Cultural Capital and Habitus in Golf Consumption: Embedded Mechanisms of Transference

Abstract

This study looks to advance our understanding of the increasingly nuanced cultural capital, subcultural capital, and habitus in consumer research by exploring how individuals transfer dispositions of habitus and embodied forms of capital across field boundaries. Using an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach, the research examines how mechanisms of transference, embedded in the habitus and homogeneity between valorizing field structures, permit individuals to utilize aggregated forms of cultural and subcultural capital sculpted by the field of golf. Through participant observation, interviews, journals, and over two years of exhaustive golf performance, both in the Northeast of England and further abroad, the research illustrates how narratives of soft skills and emotional capital shape the dispositions of individuals acquired, developed, and complemented by significant secondary socialization. This research contributes to the existing consumer research and consumer culture theory by extending understandings and conceptualisations of marketplace cultures, particularly subcultures of sport, and how cultural resources and distinctive practices previously thought to be contextdependent might be transferred. Further, the research engages with the middle-class habitus to portray these dispositions with characteristics other of the normative exclusionary and marginalizing. Emergent themes of communication, patience, discipline, asceticism, and critical practice indicate elements of ubiquity in soft skills and emotional capital, highlighted by a varied participant demographic recognising the value of these themes in other fields. By exploring these narratives of cultural and subcultural capital acquisition, development, and transference in the context of golf, the research also contributes to the conceptualisation of sports consumption and its relationship with cultural capital; illustrating sport as a context through which cultural and subcultural capital can be acquired, developed, and augmented rather than contexts in which more traditional forms of capital are simply displayed.