A new paper by Semi Purhonen, Marc Verboord, Ossi Sirkka, Nete Nørgaard Kristensen and Susanne Janssen, published in Poetics, the premier journal of cultural sociology, examines how ordinary people in contemporary Europe evaluate the contents and boundaries of culture and what are its socio-political implications. The paper entitled “Definitely (not) belonging to culture: Europeans’ evaluations of the contents and limits of culture” uses survey data collected by the INVENT project in nine European countries and identifies, using latent class analysis, five distinct ways to evaluate culture. These ways align with cross-national differences in cultural policy models and levels of inequality, besides being socially stratified and associated with individuals’ wider politico-cultural attitudes. Contrary to traditional assumptions, the narrow evaluations are associated with lower-status groups, while the upper-status groups embrace broad notions of expressive culture.
The paper is fully open access at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X23000803