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On Studying Cultural Non-participation Among Underprivileged Groups

In our era of growing inequalities and increasing politisation and polarisation of lifestyles, researching culture is not an easy task. Daniel DellaPosta used the ‘oil spill’ metaphor to describe how moral and political divisions have become more accentuated and have started to be increasingly connected to many areas of life that were traditionally not part of political opinions, such as choices of food, clothing or music (DellaPosta 2020). When starting to collect empirical data for this book, I sensed that cultural participation, however defined, could be a touchy topic to study empirically, especially among people whose cultural practices could be situated rather far from traditional or normative ones. Qualitative interviews always create and reinforce power dynamics (Bengtsson and Fynbo 2018; MacLure et al. 2010). Therefore, I expected that this subject matter would be especially prone to teasing them out because culture and cultural participation could appear as elitist topics of conversation, thus further emphasising pre-existing hierarchies between the researcher and the interviewees.

One of the main motivations for this book was that cultural non-participation is often characterised as a mere ‘lack’ of cultural participation, as a privation of something that ideally should exist. Cultural non-participation is, even linguistically speaking, the opposite of ‘engagement’ or ‘participation’. In the existing scholarly research, the role attributed to cultural non-participation has usually been that of a necessary counterpoint to middle-class cultural practices. This has automatically made ‘lacking’ cultural participation appear as something that belongs firmly to the territory of the popular and working classes, which, as has been discussed, devalues cultural non-participation and assigns it a certain stigma (Bennett et al. 2009; Charlesworth 2000; Devine et al. 2005). Bourdieu himself has been claimed to neglect the richness of the culture of the working classes because he saw them as passive and willing to accept, as he coined it, the ‘taste of necessity’. According to this idea, economic scarcity makes working classes unable to develop specific tastes, which is why they supposedly create tastes and entire lifestyles around modesty, functionality and practicality (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 378–379; see also Blasius and Friedrichs 2008).

Among others, Tony Bennett (2011) pointed out severe shortcomings in Bourdieu’s approach regarding the working and popular classes. According to Bennett, Bourdieu refuses to see the working classes as possessors of their own aesthetic and cultural tastes, thus depriving them ‘of any possible positive content except for purely defensive practices’ (Bennett 2011, 523). Regarding methodology, Bennett argued that Bourdieu’s working classes were underrepresented in the latter’s sample for the empirical analysis of Distinction; they were not treated with the same methodological rigour as the middle and upper classes, and hence the questions posed were biased, providing the working classes with very limited possibilities of exhibiting the cultural practices and forms of capitals relevant in their lives (Bennett 2011). According to Bennett’s formulation (2011, 531), Bourdieu’s account of working-class culture is informed by ‘absolute aesthetic, cultural, and political closure’.

This idea of cultural disengagement as first and foremost a ‘lack’ or a form of closure is reflected in the fact that cultural participation is, in virtually all scholarly research, associated with privileged positions in society. High education predicts active cultural participation, whereas cultural non-participation is linked to lower education (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). The same goes for high occupational class (Purhonen et al. 2011). Active cultural participation even predicts better future income, including when other factors are accounted for (Reeves and de Vries 2019). Empirical studies directly link active cultural participation with happiness and life satisfaction (Ateca-Amestoy 2011; Wheatley and Bickerton 2017). Active cultural participation even seems to be connected to good physical health: empirical studies have convincingly shown that the more active people are culturally, the better their health is, even when other socio-economic variables are taken into consideration (Hyyppä et al. 2006; Konlaan et al. 2000).

All of this, of course, reflects the fact that most existing research on cultural practices is completely biased in favour of middle-class practices, both in terms of topics and methods (Bennett 2011; Bunting et al. 2019; Flemmen et al. 2018; Miles 2016). When surveys on cultural practices typically involve items such as reading books, attending the theatre and listening to classical music, it is no wonder that many people from working and popular classes end up looking passive or disengaged. In the same vein, prioritising quantitative methods over qualitative methods and reducing entire cultural fields to easily comparable indicators strengthens canonical ways of measuring cultural participation (cf. Bunting et al. 2019). In short, traditional nationally representative surveys are a poor reflection of the activities and pastimes that fall outside the middle-class canon. In this context, Flemmen et al. (2018, 23) remind scholars of cultural stratification that they ‘should be much more careful in their description of the tastes of the lower class, especially in applying morally derogative terms to significant sections of the population on the basis of what might very well be inadequacies in research methods or data’. It can thus be claimed that macro-scale research instruments measuring conventional cultural practices are, at least to some extent, simply incapable of properly grasping and understanding the leisure time of less privileged classes.

