Keywords

Cultural Participation as a Positional Good

The social and hierarchical aspects of cultural participation have been the foci of key debates in cultural sociology since Bourdieu (1984/1979). As we saw in the Introduction, cultural participation is, together with cultural taste and knowledge, one of the three pillars of cultural practices. When studied separately from other types of cultural practices, cultural participation shows largely similar trends and hierarchical patterns of cultural stratification as cultural taste and knowledge. As we shall see in the following chapters, people with privileged backgrounds exhibit very different cultural participation patterns than their less privileged counterparts (Bennett et al. 2009; Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022; Purhonen et al. 2011). Bourdieu’s original postulate, which received significant criticism later on, was the existence of a homology between class positions and lifestyle differences, which translates into social exclusion and an unequal distribution of opportunities. This, in turn, was said to create cultural stratification whereby privileged classes adopt ‘highbrow’ cultural practices to distinguish themselves from the lower groups (Bourdieu 1984/1979). Thus, cultural participation such as attending ballet or reading poetry becomes ‘highbrow’, while cultural participation such as attending a boxing match or baking bread at home becomes ‘popular’ or ‘everyday’ participation. A classic example of the privileged status of highbrow participation and highbrow art is their inclusion in school curricula: schools reward children from privileged backgrounds as naturally talented, even though their skills are actually a by-product of socially inherited cultivation (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; DiMaggio 1982; Lareau and Weininger 2003).

What does the traditionally privileged status of highbrow culture imply for the social value attached to cultural participation? Although the debates on the value and eventual ‘impact’ of cultural participation have been going on since Antiquity (Belfiore and Bennett 2008), the most important contemporary reflections include the so-called meltdown scenario (DiMaggio and Mukhtar 2004) and the rise of the omnivore (Peterson and Kern 1996; Peterson and Simkus 1992). According to the meltdown scenario, the distinctive value of highbrow cultural participation is declining and losing its important function as a conveyor of cultural capital. This trend is said to be caused by significant devaluation of highbrow-oriented cultural participation, especially among women, the highly educated and the young, which leads to the ageing of the remaining highbrow participants. Nevertheless, DiMaggio and Mukhtar’s (2004) original study assessing the ‘meltdown’ in the USA between 1982 and 2002 is not a straightforward confirmation of this scenario. Subsequent studies have shown that although there is evidence of decline in highbrow cultural participation in many national contexts, its association with cultural capital (instead of economic capital) remains largely intact (Yuksek et al. 2019).

Meanwhile, the debate on the ‘rise of the omnivore’ has claimed that a growing group of highly educated people who used to be ‘snobs’ is becoming more open, eclectic and tolerant in its cultural practices; by combining practices from both highbrow and popular cultural milieus, this group supposedly creates ‘omnivorous’ patterns of cultural practices for the higher status groups (Peterson and Kern 1996; Peterson and Simkus 1992). The theory of omnivorousness has cast doubts on Bourdieu’s original thesis regarding the distinctiveness of highbrow cultural practices—for instance, Coulangeon and Lemel (2007, 94) stated that this theory can be directly ‘interpreted as an invalidation of Bourdieu’s sociology of taste’. At the same time, Lizardo and Skiles (2012) argued that omnivorousness is compatible with Bourdieu’s theory and interpreted omnivorous cultural practices as a form of Bourdieusian aesthetic dispositions that can be converted into cultural capital. The original claim of ‘rising omnivorousness’ has received mild support but also ample criticism, especially regarding the possibility that omnivorousness may be a methodological artefact (Brisson 2019; see also Peterson 2005). Recent research has suggested that the most omnivorous cultural practices could actually be found among middle-status groups rather than among high-status groups (Nault et al. 2021).

What has happened, then, to the long-standing trends of highbrow-oriented cultural participation? According to many sources, participation in highbrow activities has remained stable over recent decades (DiMaggio and Mukhtar 2004; Roose and Daenekindt 2015). Highbrow art still receives ample funding throughout the Global North (Council of Europe 2021; Heilbrun and Gray 2001; Saukkonen 2014). Highbrow cultural practices have retained their place in school curricula (Daenekindt and Roose 2015). However, from the perspective of cultural production, a previously tightly defined and narrow sphere of highbrow art does seem to be opening up to increased cultural heterogeneity in a double process of the legitimisation of popular culture and the popularisation of traditional legitimate culture (Purhonen et al. 2019). Still, there are no univocal signals or trends to suggest that the privileged status of highbrow-oriented cultural practices would be dissolving (Daenekindt and Roose 2015).

