European inventory of
societal values of culture

Daenekindt - Out of tune

Daenekindt, S. (2019). Out of tune: How people understand social exclusion at concerts. Poetics, 74: 101341.

Previous work has studied the exclusive nature of legitimate cultural contexts, such as art museums and classical concerts. The author offers a more comprehensive view by considering social exclusion in cultural settings varying in terms of legitimacy and by studying how people differ in their understanding of social exclusion (that is, criteria used to draw social boundaries demarcating certain cultural settings as inappropriate for some people). He scrutinizes the centrality of modes of consumption in these understandings of social exclusion. Using survey data representative for the Flemish population (n = 3144), he inductively analyses attitudes towards classical and pop/rock concerts, and uncovers four understandings of social exclusion that are present with regard to both types of concerts. These understandings differ (a) in whether they stem from an insiders’ or outsiders’ perspective and (b) in how they use modes of consumption as criteria for social exclusion. Additionally, the author finds that people’s understanding of social exclusion—i.e., which criteria people consider relevant for social exclusion—drives what cultural contexts they perceive as socially exclusive.

Stijn Daenekindt “Out of tune: How people understand social exclusion at concerts”