A related challenge of studying culturally disengaged groups—which can be turned into a motivation on why they should be studied—is that they are usually underrepresented answering different surveys and even consenting to different kinds qualitative studies (Purhonen et al. 2014, 423; Savage et al. 2015). I solved this particular problem by using previous quantitative research to determine which factors predict low cultural participation and then zooming in more closely on particular groups through qualitative interviews. Despite their limitations, qualitative interviews are one of the best ways of mapping embodied perceptions, opinions, values and attitudes (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009). Interviews on cultural practices with people with possibly little interest or experience in culture might be particularly full of discourses of potentialities and possibilities: for instance, Lamont and Swidler (2014) underlined the unique capacity of interviews in helping us to understand the underlying or latent life-worlds of the interviewees.

Problems and Challenges in Interviews

Conducting qualitative interviews usually means confronting many kinds of challenges and problems, some of them predictable and others surprising. Again, interviews on culture with participants who potentially have very little interest and investment in culture can be expected to be particularly challenging. Typical problems discussed in the rich methodological literature on qualitative interviewing include, first, interviewees’ reluctance to be interviewed, which typically manifests itself in difficulties finding interviewees or encountering different types of resistance during the interview (Heikkilä and Katainen 2021). Second, sometimes researchers can encounter silence: in focus groups, silence can mean that group members have difficulties sharing their ‘real’ thoughts with the rest of the group (Hollander 2004). On the other hand, silence offers both interviewers and interviewees tools to operate in the interview situation—for example, for an interviewee, silence can function as a means of not being labelled as ‘socially deviant’ (Bengtsson and Fynbo 2018). Third, even if interviewees are willing to talk, they may refuse to provide the specific information that the researcher is looking for (Lareau 1996, 2011) by being ironic and exaggerating (Savage et al. 2015), or they may lack suitable skills to navigate the formal interview situation (Silva and Wright 2005). Finally, whether dealing with individual interviews or focus groups, dominating interviewees can create conversational challenges—for instance, in a group situation, an extremely dominating interviewee may express normative hegemonic views that make it difficult for other interviewees to get their voices heard (Smithson 2000).

Many researchers argue that these challenges related to interview situations should be considered part of what qualitative research actually is: the different problems and challenges foreground the many power relations at play and highlight agendas that the researcher may not have initially thought of (Jacobsson and Åkerström 2012; Katainen and Heikkilä 2020; Vitus 2008). There is wide scholarly support for the idea that researchers should give particular analytical space to the ‘failed’ and ‘negative’ parts of interviews (or entire interviews) because different kinds of challenges may help better discern the power dynamics of the interview, thus improving one’s understanding of the meaning-making processes of the situation (Bengtsson and Fynbo 2018; Jacobsson and Åkerström 2012; MacLure et al. 2010).

As discussed above, one can expect such challenges to be amplified when studying the cultural practices of people who are expected to engage in few cultural practices or to participate in practices that are very far from more conventional cultural participation. I have already treated elsewhere the many problematic aspects of the interviews that form the empirical basis of this book (Heikkilä and Katainen 2021). When closely analysing the ‘counter-talk’ that emerged in the interviews, understood as implicit or explicit disruptions of the conversation, it was noticed that the counter-talk was typically directed either towards the interview situation, the topic or the interviewer. The main conclusion drawn in the article was that the problems and challenges inherent in different qualitative interview situations should be given more emphasis in analyses and that ‘counter-talk’ can also be examined as moral boundary-drawing (cf. Lamont 1992); in fact, topics related to culture are especially fruitful for encountering such boundaries. The different types of counter-talk will be explored more closely in the empirical part of this book.

