Abstract
This chapter is an introduction to the book, a qualitative research about cultural non-participation in an egalitarian society. It introduces the main dilemma: that active cultural participation is linked to high education and class position across different national contexts and that cultural non-participation is typically presented as a problem. The theoretical framework on cultural practices corresponding to social class and being able to generate cultural capital, building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his main critics, is explained in detail. Finland, as a fruitful empirical context for the study, is presented. This chapter presents the main research questions on (1) how the cultural participation of hypothetically ‘non-participating’ groups is and (2) what kinds of symbolic boundaries they draw while talking about their cultural participation.
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Keywords
A cultural divide is said to be separating our Western societies into two diverging life-worlds that are differentiated by structural factors such as income, education, political views, race and so on, but increasingly also by cultural practices. A division between liberal and alternative views, on the one hand, and traditional, anti-elitist and national views, on the other hand, seems to be capturing peoples’ political and value orientations better than the traditional left-right scale (Flanagan and Lee 2003; Hooghe et al. 2002). In this scenario, high culture has been increasingly positioned as an ‘elitist’ pursuit. This label is at least partly true in the sense that according to most scholarly research on the topic, many people seem to be ‘non-participants’ when it comes to culture. This scenario looked to me like an enigma when I first came across it. What were all these people with supposedly zero interest in cultural participation doing? Were they all similar? And why did they refrain from participation—for practical, social or political reasons? If, for instance, museums were technically open to everyone, what was the strong social force that made some people exclude themselves? These questions intrigued me when I first started working on my PhD in 2006 as part of a research project on cultural capital and social stratification in Finland (Rahkonen et al. 2006), which was intended as the Finnish counterpart to the UK’s Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion study (Bennett et al. 2009).
Of course, the first evident finding in all cross-cultural research was that cultural participation was socially structured and that culturally active people were better off, while non-participants were linked to low positions in society. Cultural participation thus seemed to be essentially a question of inequality. At the same time, the booming ‘everyday participation’ debate started to emphasise the more mundane pastimes of the working and lower classes (Miles and Gibson 2016). Still, I noticed early in my own research that people with lower cultural participation answered various surveys much less willingly than culturally active people and were more reluctant participants in the follow-up interviews that I was conducting for the research project. Therefore, studying cultural practices, specifically participation, seemed to run the risk of producing a skewed image in favour of the people who were engaged participants while revealing barely anything about the people who participated very little.
With this dilemma in mind, I applied for funding for a research project titled Understanding Cultural Disengagement in Contemporary Finland. The project received funding and started in 2017. I wanted to thoroughly understand what cultural non-participation really meant and whether it actually existed. My aim was to find out what the leisure of the supposedly disengaged people looked like and how they reacted to the normative demand that everyone ‘should’ participate. To achieve my purpose, I talked about cultural practices and everyday life with 40 different individuals and nine focus groups in Finland whose backgrounds matched, according to previous research, the known background factors associated with low cultural participation—mainly having low education, living in a small place, working in a manual job, living in remote areas and so on. On the whole, my interviewees were people with common educational trajectories, mainstream jobs and typical family structures for Finnish lower or popular classes (cf. Purhonen et al. 2014): ‘common people’ rather than an excluded and marginalised minority. My research questions needed to be investigated in light of their empirical context, Finland—an egalitarian country with relatively equal possibilities for cultural participation and supposedly few lifestyle distinctions. Therefore, I decided to include the idea of egalitarianism in the book, beginning with its title.
It has been claimed that cultural participation, as a structure that brings strangers together for something that occurs in the public sphere, is central to the definition of the modern public mindset (Sennett 2002). Moreover, in recent years, cultural participation has become a hot topic in the sociology of culture (Gayo 2017; Reeves and de Vries 2019; Willekens and Lievens 2016). At the same time, active cultural participation has been continuously linked to high education and class position across different national contexts (Bennett et al. 2009; Purhonen et al. 2014; Reeves and de Vries 2019). This disproportionality and social inequality in cultural participation is mirrored in cultural production (Brook et al. 2020) and is further reflected in the discourse of cultural non-participation as a challenge or a problem (Balling and Kann-Christenssen 2013; Stevenson et al. 2017; Stevenson 2013), which often leads to the stigmatisation of non-participants as deviants (Stevenson 2019).