Along the lines of the omnivorousness debate, with high-status groups supposedly adopting broadly ‘omnivorous’ cultural practices, low-status groups have been seen as the logical opposite: a group defined mostly by its cultural exclusion (Peterson 1992). In other words, if the breadth of cultural practices indicates high-status distinction, lower taste groups are left with narrow cultural practices characterised by high volumes of dislikes and non-participation (Bryson 1997; 1996; Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022). Although these narrow cultural practices were originally described as ‘univorous’ in contrast to the broadly ‘omnivorous’ taste, subsequent research has shown that the omnivore–univore argument does not apply to all fields of cultural practices (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007) and that univorous tastes could actually be linked to upper-middle and middle-status groups rather than lower social classes (López Sintas and García Álvarez 2004).

Finally, Veblen’s theory of the ‘leisure class’ offers a useful perspective on the status value of cultural participation. In the late nineteenth century, Veblen argued that, as a result of what he called the ‘barbarian past’, upper-class elites, with their ample resources and willingness to display their ‘pecuniary superiority’, tended to adopt economically unproductive leisure activities to distinguish themselves from the working majority (Veblen 1889/1953). From this angle, cultural participation can be considered a ‘positional good’. Although Veblen’s nineteenth-century elites had the economic means and willingness to ‘afford a life of idleness’ (Veblen 1889/1953, 46) in order to stand out from the working classes, contemporary capitalist upper and upper-middle classes seem to distinguish themselves through their long working hours, busy agendas and lack of leisure time. Time management and a constant busyness have become normal in middle-class families (Darrah 2007), and leisure itself has changed from simply relaxing to a quest of finding original, exciting and memorable choices (Keinan and Kivetz 2011). In contemporary Western middle and upper-middle-class circles, an active, occupied and overworked lifestyle has become a status symbol (Bellezza et al. 2017; Sullivan and Katz-Gerro 2007): a busy person possesses, already since childhood, the desirable characteristics of self-management, motivation and productivity, even during leisure (Lareau 2011). In an era characterised by demands for people to become self-sufficient ‘entrepreneurial selves’ (Du Gay 1996), what can be said about the context of the cultural participation of the underprivileged classes?

Cultures of the Underprivileged Classes: A Moral Turn?

With the rise of right-wing populism across the Global North, there has been plenty of scholarly interest in the cultural universes of the different underprivileged groups of society (Charlesworth 2000; Cherlin 2014; Gest 2016; Gidron and Hall 2017; Hochschild 2016; Jarness and Flemmen 2019; McKenzie 2015; Lamont 2000; Skarpenes 2021; Tyler 2013; Williams 2017). Many recent studies have identified both structural and emotional gaps between the perceived honourable and dignified past of the lower groups of the class structure and the downward mobility they are experiencing in the twenty-first century. For instance, in his ‘testimony’ on a de-industrialised working-class area in the UK, Charlesworth (2000) spoke about a ‘dying way of life’ of the working classes: milieus once marked by hard work, solid industry and strong social ties are now characterised by worsening labour conditions, vulnerability at work and a consequently weak attachment to future aspirations. A very similar image was drawn by Gest (2016), who argued, based on empirical data from the USA and the UK, that the radicalisation and political withdrawal of the white working classes can be understood in terms of deprivation or a perceived loss of power fuelled by increasing globalisation and weakening trade unions—a scenario in which the white working classes start to consider themselves ‘minorities’. In her influential book on the ‘deep stories’ behind the rise of populist right-wing politics in the USA, Hochschild (2016) attempted to break the ‘empathy wall’ between the left-leaning academic sociology and the heartlands of the white conservative working-class America, concluding that the deep divide stems from feelings of betrayal and the perception that political authorities are to blame for economic decline as well as social and environmental problems.

