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TITLE PAGE:
EVERYDAY PARTICIPATION AND CULTURAL VALUE1
Prof. Andrew Miles and Dr. Lisanne Gibson
Corresponding Authors:
Prof. Andrew Miles
School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
3.038 Arthur Lewis Building
Oxford Road
Manchester, M13 9PL
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 8986
Email: [email protected]
Dr. Lisanne Gibson
School of Museum Studies,
19 University Road
University of Leicester
Leicester, LE17RF
Ph 0116 252 5719
Email: [email protected]
1 This work was supported by the AHRC through Connected Communities Large Project funding for
‘Understanding Everyday Participation: Articulating Cultural Values’, 2012-2017, AH/J005401/1;
additional funding to support the research carried out in Scotland was provided by Creative Scotland.
2
The articles in this special issue present some of the early findings of Understanding
Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP), a 5-year large grant
project, which began in 2012 and is part of the AHRC’s Connected Communities
programme, receiving supplmentary funding from Creative Scotland. The project starts
from the proposition that the orientation of cultural policy and state-funded cultural
programming towards cultural participation and value is in need of a radical overhaul.
We argue that there is an orthodoxy of approach to cultural engagement which is based
on a narrow definition (and understanding) of participation, one that focuses on a
narrow set of cultural forms and activities and associated cultural institutions but
which, in the process, obscures the significance of other forms of cultural participation
which are situated locally in the everyday realm.
Drawing together a large interdisciplinary team of researchers, which meshes interests
across the humanities, social sciences and the policy sector, UEP’s research seeks to
identify and apprehend everyday cultural participation and the values people attach to
this, especially in relation to the social sphere. Our aim in doing this is to re-orientate
the focus of both academic and policy work on ‘cultural value’ and thereby to cast fresh
light on the nature and significance of cultural preferences and activities in the UK in
the 21st Century. We can already, part way through the project, point to the consistency
of findings across the methods used in our research, which reveal: 1. the rich variety of
cultural participation activities, the vast majority of which lies beyond the orbit of State
cultural support; 2. the importance of these everyday forms of participation for
developing social capital and sustaining social networks, and for defining the
parameters of ‘community’.
As Norbert Elias (1998) reflected, working with the concept of the everyday implies
the mobilisation of its opposite, which in this case is the ‘official’ framework of cultural
participation and value in the UK (Griffiths at al 2008). This can be defined as the
largely formal and traditional practices, venues and institutions funded by government
through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Following Pierre
Bourdieu (1984), this framework can be seen to reflect a series of historical and cultural
assumptions about certain tastes and forms of activity being canonised by the State as
more valuable than others, and which can act as powerful symbols of social distinction.
As Miles and Sullivan (2010, 2012) argue, the operationalisation of this framework by
3
the State under the New Labour governments of 1997-2010 involved a
decontextualisation of cultural value that was accompanied by the mobilisiation of a
‘deficit model of participation’ reflecting midde class norms and understandings of
what was to count as ‘legitimate’ culture. Here, policies that prioritised access to culture
in the name of reducing social exclusion were at same time part of a process of
discrimination, marking out and marginalising those people and places that did not
associate themselves with established culture as passive, isolated and in need of
(remedial) attention (Miles 2013; Gibson, forthcoming). The logics of the ‘social
inclusion’ narrative within cultural policy and across cultural practice have recently
been extended through discourses of ‘access’ and ‘participation’ into collaboration, co-
production and co-curation2; although arguably there has not been a real expansion in
the cultural activities which are the focus of co-production practices (Gibson and
Edwards, this issue).
UEP’s frames of reference in academic research and theory are multiple. Most
obviously the project reflects a revival of interest in the study of everyday life and the
significance of apparently mundane routines, activities and interactions (Scott 2009),
which as the recent special edition of the journal Sociology (Neal and Murji eds 2015)
on the same subject indicates, shows no sign of abating. Meanwhile most recent
accounts of cultural taste and consumption in Anglophone countries and Europe have
been developed within, or with reference to, a Bourdieusian framework and as such fix
on what Alan Warde (2013) calls the ‘high culture system’ and its commonly accepted
transformation by the rise of the ‘cultural omnivore’ (Peterson and Kern 1996). While
the notion of omnivorousness brings popular culture into view within this framing, the
focus of attention remains on its role in the repertoire of elite cultural practices (see
Miles, in this volume).
