‘Tastes Refined, Friends Defined?’ How Cultural Participation and Educational Belonging Shape Educational Network Diversity

The interplay between cultural capital, social capital, and education has long been theorized by scholars such as Bourdieu and DiMaggio. Building on this line of research, recent studies highlight how cultural participation can structure opportunities for network formation, enabling the conversion of cultural capital into social capital and shaping the diversity of personal networks. Despite these advances, questions remain on whether, for whom, and why highbrow cultural participation shapes educational network diversity. In this article, we extend previous literature by explicitly theorizing that the way highbrow participation shapes (a lack of) educational network diversity depends on one’s structural position (i.e. educational attainment). We hypothesize that highbrow cultural participation may paradoxically foster less educationally diverse networks among higher-educated individuals, while being associated with greater educational diversity among those with lower educational attainment. Moreover, we address the understudied micro-level processes through which cultural participation shapes network diversity by introducing educational belonging – rooted in Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus – as a key mechanism, expecting that a stronger sense of belonging to one’s educational level may partly explain this relationship. Additionally, as cultural sociology has long emphasized the intergenerational transmission of cultural dispositions, this article examines whether cultural participation relates differently to educational belonging for those who are educationally stable, upwardly mobile, or downwardly mobile. Using LISS-data (2023), we estimate structural equation models with multiple-group analyses (n = 1253). Results first show that highbrow cultural participation is associated with the educational diversity of social networks, but in contrasting ways across educational groups: it is associated with less educationally diverse networks among higher-educated individuals, while fostering more educationally diverse networks among lower-educated individuals. Second, among the higher-educated, educational belonging partially explains the association between cultural participation and more homogeneous networks. Finally, we find no evidence that the relationship between highbrow cultural participation and educational belonging varies by mobility origin.