Research Design and Data

The idea behind the data collection process for this study was to produce a theoretical sample of interviewees whose background profiles would match statistical factors predicting low cultural participation. The theoretical sampling was done by means of two pre-existing nationally representative Finnish surveys, Culture and Leisure in Finland 2007 (N = 1388) and Finnish Views on and Engagement in Culture and the Arts 2013 (N = 7859), on cultural taste and participation. To find out which background factors predicted zero or low cultural participation, I used two survey questions on visiting places related to culture and the arts, including both highbrow and lowbrow items. Statistically significant factors for low cultural participation were low education, living far from large cities, living in northern or eastern Finland, having a manual occupation and having a position outside the traditional labour market—for example, being on pension, a farmer, unemployed or on parental leave. The interview sample was formed with the idea that each interviewee should exhibit at least four of these statistically significant indicators of low cultural participation. Education was considered such an important factor in structuring and conditioning cultural participation (Bennett et al. 2009; Bourdieu 1984/1979; Purhonen et al. 2014) that none of the interviewees had a university degree (see the Appendices for a more detailed description).

Why use both individual interviews and focus groups? The underlying idea was to gain access to the advantages offered by both types of data. I expected that focus groups would be useful in travelling beyond individual perspectives by providing access to the discourses that people had on the studied topic and showing how they negotiated it in formal settings (Harrits and Pedersen 2019; Heikkilä and Katainen 2021; Silva and Wright 2005). At the same time, I expected that individual interviews would add depth to the discourses discovered through the focus groups and provide the informants with a sense of intimacy that focus groups usually lack (Silverman 2014). The focus groups were so-called naturally occurring groups—participants who already knew one another (Heikkilä 2008; Wilkinson 1998). To facilitate recruitment, potential focus groups were contacted via institutional actors, such as vocational schools, associations and the national church of Finland (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, the largest religious body in the country). Interviewed groups included vocational school students studying fields related to machinery and nursing, individuals from different pensioners’ associations in small towns, unemployed persons from several employment rehabilitation centres, regulars of a local bar of a small city and a group receiving free meals organised by the church.

The recruitment of individual interviewees was a particularly challenging task, and I had to use many different techniques to arrive at a sufficiently rich sample. First, existing contacts helped find potential participants with suitable profiles, both individuals and groups. Then, snowballing was used—for instance, many interviewed women managed to persuade their husbands to participate in the interviews after they themselves had been interviewed. Finally, different local groups, such as pensioners’ or unemployed workers’ associations and vocational education institutions, were used to recruit interviewees. As a last step, and after carefully analysing what kinds of profiles were still missing from the sample—typically young, urban men, either unemployed or working in manual jobs—a research agency was contacted to recruit suitable profiles. The interviewees recruited through the research agency were offered a gift card of a local supermarket chain—a policy recommended by the agency to ensure the interviewees would turn up. All interviews were organised and held by me in public places chosen to best suit the interviewees—in the case of the individual interviews, these were typically cafés, free meeting rooms in public libraries and, in some cases (especially in the countryside), interviewees’ homes. The focus group interviews were organised in whatever place the group would meet at regularly: these were churches, different associations’ meeting spaces, vocational schools’ classrooms and again, in some cases, interviewees’ homes. The individual interviews lasted for approximately 45 minutes each, while the focus groups lasted for approximately 1 hour. Altogether 40 individual interviews and 9 focus groups collected in spring 2018 all over Finland form the data used in this book.

The topic guide for the interviews followed the models of several recent studies on cultural practices, most importantly of the sub-study from the British National Child Development Study (Elliott et al. 2010) and of the Finnish Cultural Capital and Social Differentiation in Contemporary Finland research project (Purhonen et al. 2014). The interviews were targeted to be loosely defined ‘participation narratives’—interviewees’ life stories without the intention of portraying participation as necessarily cultural (see Miles 2016). All interviews included open-ended and closed-ended questions and touched on both overarching topics, such as leisure in general, and cultural participation and non-participation more closely; all interviews included an art-photo-elicitation part. Detailed interview guidelines and a list of the photographs used are provided in the Appendices.

Given that all interviewees had low education and that most had or had previously held manual occupations often running across generations, as can be seen in the interviewees’ background profiles presented in the Appendices, it was tempting to categorise them simply as ‘working class’. However, this category is far from watertight on many occasions. Some interviewees were students, some had never worked, some were long-term unemployed, some were ‘between jobs’, and some were outside of the labour market because they were on parental leave or on pension for various reasons. Elsewhere, I categorised my interviewees as ‘underprivileged popular classes’ (see Heikkilä 2021), which I think is a more adequate and flexible characterisation for the many kinds of life situations in which the interviewees found themselves. Obviously, some of my interviewees were much more underprivileged than others—many were unemployed, some were on disability pension, some were going through processes of debt adjustment, or some were looking for housing, while others were working or studying in more stable and secure economic and social conditions.

