Testing the universalism of Bourdieu's homology: Structuring patterns of lifestyle across 26 countries

The homology idea contends that a very close relationship takes place between social positions (economic and cultural capital) and cultural practices. This idea is at the center of Pierre Bourdieu’s work La Distinction (1984[1979]) and the subsequent studies in the sociology of culture that considered this book a necessary landmark. In this paper, we use data from the International Social Survey Programme for comparing 26 countries from different geographical and cultural areas, in order to assess the homology thesis’ applicability with a large set of very different countries. Using canonical correlation analysis, our results underline how structurally similar are the wide set of countries analysed. On the one hand, we found an analogous hierarchy of activities and social positions or capitals. On the other hand, the level of association between the factorial axis defined on cultural activities and those axis calculated using capitals are also very similar.