A highly important recent turn in the cultural participation debate has involved the idea that the volume of cultural participation could be a more important structuring factor regarding participation than the traditional divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture (Prieur and Savage 2013; Purhonen et al. 2014; Savage et al. 2015; Weingartner and Rössel 2019). A ‘voracious’ or insatiable cultural participant is a product of modern capitalism: busy, harried and multitasking, within and beyond cultural participation (Ollivier 2008; Sullivan and Katz-Gerro 2007). The growing importance of the activity dimension has largely been seen as part of the transformation towards post-materialism and self-expression, which entails a higher tolerance towards other cultures and thus less need for highbrow snobbery (Weingartner and Rössel 2019). At the same time, it echoes the arguments that the distinctiveness of highbrow cultural practices would be diminishing (Lareau and Weininger 2003).
But what exactly is participation, anyway? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as follows: ‘The process or fact of sharing in an action, sentiment, etc.; (now esp.) active involvement in a matter or event, esp. one in which the outcome directly affects those taking part’. Attending a concert, playing an instrument or singing in a choir are at the core of different definitions of participation, as we shall see. Helping neighbours, joining an association, going to the gym, collecting coins or watching television are categorised as participation according to the broader understandings of ‘everyday participation’. However, should minding your cat, looking for different puzzles on the internet, finding used parts for broken motorcycles or having sex also be categorised as participation? These are all leisure pursuits and very common ones. But are they really part of ‘sharing in an action’ or ‘active involvement’? In addition, their ‘problem’ in being recognised as cultural participation is that they are situated extremely far from legitimised, canonised participatory practices. And yet, such activities constitute the everyday practices of many ordinary people: in fact, they all were mentioned by one or several of my interviewees.
Theoretical and Methodological Starting Points
This book builds on the theoretical framework of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his idea that lifestyles are homologous to the surrounding social structures. According to this thesis, cultural practices—understood as taste, knowledge and participation—correspond to the social class structure according to existing hierarchies: upper classes practice culture that is considered ‘higher’, and the lower classes practice culture considered ‘lower’. This leads to what Bourdieu calls distinction (Bourdieu 1984/1979). In his theory, when it comes to lifestyle, power relations work in a way in which hierarchically higher cultural practices are assigned more value than lower ones—the former are granted legitimacy and enjoy an undisputed taken-for-grantedness. Whereas the upper classes, according to Bourdieu, exhibit an ‘aesthetic disposition’, or a capacity to prioritise form over function and make ‘disinterested’ judgements on culture, the lower classes conceive culture through an attitude of functional ‘popular aesthetic’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979). The cultural practices of the privileged classes appear ‘highbrow’ and legitimate in the eyes of the other classes, which usually either strive for equality without ever really succeeding—for example, with the middle classes attempting to nudge their children into prestigious cultural hobbies—or adopt practically oriented tastes because nothing else is available to them, as the working classes do by watching TV or sneering at opera-goers. This latter claim regarding the ‘taste of necessity’ that Bourdieu ascribes to the working classes has been widely criticised (see Bennett 2011 and Chap. 4). Cultural practices may seem like aleatory personal choices, but in Bourdieu’s theory, they become vehicles of violence that separate ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ cultural practices in practically all fields of culture. Different cultural practices are thus seen as a ‘socially innocent language of likes and dislikes’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 239) that makes them misrecognised as markers of class hierarchies and inequality.
