Keywords

The Intrinsic Link Between Social Position and Cultural Participation

Cultural sociology often departs from the idea that cultural practices are never arbitrary but that they reflect and eventually normalise different kinds of social hierarchies. Cultural participation, in this sense, is a special case and has a social and public dimension, unlike cultural taste or knowledge, because it is visible to others and subject to different public funding policies. Cultural sociology in the tradition of Bourdieu (1984/1979) believes that there is a homological relationship between class and lifestyle, which means that social structures are directly reflected in cultural structures, resulting in shared tastes and cultural participation patterns among different social groups or classes. According to Bourdieu (1984/1979), these patterns are organised hierarchically and create immediate social exclusion, as privileged classes adopt highbrow cultural practices to distinguish themselves from the middle and working classes. The latter, in turn, struggle to navigate the situation the best they can, with the middle classes showing their cultural goodwill by trying to mimic the upper classes, while the popular classes accept their subjugated position by developing popular practices.

Recent research in cultural sociology has proved time and again that, despite the critiques and updates to Bourdieu’s theory, which I discussed in the Introduction, his main finding on the link between social and lifestyle hierarchies holds across several national contexts (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007; García-Álvarez et al. 2007; Katz-Gerro and Jaeger 2013; Purhonen et al. 2014). In this book, my main interest lies in the division between cultural participation and non-participation. This division is a direct follow-up to Bourdieu’s original idea of the symbolic differences between highbrow and lowbrow cultural practices: researchers have shown beyond doubt that, in various national contexts, active and broad cultural participation is linked to high social status and low cultural participation to low social status (Bennett et al. 2009; Miles and Sullivan 2012; Purhonen et al. 2014; Weingartner and Rössel 2019).

Cultural non-participation and limited cultural participation are extremely common. Most studies have found that more than half of different kinds of societies can be categorised as some type of non-participant. For instance, Weingartner and Rössel (2019), based on their longitudinal survey data from Switzerland, concluded that although the share of their ‘inactive’ group decreased between 1976 and 2013, it remained sizeable and accounted for approximately one-third of the Swiss population in 2013 (in 1976, the inactive group included almost two thirds of their sample). Reeves and de Vries (2019) reported that 28 per cent of their individual-level panel survey respondents from the UK did not attend any of the 14 activities probed (an additional 23 per cent had attended only one activity). Using their nationally representative Danish sample, Katz-Gerro and Jaeger (2013) showed that 57 per cent of their sample could be categorised as ‘passive’. When studying musical tastes in the USA, García-Álvarez et al. (2007) concluded that 56 per cent of their respondents had ‘limited’ taste. In their study on arts participation in the UK, Chan and Goldthorpe (2007) concluded that as much as 59 per cent of their sample consisted of non-consumers or ‘inactives’. In other words, significant portions of various populations can be defined as cultural non-participants. What does this large group look like when scrutinised more closely? My next step will involve looking at the most common socio-economic indicators predicting zero or very low cultural participation across different national contexts.

Education. Generally, all scholarly literature maintains that education is the most important factor structuring and conditioning cultural participation. Cultural activeness is linked to high education, and cultural non-participation is linked to lower education across practically all national contexts (Bennett et al. 2009; Chan and Goldthorpe 2007; García-Álvarez et al. 2007; Katz-Gerro and Jaeger 2013; López-Sintas and García-Álvarez 2002; Purhonen et al. 2014; Reeves and de Vries 2019; Weingartner and Rössel 2019). High educational levels seem to be connected to both the breadth and frequency of cultural participation (Stichele and Laermans 2006). The key role high of education as a structural factor enabling cultural participation is a worthy reminder of the fact that culture and the arts have preserved their position as markers of social status and cultural capital and that Bourdieu’s assumption that cultural capital is a skill for navigating the dominant culture and obtaining returns through the formal education system remains directly connected to symbolic domination by the higher classes (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). However, there are diverging views on how exactly education affects cultural participation. For instance, Reeves and de Vries (2016) showed that although high education generally predicts high cultural participation, the academic disciplines that different individuals have studied have a great effect on participation patterns: humanities degrees are particularly associated with the widest range of cultural participation. Education also seems to have a transgenerational effect: people with the most educated parents end up participating in culture the most (Van Hek and Kraaykamp 2013; Kallunki and Purhonen 2017).

