Taxes on knowledge
exclusion. See audience differentiation;
audience measurement; vals typology.
Technique: Ellul’s theory of technique In
a number of books written between the 1950s
and 1990, Jacques Ellul saw contemporary
society as being dominated by technological
advances, each aiding the mediating power of
mass communication; and together leading to
a society in which effi ciency and consequently
conformity become the key determinants of
human aff airs. Ellul uses the term ‘technique’ to
suggest the generality of attitudes to, and uses
of, machines in everyday life, applying equally to
social production as to material production.
His view is a bleak one, seeing efficiency,
brought about by the wholesale adoption by
those who rule and those who are ruled, as being
both authoritarian in tendency and beyond the
control of governments: ‘Technical advance,’
says Ellul in Th e Technological Society (Knopf,
1964), ‘gradually invades the state, which in turn
is compelled to assume forms favourable to this
advance.’ Politicians, Ellul sees as ‘impotent satel-
lites of the machine, which with all its parts and
techniques, apparently functions as well without
them’. However, the politicians do not step down.
Instead they create an illusion of politics and
political leadership.
Ellul anticipates the response that the Infor-
mation Age has brought about a more involved
public in the political process. For him the
sheer volume of information works to reinforce
the technological society by overwhelming the
citizen. In a detailed analysis of Ellul’s theory of
technique in ‘Hegemony, agency, and dialectical
tension in Ellul’s technological society’ in the
Journal of Communication (Summer 1998), Rick
Clifton Moore writes: ‘This is not to say that
all of the blame for the political illusion must
be laid at the feet of the state and the media.
Ellul’s orientation suggests the complicity of
the citizens themselves ... Th e modern citizen is
much too willing to accept the comfortable route
of technique, rather than make diffi cult choices
that would require humanness.’
Th e public, in Ellul’s view, is subject to, and
in thrall to, the ‘spectacle-orientated society’ in
which everything is ‘subordinated to visualiza-
tion’ and ‘nothing has meaning out of it’. In
today’s society, Ellul says, there are many, and
powerful, deterrents of human freedom. A key
question is whether, in societies where ‘covet-
ousness and the desire for power’ are human
constants across all cultural boundaries, there
is suffi cient agency among citizens to achieve
freedom. See hegemony; ideological stateTaste can also be used to refer to the cultural
or aesthetic tastes of an individual or group, and
such tastes can be used as signifi ers of economic
and cultural capital and used as a means of
social distinction. Th is perspective on taste owes
much to the work of Pierre Bourdieu outlined
in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984). He
argued that an individual’s taste was signifi cantly
infl uenced, though not totally determined, by
his/her class background, and thus aspects of
taste could be read as both a product and a signi-
fi er of class affi liation.
Bourdieu uses the term habitus to refer to
the collection of unconscious dispositions that
individuals may have as a result of their location
within the class structure; these may then infl u-
ence tastes, body image and bodily communica-
tion: a person might buy an Armani suit but he/
she will also need to look at ease wearing it, to
carry off the statement it may make about his/
her social position.
Bourdieu’s view that class signifi cantly infl u-
ences an individual’s tastes has been criticized,
in part because some commentators argue that
class distinction in modern-day society is less
easy to defi ne than in the past, and generally
considered of diminishing importance. However,
this is not to say that people are unaware
of the signs of distinction located in some
tastes. See communication, non-verbal
(nvc); consumption behaviour; culture:
consumer culture; culture: popular
culture; object language; self-identity.
▶Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Post-
modernism (Sage, 1991); Fran Martin, ed., Interpreting
Everyday Culture (Edward Arnold, 2003); David Bell
and Joanne Hollows, eds, Ordinary Lifestyles: Popu-
lar Media, Consumption and Taste (Open University
Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2005); Jean-Pascal
Daloz, Th e Sociology of Elite Distinction (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
Taxes on knowledge See stamp duty.
Taxonomic conquistadors Term used by Bill
Nicholls in Blurred Boundaries: Questions of
Meaning in Contemporary Culture (University
of Indiana Press, 1994) to describe the agencies,
sociological and marketing, that subject humans
to classification or segmentation. Nicholls
admits the dangers inherent in placing people
into (often stereotypical) slots, but concedes
that ‘with no categories at all culture itself would
disappear’. Th e use of the term conquistadors
suggests that such taxonomies – lists of classifi -
cation – have an enforcing and shaping capacity
through powers of persuasion and of inclusion/