This means that cultural non-participation can also very quickly elicit labels such as narrow-mindedness and lack of knowledge (Stevenson 2019). When taken into account that active cultural participation is linked to high-status qualities, such as high education, high income and so on (Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022; Reeves and de Vries 2019), this scenario almost by default paves the way for a denigration of cultural non-participation as a feature of the lower classes, seen not only as ‘ignorant’ or ‘vulgar’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979) but also as unwillingness to learn by participating in culture (Stevenson 2019). McKenzie (2015) argued that the working classes are seen as ‘unidimensional’ and lacking ‘positive namings and valuations’; this becomes very clear through the use of pejorative labels, such as ‘chavs’ (Jones 2016) or ‘underclasses’ (Tyler 2013). Finally, regarding the judgements received by the working classes, it has been claimed that the lower classes have the tools and resources to reject these unjustifiable and undesired judgements (Skeggs and Loveday 2012). The question of how exactly this rejection occurs in an egalitarian country such as Finland will be one of the key themes of this book.
Bourdieu’s theory has been fundamentally questioned over the years, although it should be remembered that his empirical data and approach were deeply embedded in the cultural and ideological context of 1960s France, a very different world from today’s post-consumerist and relatively individualistic Western societies. Yet, this book takes the critiques and updates on Bourdieu’s work very seriously indeed—and tries to work beyond them. According to one of the most important critical arguments against Bourdieu, modern consumer-citizens live in rapidly transforming societies with plenty of room for leading individualistic lifestyles free from class constraints and sensitive to peers, life-courses and significant others (Featherstone 1991; Lahire 2004). In the last 30 years or so, the ‘omnivore debate’ has questioned whether highbrow snobbery actually functions as a sign of cultural distinction or whether previous highbrow snobs are starting to participate in both highbrow and popular culture (Peterson 2005). Finally, scholars have wondered what really works as effective cultural capital in different contexts—for example, what forms of cultural participation are strong enough to create social exclusions or to form difficult-to-cross group boundaries? Lamont and Lareau argued that ‘the power exercised through cultural capital … is first and foremost a power to shape other people’s lives through exclusion and symbolic imposition’ (1988, 159). This means that classical highbrow culture is not linked to cultural capital as such; rather, national contexts and the institutionalisation of certain kinds of cultural practices grant cultural capital to certain forms of cultural participation. Within the scope of this book, it is especially interesting to consider what works (or not) as cultural capital among Finnish underprivileged groups.
Finally, Michèle Lamont’s important criticism of Bourdieu’s model was that the latter exaggerated the importance of cultural and economic resources and overlooked the significance of morality. Lamont created the concept of symbolic boundaries to mark the conceptual distinctions or rules used to ‘categorise objects, people, practices’ and to ‘separate people into groups’ (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168), which helped understand how people regarded those above and below them in hierarchies. Lamont also distinguished between cultural, economic and moral symbolic boundaries. In her comparative study between French and North American upper-class men, Lamont found that the cultural context was essential for boundary-drawing: whereas cultural boundaries were central in France, in the USA cultural boundaries were much looser, with more emphasis being placed on moral boundaries. However, the symbolic boundary approach has been strongly criticised because of its tendency to separate boundary types—for instance, Jarness and Flemmen (2019) argued that moral boundaries work very differently when drawn upwards or downwards and that boundaries very rarely exist in their ‘pure’ form.
Aims and Definitions
The aim of this book is to provide a systematic understanding of cultural non-participation in contemporary Finland. My research was centred on two fundamental research questions:
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1.
How is the cultural participation of the hypothetically ‘non-participating’ groups constituted in Finland?
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2.
What kinds of boundaries do they draw while talking about their cultural participation?
In order to be able to these questions, I will next define the main concepts used in the book.
We have already used a dictionary definition of ‘participation’, but defining ‘cultural participation’ is a more difficult task. The different operationalisations of cultural participation are thoroughly discussed in Chap. 3; we will see that different scholars have operationalised cultural participation in highly diverse ways. Moreover, there is no established system of categorising the different forms of cultural participation: while many scholars follow the Bourdieusian way of coupling directly highbrow cultural practices with the culture of high-status groups, for instance, Warde and Gayo-Cal (2009) have suggested a more fixed conceptualization of cultural practices, using education as a proxy to distinguish between the cultural practices of highly educated groups compared to those without educational qualifications (arriving at a tripartite division between highbrow, common and unauthorised cultural practices).
