Keywords

Main Findings

In this book, I set out to understand cultural non-participation in Finland, a relatively egalitarian context. I asked how the cultural participation of the hypothetically ‘non-participating’ groups is constituted in Finland and what kinds of boundaries the people who belong to these groups draw when discussing their cultural participation. For this purpose, I interviewed 40 individuals and 9 focus groups whose background factors—such as low education, living in a small place, working in a manual job or being outside of the labour market, living in northern or eastern Finland and so on—predicted low cultural participation.

The first main finding was that non-participation in culture is first and foremost a methodological artefact: the fact that most surveys on cultural practices are based on highbrow-oriented items obscures the fact that people who look like non-participants when only highbrow items are taken into consideration do, in fact, have active lives filled with popular and mundane cultural practices. Culturally speaking, not a single one of my interviewees was entirely ‘passive’—all participated in cultural activities of some kind. This methodological short-sightedness has been widely criticised as derogatory and as a way of effacing from view the life-worlds of different underprivileged classes (see Flemmen et al. 2018; Ollivier 2008; Savage et al. 2015). There is a wide consensus that the labelling of cultural non-participation as disinterest or laziness (see Stevenson 2019) is degrading.

The everyday participation debate has, in many ways, come to the rescue here by pointing out that informal and mundane forms of culture are also valuable (Back 2015; Ebrey 2016; Gilmore 2017; Miles and Gibson 2016). In the same vein, it has been suggested that the lack of highbrow-oriented cultural participation can be compensated for by different kinds of forms of informal, home-based, vernacular and local participation (Bennett et al. 2009). However, in the light of my empirical data, it seems like this is only a part of the whole story. My second main finding was that cultural non-participation (in highbrow-oriented activities) is only in some cases ‘compensated’ for by informal, social or kin-based participation. Rather, although all interviewees do exhibit at least everyday participation, it was possible to detect a certain polarisation between general activity and a withdrawal from canonised forms of cultural participation: at one end of the spectrum, there are people who are active in highbrow-oriented, popular and everyday cultural activities, while at the other end, there are people who mostly engage in everyday pursuits only and who sometimes have hostile attitudes towards established forms of cultural participation. This picture further confirms the pattern revealed by many recent quantitative studies (Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022; Prieur and Savage 2013; Purhonen et al. 2014; Savage et al. 2015; Weingartner and Rössel 2019). This polarisation emerges when looking more closely at the discourses of my interviewees. My third finding was that these discourses fell into the following three categories: these were ‘affirmation’, ‘functionality’ and ‘resistance’.

The affirmation discourse includes elements from both highbrow-oriented, popular and everyday milieus. It is characterised particularly by its emphasis on the value of culture per se, the importance of remaining active and a belief in the positive or even transformative power of cultural participation, all of which can be interpreted as a version of cultural goodwill, described as ‘the most unconditional testimonies of cultural docility’ (Bourdieu 1984/1979, 321). In the affirmation discourse, while there are no upward boundaries drawn, downward boundaries are both aesthetical (directed against lowbrow cultural practices in general) and moral (directed against laziness and non-participation). One could argue that the affirmation discourse, at least to some degree, recognises the hegemonic discourses of the participation norm and exhibits acquiescence towards it. Thus, this discourse comes close to Bourdieu’s idea that symbolic violence requires the acquiescence of the dominated party and that such acquiescence is actually the principal mechanism of social reproduction and keeping up the hegemony (Bourdieu 1998). This interpretation can also help us understand why the affirmation discourse seemed to be much more prevalent among women than men (see also Jarness and Flemmen 2019). The affirmation discourse is situated close to the core ideals of egalitarianism: there is a strong feeling of being a sovereign member of different societal levels and of being entitled to participate in highbrow-oriented culture. Finally, there is also the belief that highbrow-oriented cultural participation can provide cultural capital which, in turn, is capable of providing returns, at least hypothetically.

