Social mobility and cultural dissonance

• We argue for a conceptual distinction between dissonance and omnivorousness.
• Dissonance refers to combining legitimate with illegitimate cultural practices.
• Omnivorousness is the most dissonant form of dissonance, typical for social elites.
• Cultural dissonance can be partly explained by social mobility.
• Highbrow genres and not boundary-crossing tastes associate with high social status.

Cultural omnivorousness has been associated with the cultural tolerance or cosmopolitanism of the upper social strata. Building on a large-scale survey in Flanders (Belgium) (n = 2849), we find that dissonant taste profiles—i.e., the combination of musical genres from different brow-levels, of which omnivorousness is one manifestation—are not only characteristic of the social elites. These profiles are also present in lower social strata and are partly the result of social mobility: Both upwardly, as well as downwardly, socially mobile individuals include cultural activities characteristic of the social position of origin and destination in their cultural profiles. We argue that the omnipresence of this “cultural dissonance” questions the idea that tolerance and cosmopolitanism are exclusive characteristics of higher social strata and that boundary-crossing per se functions as a status-marker.