Cultural resources and assets inherited from one’s family of origin can be an important source of social inequality. In Finland, research on the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital is very limited. To fill this gap, we ask whether there is an association between the cultural capital of parents and that of their children in Finland and, if so, how significant it is. We useda two-fold operationalization of cultural capital for respondents and their parents comprising educational attainment (institutionalized cultural capital) and interestedness or participation in highbrow culture (embodied cultural capital). Our multinomial logistic regression analysis of nationally representative survey data from 2007 (N=1,279) showed close links between respondents’ cultural capital and that of their parents. Respondents’ educational attainment was strongly influenced by their parents’ education level but not their cultural interestedness; in contrast, respondents’ cultural participation was influenced by both their parents’ education and cultural interestedness.
Cultural reproduction has attracted the attention of cultural sociologists over the last few decades. While a body of research has shown that the orientation to highbrow culture is transmitted from parents to their children, research on the transmission of other cultural orientations has been scarce. In this paper, I study the intergenerational transmission of three cultural orientations—highbrow, popular, and crafts—in Finland. The data were derived from a nationally representative sample (N = 1425) surveyed in Finland in 2018, and it was analysed with regression techniques. For the respondent, I target current cultural participation, and for the parents I rely on retrospective data targeting joint cultural participation with the respondent during their childhood. I show that there is symmetric transmission of cultural orientation, namely that the respondent's current orientation is most tightly associated with the same orientation that they practiced with their parents, suggesting symmetric cultural reproduction in Finland. Additionally, parents’ overall cultural participation is associated with their children's overall cultural participation. I reflect on the findings in the light of past and current research on cultural practices and suggest directions for future research.
The Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) has traditionally been considered as the most central actor and the powerhouse in the education policy field in Finland. While the position of the MEC in the Finnish education policy system seems stable, there have been several organisational changes within the MEC over the past three decades. One of these is the disintegration of the committee system and its replacement by the working groups system, a trend that is part of a more general change from governing to governance since the 1990s. In this chapter we analyse data containing the MEC’s working groups and their members with social network analysis in order to understand the ways in which the working group system affects the MEC and its operation. Our analysis suggests that the MEC is organised rather strongly by departments: early childhood and general education, vocational education and training, higher education and research, culture and arts, and youth and sports. Analysing the network through the individual working group members we observed that, in addition to public officials, individuals representing interest organisations such as labour and trade unions were important links between the working groups.
How does social mobility influence cultural taste and participation? Cultural reproduction theory predicts little change, while cultural mobility theory suggests more substantial makeover. This article explores the influence of upward educational and occupational mobility in reading literature, participation in highbrow activities, television watching, and music and food tastes, focusing on mobility from the secondary-level education and the working class to the higher education and the middle class. By analysing survey data (N = 2,813) collected in Finland in 2007 and 2018 with ordinary least squares regression, we show that educational mobility and occupational mobility are mostly differently related to tastes and participation. Both educationally and occupationally upwardly mobile people tend to participate more in highbrow activities, watch less television and dislike meat-heavy food, as is more typical to their social destination than to their social origins. Conversely, the educationally upwardly mobile, again more typical to their destination, tend to read more books, like light-ethnic food and classical music, and dislike popular folk, but occupational mobility is not associated with reading or liking light-ethnic food, and the occupationally mobile retain their original tastes in classical and popular folk music when education is controlled for. We discuss the implications of our results.
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