Researchers examining entries in Who's Who and Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs found a correlation between elites embracing the more common pursuits of football and pop music at the same time as rising inequality. Over the 120-year period, they found a significant shift from traditional aristocratic pursuits, such as hunting and opera, to more “everyman” interests of family and pets. The trend was particularly marked in the past 30 years.
The research by Dr Sam Friedman, an associate professor at the department of sociology at the London School of Economics, and Dr Aaron Reeves, a senior research fellow at Oxford University’s department of social policy and intervention found elites were more recently adopting a blend of the highbrow and ordinary, suggesting an attempt to find commonality with the rest of the population, while still signifying their eliteness.
It was most clear from the 1990s onwards, said Friedman, “coinciding neatly with the continuing rise of the top 1%. Of course, this is only an association. Yet, we would speculate that these patterns may be connected. Put simply, as elites have pulled away economically, there is mounting evidence that they are increasingly insecure about their moral legitimacy, and increasingly sensitive to public concern they are snobbish, self-interested and out of touch.”
How elites presented their cultural lives had become a key PR battleground, he said. “Performing ordinariness may provide a very effective means of shoring up authenticity in an era of rising inequality.”
Friedman likened it to Boris Johnson declaring his hobby of making model buses during last year’s Conservative leadership campaign, “when he actually enjoys incredibly highbrow painting and Greek literature”, which he chose not to talk about.
Reeves said it mattered what people played on Desert Island Discs, which was an even more public performance of cultural identity. “Tony Blair famously convened a focus group – as he did for many things – to help him calculate what to play,” he said. Reeves said: “The move towards mundane and everyday leisure pursuits doesn’t necessarily mean elites are actually becoming ordinary, of course.”More, it revealed how they wished to present themselves. Researchers found traditional aristocratic recreations, like horse-riding and polo, were still mentioned alongside the more commonplace.Elites were, perhaps, trying to forge a sense of commonality and connection, added Friedman. “And the way they do that is to try to cultivate a cultural profile that they feel looks like the ‘everyman’..."
Who’s Who has just 0.05% of the UK population featured.
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