How, then, are these debates related to cultural participation? Previous research suggests that people who identify as economically underprivileged typically feel culturally distant from dominant societal groups. Already in the 1940s, Genevieve Knupfer summarised that ‘low status people’ participate less in cultural and social life than ‘high status people’ and that economic underprivilege easily turns into a ‘psychological underprivilege’ or a lack of self-esteem which ‘increases the willingness of the low status person to participate in many phases of our predominantly middle-class culture’ (Knupfer 1947, 114). This phenomenon seems to be durable: the ‘status effect’, people’s subjective understanding of the respect or recognition that they receive, is a powerful predictor of certain political behaviours (Gidron and Hall 2017)—for example, low subjective social status is clearly associated with support for right-wing populist parties. There is large variation inside the underprivileged classes, from politically engaged ones—either through traditional pro-system means or through anti-system activities, as Gest (2016) has shown—to largely indifferent or passive groups, also in the Nordic countries (Salo and Rydgren 2021). Scholars have often argued that the popular classes appear to lack a shared culture (Bennett et al. 2009) and that they are extremely divided in terms of income and consumption (Hugrée et al. 2020). By and large, it can be expected, following Skeggs (1997), that working-class people, or underprivileged groups in general, feel excluded from large institutional structures, such as the labour market and the education system, and therefore disidentify with class, even though their everyday lives and cultural practices are entirely ‘classed’.

The scholarly consensus that the underprivileged classes have faced steep downward mobility in the last decades leading to feelings of cultural stigmatisation has produced debates on whether moral standards can work for the underprivileged groups as a kind of alternative currency in the face of diminishing economic and cultural resources (Jarness and Flemmen 2019; Lamont 2000). Lamont (2018, 424) has famously argued that ‘neoliberal scripts feed growing recognition gaps’—in other words, differences are growing between various societal groups regarding perceived worthiness and cultural membership, with the lower classes seeing themselves as incapable of achieving the neoliberal ideals of socio-economic success, self-reliance and self-management, which makes them feel stigmatised and de-valued. Lamont has claimed that this scenario further narrows down the cultural membership of the most vulnerable groups of society.

There are echoes of these developments and debates in the Nordic context. Based on focus group and survey data from Denmark, Harrits and Pedersen (2019) showed that working classes use moral categorisations as a strategy of increasing their own value: moral categorisations can challenge economic and cultural inequalities by forming an alternative hierarchy upon which lower-placed groups in the hierarchy can base their value, thus potentially compensating for low socio-economic and cultural boundaries. Still, Harrits and Pedersen concluded that socio-economic boundaries are the strongest of all boundaries and that moral categorisations mainly serve to legitimise already existing status differences. Contrary to Harrits and Pedersen, Skarpenes (2021) argued, using qualitative interview data with members of the Norwegian working class regarding their symbolic boundaries, that the Norwegian working classes still firmly believe in the Nordic model with its large public sector, collective bargaining, wage equality and tripartite agreements between trade unions, employers’ organisations and the national government. According to Skarpenes, members of the working class have a sense of ownership of this Nordic model and draw harsh symbolic boundaries against people and groups that do not accept the social responsibilities that belong to them.

On a slightly different note, Jarness and Flemmen (2019) showed, based on Norwegian interview data with people with low levels of cultural and economic capitals, that the concept of ‘moral boundaries’ entails a complex interconnection between upward and downward boundaries and can be used to both mock the most resourceful groups and exclude and denigrate those that are placed even lower on the social ladder. This clearly resembles Skeggs’s (1997) famous description of how British working-class women distinguished themselves from the groups they perceived as lower in an attempt to maintain ‘respectability’. Jarness and Flemmen (2019) also made an important contribution by revealing an oscillation between mostly male ‘moral defiance’ and mostly female ‘cultural deference’ (demonstrated many times in different national contexts as women’s tendency to be closer than men to many forms of cultural engagement; cf. Christin 2012; Katz-Gerro and Jaeger 2015; Lizardo 2006; Purhonen et al. 2014) and speculating whether this difference could be understood as women misrecognising or extending social hierarchies.

