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Cultural reproduction has attracted the attention of cultural sociologists over the last few decades. While a body of research has shown that the orientation to highbrow culture is transmitted from parents to their children, research on the transmission of other cultural orientations has been scarce. In this paper, I study the intergenerational transmission of three cultural orientations—highbrow, popular, and crafts—in Finland. The data were derived from a nationally representative sample (N = 1425) surveyed in Finland in 2018, and it was analysed with regression techniques. For the respondent, I target current cultural participation, and for the parents I rely on retrospective data targeting joint cultural participation with the respondent during their childhood. I show that there is symmetric transmission of cultural orientation, namely that the respondent's current orientation is most tightly associated with the same orientation that they practiced with their parents, suggesting symmetric cultural reproduction in Finland. Additionally, parents’ overall cultural participation is associated with their children's overall cultural participation. I reflect on the findings in the light of past and current research on cultural practices and suggest directions for future research. publishedVersion

In this paper, we examine the centrality of policy actors and moral justifications in media debates on Arctic climate change in Finland and Canada from 2011–2015. We take a network approach on the media debates by analysing relations between the actors and justifications, using discourse network analysis on a dataset of 745 statements from four newspapers. We find that in both countries, governments and universities are the most central actors, whereas business actors are the least central. Justifications that value environmental sustainability and scientific knowledge are most central and used across actor types. However, ecological justifications are sometimes in conflict with market justifications. Government actors emphasize new economic possibilities in the Arctic whereas environmental organizations demand greater protection of the vulnerable Arctic. Ecological justifications and justifications that value international cooperation are more central in the Finnish debate, whereas justifications valuing sustainability and science, as well as those valuing national sovereignty, are more central in the Canadian debate. We conclude that in addition to the centrality of specific policy actors in media debates, the use of different types of moral justifications also reflects political power in the media sphere.

Young adults who are not in education or work are often depicted as deviating from the norm of gainful employment that is still widely shared across the Nordic countries. While it has been argued that young adults feel that they are being blamed for their NEET situation, this article seeks to identify the variety of interpretations they have of their situation and what kind of explanations can be proposed for the differences. Theoretically, perspectives from Axel Honneth's recognition theory are combined with Thomas Scheff's sociological work on shame to discuss the variations in the sentiments of young adults. Based on this framework, the article illuminates how young adults use the shared semantics available within their immediate circles to enable them to feel worthy of recognition despite their depicted deviation from the norm of gainful employment. Additionally, the article contributes to sociological debates on Honneth's recognition theory – especially its ambiguous concept of shared semantics – by making sense of the role of communities and institutions as providers of shared semantics. The findings are based on an abductive analysis of 35 in-depth interviews with young Finnish adults aged 18–29 who have been or are currently outside of education or employment.

As a part of their normative theory of expertise, Harry Collins and Robert Evans proposed that interactional expertise forms the third kind of knowledge, located between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skills. Interactional expertise refers to the capability to grasp the conceptual structure of another’s social world, and it is expressed as the ability to speak fluently the language spoken in that social world. According to their theory, it is a key concept of sociology, because it refers to the understanding and coordination of joint actions between members of different social groups. Collins and Evans have further claimed that minority social group members tend to outpace majority social group members in terms of interactional expertise. Drawing on ethnomethodology, we detail the ways in which interactional expertise is displayed and revealed in experiments. This allowed us to specify the underlying reasons for the distribution of interactional expertise between social groups. Our results indicate that the difference between the groups depends on whether a group is either actively maintained or a passive latent category, because interactional expertise provides for not only the crossing of social boundaries but also their maintenance. The minority social group members’ greater interactional expertise or competence is therefore proven to be illusory.

Studies on post-World War II housing estates have largely focused on problematic neighbourhoods, and there is a scarcity of literature on housing estates across their entire social scale. Moreover, there is insufficient evidence on the extent to which tenure structure differentiates estates from each other in terms of social disorder. Using a large cluster sample of Finnish estates representing a wide variety of estate neighbourhoods, we examined the implications of tenure structure in terms of social disadvantage and perceived social disorder. We also studied how social interaction and normative regulation mediate the impact of structural estate characteristics. We found that rental domination is associated with social disadvantage, which exposes residents to social disorder, in line with social disorganisation theory. Differences in normative regulation partly explain this association. In contrast, social interaction in the neighbourhood is not associated with the level of perceived social disorder. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.