Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This study adopted Bourdieu’s perspectives on habitus, cultural taste, and social trajectory as the theoretical framework and used data from the 1997 and 2007 Taiwan Social Change Survey to investigate the effects of changes in cultural taste as influenced by intergenerational social mobility. Research results show that a wide variety of cultural taste permeated cultural consumption behaviors in the survey years, which is in contrast to the logic of class distinction proposed by Bourdieu. Cultural taste effectively distinguished groups according to educational attainment and social class. The trajectories of intergenerational educational and class mobility were the key factors shaping this variety in cultural taste. However, the trajectories of intergenerational educational and class mobility differ in their influences on the variety of cultural taste in Taiwan.