The influential study Culture, Class, Distinction in the UK by Bennett et al (2009),
based on the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Survey, is no exception here.
Pointing usefully to the importance of age and life course effects, together with gender
2 There is a wealth of academic and practice based studies and reports across the arts and cultural sector
articulated in these ‘co-production’ terms. In relation to museum practice, for instance, see The
Participatory Museum (Simon, 2010) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation project Our Museum: Museums
and Communities as active partners (2012-2015), http://www. ourmuseum.org.uk/
4
and ethnicity, alongside and in combination with the role of class, in shaping cultural
engagement, it nevertheless pays little detailed attention to the world of ordinary
consumption. A second notable absence in this study is its failure to consider the spatial
dimensions of participation (Gibson, 2010), in the process reproducing the
methodological nationalism that characterises Bourdieu’s own work in Distinction
(1984). In contrast, UEP seeks to re-mobilise the central concepts of field, habitus and
capital in Bourdieusian theory as a broad theoretical frame through which to explore
the dynamics and stakes of everyday participation as a both a relational and a situated
process.
The re-inclusion of place as a frame for analysis provides a way of locating participation
as a set of processes, relationships, and structures of feeling, which enact, define and
discriminate communities (Williams 1978, Savage 2010). It also allows us to consider
how cultural and social capital is produced and mobilised contextually through
participation (Frow 1995), and how these assets might be translated into value in the
vernacular dimension to effect civic capacity and quality of life around alternative value
sets (Edensor et al 2010, Gilmore 2013). Our other frame for exploring everyday
participation as a situated process derives from an identification of the ways in which
‘community’ and ‘place’ have, since the late nineteenth century, come to operate as
central logics in the governance of ‘culture’ (Amin 2005, Osborne & Rose 1999).
UEP’s focus on the concept of the cultural ecosystem (see below) is designed to
contextualise and examine the impact of these logics on the socio-cultural constructions
of places and communities and the relationships between formal and informal
participation, both historically and in the present day.
Questions of method and methodology are central to the issue of cultural participation
because they simultaneously help define both what it is and how much of it there can
be. Here we draw from work in the CRESC3 tradition on the politics of method, which
insists that methods need to be understood in terms of their ‘social lives’ (e.g. Law et
al 2011); that they are loaded with assumptions about the world in their design, and in
the process of their application, help to re-enact it. In the case of data instruments used
3 The ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change, 2004-14, located at the University of
Manchester and the Open University (www.cresc.ac.uk)
5
in cultural policy, for example, the prioritisation of quantitative methods based on the
sample survey - such as the UK government’s national Taking Part survey – involves
the reduction of the cultural field to a partial and specific set of measurable indicators
that both represent and help to reinforce particular ways of ‘seeing’ participation (see
Taylor, this issue and Bunting, Gilmore and Miles, forthcoming).
Accordingly, UEP’s work is set out according to a non-hierarchical, mixed methods
design, in which different approaches, offering different lenses and therefore fields of
view on the domain of cultural participation, are brought into dialogue with one another
(Mason 2006). A set of macro-level histories examining the terms, narratives and
assumptions constructing present day notions of participation, value and cultural
governance (Belfiore and Gibson eds, forthcoming) is being mobilised alongside the
reanalysis of existing participation data (Taylor this volume; Leguina and Miles,
forthcoming) to frame an extensive programme of new empirical work in six UK
locations. The findings from this research then become the subject of re-investment in
a series of community-focused application projects (e.g. Gilmore, forthcoming; Milling
and Schaeffer, forthcoming) and, it is intended, will ultimately provide the foundation
for a new cross-sector dialogue in cultural research and policy.