The functionality discourse mainly consists of elements from the popular and everyday milieus. It is characterised by a practical, functional and thus extremely personal relationship with cultural participation: cultural participation serves everyday life by facilitating relaxation and wellness, and therefore, the discourse is characterised by a modest and indifferent attitude towards cultural participation. This finding reflects, for instance, Ollivier’s argument on ‘indifferent openness’ (Ollivier 2008) whereby openness to all kinds of cultural practices is emphasised although one’s actual cultural practices are narrow. There are also similarities with Vassenden and Jonvik’s (2019) finding that their Norwegian interviewees with less education were largely indifferent to cultural capital and secure about their own lifestyles. Unlike the affirmation discourse, the functionality discourse draws upward boundaries which all are aesthetical: they are directed against what are perceived as impractical or non-functional cultural practices. The core of the functionality discourse consists in representing these aesthetical upward boundaries as individual choices, as not ‘my thing’. This strategy could be interpreted as a weak sign of egalitarianism: although aesthetical boundaries are drawn upwards against cultural practices perceived as remote and alien, there is a strong tolerance of others’ cultural practices without signs of anti-elitism.

The resistance discourse, like the functionality discourse, rests on elements from the popular and everyday milieus. Unlike the two previous discourses, however, its relationship with culture is characterised by hostility, defiance and a sometimes even a certain search for conflict. There is cultural participation, but highbrow-oriented culture is seen as having very little or no intrinsic value. The resistance discourse is largely marked by feelings of being left behind, a finding that echoes the empirical results of other scholars who have described the feelings of loss of power and resentment that many contemporary low-standing groups have (Gest 2016; Hochschild 2016). In the resistance discourse, two kinds of upward boundaries are drawn: aesthetical (drawn against classical highbrow-oriented cultural practices, perceived as both disgusting and ridiculous) and moral (drawn against snobbishness and hierarchies in general). These boundaries can be understood as a strategy of building and maintaining worth in a context of low cultural, social and economic resources (Harrits and Pedersen 2019; Jarness and Flemmen 2019; Lamont 2000). The connection of the resistance discourse to egalitarianism is twofold. On the one hand, there is a strong awareness of exploitation (Skeggs and Loveday 2012) and, therefore, a tendency to adopt a dismissive and non-conformist ‘fatalistic worldview’ (De Keere 2020). On the other hand, in the resistance discourse, there is an explicit wish to return to a more egalitarian scenario—the interviewees closest to the resistance discourse express their desire to be treated as equals instead of following naturalised class inequalities (see Jarness and Flemmen 2019). Bearing in mind that the resistance discourse does not draw any downward boundaries, it could be speculated that among the underprivileged groups interviewed in Finland, there is some intra-class solidarity and a wish for more egalitarianism.

These findings, which show highly differentiated discourses regarding cultural practices within a relatively homogeneous group in an egalitarian context, may seem surprising. Nevertheless, it is possible that a highly egalitarian context can ‘conceal, maintain and even help to shape, the hierarchical structures of society’ (Jarness 2015, 68), which makes ‘falling out of the reach of the system’ an even more stigmatising experience.

The Problematic Role of Cultural Policy in Subverting Existing Hierarchies

Although all my interviewees actively engaged in some kind of cultural participation, my research echoes the results of quantitative studies with large representative samples: a large part of people with low class positions withdraw partly or totally from publicly funded, highbrow-oriented culture (García-Álvarez et al. 2007; Heikkilä 2021; Katz-Gerro and Jaeger 2013; Purhonen et al. 2014; Taylor 2016; Willekens and Lievens 2016). This kind of scenario represents a challenge to the kind of public cultural policy whose basic ideal claims that cultural participation is beneficial and that the public subvention of culture equalises the participation of underprivileged groups.

It has been argued that the fundamental elements of public policy are skewed in multiple ways. First, funding typically ‘entails a redistribution of resources upwards, towards those who are already most privileged’ (Miles and Sullivan 2012, 321). A typical practical example of this tendency is that, since the advent of neoliberal policies and the decentralisation of cultural policy in the 1990s, even in countries with traditionally strong national cultural policies, governments have had to look for new sources of funding for public culture, such as national lotteries (Dubois 2015). For instance, in Finland, three-quarters of the budget for public culture comes from the national lottery funds, which are susceptible to economic fluctuations (Häyrynen 2006). Thus, it can be argued that the public money for funding highbrow-oriented culture comes disproportionately from the lower classes, also in Finland.

Second, it has been suggested that cultural policymaking itself is biased because its voices basically come from and therefore favour different elite groups (Jancovich 2017; Stevenson 2019). Beyond these practical asymmetries, it is an open question whether public funding of culture can actually modify the existing social hierarchies by lowering the cultural participation threshold of underprivileged groups (see Belfiore 2002) or whether public funding of culture ends up reproducing existing social hierarchies by supporting cultural activities that are mostly associated with higher-status groups (Bjørnsen 2012; Feder and Katz-Gerro 2015).

