Arts and cultural consumption and diversity research

Key findings

1. The study uses articles for their analyses that have been published in academic journals of sociology, business, economics, marketing, culture, leisure sciences and ethnic studies, among others. With 41 articles the leading journal is Poetics, a sociological journal devoted to the realm of culture. Other cited sources are more general in scope not only linked to sociology but also to economics and marketing.
2. Between 1987 and 2023, a total of 1,155 documents were published, indicating a significant annual growth rate of 14.06%. This trend underscores a growing academic interest in the intersection of cultural consumption and diversity.
3. Regarding authors, the most relevant and cited ones are sociologists. Production comes mainly from US universities. Similarly, USA ranks first as authors´countries. It is also by far the most cited country. In relation to documents, nine out of ten local cited ones were published in a journal of sociology. Only one in an economics publication. As per cited references, again nine out of ten come from sociological reviews.
4. The most frequent words in the compilation retrieved were gender, cultural capital, religion and identity. This suggests a restricted presence of studies on cultural consumption in relation to other diversity dimensions such as sexual orientation or disability.
5. The intellectual and conceptual structures of this research field were analysed and produced a set of communities or clusters. Three clusters emerged, being respectively labeled: cultural capital, identity and educational attainment, shaping the intellectual base of the different subfields in relation to cultural consumption and diversity.
6. Using a thematic map, based on the co-word network to classify clusters of terms, five clusters emerged. They were mapped into a two-dimensional space through their centrality (i.e. popularity of the topic) and density (links within the topic). First, an average central and density theme (cultural capital). This is the largest one and orbits around the concept of cultural capital, its impact on cultural participation as well as the reciprocal relationship it has with factors such as education, social class, religion, gender or race. Second, the topic with the highest centrality and density, suggesting a motor theme (women), stands out by incorporating equality, diversity and inclusion across different aspect of cultural consumption and arts organizations. Third, a high centrality and low-density theme (gender) mostly deals with the determinants of arts and cultural consumption highlighting gender biases in participation. Last two clusters are comparatively small in size. Fourth, an emerging topic, low centrality and density, dealing with immigration and derivatives. Finally, a niche topic, upper-left quadrant, includes recent papers on disability and arts engagement.
7. Diversity in the context of arts consumption has been considered in the literature retrieved its scope has been rather limited. It has been analysed mostly from a gender perspective, with some papers also including race/ethnicity and religion. The review shows there are other dimensions of diversity that could be further explored and/or included in the research agenda on arts and cultural participation, namely studies on sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability, which are scarce and disconnected from the core of the research field.
8. Digitalisation is also a topic scarcely studied in such a context. We see only less than 5% of the documents containing terms such as digital, online and Internet while more remarkable is the lack of references to techniques such as webscraping, webcrawling, API (application programming interfaces, used to retrieve information from social networks) or AI.