Text: Roza Meuleman. This article previously appeared on the Sociale Vraagstukken website. Photo: Diogo Nunes via Unsplash.
According to the Council for Culture, it has been a long time since the power of culture in providing meaning, value, interpretation and pleasure to life has been so evident. Due to the current coronavirus measures, people have had to miss out on attending performances, concerts, and festivals and making music together. At the same time, books, films and TV series and online concerts have provided a bright spot for many people during the lockdowns.
The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science also attaches great importance to the intrinsic and social value of culture for the general development of individuals, identity and historical awareness, the economy and the potential to connect people. The Council for Culture has therefore stated that the cultural policy of the Netherlands should be accessible to Dutch people from any background, anywhere in the country.
However, a recent Netherlands Institute for Social Research report showed that, when we take into account different personal characteristics, people with a migrant background who have a lower level of education or whose parents have a lower level of education, tend to exhibit less interest in culture, talk less about culture and spend less time attending cultural events or practising cultural traditions. When it comes to social groups and attendance at cultural events, there are greater differences between the classical arts (classical music, opera, theatre, classical dance, ballet) and the visual arts than there are between the popular performing arts (pop music, musical, cabaret, stand-up comedy) and film.
Is culture a social unifier or a social divider?
What are the consequences of these differences between cultural interests and participation? Previous research has clearly stated that cultural capital can contribute to success in both a scholastic and professional career. Although many policies are based on the cohesive effect of culture, the role of cultural capital in facilitating ties between different groups or status groups is less clear.
Shared cultural tastes give people something to talk about and facilitate social interactions. The question, however, is which cultural tastes facilitate which social relations and, more specifically, which social networking resources can consequently be accessed.
There are conflicting ideas about this. Is it the case, for example, that people from higher socioeconomic classes recognise and select one another on the basis of the knowledge of classical culture that is expressed during social interactions while people from lower status groups tend to be excluded from such social activity (cultural reproduction)? Or does culture offer people of lower socioeconomic status the opportunity to connect with and gain access to these higher socioeconomic networks (cultural mobility)?
Classical culture connects to higher status groups
In order to answer these questions, I examined the relationship between people’s cultural tastes and the socioeconomic status of their social network. For this purpose, I used the NEtherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (NELLS), in which people were subsequently asked how often in the past year they had attended a cultural event such as a classical concert, an opera, or a ballet, or had visited a museum (classical culture) or had attended a pop concert or gone to the cinema (popular culture). Respondents were also asked about their social network and the characteristics of their network members (such as their level of education and their occupation).
Firstly, my research showed that people’s classical cultural tastes are positively related to the number of network relations with a higher level of education and a higher occupational status. This pattern even emerged when such factors as the respondent’s level of education and occupational status and their parents’ level of education and occupational status were taken into account. This underscored the concept of cultural taste as an indicator of social identity and as a conversational tool that is used in the formation and maintenance of social relations.
In addition, classical cultural tastes tended to be more associated with the level of education and occupational status of social contacts than popular culture tastes. This was consistent with previous research, which argued that it is generally easier to respond to popular cultural codes which are not a specific indication of high status.
Classical culture excludes lower status groups
Classical culture not only has a cohesive effect. My research also showed that people’s classical cultural tastes actually tended to have a negative association with the number of contacts that a person had with people with a lower level of education and a lower occupational status.
This means that classical cultural tastes not only seemed to function as a social bridge to individuals with a higher socioeconomic status, but also as a social fence to individuals with a lower socioeconomic status who were less able or less willing to respond to specific cultural codes.
Although my research did not focus on this element, it was also inferred that the individual’s cultural taste was influenced by the people with whom they interacted. Nevertheless, the research did show that this process of influence (from network to cultural taste) was less powerful than the process of selection (from cultural taste to network) that was discussed above.
People from a lower socioeconomic background benefit more from classical culture
So, who actually seemed to do the best job of converting their classical cultural tastes into access to the higher socioeconomic networks? From the perspective of cultural reproduction, it was inferred that due to extensive socialisation during their youth, people from a higher status background not only felt at home in higher status networks, but that they may also be more adept at converting their cultural tastes into social conversations and sustainable social relations within these networks.
But this did not appear to be the case; it was quite the reverse. This meant that, especially for people from a lower socioeconomic status background – who probably grew up with fewer of the standards and cultural codes that are part of higher status networks – cultural taste may play a role in gaining access to higher socioeconomic status groups. This cultural mobility, in which cultural tastes may provide a gateway to higher status networks, underscores the importance of cultural participation and education in reducing socioeconomic segregation and inequality of opportunity.
Roza Meuleman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Radboud University. Her research study, which was funded by a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council, can be downloaded here.