight. They also adopt (iii) political positions on feminism, antiracism and environmental protection, seamlessly interweaving these forms of position-taking in their everyday lives. (iv) Those who break key moral-political and aesthetic norms are negatively sanctioned and there are few signs of truly 'open' and 'omnivorous' lifestyles. We conclude that an elite education in an egalitarian society such as Norway is associated with a purported non-elitist style, where liberal values such as gender equality and international solidarity are at the centre. Simultaneously, however, through their education at Schola Osloensis, these students acquire high levels of cultural capital, including symbolic mastery and an embodied ability to perform well in demanding social settings. These skills, we argue, will be useful at the top levels of a rapidly changing labour market. In pointing to the persistent salience of 'old school' displays of cultural capital, as well as clear instances of symbolic boundary work, our study challenges core assumptions in research about cultural stratification and omnivorousness.

In this article we analyse class cultures by mapping out differences in 'original taste'; that is, respondents' classed preferences for food and drink. By employing Multiple Correspondence Analysis, we produce a relational model of tastes. Using three indicators of social class – occupational class, income and education – we find clear class divisions. The upper and middle classes exhibit diverse and what are typically regarded as 'healthy' tastes; this contrasts with the more restricted and what are typically regarded as 'less healthy' tastes found among the working classes. Our findings challenge ongoing debates within cultural stratification research where it has become almost usual to demonstrate that the contemporary upper and middle classes exhibit playful tastes for the 'cosmopolitan' and the 'exotic'. We find that upper- and middle-class households also enjoy very traditional foodstuffs. We argue that this illustrates a need for a relational understanding of taste: even the consumption of the traditional peasant food of pre-capitalist Norway can be refashioned as a badge of distinction in the 21st century.

Abstract Although social class was once central to political sociology, it has become increasingly less so; many analysts now believe that one's class position is less important in determining political attitudes and political party preferences. Simultaneously, more attention has been paid to what might be called the culturalization of politics, as epitomized by the US culture wars and stereotypes like the "latte-drinking liberal." Here, political attitudes are regarded as primarily structured by people's lifestyles and broader way of life. But do political preferences have to be explained by either relations of sociomaterial conditions (e.g. class) or cultural orientations (e.g. status and lifestyles)? In this article, we argue in favor of an approach that aims to reconcile these factors, allowing for the empirical mapping of whether and how they intersect in shaping political party preferences. We investigate this by using detailed Norwegian survey data to measure the extent to which intraclass heterogeneity in political party choices can be accounted for by the interaction between class and lifestyle. We employ a novel combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and Chi-Squared Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID). In drawing on constructed models of the social space and the space of lifestyles, we show that there are important correspondences between these spaces and that their interaction may help account for party choices. The results highlight the need for a more complex account than that suggested in recent works of cultural stratification research.

Questions of political conflict have always been central to class analysis; changing political fault lines were a key argument in the debates about the 'death of class'. The ensuing 'cultural turn' in class analysis has shown how class continues to shape lives and experience, though often in new ways. In this article, we bring this mode of analysis to the political domain by unpacking how a multidimensional concept of class – based on the ideas of Bourdieu – can help make sense of contemporary political divisions. We demonstrate that there is a homological relation between the social space and the political space: pronounced political divisions between 'old' politics related to economic issues and 'new' politics related to 'post-material values' follow the volume and composition of capital. Importantly, the left/right divide seems more clearly related to the divide between cultural and economic capital than to the class hierarchy itself.

We investigate the recruitment into the upper class, analysing the impact of different forms of capital and modes of closure. Unlike many Bourdieu-influenced approaches to class, we systematically investigate divisions by composition of capital: the relative weight of economic to cultural capital. We find capital-specific barriers to mobility: access to the upper class fractions is not only differentiated by one's parents' volume of capital or the general class hierarchy, but also by the relative weight of cultural to economic capital. Drawing on theories of social closure, we further investigate the role of two distinct modes of closure – credentialism and private property. The degree of closure differs significantly between subfractions of the upper class, based on the degree to which they refer to positions involving specific credential requirements. Our findings underline the importance of capital composition, but also that closure operates by neither credentials nor property alone.