An attitude of moral defiance among the lower echelons of society is not far from what Paul Willis famously characterised as ‘caged resentment’ (Willis 1977/2017, 120), a ridiculisation and outright rejection of the middle-class way of life and cultural practices by the working-class ‘lads’ he studied or what Hochschild (2016) described as feelings of resentment or betrayal among contemporary American white working classes. De Keere (2020) has recently studied moral positions as markers of class and found, using data from Flanders, that groups with low amounts of economic capital in particular exhibited a fatalistic worldview: ideals of anti-establishment and non-conformity as well as the idea of not properly benefitting from how society works. This echoes what Skeggs and Loveday (2012) characterised as the ‘value struggles’ that underprivileged groups have to confront in the face of a normative consensus that claims they are dysfunctional, antisocial, morally dubious and so on. Skeggs and Loveday concluded that the underprivileged classes are perfectly aware of the judgements and forms of exploitation coming from above.

We have seen that moral boundaries have been considered an important means for underprivileged classes to defend their worth in a scenario in which they ‘lack’ cultural and/or economic resources and that, at the same time, there seems to be resistance and defiance among the lower classes towards established middle-class norms and valuations, be they aesthetical or moral. In this context, it is intriguing to look at public cultural policy as an attempt to lower barriers and enable different societal groups to broadly participate in culture while supporting institutionalised and canonised forms of cultural participation.

Cultural Policy as a Tool for Legitimising Certain Forms of Cultural Participation

We have seen that there are many arguments and scholarly findings on feelings of cultural ‘devaluation’ among underprivileged classes (Charlesworth 2000; Gest 2016; Hochschild 2016), which have to bear many derogatory labels associated with them (Jones 2016; Skeggs and Loveday 2012; Tyler 2013). These findings go hand in hand with contemporary discussions on the ‘cultural non-participant’ in the field of cultural policy. In recent decades, concerns have emerged regarding an alleged decrease in cultural participation and a subsequent challenge regarding non-participation in culture, with non-participation being portrayed as a ‘problem’ that requires a ‘solution’ (Balling and Kann-Christensen 2013; Stevenson et al. 2017; Stevenson 2013, 2019). This ‘deficit model of participation’—in which non-participation is seen, from the perspective of governmental actors, as a ‘lack’ (Miles and Sullivan 2012)—also implies that non-participants of highbrow culture constitute an excluded minority, a claim that is erroneous, as we shall see more in detail in the next chapters.

An important point in the debate on cultural non-participation was formulated by Stevenson (2013, 2019), who argued that instead of a ‘problem’ what actually exists is a ‘problematization’ that is tightly linked to hegemonic institutional discourses. Stevenson claimed that the ‘cultural non-participant’ is a superficially constructed discursive subject identity that essentially blames the non-participating people, framing them as deprived, deviant and in need of ‘meaningful transformative experiences’ (Stevenson 2019, 53). These ‘transformations’ are presented as being possible through (highbrow-oriented) cultural participation. When interviewing experts working in or for cultural organisations receiving state funding, Stevenson encountered a double standard in the ‘cultural non-participant’ discourse: highly educated experts framed cultural non-participants as excluded people in need of ‘life-changing experiences’ while claiming the right to shun certain forms of culture because of their own high status (Stevenson 2019). What is more, the publicly expressed excessive worry over the ‘problem’ of cultural non-participation ends up ultimately legitimising the institutions and organisations that produce and provide access to highbrow culture (Jancovich and Bianchini 2013). Cultural non-participation is thus defined from a top-down highbrow-oriented perspective and becomes a ‘problem’ only when defined from above in the social hierarchy. These are essential points in the cultural non-participation debate.

Cultural policy research has seen many debates on the enormously complex relationship between cultural participation and power in society (Hadley and Belfiore 2018). On the one hand, the ideal and the great promise of public cultural policy is that—because participation in culture is often assumed to be connected to many positive things in life, from individual well-being to larger social integration (Milling 2019)—successful cultural policy should ease social hierarchies by funding culture consumed by low-placed groups in the hierarchy (Belfiore 2002), for instance, via street art projects or neighbourhood renewal programmes. These kinds of policies are supposed to directly benefit lower-status groups. On the other hand, it is recognised that public funding of culture may simply reproduce existing socio-economic hierarchies by subventing the cultural participation of resourceful groups already high in the hierarchy (Feder and Katz-Gerro 2012), for instance, by funding operas, symphonic orchestras and theatres, whose audiences have an overrepresentation of well-off groups. This view is corroborated by the fact that the lion’s share of public funding for culture is usually directed towards a relatively small number of highbrow-oriented fields of culture, which is also true in Finland (Saukkonen 2014). In the same vein, scholars have debated whether different kinds of elite groups have too much power in designing policies about which types of cultural participation to support (Jancovich 2017). The cultural policy aspect brings along a question of fairness: Whose cultural participation is seen as relevant enough to fund? Is there a risk that popular, rich and vernacular forms of cultural participation go unfunded simply because they are not considered high enough in the hierarchy?