Belfiore and Bennett (2008) show that many key motivations and ideals of cultural policy, such as the arts being ‘good for you’ or having transformative positive powers, are in fact age-old. In a similar manner, Belfiore has argued that one of the central ideals behind cultural policy is the belief that cultural participation can alleviate inequalities and even ease complicated social problems related to health, crime, social integration and so on (Belfiore 2002). In the recent decades, there has been plenty of critical discussion on the evaluation and performance measurement of cultural policy in terms of whether the effects of cultural participation can really be ‘measured’: it has been argued that ‘public cultural expenses are gradually viewed in terms of investments from which economic impacts are expected’ (Dubois 2015, 13). This ‘cult of measuring’ is argued to be driven by the perceived positive social impact of cultural participation (Belfiore and Bennett 2010; Bunting et al. 2019) and the fact that cultural policy has been penetrated by neoliberal ideals. Some scholars have claimed that this development, in fact, legitimises the institutions receiving public funding and bolsters the argument on the ‘problem’ of cultural non-participation (Stevenson 2013, 2019). One can argue that this process leads to a certain vicious circle in which highbrow-oriented cultural institutions are supported through public funding in order to attract larger publics, while the funding received further legitimises these institutions and ends up alienating them even more from the groups whose participation has been low since the start. It has even been suggested that cultural policy models as we know them have reached the end of the road: cultural policy has not succeeded in ‘democratising’ culture as promised, a central aim and mission of cultural policy since the mid-twentieth century (Mangset 2020). Mangset (2020) further claims that, for instance, public policies have become stagnant in supporting out-of-date cultural institutions and in continuing to see public cultural policy as a national matter even though cultural production, dissemination and supply chains are thoroughly globalised.

The following question remains: How can different public actors implement equal and intelligent cultural policies? The fact that cultural participation seems to be organised along a continuum of participation versus non-participation (Prieur and Savage 2013; Purhonen et al. 2014; Savage et al. 2015; Weingartner and Rössel 2019) reflects the complicated challenge of engaging the people who are most detached from cultural participation. Research shows that different interventions to engage people usually manage to target mainly those who already are potential or existing participants (Jancovich and Ejgod Hansen 2018). A related question is whether the people who participate little in highbrow-oriented culture really even wish to participate more. Bourdieu has suggested that the language of ‘deficit’ in itself is pointless because the underprivileged classes themselves do not experience a deprivation of culture (Bourdieu and Darbel 1991). Bourdieu’s explanation was that only a minority of people can properly benefit from highbrow-oriented cultural participation and that institutions of high art, such as museums, ‘betray, in the smallest details of their morphology and their organization, their true function, which is to strengthen the feeling of belonging in some and the feeling of exclusion in others’ (Bourdieu 1993, 236). Bourdieu maintains that the attempts to lower the participation thresholds of high arts institutions—for instance, by providing free entrance—is misleading and strengthens the initial inequality of access: ‘free entrance is also optional entrance, reserved for those who, endowed with the ability to appropriate the works, have the privilege of using this freedom and who find themselves consequently legitimised in their privilege’ (Bourdieu 1993, 237).

In this context, it becomes important to ask who is seen as ‘deserving’ of certain patterns of (publicly funded) cultural participation. Borrowing from social policy scholarship (Van Oorschot 2000, 2006), cultural policy could, perhaps, be understood as a question of ‘deservingness’. For example, Van Oorschot (2000) identified the following deservingness criteria: (1) control over neediness (people considered responsible for their own neediness are not seen as deserving), (2) the level of need (people needing more also deserve more), (3) identity (people considered closer to ‘us’ are considered more deserving), (4) attitude (the people seen as pleasant, thankful and/or compliant are seen as deserving) and (5) reciprocity (groups that have contributed to ‘us’ before are seen as more deserving than others). For instance, McKenzie (2015, 171) argues that the working classes themselves recognise well the discourse of the ‘deserving poor’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. When translating these conceptualisations into cultural policy, one could argue that there are groups that see themselves as either ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ of the fruits of cultural policy and adopt their stances towards cultural participation accordingly. To give another example, Kantola et al. (2022) showed that among the lowest-standing groups, not participating in societal affairs or refraining from, for instance, voting was considered an active operation, a kind of ‘weapon of the weak’ that materialises in different forms of everyday resistance (Scott 1985).

