HabitusMatch combines four sociological theory strands into an integrated analytical framework. Here you'll find the key concepts, sources, and their significance for algorithmic cultural analysis.
HabitusMatch combines these theory levels into a closed analytical framework: Bourdieu's habitus concept provides the fundamental sociological logic — musical taste as expression of capital structure and class position. Peterson & Kern's omnivore thesis extends this framework to account for contemporary shifts from exclusivity to diversity as a new distinction strategy. Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model explains how AI models function as cultural decoding instances and thereby produce specific readings. The Sinus Milieus finally translate these theoretical concepts into an empirically validated milieu map for the German-speaking region.
These theories were not developed for algorithmic analysis. HabitusMatch is an experiment — it tests whether theoretical constructs are applicable to streaming behavior data. The research study systematically collects evidence for this question.
All four theory strands flow into HabitusMatch's prompt architecture. The LLM is instructed to interpret song lists along these theoretical axes — not as free association, but as theory-guided encoding work. The quality of this encoding is the subject of the ongoing research study.