The aim of this study is, using the Swedish expression “kulturtant” (cultured lady) as starting point, to understand how and why women consume the products of the culture industry more eagerly than men. The study is using the concepts put forward by Pierre Bourdieu; fields, capital and habitus. It is a qualitative study based on discussions in focus groups, interviews and material gathered through Google Alerts. In the literature this gap between the sexes with regard to the higher consumption on behalf of women has been referred to as the “puzzle” of women´s cultural consumption. The empirical results show that the women in the study are well aware of what they want to gain by participating in cultural activities like reading, going to concerts, watching plays or going to the movies. There are three main results: The first result is that the women in the study want to participate in activities with peers that respect them. The second result is that the women are eager that their cultural activities should give them durable experiences. The third result can be described as a wish of the women that taking part in cultural activities will help them to develop as human beings, to become better persons. The women have made what can be called a culture journey that in analogy with a class journey may be argued to be non-reversible.

Bombarded by various waves of consumer information,Taiwan has hit the road to the so-called ¡§style society¡¨ with the trend towards aestheticization of daily lives and growing emphasis on tastes, and in the meantime the industries, while churning out products, do not forget to compete for the interpretive power and symbolic control over the media. In Taiwan, as far as cultural tastes and lifestyle modeling are concerned, the ¡§Eslite phenomenon¡¨ shall not be ignored. With content analysis, this research probes into the editorial logic by which the Eslite Bookstore, as one of the important indicators on the map of Taiwan culture consumers¡¦ tastes, has tried to design its style-based Eslite Book Review and Eslite Reader magazines. In the end, the researcher deliberates over some visages of bourgeois tastes shaped by Eslite and contextualizes the findings in the class struggles for culture distinction as well as the recent social-economic changes in Taiwan. As the research shows, the main editorial notion of Eslite Bookstore is to construct an orthodox and legitimized legitimate taste domain by the voices of those culturally powerful male experts. It aims to build up a consumer style that is different from the past bourgeois conspicuous consumption and offers certain symbolic repertoires for the pursuit of delicate culture and life.Proclaiming itself as with higher cultural capital, Eslite prefers to involve more cultural activities and discourses to demonstrate its superiority, and to balance practical functions with more style innovations to distinguish itself from peers. In general, Eslite Book Review and Eslite Reader maintain a consistent style that uniquely belongs to Eslite . During the period of Eslite Book Review, it stresses mainly on life attitude, aesthetic style the second; whereas, Eslite Reader puts aesthetic style on the top of life attitude. Neither in these two periods have conventional values been emphasized. Eslite skillfully takes advantage of the existing cultural capital from the academic and expert systems to polish its cultural taste, and then elegantly projects such a cultural taste onto its consumers.By doing so, it successfully attains the identification from the readership and achieves its purpose of accumulating cultural capital and transforming it into economic capital.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 43-45).

Thesis (M.A.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 43-45). Also available in print.