Finally, going back to the empirical data used in this book and to the idea of egalitarianism: in the Finnish case, is it true, as De Keere argues (2020), that low-standing groups with some cultural capital adhere to egalitarian values the most? The data clearly shows that the discourses indicating some cultural capital (or with favourable attitudes towards it) are close to egalitarian values; these discourses entail the belief that one can participate in and be a part of culture or at least acquire culture and to learn to appreciate it. At the same time, the discourses furthest away from egalitarianism are close to fatalism; they are penetrated by the idea of falling out of the reach of established forms of culture and that most highbrow-oriented forms of cultural participation do not ‘speak to one’ at all. This attitude is sometimes accompanied by surrender or even defiance and anger—and this is precisely what makes it especially challenging for cultural policies to attract the groups that embrace this kind of attitude.

Limitations

Like always, there are some limitations to take into account. A central one of them was that in the empirical data, probably very much like in everyday conversations, it was difficult if not impossible to disentangle participation from the other components of cultural practices, namely, taste and knowledge. In the interviews, when people were discussing cultural participation, they often started talking about taste, and when talking about taste, they typically begun discussing whether they knew certain cultural products. Cultural participation is thus not an island that can be studied in isolation from other areas of culture. In the words of Antoine Hennion, ‘Taste is not an attribute, it is not a property (of a thing or of a person), it is an activity. You have to do something in order to listen to music, drink a wine, appreciate an object’ (Hennion 2007, 101). The same goes for participation: there is rarely any cultural participation without pre-existing taste or knowledge.

Another limitation is related to the much-debated topic of whether interviews can convey true behaviours (Jerolmack and Khan 2014). Qualitative research interviews are certainly artificial situations in which the interviewers typically have more power than interviewees (Heikkilä and Katainen 2021) and in which interviewees tend to present themselves according to their choices or abilities (Ollivier 2008). Nonetheless, I maintain that interviews are highly useful in capturing interviewees’ life-worlds and can demonstrate how (and whether) different interviewees are able and willing to navigate situations of asymmetrical power relations (Heikkilä and Katainen 2021; Kvale and Brinkmann 2009; Lamont and Swidler 2014). I also argue that qualitative methods entail an important sensitivity that is needed to capture the life-worlds of partly vulnerable groups and to unveil practices that remain invisible to a large part of research. This perspective is especially relevant for research on cultural practices in which the ‘domination of survey instrument limits understandings of the everyday cultural field’ (Miles and Gibson 2016, 154). Scholars have argued that if we adopt a narrow view of what cultural participation actually is, this will end up narrowing the entire conceptualisation of cultural participation and further reifying highbrow-oriented culture (Milling 2019).

It could be considered a limitation that I formed a theoretical sample based on factors statistically predicting a certain kind of behaviour, in this case low cultural participation, instead of finding people with self-reported low cultural participation and conducting interviews with them. The main reason for this methodological choice was that interviewing people who label themselves as ‘passives’ and voluntarily participate in an academic study on the topic would probably have produced mostly hostile discourses, as argued in the Introduction to this chapter. Moreover, interviewing people whose backgrounds predict low cultural participation means that one has better chances of going beyond the methodological dilemma related to finding large proportions of ‘passives’ in nationally representative surveys (Flemmen et al. 2018; Heikkilä 2021; Purhonen et al. 2014), which are often inadequate at representing people’s motivations and reasons for participating or not participating in culture (Bunting et al. 2019). Finally, it should be kept in mind that my interviewees belong to the Finnish popular classes (possibly excluded from high culture but not from the rest of the society), a large societal group rather than a muted minority. My results could have looked different, had I included, for instance, people from the Swedish-speaking language minority, who are known to perform better than the language majority on most socio-economic indicators and who possibly exhibit fewer inter-class differences when speaking about cultural practices (Heikkilä and Kahma 2008) or different kinds of excluded groups, such as people with immigrant backgrounds or those who live in extreme poverty.

Understanding Cultural Non-participation

This book has shown that certain classical debates regarding cultural stratification are still highly relevant, also in an egalitarian contexts such as Finland, and has argued that it is indeed still possible to claim that culture ‘exists’ or at least seems to be enjoyable for the people who have the resources to understand and properly decipher it. Cultural participation is not a question of accessibility or even personal motivation; rather, it is a matter of long-term embodied and resource-demanding exposure to highbrow-oriented culture. In the words of Bourdieu and Darbel (1991, 39): ‘Access to works of art cannot be defined solely in terms of physical accessibility, since works of art exist only for those who have the means of understanding them’. Here, Bourdieu’s point is that different cultural products do not even exist as cultural products or symbolic objects for groups that are unable to perceive them as such.