In this book, after finding that cultural participation was described on many different levels by my interviewees, I have decided to speak about highbrow-oriented, popular and everyday cultural participation. By highbrow-oriented cultural participation, I refer to canonical cultural practices, such as attending the opera, ballet or theatre, going to museums, reading books, listening to classical music and so on, which are linked to the cultural practices of high-status groups (Reeves and de Vries 2019), also in Finland (Purhonen et al. 2011, 2014). Popular culture is usually understood as a simple counterpart of ‘highbrow’ taste (thus ‘lowbrow’), something for which Bourdieu has been criticised—for instance, by Fiske (1987/2010)—because popular culture clearly includes meaning-making and a certain accumulation of capital just like highbrow-oriented culture. By popular cultural participation, I refer to common cultural practices, such as going to the cinema, watching TV, attending the circus, going to a pop or folk concert or listening to similar music at home, which are linked to how previous studies have conceptualised popular culture (Gayo 2017; Katz-Gerro and Jaeger 2013; Warde et al. 2007). Finally, everyday participation refers to a more recent debate that starts with the mundane and community-centred everyday leisure practices that were previously not even considered when studying cultural participation (Ebrey 2016; Miles and Gibson 2016). Following other studies (Leguina and Miles 2017; Miles and Sullivan 2012), I take everyday cultural participation to involve mundane and informal activities, such as doing crosswords, socialising with relatives, walking the dog, attending fairs or flea markets and so on. Faced with a large number of different terms for capturing non-participation in culture (e.g. cultural disengagement, passivity, inactivity and so on; see Chap. 3 for an in-depth discussion), I have chosen to use the least normative and hopefully the most neutral term, namely non-participation, when describing the simple lack of participation in either highbrow-oriented, popular or everyday culture.
A significant empirical question looms over the discussion: How do these three different forms of cultural participation relate to cultural capital? Bourdieu’s theory is based on the assumption that the social classes—the upper classes, the middle classes and the working, or popular, classes—have different amounts of resources, which he conceptualised as capitals: economic, cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986). Class, for Bourdieu, involves two dimensions: the overall volume of capitals and the composition of capitals. The higher the capital volumes, the higher people are in the social structure (Bourdieu 1984/1979). Many scholars have argued that the compositions of capitals are important in determining an individual’s status in the social structure (Blasius and Friedrichs 2008). According to Bourdieu’s theory, the three capitals are interchangeable: economic capital can be converted into cultural capital by, for example, buying a theatre ticket, cultural capital can be converted into social capital by using certain language skills to enter privileged groups, and social capital can be converted into economic capital by using one’s connections to get a good job—and so on (cf. Reeves and de Vries 2019). Bourdieu reminds us, however, that this interchangeability is not automatic: especially the realm of cultural production is an ‘economic world reversed’ in which economic capital, such as high sales numbers, becomes problematic in terms of the possible prestige and exclusivity of works of art (Bourdieu 1993).
Bourdieu originally coined the concept of cultural capital to explain the link between the academic success of educated parents’ children. According to Bourdieu’s argumentation, formal school curricula include items (e.g. highbrow arts) that are already familiar to children from educated families (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979; DiMaggio, 1982; Lareau and Weininger, 2003). These children, then, are rewarded for their ‘cultivated naturalness’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 71), even if their skills are socially inherited and eventually embodied. Other scholars have pointed out that the value of cultural capital may be different from what Bourdieu originally meant. The debate has mainly been between ‘fixed’ and ‘floating’ concepts of cultural capital (cf. Prieur and Savage 2013). Lamont and Lareau proposed that cultural capital should refer to ‘widely shared, high status cultural signals used for social and cultural exclusion’ (1988, 156), allowing for a certain fluctuation of the value of different cultural products over time.