In recent decades, and in the wake of new public management policies, cultural policy has undergone new kinds of evaluations and performance assessments on whether implemented policies have been ‘successful’ enough, often based on idealised images of the ‘transformative powers’ of cultural participation (Belfiore and Bennett 2010). There have been debates on whether audited and measured cultural participation is becoming the sole indicator of the eventual ‘success’ of different cultural policies (Bunting et al. 2019). Already in the early twenty-first century, Belfiore predicted that instrumental cultural policy was here to stay (Belfiore 2002): the tax money spent on culture and the arts can be justified as an ‘investment’ if it entails positive social and societal impacts, such as easing social exclusion, typically by trying to lower the threshold of cultural participation for groups that participate very little (e.g. ethnic minorities, disabled people or otherwise socially very excluded groups) and thus supposedly activating the alleged ‘non-participants of culture’. However, there is empirical evidence that the reality behind this idealisation is very different. For instance, research on participatory decision-making shows that people who typically become engaged through various participatory programmes are people who are already participating (Jancovich and Ejgod Hansen 2018). Overall, practical ‘barriers’, such as lack of time and money, only appear to prevent the cultural participation of the people who are already participating in culture; the real obstacles for cultural participation seem to reside much deeper in the social structure and be connected to very low levels of cultural and social capital (Willekens and Lievens 2016). This echoes the empirical findings of Heikkilä and Lindblom (2022): the real non-participants are the people who have drifted away from every possible kind of participation, including participation in everyday culture. All this means that different initiatives for lowering the threshold of cultural participation through lower prices or different community projects run the risk of remaining meagre intents to curb the real problems of social inequality.

Conclusion: Cultural Participation as a Question of ‘Deservingness’

We have seen that participation in culture, especially in cultural fields considered ‘highbrow’, functions as a status symbol. Although there are signs of a weakening of highbrow culture as an indicator of privileged status (DiMaggio and Mukhtar 2004; Peterson and Kern 1996; Peterson and Simkus 1992), it can be argued that a hierarchy of lifestyles remains, with many studies arguing that different underprivileged groups feel isolated and de-valued, even culturally stigmatised (Charlesworth 2000; Gest 2016; Hochschild 2016; Lamont 2018; Skeggs and Loveday 2012). There is evidence that, due to their ‘lack’ of cultural resources, they mobilise different moral boundaries to express their own dignity and worth.

Finally, we have seen that it is debatable whether public cultural policy actually manages to improve access to culture or even lower much its barriers. Rather, it looks as if such policy serves as a tool for validating and legitimising specific kinds of highbrow-oriented cultural participation (Belfiore and Bennett 2007; Jancovich and Bianchini 2013) and represents, to a large extent, the interests of a narrow cultural elite (Jancovich 2017). In the same way, the discourse regarding the ‘problem’ of non-participation, which involves blaming and shaming non-participants, can be considered a handy means for arts organisations to legitimise the funding that they receive (Stevenson 2019). Considering that the bulk of public funding for culture and the arts is channelled mostly to highbrow culture, it is important to ask which segments of society receive the highest subventions for their forms of cultural participation and why.

There is thus a need to understand better how cultural non-participation should be conceptualised. According to Stevenson’s argument, cultural non-participation is a label given from above to people and groups that stand out as problematic for other, mainly structural reasons (for instance, because of their poverty) that serve to categorise non-participants as narrow-minded and lacking knowledge or even willingness to learn. Thus, we end up with the notion of ‘flawed subjectivities’ (Stevenson 2019) whose contribution to any level of cultural participation is further diminished via this pejorative labelling. The next chapter on the existing scholarly literature on cultural participation and non-participation will help us contextualise this argument further.