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The article discusses the comments on the contributions to the social cultural participation. Topics include focusing on the broader concept of ‘lifestyle' instead of cultural participation, discussion to explore the links between cultural participation and social stratification, and consideration of eclecticism reflects omnivorousness, which is the choice of cultural expressions based on distinct aesthetics.

Do ticketing data and national survey data on attendance tell the same story? This question is particularly important in the context of debates over the power of new forms of data to supplant the "traditional" survey methods that have underpinned our understanding of the social stratification of culture. This paper compares three data sources on attendance: the Active Lives Survey, the Taking Part Survey, and Audience Finder. We first compare self-reported attendance at events in each English local authority from the Active Lives survey with ticket sales data, finding a close relationship. We follow up by comparing the distributions of ticket buyers across the Indices of Multiple Deprivation with those from Taking Part, finding that for widely-ticketed and widely-attended art forms they track closely together, providing support for existing trends. Ticketing data does not seem to offer more information on social stratification than traditional social science sources. However, we extend the comparison through more detailed analysis of subcategories within less well-researched forms – literature and dance events – where numbers of attendees are lower, with accompanying uncertainty in survey sources. We find that the audiences for dance vary widely, with ballet attendance being heavily socially stratified but attendance at contemporary dance much more similar to the general population. However, we find that audiences for literature events are more heavily socially stratified than almost any other art form, almost regardless of the subcategory. The power of new datasets is in offering specificity about artforms, rather than overturning what we know about culture and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using exceptionally rich qualitative data coming from the FP7 EUCROSS project on the ‘Europeanization of the Everyday Life’, this paper focuses on high-skilled and highly transnational Turkish migrants who reside in the UK, Romania and Italy. The article analyses participants’ discursive constructions of Europe and Europeanness and shows how specific images and symbols of Europe and Turkey influence their own relationship to Europe. We argue that understanding Turkish migrants’ identification with Europe requires a comprehensive analysis of the development of a Westernization discourse in Turkey that has framed people’s identities. This discourse symbolizes the desire for being part of the Western world, and especially Western Europe, but, at the same time, the fear of being dominated by the very same world. We show that we need to grasp the values, images, symbols and discourses that underline transnational practices to understand the making of European identity among migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over the rise of eclecticism, more particularly Peterson’s ‘omnivore thesis’, has received much attention over recent years. For Lahire, eclecticism reflects less an increasing individual openness to a variety of cultural styles than intra-individual dissonances. Based on a large survey into cultural practices in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (Belgium – N = 2021), this article compares these two notions with the aim of understanding the complexity of the structural relations that organise cultural tastes and practices into ‘cultural profiles’. I argue that omnivorousness cannot be reduced to dissonance but instead both notions characterise different configurations of cultural choices. More importantly, I show that identifying omnivorous and dissonant patterns matters less than understanding how these patterns emerge from tensions between existing and emerging cultural hierarchies at the individual and social levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on a quantitative survey (n= 1497) and semi-structured interviews (n= 30) conducted in the U.K., we explore British nationals’, Romanian and Turkish migrants’ attitudes of tolerance and the factors influencing them in the current socio-political context in the U.K. The quantitative data reveal the role of younger age, diverse networks, higher education, attachment to city/region and supranational identifications in more open attitudes towards diversity. The qualitative findings illustrate how diverse these three groups’ attitudes of tolerance can be and how they are affected by their position and status in the U.K. The British’ attitudes show their tolerance can reflect diverse forms of acceptance of ethnic and cultural differences but can also draw lines in terms of civic values opposing ‘those who contribute to society’ versus those who ‘live as parasites’. The Turks are in favour of diversity with the expectation of receiving more civic rights and facing less prejudice. The Romanians tend to have a more ambiguous relation to diversity given their position of stigmatised migrants in the U.K. Our analysis reveal how inclusive or exclusive people’s (sub- and supra-)national identities can be and how these frame their attitudes of tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last 20 years, European identity has become a key topic widely investigated in social sciences. However, most research has only focused on EU nationals and EU immigrants, neglecting the fact that a substantial segment of citizens in Europe are non-EU immigrants. This article explores the differences between and within EU and non-EU immigrant groups in terms of European identity and potential factors behind these differences. Based on the 2013 IAB-SOEP Migration Sample of first generation immigrants in Germany (N = 2581), this paper reveals that non-EU immigrants tend to identify as European – even if to a lesser extent than EU immigrants. Moreover it provides a systematic comparative exploration of different factors possibly able to foster a European identity among EU and non-EU immigrants. It reveals, for instance, that religious affiliation has no significant impact but that spatial mobility is especially important in accounting for patterns in ethnic disparities in the endorsement of a European identity. Furthermore, this article illuminates a