Occupation. Although high education is the single most important factor predicting cultural participation, the impact and direction of occupation is similar but typically somewhat weaker (Purhonen et al. 2011)—for example, executive-level workers exhibit higher levels of cultural participation than the intermediate or working classes. When it comes to specific occupations, Bourdieu himself pointed out that working close to the cultural sectors indicates affinities with highbrow culture (Bourdieu 1984/1979). Subsequent scholars have added that this could partly explain why women tend to participate in highbrow culture more than men (Bihagen and Katz-Gerro 2000). When looking closer at workforce participation and differences in occupational cultures, scholars have argued that arts-related culture in the workplace can serve as a crucial determinant of individual cultural practices (Lizardo 2006). Finally, it should be kept in mind that occupational positions directly function as social networks—for instance, Lauren Rivera’s research on elite hiring found that elite evaluators assess not only applicants’ CVs and cognitive skills but also, importantly, their leisure interests and cultural participation patterns, which are rewarded for being similar to the evaluators’ cultural practices; this finding emphasises the effect and importance of ‘cultural matching’ (Rivera 2012).

Gender. Practically all studies conclude that men participate in culture less than women, which makes the female gender a strong predictor of active cultural participation and the male gender a predictor of lower participation (Bihagen and Katz-Gerro 2000; Christin 2012; Katz-Gerro 2002; Katz-Gerro and Jæger 2015; Purhonen et al. 2011). No sole explanation has been found for women’s higher rates of cultural involvement. Research-based suggestions include arguments that women are more often in charge of the family’s cultural status and socialisation (Bihagen and Katz-Gerro 2000), that women experience early socialisation in culture through arts-related hobbies more often than men (Christin 2012) or that women more often work in positions closer to cultural fields than men (Lizardo 2006). Regarding the many different functions that cultural capital can perform in social stratification, scholars have speculated that women play an important role in the ‘cultural reproduction model’: in the realm of the family, women tend to be responsible for socialisation related to culture (DiMaggio 1982), although there is evidence that the gender difference in highbrow participation could also originate outside of the immediate family context (Katz-Gerro and Jaeger 2015). Finally, the strong impact of gender on cultural participation should always be considered side by side with other contextual indicators—for instance, Lagaert and Roose (2018) have suggested that gender-equal countries have higher numbers of both men and women participating in culture due to greater equality in sharing housework and childcare.

Income. Across most studies, income has been found to have a weaker effect on cultural non-participation than other socio-economic background variables (Chan and Goldthorpe 2007; Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022; Purhonen et al. 2011). Alderson et al. (2007) concluded that the role of income is mostly to enable participation: further than that, income does not really distinguish between different modes of cultural participation. Willekens and Lievens (2016) found that economic capital was the only form of capital with zero effect on the propensity to belong to the group of ‘non-attenders’. Yaish and Katz-Gerro (2012) made an important contribution by showing that although cultural resources, such as education and inherited cultural capital, affect tastes, income affects actual cultural participation.

Place. Scholars studying the effects of location and access on cultural non-participation often argue that not enough attention is paid to place (see Gilmore 2013; Miles and Gibson 2016). The rationale for emphasising the role of place is that the lack of suitable venues for cultural participation could be a central reason for non-participation and that culturally thriving urban spaces could function as drivers for improving access to culture and enabling the cultural participation of more people. Cutts and Widdop (2017) claimed that people’s surroundings are a significant factor structuring participation; according to their study, the extremely active omnivores (whom they call the ‘voracious’) are associated with big cities with many cultural activities, such as Inner London in the UK. They argued that a suitable context could enhance the possibility of participating in culture—when all other variables were controlled for, one’s living area remained an important explanatory factor for cultural participation (Cutts and Widdop 2017). In the same vein, Gayo (2017) found that people living in medium-sized and small cities specifically mentioned the scarcity of possible venues as an obstacle to participating in culture. Gilmore (2017) stressed the important difference between de-commodified and private places—for instance, public parks can become important locations for grassroots cultural participation.