Education has traditionally been a key institution for cultivating this kind of ability to understand legitimate culture. Bourdieu’s idea of cultural reproduction is that children assimilate cultural practices in their childhood homes and that later, the school system either punishes or rewards them for their ‘natural’ skills or the lack thereof, thus eventually transforming social hierarchies into academic and merit hierarchies (Bourdieu 1984/1979; Bourdieu 1993; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). Mirroring this initial inequality, high education predicts active cultural participation across most national contexts (Bennett et al. 2009; García-Álvarez et al. 2007; Katz-Gerro and Jaeger 2013; López-Sintas and García-Álvarez 2002; Purhonen et al. 2014; Weingartner and Rössel 2019). Moreover, it seems that education has become an increasingly more significant predictor of both highbrow-oriented, mainstream and mundane cultural participation, also in Finland (Heikkilä and Lindblom 2022). Going back to my empirical results regarding the highly differentiated and partly hostile discourses on cultural participation, it could be interpreted that if differences are so noticeable in a traditionally highly egalitarian country with free public education such as Finland, they will larger still almost everywhere else, perhaps with the exception of the other Nordic countries.

In this scenario, and considering the fact that practically all people participate in everyday or popular culture in some ways, are there any viable ways of making people participate more in (highbrow-oriented) culture? Bourdieu and Darbel (1991) proposed levelling access to high culture institutions, such as museums, by offering visitors different verbal or textual ‘codes’, or explanations, that would help them navigate previously unfamiliar cultural experiences, thus creating ‘an implicit recognition of the right not to understand and to demand to understand’ (Bourdieu and Darbel 1991, 94). Bourdieu and Darbel also suggested things that today are commonplace in nearly all museums: catalogues, ground plans, shops, bars, restaurants and so on. However, it is unclear whether, and most probably unlikely that, these attempts to make highbrow-oriented cultural participation more accessible or democratic really manage to make audiences less culturally differentiated than before (Bennett 1995). This also means that many well-intentioned endeavours meant to lower access barriers to high culture may be useless or may only engage people who are already likely participants (see Jancovich and Ejgod Hansen 2018). Bourdieu and Darbel (1991, 102) went on to argue that ‘there is no short cut to the path leading to the works of culture, and artificially produced (…) encounters (…) with them have no future’. Thus, encouraging people to participate in highbrow-oriented culture will likely not work through quick fixes such as lowering ticket prices, bringing culture physically closer to the people or so forth.

We perhaps too often pose the question about cultural participation incorrectly, by asking why certain people or groups do not participate in (highbrow-oriented) culture. We might as well ask: Why should they? Does (again, highbrow-oriented) cultural participation offer the people participating the least a mirror for their own experiences—that is, are people like themselves represented either in cultural production or in the cultural items themselves? Does cultural participation mean being at ease and enjoying themselves without feelings of alienation for the people who participate the least? Does public education offer, at least in theory, equal resources for everyone to understand and discern different forms of cultural participation—in other words, do people have more or less similar chances of extracting cultural capital from participating in culture and using it elsewhere in society for their benefit? If the answer to all or some of these questions is negative, it is no wonder that certain groups refrain from highbrow-oriented cultural participation.

I am tempted to ask, although in a provocative way, whether it is possible or even worthwhile to try to impose highbrow-oriented cultural participation on all citizens. What is the problem if some people have either literally or metaphorically ‘gone fishing’ instead of going to the opera or to the theatre? For a person from an underprivileged class position, choosing not to participate in highbrow-oriented culture is, perhaps, only a logical reaction in a society that puts high value on education and individual success. The people who refrain from participating in highbrow-oriented culture seem to know or to estimate that such participation will not give them either pleasurable experiences or useful capitals; rather, it will simply make them feel out of place, bored or angry. Engaging the least participating audiences cannot be approached as a matter of cultural policy alone—it is related to much broader structures of equality and belonging. The best possibilities for equalising or at least balancing cultural participation lie in an equal society, particularly when it comes to education, in avoiding marginalisation and in offering ‘ownership’ of culture to different kinds of underprivileged groups which are not an excluded minority but rather a silent majority. Understanding this is key in our societies characterised by cultural divides. In fact, if there are such steep differences regarding cultural participation and non-participation in the discourses of underprivileged classes in an egalitarian society such as Finland, these differences will only be larger elsewhere.