Kelcie Vercel

Short Dissertation Abstract

"The Cultural Mediation of Home Buying in the United States: How Home Stagers, Homebuilders, and Realtors Construct the Home Buying Landscape and Contribute to Symbolic Exclusion"

How do cultural intermediaries contribute to symbolic exclusion in the housing market? Using a combination of content analysis, interviews and observations, I unpack the cultural practices of home stagers, homebuilders and realtors to reveal how these cultural intermediaries shape the most significant purchase most people ever make. Home stagers strategically arrange the material environments of houses in order to construct experiences of belonging for potential buyers. Homebuilders participating in the country’s longest-running show home program demonstrate how different meanings of home inspire and justify dramatically different material results. Realtors draw on popular property television shows as cultural resources to locate themselves and their clients in the home buying process, alternately embracing and rejecting the meanings these shows exhibit as they guide clients’ expectations and assert their expertise. These housing professionals determine what types of buyers will experience a sense of belonging in a house, whose anticipated needs are addressed in a home’s construction, and how buyers and sellers navigate the buying process. These findings clarify how cultural intermediaries instantiate and mobilize cultural meanings in the home buying process, and reveal the implications of their actions for housing access and the reproduction of inequality.

Kelcie Vercel

2018-07-19

Rebecca Overmyer