In sum, cultural non-participation is such a complex phenomenon that it cannot be explained but only, at best, predicted through certain standard background factors. Other elements to keep in mind include, for instance, digital access, which recent scholarship has found to entail and reproduce exactly the same hierarchies that exist in physical participation (Mihelj et al. 2019), and time constraints. Although lack of time is an often-cited reason for the non-participation of well-off people living busy lives in big cities (Gayo 2017), shift workers, for example, are excluded from traditional event-based cultural participation simply because their timetables do not allow it (Miles and Sullivan 2012). In the family context, it is usually women whose cultural participation suffers due to time constraints (Bihagen and Katz-Gerro 2000); perhaps surprisingly, working full time increases the cultural participation of women but not of men (Willekens and Lievens 2016). Also, context plays an important role for cultural non-participation: the inequality of cultural non-participation varies across countries in relation to wealth and social mobility, with there being less differentiation in highbrow cultural participation in wealthy countries and countries with high social mobility (Van Hek and Kraaykamp 2013).

The Multiple Definitions of Cultural Participation and Non-participation

One of the main problems in the scholarly debate on cultural non-participation has been the fact that there are many different yet partly overlapping definitions for it. Terminological differences reflect the variety of the different emphases the phenomenon has been given across time and show that different studies use rather different operationalizations to coin different versions of non-participation.

Most of the operationalisations of cultural non-participation are tightly tied to formal, highbrow-oriented participation. For instance, Chan and Goldthorpe (2007) used the Arts in England survey conducted in 2001 to focus on questions on visual arts that probed whether the participant attended museums and art galleries, exhibitions and collections, craft exhibitions, events including video and electronic art, and cultural festivals; they discovered three types of consumers, among them the ‘inactives’. Based on a participation survey conducted in Flanders in 2009 and using the number of visits to arts and heritage events during the last six months, Willekens and Lievens (2016) described the group participating the least as ‘non-attendees’. When looking at longitudinal data on US citizens’ participation during the last 12 months in the performing, visual and literary arts between 1982 and 2002, López-Sintas and Katz-Gerro (2005) named one of their six different types of patterns of cultural attendance ‘passives’.

Recent studies have looked for broader conceptualisations of cultural non-participation and have considered a larger number of variables and indicators beyond traditional highbrow items to measure participation. For instance, based on several waves of the well-known longitudinal and nationally representative British Taking Part survey and taking into account 90 different variables ranging from state-supported highbrow activities to mainstream pastimes such as going to pubs or playing darts, Taylor (2016) concluded that the respondents furthest from active cultural participants can be classified as ‘TV viewers’. Miles and Sullivan (2012) combined the Taking Part survey with several qualitative data sets to thoroughly examine the relationship between different forms of participation and non-participation, finding that highbrow non-participation was very common and that, in general, any kind of participation—not only highbrow cultural participation—was linked with health and well-being. Leguina and Miles (2017), once again based on the Taking Part survey, discovered that informal everyday cultural practices functioned as alternatives or possible complements to non-participation. This finding resonates with the consensus of many recent studies, namely, that participating in informal everyday culture at least partly compensates for non-existing participation in traditional formal culture: ‘Lack of cultural engagement is compensated for by considerable informal involvement in kin-based and local circles, and in home-based activities’ (Bennett et al. 2009, 64).