Finally, in addition to the concept of cultural capital, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus may facilitate our understanding of why some people feel more at home than others when participating in certain forms of culture. According to Bourdieu, the durable and transposable habitus becomes ‘second nature’ as a set of class-based and embodied dispositions that help people navigate the social structure, giving them an idea of what kinds of cultural practices are possible for people like them (Bourdieu 1993). Habitus provides an individual with ‘a sense of one’s place which leads one to exclude oneself from places from which one is excluded’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 471).
Mapping the Context
Some words should be said about the empirical context, namely, Finland. Finland is a Nordic country with a relatively small population of 5.5 million people. Although a Western capitalist economy, it is one of the countries scoring highest in egalitarian values and the redistribution of wealth, which makes Finland one of the so-called Nordic welfare states (Esping-Andersen 1999). Finland has a largely de-commodified public sector with, for instance, an almost completely public and free education system, including university studies. Taxation is relatively high; particularly income taxes are high compared to other countries (OECD 2022). Voter turnout is high compared to many other countries (OECD 2019). In terms of the labour market, Finland boasts a collective bargaining system and a permanently high trade union density compared to other European countries (Ruostetsaari 2015; Stokke and Thornqvist 2001). Economic, labour market and social policy debates have historically been marked by a will to reach consensus (Ruostetsaari 2015). A traditionally centralised model of industrial relations has only recently started to loosen up. Although Finland has a strong labour movement with historical roots, compared to most other European countries, the country has experienced industrialisation and urbanisation relatively late, and a certain ‘rural identity’ is still central for many people (Kantola et al. 2022). Finland is an EU member since 1995 and is part of the EMU with Euro currency. At the time of writing this book, Finland is applying for NATO membership together with Sweden.
In terms of cultural sociology, Finnish sociologists have often claimed that Finland lacks ‘class culture’ and, therefore, effective possibilities for true lifestyle distinctions (Mäkelä 1985), mainly due to historical reasons, such as a lack of a proper feudal nobility. These claims have been criticised and even proved wrong; in fact, Finland has similar patterns of heavily class-based lifestyles as do other countries in the Global North, and education functions as an important factor in structuring lifestyles (Heikkilä 2021; Purhonen et al. 2014). Recently, scholars have identified polarisation in many of the key institutions of egalitarian Finland. Regarding voter turnout, recent research has revealed a trend of polarisation along socioeconomic lines (Lahtinen 2019). Regarding media repertoires, socioeconomically underprivileged groups seem to be drifting towards increasingly narrow and restricted media consumption habits (Heikkilä et al. 2020). In a previously highly egalitarian setting of equal public education, there is increasing segregation of schools (Bernelius and Vaattovaara 2016).
Despite these developments, Finland is still considered an egalitarian country. In the Nordic countries, egalitarianism—often characterised as a belief in human equality at the social, political and economic levels—has entailed a particular demand for anti-elitism: people generally consider themselves equal in the Nordic countries, and there is, for instance, a tendency to avoid titles or to downplay economic wealth (Daloz 2007; Hjellbrekke et al. 2015; Skarpenes and Sakslind 2010). In Nordic societies, groups occupying top positions in the social hierarchy have typically preferred to portray themselves as ‘ordinary’ (Ljunggren 2017). In Finland, the elites have been keen to emphasise their humility in a framework of modesty belonging to the Lutheran tradition (Kantola and Kuusela 2019). Although factors such as relatively small income differences and equal education opportunities help foster egalitarianism, they do not necessarily translate into equal cultural practices; on the contrary, such factors can conceal and even shape hierarchical structures. As Jarness (2017, 369) argued, ‘Egalitarianism functions as a misrecognised counterforce members of the culturally privileged middle class direct against members of the economically privileged middle class – and vice versa’ (see also Jarness 2015). De Keere (2020) found that support for egalitarianism is skewed towards groups with some cultural but little economic capital; their opposite is found in groups with little capitals in general but characterised by some economic capital—among them De Keere encountered a ‘fatalistic’ worldview which is characterised by distrust towards regulations and an idea that society is not trustworthy or even profitable. In Finland, concerns have arisen about different societal groups drifting further away from one another—for instance, in a large recent study, Kantola et al. (2022) found that Finns with very little income and precarious positions largely share a lack of confidence in the welfare state. In this light, although the topic of this book is cultural non-participation in general and not the Finnish case as such, Finland is an interesting context for studying this topic.