positive association between European identity and identity with the receiving society among both EU and non-EU immigrants as well as a positive association between European identity and identification with the origin country among EU immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the establishment of people's lifestyles, places, and especially cities, have become central arenas for display and consumption, and have become part of the aesthetic experience itself. These changes have affected the composition of cultural capital, which may have then taken an urban dimension. Art museum visitors, often associated with highbrow culture, constitute an excellent case study to explore the links between cultural capital and place. Based on a survey of 1900 visitors of the six main museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, this article will focus on the distribution of the audience characterized by their cultural tastes and activities across the Belgian territory (through their postcodes). It shows that visitors mainly come from areas with high and moderate density and that the socio-demographic but also urban characteristics of their place of residence can be related to the way visitors' cultural capital is composed. Yet, it also suggests that places like cities (just like museums) form meeting places, in which co-exist and interact different stories, different trajectories and, as this article shows, a multiplicity of lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists traditionally focus on the power of socio-economic variables as drivers of attendance at museums. However, this research runs the risk of a certain socio-economic reductionism which fails to register the aesthetic dimensions of cultural consumption. To remedy this, I propose a new focus on cultural profiles beyond the prism of SES, which allows us to better interpret the role of the art museum visit in visitors' daily life. The cultural profile is defined as a set of cultural, creative and leisure preferences and activities, towards various forms of art, which classify and can be classified. I use multiple correspondence analysis to examine the nature of cultural profiles among visitors of six museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium. Six different cultural profiles are defined, each a 'bricolage' of different classifying registers that structure and define practices and tastes. My approach allows us to reconcile and elaborate current interests in cultural sociology about the relationship between high versus low culture ( Bourdieu), experimentation versus classicism, transgression versus conservatism and omnivores versus univores ( Peterson). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ways in which art museums' visitors define their relationships to art and culture, and how this affects their perceptions of art museums. Existing approaches have traditionally attempted to define the meaning of art museums on the basis of the socio-economic composition of museum audiences. Using mixed methods analysis, with a particular stress on qualitative data about the audiences of the six main museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, I argue for the need for a more complex and comprehensive framework to understand visitors' perceptions. I show that people characterized by similar cultural tastes and practices use similar strategies to interpret their relationship to culture, art and museums (the same principles of classification, legitimation and justification). On this basis, I argue that those with a similar cultural profile belong to the same “interpretive community” (Fish, 1980; Hooper-Greenhill, 2000). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that although museums have increasingly changed their mission to embrace 'spectacular' and 'commercial' goals in recent decades, their audiences resist this redefinition of the museum's role. Based on a structural equation model derived from a survey of 1,900 visitors of the six main galleries of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, it shows that different kinds of visitors tend to share the same conceptualization of what museums signify, as a kind of 'educative leisure'. They continue to differentiate museums from more commercial forms of leisure, and associate them with schooling and educational processes. We demonstrate that this appreciation of 'educative leisure' is shared by visitors from different socio-demographic backgrounds and is affected by other dimensions of the visitors' profiles, such as the practice of creative activities or recent experiences of other art places (commercial galleries, fairs, contemporary art centers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the Montmartre Bruxellois, which refers to the mobilization of artists attempting to rescue their artists' workshops, the Ateliers Mommen located in the center of Brussels, Belgium, from real estate developers. The author analyzes the media's portrayal of the artists' political activities in order to shed light on issues concerning art and its role in society. Also mentioned is the gentrification of working-class neighborhoods, which correlates with the rediscovery of city centers by wealthier people influenced by real estate developers. Further topics include an overview of the Ateliers Mommen, built by manufacturer Félix Mommen, who offered artists a creativity space, and contradictions between the media and the artists' comments.

In recent years growing sociological interest in new forms of cultural distinction has led some to argue that the advantages previously conveyed by the consumption of ‘high’ culture ‘or ‘omnivorousness’ are being overwritten by the possession of what has been termed ‘emerging cultural capital’. So far, though, this term has only been discussed in passing within empirical work and remains in need of further analytical specification. This special issue seeks to both critically interrogate and develop this concept by bringing together the work of leading cultural sociologists around four key themes: the role of age and generation in the formation of cultural capital; the power of visual display for distinction; the significance of new elite cultures; and the need for methodological pluralism to apprehend the expressions and mechanisms of distinction. This editorial introduction outlines the descriptive terrain on which the concept of emerging cultural capital has rested until now before exploring the common themes that sit across all five papers in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]