Everyday Participation

We have seen that conceptualisations of cultural non-participation can be somewhat misleading—they focus on recognised and canonised, legitimate and highbrow-oriented participation, quickly labelling any activity outside of conventional culture as inactivity or passivity. Lately, this myopia has been criticised by several scholars for being derogatory, especially given that the seeming inactivity of low-placed groups in social hierarchies may be a methodological artefact based on an incapacity to capture, or even an unwillingness to see, the informal cultural practices of these groups (cf. Flemmen et al. 2018; Ollivier 2008; Savage et al. 2015). In any case, it seems that starting in the 2010s, studies measuring cultural practices have become more sensitive and more willing to include a wider repertoire of indicators when examining participation. The flourishing debates on ‘everyday participation’ have played a significant role in this context. The everyday cultural participation approach starts with the notion that ‘culture is ordinary’ (Williams 1963/1971). Its main ideas stem from the community studies tradition and are based on the central argument that mainstream cultural sociology often disregards the many informal, vernacular, mundane and locally negotiated cultural practices that have little articulated value beyond their immediate contexts (Miles and Gibson 2016). While playing cards, picking mushrooms or being a regular at the local pub might make a person look ‘inactive’ if measured through mainstream cultural participation surveys emphasising canonised forms of cultural practices, that same person can be said to be extremely active from the perspective of everyday participation—and, in addition, these popular pastimes often overlooked by Bourdieu might have their meticulous social hierarchies and in this sense form entire ‘social worlds’ (Gronow 2020). Scholars studying everyday participation remind us that a ‘careful analysis of the complexities of everyday life can help generate more democratic and more participatory everyday cultural environments’ (Ebrey 2016, 158).

One of the main arguments and sociological critiques of the everyday cultural participation debates is the idea presented above: that cultural participation is traditionally defined very narrowly. By adopting a macro approach focusing on the ‘seemingly unimportant’ aspects in the everyday lives of ordinary people (Back 2015), it is possible to uncover rich cultural participation patterns beyond the narrowly defined and publicly funded highbrow culture. The emphasis on the ‘ordinary’ or the ‘mundane’ within the everyday participation tradition links it strongly to working and popular classes (Ebrey 2016). At the same time, there is a strong belief that everyday mundane activities are, in some way, important and cohesive for the ‘community’ (Gilmore 2017; Miles and Gibson 2016).

The everyday participation debate also calls into question what is valued as culture in society. The different understandings of the value of culture—whether this value is understood as purely cultural and social or simply instrumental and economic—are at the heart of the cultural policy debates (Belfiore 2015). The ‘deficit model of cultural participation’ (Miles and Gibson 2016) begins with the idea that there is a deficit, or a direct lack, in the participation patterns of the groups with very low cultural participation and that these groups should be nudged towards being more active through different participatory cultural policies. This vicious circle results in implicit hierarchies of cultural participation and ends up mirroring and reproducing these hierarchies in cultural institutions, such as schools and museums. Meanwhile, the people who remain outside these normative participation patterns are seen as isolated and excluded and are further labelled as deviants (Stevenson 2019).

This book intends to expand our idea of cultural participation and to put into practice approaches from the everyday cultural participation debate by trying to understand cultural participation from the perspective of ordinary Finns. At the same time, the book aims to nuance the existing literature by critically assessing the idea that traditional cultural participation and different forms of everyday participation would automatically be complementary counterpoints. It could be that in the Finnish case, everyday participation takes on a less social or community-oriented form than what has been described elsewhere (Bennett et al. 2009; Gilmore 2017).

Conclusion: Towards a More Sensitive Way of Studying Cultural Participation

In this chapter, we have seen that cultural participation has strong social underpinnings. Active and broad cultural participation is associated with social privileges, such as high education, and occupations at the middle and top of the hierarchy, which immediately connects non-participation with underprivileged class positions. At the same time, non-participation is extremely common. Therefore, it is surprising how rarely cultural non-participation has been considered a topic of its own.

The terminology and operationalisations of cultural non-participation are far from solid. They tend to depart from a homogeneous understanding of highbrow-oriented cultural practices as the main indicators of whether there is participation at all. The concept of cultural non-participation thus points to a large grey area, given that everything beyond certain preconceived cultural areas is labelled as non-existing participation. One of the aims of this book is to shed light on this grey area using the viewpoints and approaches from the everyday cultural participation debate. The empirical data and methods that have made it possible to undertake this task will be discussed in the next chapter.