<p>This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. The first two essays address the consumption of culture and are closely related in terms of the theoretical framework used. The third essay is a separate analysis of international trade and competition.</p><p>The studies of culture are motivated by the special treatment of culture consumption in most modern societies: there are usually large, government-provided subsidies, the aim of which is to stimulate both the production and the consumption of culture. The purpose of the present work is to explore reasons for this special treatment. Using a stylized theoretical framework, the essays contrast culture with another, generic, good or activity. Culture is thus regarded as an "experience good": previous consumption of the good enhances the current appreciation of the good. The generic good is one where experience is assumed not to be at all relevant for the appreciation of the good. For experience goods, decisions made today will influence future utility and future choices. This makes the intertemporal preferences essential. If, in particular, consumers have time-inconsistent preferences of the type that can be characterized as a present-bias---modeled with "multiple selves" using quasi-geometric discounting---as opposed to standard, time-consistent preferences, there will be a case for government subsidies. The first essay explores this possibility in detail in a framework where experience is mainly of importance in the short run. The second essay then studies cases where experience is more potent and can cause persistent diversity in culture consumption across individuals.</p><p>"Culture and Control: Should There Be Large Subsidies to Culture?" studies the circumstances under which public support for culture is warranted. A policy example is designed to illustrate important aspects of public support systems currently in place, and is calibrated to Swedish data. The essay concludes that, given present-biased agents with self-control problems, public support of culture can work as a commitment device and improve long-run welfare. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that welfare-maximizing subsidies to culture can be substantial if the present-bias is profound and the taste-cultivation property of culture consumption is pronounced.</p><p>"Origins of the Diversity of Culture Consumption" analyzes the diversity of culture consumption among individuals. If the culture good and the generic good are sufficiently close substitutes in a static sense, very large and persistent differences in the consumption of highbrow culture across consumers can be explained by differences in initial experience levels alone. Moreover, slight differences in preferences and time endowments can cause significant diversity between individuals, both in the long- and short-run levels of culture consumption. In addition, if consumers have time-inconsistent preferences, further diversity can be rationalized. If there is a present-bias, there may also be Pareto-ranked multiple equilibria with "optimism" and "pessimism": high (low) culture consumption of the current self is rationalized, based on the belief that future culture consumption will be high (low).</p><p>"Has international competition increased? Estimates of residual demand elasticities in export markets" studies the impact of the last decades of intense economic integration on the competitive conduct of Swedish export industries. The functional relationship between the inverted residual demand elasticity and the Lerner index is used to estimate markups in eight industries. The econometric evidence suggests a deviation from competitive behavior in all industries. Moreover, the results demonstrate a trend of decreasing market power.</p>

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. The first two essays address the consumption of culture and are closely related in terms of the theoretical framework used. The third essay is a separate analysis of international trade and competition. The studies of culture are motivated by the special treatment of culture consumption in most modern societies: there are usually large, government-provided subsidies, the aim of which is to stimulate both the production and the consumption of culture. The purpose of the present work is to explore reasons for this special treatment. Using a stylized theoretical framework, the essays contrast culture with another, generic, good or activity. Culture is thus regarded as an "experience good": previous consumption of the good enhances the current appreciation of the good. The generic good is one where experience is assumed not to be at all relevant for the appreciation of the good. For experience goods, decisions made today will influence future utility and future choices. This makes the intertemporal preferences essential. If, in particular, consumers have time-inconsistent preferences of the type that can be characterized as a present-bias---modeled with "multiple selves" using quasi-geometric discounting---as opposed to standard, time-consistent preferences, there will be a case for government subsidies. The first essay explores this possibility in detail in a framework where experience is mainly of importance in the short run. The second essay then studies cases where experience is more potent and can cause persistent diversity in culture consumption across individuals. "Culture and Control: Should There Be Large Subsidies to Culture?" studies the circumstances under which public support for culture is warranted. A policy example is designed to illustrate important aspects of public support systems currently in place, and is calibrated to Swedish data. The essay concludes that, given present-biased agents with self-control problems, public support of culture can work as a commitment device and improve long-run welfare. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that welfare-maximizing subsidies to culture can be substantial if the present-bias is profound and the taste-cultivation property of culture consumption is pronounced. "Origins of the Diversity of Culture Consumption" analyzes the diversity of culture consumption among individuals. If the culture good and the generic good are sufficiently close substitutes in a static sense, very large and persistent differences in the consumption of highbrow culture across consumers can be explained by differences in initial experience levels alone. Moreover, slight differences in preferences and time endowments can cause significant diversity between individuals, both in the long- and short-run levels of culture consumption. In addition, if consumers have time-inconsistent preferences, further diversity can be rationalized. If there is a present-bias, there may also be Pareto-ranked multiple equilibria with "optimism" and "pessimism": high (low) culture consumption of the current self is rationalized, based on the belief that future culture consumption will be high (low). "Has international competition increased? Estimates of residual demand elasticities in export markets" studies the impact of the last decades of intense economic integration on the competitive conduct of Swedish export industries. The functional relationship between the inverted residual demand elasticity and the Lerner index is used to estimate markups in eight industries. The econometric evidence suggests a deviation from competitive behavior in all industries. Moreover, the results demonstrate a trend of decreasing market power.