The Design of This Book
This book consists of three parts. In the first part, ‘Situating the Research’, the Introduction is followed by three chapters that form the theoretical backbone of the work. Chapter 2 contextualises cultural participation by first discussing cultural participation as a positional good. Then, the chapter asks whether there can be a ‘moral turn’ in the cultural practices of different underprivileged groups. Finally, cultural policy is discussed as legitimation for certain kinds of cultural practices. Chapter 3 deals with cultural participation and non-participation in relation to the previous literature. The chapter discusses the connections between social status and cultural participation, followed by the many different definitions and operationalisations of cultural participation and non-participation. Finally, ‘everyday participation’ is discussed in a sub-chapter. Chapter 4 lays the groundwork for the subsequent empirical chapters. It contains a description of the challenges involved in studying the cultural non-participation of underprivileged groups and offers details about my data collection process, the data themselves and the analysis. The second part of the book, ‘Cultural Milieus of the Potentially Passive’, presents the empirical material. This part is divided into three chapters according to the interviewees’ main discourses regarding cultural participation: ‘affirmation’, ‘functionality’ and ‘resistance’. I did not group the interviewees according to these categories; rather, I identified the major discourses employed by the interviewees themselves. In addition to standard excerpts from interviews, the chapters contain illustrative text boxes focusing on individual empirical cases that help clarify key theoretical concepts or ideas. The last part, ‘Paving the Way for Future Debates’, contains the concluding chapter. It provides an overview of how cultural non-participation should and could be understood in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. It also deals with the often-problematic role of cultural policy in trying to alter existing hierarchies. After discussing the limitations of my study, the chapter outlines an agenda for future research.
Finally, some reflections on interview dynamics are in order. My role as the interviewer certainly affected both the interview situations and their analytical outcomes. Qualitative interviews are typically asymmetrical in terms of power dynamics because interview situations are usually dominated by the interviewer (Bengtsson and Fynbo 2018). At the time of the interviews, I was an academic woman in my mid-thirties with prestigious state funding, and I was consciously recruiting interviewees with background factors predicting low cultural participation (see Chap. 4). The combination of my age, gender and education may have seemed surprising, ridiculous or even provocative to some interviewees, and in one way or another, this situation was often referred to in the interviews themselves (for a more detailed account, see Heikkilä and Katainen 2021). A particular sensitivity was often needed on my part; as Michèle Lamont did during her interviews with French and North American upper-class men, I attempted to ‘minimize distorting effects’ (Lamont 1992, 19) by presenting myself as a harmless, non-intrusive and non-judgemental outsider to the interviewees’ many different cultural and geographical contexts in order to put them at ease and encourage them to speak. Much like Justin Gest, who recently studied working-class culture in the USA and the UK, I also made every effort to attain ‘full immersion into communities’ (Gest 2016, 206), often spending many days in the towns in which I conducted interviews, getting to know and better understand my interviewees and their local contexts. In this sense, qualitative methods proved to be an effective means of gaining at least some access to difficult-to-reach profiles. My wish is to have captured the ‘seemingly unimportant’ (Back 2015) aspects of the daily lives of my interviewees; the following chapters will show whether I have succeeded in this task.
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Heikkilä, R. (2022). Introduction. In: Understanding Cultural Non-Participation in an Egalitarian Context. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Participation . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18865-7_1
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