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This article explores the social distribution of involvement in highbrow culture in light of three issues being discussed in cultural sociology. One is that highbrow cultural orientation is an indicator of cultural capital or of social status. A second, the ‘meltdown scenario’, suggests that not only the popularity of highbrow activities, but also their distinctiveness, has decreased among younger cohorts in comparison to older cohorts. A third deals with the ‘feminization’ of highbrow culture. These issues are empirically addressed in contemporary Finland using nationally representative survey data. Highbrow culture is measured in three dimensions of cultural practices – knowledge, taste and participation – covering four different fields: music, literature, cinema and the visual arts. The results support all three arguments: First, education and occupational class are important social determinants of involvement in highbrow culture in Finland. Second, younger age cohorts show less interest in highbrow culture than do older Finns. Third, women tend to be more involved in highbrow culture than men. The results indicate considerable stability across the measures of highbrow culture and cultural fields. Social determinants of knowledge and cinema, however, are different from those in other dimensions and fields.

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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...

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