European inventory of
societal values of culture

INVENT Team - What does culture mean to Europeans?

Purhonen, S., Sirkka, O., Sivonen, S., Heikkilä, R., Janssen, S. & Verboord, M. (2022)  What does culture mean to Europeans? D3.1 Report on the diverse notions of culture

This report provides an overview on the diversity of the notions of culture among people in present-day Europe.  It adopts a “bottom-up” perspective to the conceptions and understandings of culture, which means that instead of starting from some pre-defined notions, it presents an inductive and exploratory investigation into the notions of culture held by people in and across different European sociodemographic groups and geographical locations. The report opens with a brief discussion of the diverse conceptions of culture, the current “cultural abundance”  and how the manifold societal megatrends in Europe and the western world since the latter part of the 20th century have affected both the cultural environment in which we  live, and the conceptual “baggage” associated with  the term culture. The empirical parts that follow are based on wide-ranging and nationally representative survey datasets collected by INVENT in 2021 in its nine countries: Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. 

The first empirical part analyses an open-ended question, in which the respondents  could freely define in their own words which meanings  they associate with “culture”. The analysis utilizes topic modelling  to create distinct clusters for the major meanings attached to the  culture concept, after which  it is inspected how those clusters are distributed according to major sociodemographic divisions  –  such as age, gender, household size,  place of residence, education, income, migrant background, and religion – as well as how they are associated with other politico-cultural factors and attitudes,  in and across the nine countries. The second empirical part analyses a  structured survey question including a list of twenty items (of cultural objects, places, and practices) and asking whether the respondents see each of them as belonging to culture, not belonging to culture or whether they remained ambivalent.  Using Latent Class Analysis, distinct clusters of different understandings of culture are, again, constructed and then analysed according to several sociodemographic variables in the nine countries. Thus, both empirical parts proceed rather similarly but are based on different ways of measuring the meanings attached to culture, which enables comparing  the results and asking  to what degree the methodologies used matter in capturing the meanings of culture.

The results demonstrate the persistence of the relevance of the classical distinction between the narrow (“culture as arts”) and the broad (“culture as ways of life”) notions of culture, yet, at the same time,  they show  that the distinction  does not  fully  capture  how people in today’s Europe understand the concept. The topic modelling in the first empirical part, based on the content of open-ended answers, reveals five distinct understandings of culture: culture as 1) cultivation, as 2) arts, as 3)  institutional, as 4) group characteristic, and as 5) social custom. The Latent Class Analysis in the second empirical part, in turn, disentangles  these  five major understandings, based on the level of breadth and ambiguity of the respondents’ views of what counts as culture and what does not; these are the 1) traditional cautious, 2) broad cautious, 3) broad distinct, 4) exclusive determinate, and 5) inclusive exhaustive understandings of culture. Both ways of measuring the diverse notions of culture were capable of showing that different understandings are statistically significantly associated with sociodemographic  divisions, besides  also  being associated with several socio-political attitudes. However, these associations were stronger in the case of clusters produced by Latent Class Analysis than topic modelling. Nevertheless, the results unambiguously show that the traditional hypothesis of the narrow and exclusive understandings of culture being more typical to upper-status groups rather than lower-status groups does  not hold anymore in present-day Europe.  In contrast, the narrow understandings are associated with lower-status groups, while the upper-status groups embrace broad notions of culture.