Research into the material culture of the household and the domestic interior has increased rapidly during recent years. It has primarily focused on the appearance and use of domestic space leaving household management and maintenance a neglected area of study. Furthermore the relationship between the ownership of goods, the domestic interior and the use of the home has not been studied in conjunction with the management and maintenance of the household. Additionally, research into the material culture of the household has predominantly focused on quantitative changes experienced during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. It has long been established that the ownership of household goods increased in this period, but similar research has not taken place to explore the nature of these goods, nor to extend this work to the subsequent period. This thesis brings these aspects of research together for the first time to create a synthesis between the ownership of goods and the changing nature and use of the home and household maintenance and management. The argument proposed here suggests that the changing nature of the material culture of the household and developments to the use of the home had an impact upon the way that the household was managed and maintained. The complex inter-woven relationship between the material culture of the domestic interior and the ways in which it was maintained and managed reveals that both elements were a part of an emerging middle class culture of domesticity. Therefore, this thesis makes a significant contribution to a holistic understanding of the household by looking at the ownership of goods and the use of domestic space within the context of maintenance and management.

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Francisco de Assis Comarú / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do ABC, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Planejamento e Gestão do Território, 2016. / O presente trabalho visa analisar e suscitar reflexões teóricas do processo de gentrificação. Buscamos com a conceitualização e a evolução do termo - por intermédio dos principais acadêmicos dos estudos marxista e culturalista - o debate entre as teorias e com isso, identificar as similaridades nos projetos de intervenção nas áreas centrais da cidade do Recife, Rio de Janeiro e Salvador, assim como identificar os possíveis sinais do processo de segregação urbana, mesmo com as peculiaridades de cada uma das capitais estudadas. O trabalho se desenvolve com a análise da concorrência entre cidades no mercado global, da mercantilização e consumo da cultura. A finalidade é identificar nas três cidades abordadas como se configura o processo de gentrificação através das intervenções urbanas de revitalização em suas áreas centrais. / The aim of present work is the analysis and theoretical reflections on the gentrification process. We employed Marxist and culturalist tools, developed for prominent authors, to study and debate the conceptualization and evolution of term: gentrification. We identify the similarities between the intervention projects in the city center of Recife, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. We also identify the possible indicators of the urban segregation process, even with the peculiarities of the culture consumption and the merchandization. Our purpose is to identify how the urban revitalization into the city center structured the gentrification process in the three cities studied.

臺灣已經成為一個富裕的消費社會。隨著經濟能力的普遍提升，文化產品的消費不再只取決於個人的經濟能力。本研究由質疑三種傳統以經濟特性為主的階級指標談起，並根據P.Bourdieu的階級理論建立起第四種文化的階級指標，認為除了經濟因素的考量外，也必須加上個人文化資本的評估，並將這樣的階級觀討論古典音樂文化產品的消費。 　　消費高級文化產品向來具有社會區辨的符號性功能；近來受到科技變遷、大眾媒介和市場經濟出現的影響，資本主義商品生產趨勢擴展至文化領域，文化層級呈現模糊的狀態。這種同時來自生產和文化層級的變化影響了階級和文化消費之間的關係，特別是以消費做為階級社會區辨的展示。 　　針對這種現象，本研究採取政經、歷史分析和深度訪談加以討論，認為有錢並不一定就會有文化，文化消費同時需要購買能力和鑑賞能力，要討論階級和文化消費的關係必須採行文化階級指標的新階級觀；同時類似像古典音樂之流的高級文化仍舊被多數人視為社會區辨的標的，只是不應淪為假意的模仿。