Key debates of contemporary cultural sociology -the rise of the 'cultural omnivore', the fate of classical 'highbrow' culture, the popularization, commercialization and globalization of culture -deal with temporal changes. Yet, systematic research about these processes is scarce due to the lack of suitable longitudinal data. This book explores these questions through the lens of a crucial institution of cultural mediation -the culture sections in quality European newspapersfrom 1960 to 2010.Starting from the framework of cultural stratification and employing systematic content analysis both quantitative and qualitative of more than 13,000 newspaper articles, Enter Culture, Exit Arts? presents a synthetic yet empirically rich and detailed account of cultural transformation in Europe over the last five decades. It shows how classifications and hierarchies of culture have changed in course of the process towards increased cultural heterogeneity. Furthermore, it conceptualizes the key trends of rising popular culture and declining highbrow arts as two simultaneous processes: the one of legitimization of popular culture and the other of popularization of traditional legitimate culture, both important for the loosening of the boundary between 'highbrow' and 'popular'.Through careful comparative analysis and illustrative snapshots into the specific socio-historical contexts in which the newspapers and their representations of culture are embedded -in Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK -the book reveals the key patterns and diversity of European variations in the transformation of cultural hierarchies since the 1960s. The book is a collective endeavour of a large-scale international research project active between 2013 and 2018. Semi Purhonen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tampere, Finland. Between 2013 and 2018, he worked as academy research fellow at the Academy of Finland and was the Director of the research project 'Cultural Distinctions, Generations and Change', which lays the ground for the present book. His research interests are in the fields of cultural sociology, consumption, lifestyles and social stratification; sociology of age, generation and social change; and comparative research and sociological theory. Riie Heikkilä is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her main research interests include cultural capital, cultural consumption and social stratification, and comparative sociology in general. Her research project 'Understanding Cultural Disengagement in Contemporary Finland' has funding from the Academy of Finland until 2020. Irmak Karademir Hazır is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research focuses on topics such as taste, socio-cultural change, Bourdiesian analysis of Turkish consumption scene and embodiment. She has worked as a board member of the European Sociological Association, Consumption Research Ne...

The media is a key institution in producing, legitimizing and disseminating cultural classifications. From this perspective, newspapers and their sections devoted to culture are particularly interesting. This article examines how the structures of quality European newspapers have changed over time and in different socio-historical contexts, especially regarding the amount of space allocated to and the placement of articles related to culture. We draw on data from Helsingin Sanomat (Finland), Le Monde (France), ABC/El País (Spain), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) and The Guardian (United Kingdom) -covering the time frame from 1960 to 2010. We use three types of data: individual articles about culture (N = 11,775), data on all the issues (N = 585) and full editions of the newspapers (N = 30). We show that the amount of space dedicated to culture has increased but that the placement of articles on culture has shifted slightly. We detect only weak signs of the assumed crisis of cultural journalism.

This article addresses two key debates in cultural sociology: one on coherent lifestyle patterns crossing several cultural fields and one on pervasive lifestyles, which also includes, apart from the cultural elements, wider socio-political orientations. The study takes the point of view of three fields rarely studied together – food, music and political attitudes – employing a rich empirical research design utilizing both representative survey data ( N = 1,388) and qualitative interviews ( N = 28). Starting from the analysis of how culinary tastes are socially stratified in present-day Finland, three culinary taste patterns are identified: preferences for ‘heavy/meat’, ‘light/ethnic’ and ‘fast food’. The most salient distinction is established between the light/ethnic taste (indicating a trend towards high status, female and urban) and the heavy/meat taste (inclined towards low status, male and rural). Culinary taste patterns are closely related with ‘highbrow’ musical taste and politically conservative attitudes. In particular, the light/ethnic culinary pattern is strongly associated with highbrow musical taste and liberal attitudes. The results support the ideas of structural homology between cultural fields and lifestyle patterning, including an important political component. At the individual level however the ‘homology’ is often far from perfect.

This study presents an analysis of changes in the coverage of culture in major European newspapers from 1960 to 2010. Employing a content analysis of the newspapers, we examine how culture sections have changed in terms of the cultural areas covered. We ask whether the content of cultural coverage has become more heterogeneous and whether newspapers embedded in different geographical and cultural contexts differ in this respect. To assess heterogeneity, we first focus on the opening of culture through the increase in coverage of emerging art forms at the expense of the coverage of established art forms. Next, we turn our attention to music and measure openness according to the increase of pop-rock content. The results suggest a cultural opening, albeit mostly measured by the second proxy. Established art forms hold their mainstream position, while emerging forms are validated at a slower pace than expected. Regarding music, the transformation of coverage from classical music to pop-rock is very dramatic. The findings challenge expectations about the order in which the newspapers manifest the timing and thoroughness of the opening of culture, highlighting the complexity of the factors shaping newspapers' cultural coverage.

This paper adds a comparative perspective to the study of taste, cosmopolitanism and social organisation.

Research on cultural practices has highlighted the rise of different cultural consumption patterns that challenge the classic theories on class-based hierarchies. However, most scholarly work has focused on active, rather than passive, cultural consumers. This article aims to fill that gap by exploring the orientations of cultural participation of hypothetically passive cultural consumers in contemporary Finland. Existing research proves that culturally non-active groups are difficult to reach through quantitative methods, so this project will draw on qualitative data: 40 individual interviews on everyday life, cultural taste, knowledge and participation with a theoretical sample of people whose background profiles statistically predict cultural non-participation. This article finds three main orientations of participation, expressed as attitudes on different kinds of cultural practices and symbolic boundaries drawn – these orientations of participation are the social-mundane, the cultural-legitimate and the introvert-hostile. It is argued that while none of the orientations equals to cultural non-participation, the latter orientation stands out from the other two as drawing symbolic boundaries upward, highlighting that cultural participation remains a highly stratified and polarized field, also in an egalitarian society.

Over the last 10–15 years, Western societies have faced two interrelated social changes: the digitalization of media and the increase in socio-political polarization. While their relationship is causally reciprocal, population-level empirical studies focusing on over-time change remain scarce. We adopt the temporal perspective on the socio-political stratification of media usage in the context of Finland, one of the so-called Nordic media welfare states. We ask whether the ways in which media usage is socially stratified has changed from 2007 to 2018 and whether there is political polarization of media consumption. We draw on two nationally representative comparative surveys, collected in 2007 ( N = 1388) and 2018 ( N = 1425), and show that the main media usage patterns—the wide, the narrow, and the Internet-focused media repertoires—differ both in terms of their sociodemographic and political profiles and that the opposition between the wide and the narrow repertoires becomes increasingly polarized.

In Nordic countries and beyond, there exists a lack of longitudinal, population-level research focused on sociopolitical polarisation and the proliferation of new online activities in the context of changing media usage. In this article, we examine media usage in Finland in 2007 and 2018. We use two nationally representative surveys (N = 1,388 in 2007 and N = 1,425 in 2018) to make comparisons over time and include a wide set of media usage indicators. Applying multiple correspondence analysis, we assess the impact of the proliferation of online activities on the structure of the space of media usage and examine whether the association between media usage and sociopolitical divisions has become more sharply pronounced. The results suggest stability of the structure of media use rather than dramatic change. We discuss these results by reflecting on the relatively strong persistence of “traditional” models of stratification in digital cultural consumption and media practices.