Case studies of situated participation are the empirical focal point of the project, where
we investigate how participation is articulated by location and by the relations and
boundaries within and between places and communities. To do this we use the concept
of a ‘cultural ecosystem’: defined as an historically wrought, physically situated
assembly of formal and informal cultural resources, participation contexts, practices
and communities, which reflect the interplay of local structures of investment, supply
and demand, and as such constitute distinct economies of participation. Here we have
chosen six contrasting location to work in – Manchester/Salford, Gateshead, Dartmoor,
Aberdeen, Peterborough and the Outer Hebrides - framed in the first instance by their
‘official’ profile as more, or less, cultural places based on the ratio of investment in
formal cultural provision to rates of formal cultural participation and attendance at the
local authority level (for further detail on the geographic focus of work in each of these
places see http://www.everydayparticipation.org/eco-systems/).
6
In each ecosystem the project adopts a largely grounded, inductive approach which
begins with scoping exercises, such as community meetings, and is then organised
around the same suite of largely qualitative and descriptive methods: local histories of
participation, value and governance; longitudinal in-depth life history interviews,
probing issues of participation practices and belonging, identity, friendship and places;
ethnographies of participation contexts, which have so far included parks, a charity
shop (Edwards, forthcoming), social clubs, a village hall (Miles and Ebrey
forthcoming), and the participation of young people in care (Gibson and Edwards, this
issue); the mapping – from official sources but also research participants’ vernacular
maps – of local cultural and leisure assets and participation activities (Gibson and
Delrieu, forthcoming); and in some ecosystems, social network analysis of participation
communities and cultural intermediaries.
Papers in this first volume (issue 3, September, 2016) of the Special Issue, present and
discuss project work that addresses the theoretical and methodological framings for
understanding cultural participation and value. Papers in the second issue (Issue 1,
March, 2017), which focus more specifically on research in the cultural ecosystem
case study locations, will address the vernacular components of cultural value, issues
of creative economy and the cultural signatures of place.
First in the current issue, Jill Ebrey’s article provides us with a broad theoretical framing
of the notion of ‘the everyday’, in which she unpacks and relates central themes in
historical and sociological writing on everyday life. In doing so, she discusses the ways
in which the quotidian became a subject of scrutiny and analysis and then a space of
political resistance and change. Subsequently, the sociological focus on everyday life
made the cultures and experiences of marginalised groups central to its analysis. In
documenting this important theoretical background to the UEP project, Ebrey draws us
back to our concern with cultural policy and practice by arguing that more recent
developments in thinking about the everyday – such as practice theory – offer an
important practical tool for understanding the lived experience of participation, and
thus for more democratic models of policy-making.
7
The next three articles provide a snapshot of the multimodality of the UEP project.
Reporting on elements of the quantitative, ethnographic and interview-based
components of our research, they all reveal some of the variety and richness of
people’s everyday cultural participation. Crucially, however, they also show the ways
in which these forms of participation are embedded in value systems that work to
relegate, obscure or deflect attention from their importance in negotiating personal
relationships and shaping social life.
Mark Taylor’s piece reporting on his interrogation of the cultural participation
survey Taking Part finds that 8.7% of the population is highly engaged with state-
supported forms of culture, and that this fraction is particularly well-off, well-
educated and white. However, in contrast to the ways in which such findings are
generally viewed by the cultural policy and practice community, as a call to arms
to get more people ‘engaged’, Taylor finds that the half of the population which
has fairly low levels of engagement with state-supported culture is nonetheless
busy with everyday culture and leisure activities, such as pubs, shopping, darts,
and gardening. In fact only about 11% of the population could be described as
‘disengaged’; that is, detached from mainstream pastimes and social events
outside of watching television. As Taylor argues, these findings challenge the
basis on which policies seeking to manage cultural and leisure participation are
made.
