Levensstijlen binnen de nieuwe middenklasse. Differentiatie op basis van beroepssector

Samenvatting

Lifestyles within the New Middle Class. Differentiation between Job Sectors. In this article, the lifestyles of civil servants, private-sector employees, and self-employed workers within the new middle class are compared using the Dutch Time Budget Studies from 1990, 1995, and 2000. On the basis of the work of Bourdieu, Savage et al, and Martin, it was hypothesized that civil servants would be most active in highbrow culture and serious reading and least interested in popular outdoor entertainment. Private-sector employees were expected to be more engaged in pop culture and rather frequent visitors of bars and restaurants. For the self-employed workers, we predicted a mixture of these lifestyles; both culture and sociability were expected to be important to them. By and large, these results were confirmed, and remained essentially stable during the 1990s, indicating that the self-employed are the most typical exponents of a postmodern NMC lifestyle. 2 Tables, 2 Appendixes, 23 References. Adapted from the source document.