Households’ economic standing is measured as SES position relative to others, not by consumption.

Evidence

In our paper, the main measure of a household’s position is its relative place in the SES distribution. We conceive of SES as an index measure based on a household’s income, assets and educational attainment. The most influential sociological statement on lifestyles views them as product of one’s location on two separate dimensions of status: economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984). We opt to use a single-dimension measure because it better serves our analytic purposes. Unlike Bourdieu, we are not interested in what people are consuming per se, but instead in their ability to maintain their lifestyle given their current resources. — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 40

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes a resource-maintenance conception of lifestyle from Bourdieu’s consumption-based cultural capital framework.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s financialization-of-everyday-life work: the shift from cultural consumption to ability to sustain a lifestyle under resource constraints is a financialization lens.

Related

• Finance culture is a cultural frame, not an exogenous shift imposed on households. (similarity 0.79)