Andrew Miles also finds evidence of a rich world of participation outside the realms
of state supported cultural activities, arguing that the domination of survey approaches
in research has limited understandings of the everyday cultural field in both sociology
and policy. Drawing on in-depth interviews undertaken in UEP’s Aberdeen,
Manchester and Gateshead case study locations, Miles explores the content and form
of individual ‘participation narratives’ in order to understand how far participation is
implicated in various types of boundary work; around age, class and gender in
particular. His readings of people’s life stories illuminates that while participation
practices are strongly rooted in mundane contexts of friendship, family and the life
course, they nevertheless remain charged with social and cultural tensions. The
drawing of boundaries around participation may have become more indirect, nuanced
and distributed with the demise of the high cultural system but they are particularly
8
evident privately, in the gendered dynamics of family formation, and in the public
sphere, over territorial struggles for identity and belonging in the cultural city.
Lisanne Gibson and Delyth Edwards develop the issue of how participation is
bounded by an hierarchical understanding of cultural value, focusing on the particular
case of the cultural activities of young people living in care. This is a group whose
participation is ‘facilitated’ for them, with the aim that this will effect positively their
cultural, educational, emotional and social capital. Gibson and Edwards find that a
restrictive conception of cultural value on the part of the facilitators places limits on
the activities available, arguing that the development of agency through cultural
programmes is constrained by an assumption that young people’s everyday cultural
choices lack value and that to promote them (and thereby their agency) would involve
risk. Through a discussion of ethnographic research undertaken with young people in
Gateshead, this paper explores how different domains of participation are understood
by both the facilitators and the facilitated. Gibson and Edwards conclude by
considering how these understandings contribute to the development of forms of
cultural practice that reveal, recognise, interrogate and challenge the relations that
inform participant’s autonomy, as well as the relations that inform the roles of the
facilitators themselves.
Finally, Eleonora Belfiore’s article addresses the UEP project’s engagement with the
‘research-policy-practice nexus’ in the cultural sector, through which we are self-
reflexively exploring relations in this field as we experience them as researchers with
different disciplinary backgrounds and orientations. Belfiore’s contribution to this issue
is a first attempt at thinking through some of the project’s aims in this respect. In it she
documents the trajectory of one of the initial findings of the UEP project - that only 8%
of the population take part in funded cultural activities in any regular manner - (Taylor
this issue), to reveal its reception in English cultural policy debates. She argues that
while researchers cannot control the use (and misuse) of their data, nevertheless it is
still a ‘realistic objective’ for cultural policy researchers to hope and aim for influence
on policy, especially if they understand that the influence can be, and is perhaps more
likely to be, ‘conceptual’ rather than direct.
9
Recent work attached to cultural policy studies, such as that connected with the
AHRC’s Cultural Value project (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016; O’Brien and Oakley
2015), together with studies of regional disparities in arts funding conducted by Stark,
Gordon and Powell (2013 and 2014), have begun to highlight more clearly the ways
in which the operation of the formal cultural realm is implicated in the making of
economic, social and geographical inequalities. Given the association between the
possession of established cultural capital and life chances in societies such as the UK
(Bennett et al 2009, Scherger and Savage 2010), it has been argued that by focusing
on everyday activities we risk neglecting the consequences of unequal access to the
arts in divided societies (Crossick 2015). Yet, whilst it remains the case that only a
small, affluent minority of the UK population4 is regularly engaged in cultural
practices which are effectively subsidised by the less affluent majority of non-
participants in these same practices, issues of equity loom large for a cultural policy
that fails to challenge the status quo. In this context, by reversing the deficit model
underlying official cultural policy and starting from what people themselves value
about their own everyday participation practices, UEP’s research raises both an
epistemological and political challenge to policymakers. It suggests that by focusing
on the demand side of culture we are more likely to uncover evidence of resources
and assets which could be mobilised to effect the kinds of recalibration – in
understandings of value but also in the social relations of participation and production
- necessary to accredit and generate engagement with cultural opportunities of all
kinds.
4 Although Taking Part is not unusual in revealing the white, educated nature of the majority of
participants in the cultural activities supported by the State. See e.g. in the USA DiMaggio and Muktar
2007, in the UK more broadly Bennett et al 2009, and in Australia Bennett et al, 1999.
10
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