Susanne Janssen

Drawing on cross-national data from focus groups with representatives from diverse cultural organisations in Denmark, the Netherlands, Serbia, and Spain, this chapter explores how cultural institutions and practitioners throughout Europe approach audience development and the inclusion of “non-participants” in culture, such as less educated people, younger audiences, or migrants, to promote social inclusion and counter inequality. The analysis highlights that practitioners are committed to these goals but also face challenges and tensions in their efforts to achieve them. While focus group participants concurred on the importance of inclusion and participation, they differed in their strategies. Some preferred an approach described in the literature as “democratising culture” or cultivating a taste for institutionally recognised culture among non-participants. Others advocated a “cultural democracy” approach, which entails adapting cultural offerings to audience preferences and encouraging active participation. Many favoured hybrid approaches but also acknowledged the impossibility of complete inclusion, as the ideal of inclusion itself might be at odds with the beliefs of certain groups. This “inclusion paradox” has hitherto received insufficient attention from policymakers and academics, especially in view of rising right-wing populism and migration in Europe.

At the heart of this volume are the questions: What does culture mean to European citizens in the face of globalisation, digitalisation, diversity, and social inequality? How do Europeans engage with culture in its various forms, and what societal values are tied to this cultural engagement? These questions are explored in depth across the 15 chapters of this book. By delving into the understandings, practices, perceptions, affordances, and impacts of culture, this book advances the study of the societal values of culture in contemporary European societies, offering insights beneficial to both research and cultural policy work. The book stands out with its five unique features. It embraces an inclusive conception of culture, spanning the arts, popular culture, and everyday cultural practices, both offline and online. It takes a grassroots approach, starting from the cultural understandings and experiences of European citizens. It employs a comparative method involving people from diverse socio-economic groups in nine European countries – with different cultural policy models, social-structural features, socio-cultural value orientations, and media systems. It builds on a multi- and mixed-methods approach, including a large-scale survey, a smartphone study with experimental stimuli, several phases of online content data collection and analysis, qualitative interviews, and focus groups. Finally, it delves into how wide-ranging and interconnected sociocultural transformations such as migration, digitalisation, and social inequality impact people’s understanding of and engagement with culture as well as the meanings and values they attribute to culture. These unique features promise to offer a fresh and comprehensive perspective on cultural engagement in contemporary European societies. The collection showcases the multiple, often contradictory concepts and understandings of culture and its societal values among social groups within and across European societies. The findings call for a “social turn” in cultural policy that extends beyond traditional arts and culture to support diverse cultural expressions that may enhance social values, address complex social issues, and shift the focus from economic objectives to promoting civic solidarity, equity, inclusivity, tolerance, and shared community values.

This chapter examines migrants’ use of digital and information technologies to communicate and connect to the culture of their respective countries of origin and current residence. It specifically addresses migrants’ engagement with different forms of culture in the digital sphere and compares their habits to those of native-born citizens. Using a mixed-methods approach combining survey and interview data from multiple European countries, the chapter contributes a crucial cross-national perspective to the extant body of research and provides a comprehensive exploration of migrants’ digital cultural participation. Across different types of news media use and cultural participation investigated in an extensive international survey, migrants demonstrate active engagement – even more so than native-born citizens. Further analyses of qualitative interviews with migrants in four countries reveal that their use of digital media can be understood through four themes: active two-way (news) use, Internet enthusiasm, digital dislike, and social media sociability. Together with the survey data, these themes highlight opportunities and challenges migrants in Europe embrace and face when using digital technologies.

Policymakers increasingly look at culture to improve well-being. Concurrently, growing bodies of research address the relationship between the two. However, most studies focus on cultural participation in specific demarcated types of culture – visual arts, dance, theatre – and how these impact the well-being of particular groups, like the elderly, ill, or displaced. This chapter takes a different approach, investigating the relationship between all sorts of cultural activities and well-being from an open-ended, bottom-up perspective. The researchers asked a diverse range of 65 interview participants in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom to define whatever culture means to them and how culture affects their well-being, such as physical and mental health, feelings of communal belonging, or their individuality. The thematic content analysis of the interviews revealed that the participants consider culture and well-being strongly related. While the chapter focuses on commonalities in interviewees’ experiences across the three countries, there are notable differences in how foreign and native-born interviewees experience culture’s relation to well-being. Migrants more often reflect on broader cultural conditions in their current countries of residence that influence their sense of well-being. Furthermore, interviewees’ in-depth descriptions elucidate how culture enhances well-being in multiple ways, adding an interpretative dimension to research literature where mechanisms behind the observed effects are often left unexplained.

In recent decades, culture has become a key element in explaining social processes and inequalities – a development described as the “cultural turn in sociology” (e.g., Mohr, 1998). Following classic studies on how culture serves as a resource affecting social mobility (Bourdieu, 1984), scholarship on culture has expanded to examine how it shapes action in daily life (Swidler, 2001; Vaisey, 2009), its role in classification and meaning-making (Janssen et al., 2011; Rawlings & Childress, 2021), and how it impacts individual lives regarding, for instance, well-being (Diener & Suh, 2003; Andersen & Hakemulder, 2024). Concurrently, culture continues to signify “a way of life” found in communities worldwide and captures values describing citizens and societies at large (e.g., Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Moreover, culture increasingly manifests as a divisive mechanism between ideological fractions in the political realm, often called “culture wars” (e.g., Furedi, 2017).

This chapter focuses on the individual motivations or gratifications sought that drive Europeans’ cultural participation and how these differ across various cultural activities and socio-demographic profiles. Whereas the so-called “uses and gratifications” of mediated and digital culture have been thoroughly studied and theorised by media scholars, the crucial role of motivation in other areas of cultural participation has received far less systematic attention. This chapter aims to contribute to a more comprehensive account of the links between specific motivations, types of cultural participation, socio-demographic profiles, and country contexts. Drawing on the INVENT survey, we first examine and compare the main motivations for Europeans’ engagement in a variety of cultural activities. Next, we explore if motivational drivers of participation in specific activities vary according to socio-demographic characteristics and geographical context. Our findings highlight the diversity of motivations that drive cultural participation and how these motivations vary across socio-demographic profiles. We also find considerable differences between countries in the prevalence of specific motivations.

The cultural integration of migrants has garnered increased attention in policy and research in recent years. Whereas some researchers see successful cultural integration as a process of cultural convergence between native and migrant populations, others identify instances of failed integration with fundamentalism and parallel societies spreading among several groups of migrants. Instead of taking the receiving society’s perspective, this chapter puts migrants on centre stage, drawing on contemporary theories of integration and transnationalism. The analysis focuses on how migrants perceive the culture of their country of residence (CoR), the differences compared to their country of origin (CoO), and their evaluation of these cultures, offering an alternative perspective to conventional integration discussions. Based on 61 in-depth interviews with migrants from European and non-European countries in 11 Western European countries, the analysis reveals significant variations in migrants’ perspectives, primarily according to the cultural distance between CoO and CoR. Whereas most migrants from Western Europe discern limited cultural differences, migrants from Eastern Europe and non-European countries highlight pronounced divergences, particularly in areas like food, interpersonal contact, and values.