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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: Andrew.Miles@manchester.ac.uk

Dr. Lisanne Gibson

School of Museum Studies,

19 University Road

University of Leicester

Leicester, LE17RF

Ph 0116 252 5719

Email: lg80@le.ac.uk

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.

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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

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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/

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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)

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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/).

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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