Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism Among French Young People: Beyond Social Stratification, The Role of Aspirations and Competences

Abstract

Based on a French survey designed to understand how young people appropriate internationally disseminated cultural products, this article explores the social stratification of everyday aesthetico-cultural cosmopolitanism in France among them. Using two classification techniques (ascending hierarchical classification and k-means clustering) and a polytomic logistic regression, we demonstrate that this cosmopolitanism can be viewed along a continuum of configurations rather than in a number of pure types. We identify five configurations: inadvertent cosmopolitans, specific cosmopolitans, cosmopolitan fans, national fans and impossible cosmopolitans. These configurations are not uniformly distributed across society: socio-demographic factors do not have a single, unambiguous effect, but are in fact combined with individual resources (experiences, competences and aspirations).