The Finnish case, introduced in more detail in the Introduction, was thoroughly reflected in the sample. Finland has a small number of immigrants compared to most other European countries—for instance, the percentage of persons with a foreign background for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 was 7.3 per cent, 7.7 per cent and 8.0 per cent, respectively (Official Statistics of Finland 2021). The largest integrated language minority were the Finnish Swedes, one of the few minorities in the world that do better according to most socio-economic indicators than the language majority, but they only account for approximately 5 per cent of the Finnish population (Heikkilä 2011; Official Statistics of Finland 2021). Therefore, the sample was, except for one immigrant in one of the focus groups, deliberately composed of only Finnish-speaking ethnic Finns.

In this book, the main analytic tool was a rigorous close reading of all the interviews, followed by thematic analysis (Silverman 2014). Originally, the main aim of the close reading was to identify the different modes of cultural engagement (cf. Heikkilä 2015), which I categorised elsewhere as social-mundane, cultural-legitimate and introvert-hostile (Heikkilä 2021). As the analysis proceeded, I understood that the different modes of cultural engagement were not the whole story; a much deeper division lay behind the interviewees’ approaches, attitudes and discourses on the enormous normative demand to participate in culture, which has been thoroughly discussed in the previous chapters. This made the analysis first run through the following questions: What do the interviewees’ life-worlds look like? What kinds of things do their daily lives consist of—where, when and with whom? Are there orientations towards highbrow or popular culture, towards forms of ‘everyday participation’ or towards something entirely different? Then, I proceeded to the following questions: How do the interviewees understand and describe their own participation? What kinds of symbolic boundaries are drawn in the interviews? What attitudes do the interviewees have towards others’ perceived participation? Are there signs of cultural goodwill, hostility, tolerance or something else? Finally, I attempted to systematically scrutinise the attitudes towards cultural participation by asking the following questions: How is normative cultural participation discussed in the interviews? How do the interviewees frame themselves as participants, if at all?

It should be stressed that I was not looking to cluster the interviewed individuals and groups into specific categories but to identify larger discourses that individual interviewees would mobilise. In this book, the analysis—and also the three empirical Chaps. 5, 6 and 7—will present three overarching themes based on the attitudes that the interviewees had towards cultural participation: ‘affirmation’, ‘functionality’ and ‘resistance’.

Regarding ethical issues, all interviewees were informed openly and comprehensively, both during recruitment (in writing) and again before the interview (orally), of the following topics: the researcher’s contact information along with detailed information about the funding of the study, the topic and objectives of the research, the means of collecting the data, the voluntary nature of participation, the provision of full confidentiality and the fact that the data would be transcribed and anonymised for publications and archived for possible further research use. Given that the data were collected directly from the informants without combining personal information to, for instance, register the data, the data were anonymised, and the topic was not considered sensitive according to the Finnish Personal Data Act (523/1999); oral consent for the interviews was considered sufficient. The data were transcribed by a professional transcriber and anonymised by the author, carefully following the guidelines of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive. The entire data, together with relevant metadata, such as the exact dates of the interviews, has been delivered to the Finnish Social Science Data Archive for possible future research use.

Conclusion: Why Interviews?

The aim of this chapter has been to provide a detailed account of the empirical data consisting of a theoretical sample of people with background factors predicting low cultural participation and to discuss why the particular interview selection process was potentially the most suitable data gathering method for the study.

In tracing what cultural non-participation means in cultural stratification research, this chapter has argued that cultural non-participation is typically presented as the negative counterpoint of active cultural participation strongly associated with the middle classes and depicted as a ‘lack’ of something that should be in place. This bias, partly inherited from Bourdieu (1984/1979), easily neglects and overlooks the potentially rich and active lifestyles led by people and groups beyond the traditional scope of cultural participation. It only makes the situation more complicated that the act of filling out surveys measuring conventional cultural participation seems to be closely related to cultural participation itself—people with little traditional cultural participation are underrepresented in answering surveys and also in participating in different kinds of qualitative interviews.

It is for this reason that I argue that studying potential cultural non-participants through qualitative techniques, namely, interviews, is a good idea: interviews can be helpful in teasing out different embodied perceptions, values and motivations that are difficult to access through other qualitative techniques, such as ethnographic observation or accounts produced independently by the people studied. The following empirical part of the book will put to the test how well the individual and focus group interviews captured the interviewees’ everyday lives and participation.