‘IT IS NOT A MATTER OF TASTE … ’: Cultural capital and taste among the Swedish-speaking upper class in Finland

Upper classes and elites are usually exclusive circles which are hard to enter. In this paper we approach one such group using a focus group interview: a group from the Swedish-speaking upper class in officially bilingual Finland. Our paper addresses Bourdieu's idea of distinction by cultural or taste distinctions. In comparison to some international studies on elites and upper classes, our group was surprisingly keen on expressing disgust towards other tastes and lifestyles and therefore other classes and/or social groups. One might be surprised at how efficiently distinction works in the Swedish-speaking old upper class and how politically incorrect its outspokenness about cultural superiority is. In this specific group, there is a double-distinction: not only are Finnish speakers looked down upon regardless of their class position, almost any other group is, too. In this sense, this is more or less a case par excellence of Bourdieu's theory of distinction.

The sociological¹ gaze has usually been focused downwards, e.g., on the working class, underdogs or marginalised people, etc. Less frequently, the gaze has been directed upwards, to upper classes or elites. Those exclusive circles are in general hard to enter. Survey methods prove unworkable in practice (cf. Savage and Williams 2008: 6), and these circles do not open their doors to outsiders like social scientists. In this paper, however, we have tried to approach one such a group, i.e., a group from the Swedish-speaking upper class in Finland.

It is only through personal social networks that an outsider can reach exclusive groups like elites or upper classes. One possible way to get in touch with such a group is via personal contacts with some members of the group. In their study of the British managerial elite, Warde and Bennett (2008: 242) call their sample ‘opportunistic, derived from institutional and personal contacts of the research team’. In this sense, our sample is opportunistic as well. It was through some personal contacts that we succeeded in finding our group, which was willing to participate in a focus group interview.

The purpose of this paper is to address Bourdieu's idea concerning the upper class distinguishing itself by cultural or taste distinctions. We are also interested in the cultural capital of the upper class in order to identify social and cultural differences in Finland. In addition, we are interested in studying a specific upper class group, i.e., the traditional Swedish-speaking upper class in Finland.

In his classic work Distinction, Bourdieu (1984: 15–18) presented three general attitudes towards culture, each connected to a given class position. Firstly, there is the dominant class, which in our case means the upper class in terms of economic capital, though Bourdieu (1984: 22–23) also included in his dominant class another fraction, i.e., those rich in cultural capital, e.g., leading intellectuals. This class is characterized by ‘sense of distinction’. Secondly, there is the middle class, characterized by ‘cultural good will’; and thirdly, the lower classes are left with ‘the necessary choice’.

For Bourdieu there are three different kinds of taste. Firstly, there is pure, legitimate taste, i.e., a taste for cultural objects, which are considered legitimate. This kind of taste is most often found in those fractions of the dominant class who have the greatest educational capital. The second kind of taste is the ‘middle-brow’ taste (le gôut moyen), directed to less valuable and more common objects. And finally, the third taste is the popular or vulgar taste represented by objects, which lack all artistic ambitions (Bourdieu 1984: 16).

These three kinds of taste are directly related to the habitus typology: each taste corresponds to a habitus of its own. But taste is also a means of power: taste is an instrument of dominance for the dominant class. The dominant class, says Bourdieu, strives to distinguish itself from those representing other taste categories: the line of demarcation runs between ‘good’ and bad, i.e., ‘barbarian’ taste: ‘In matters of taste… all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes’ (Bourdieu 1984: 56).

Regarding the context of our study, Finland can be considered one of the so-called Nordic welfare states. Jean-Pascal Daloz (2007a, b) has pointed out that there are great cultural variations among elite cultures even in Europe. For example, Daloz (2007a: 54) refers to the so-called ‘Jante Law’, originally formulated by the Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose, who stressed that Nordic people are generally modest: ‘Don't think that you are special’. It also implies very strong egalitarian spirit even with a repressive edge, so that one, for example, should not – at least in public – express distinctions. Also in the 1980s Finnish discussion of Bourdieu's applicability, Bourdieu's theory of distinction was strongly rejected by claiming that Finnish society and culture is more homogenous than the French one and does not include as sophisticated distinctions as French culture (see Rahkonen 2008). In this sense, it is interesting to study the upper classes in the Nordic countries or welfare states, in our case, in Finland, where expressing cultural superiority in public can be seen to be more or less as politically incorrect.

Data in this paper are drawn from the research project ‘Cultural Capital and Social Differentiation in Finland: An International Comparsion’ (Rahkonen et al. 2006; see also Purhonen et al. 2009). The overall data collected in Finland by our research team consists of a nationally representative survey, household interviews with 25 respondents of the survey and focus group interviews with 51 groups in total, of which 26 were Swedish-speaking groups. The data collection – both the survey and focus group interviews – was designed following the example of a recent British research project (Bennett et al. 2009). Some national or cultural modifications were made to maintain comparability as far as possible. Due to the small size of the Swedish-speaking population in Finland, Swedish-speaking Finns were too few for meaningful statistical analysis. However, as this group is a particularly interesting minority regarding cultural capital and social differentiation, we have tried to reach them through a number of focus group interviews, of which a specific one is described here.

Our study is a case study. In this paper we address ourselves to the culture capital, taste and lifestyle of the supposedly ‘high society’² of the Swedish-speaking upper class through one focus group interview with Swedish-speaking upper-class women living in metropolitan Helsinki. Focusing on the very upper layers of society, we have picked from our entire data only one focus group interview with six female members of the Swedish-speaking old upper class. Our aim is to explore the mechanics of distinction in a very exclusive and difficult-to-reach group. Using only one group fits well the idea of a focus group as a contextual situation that makes the cultural discourses and hierarchies visible. According to Robert Merton, the purpose of the focus group is to ‘gain enlarged sociological and psychological understanding in whatsoever sphere of human understanding’ (Merton 1987: 565). As it brings people together to talk about a certain topic in the presence of a researcher, it is also a way to probe into their abilities in ‘focussed talk’ and, through that, into their skills in formal discussion and cultural capital (cf. Silva and Wright 2005).

Although our study is primarily a case study, and not a systematic comparative study, we make some comparative references to the British elite group study (Warde and Bennett 2008) and also to the other focus group interviews with Swedish-speaking Finns; 26 interviews in total. Geographically the groups were chosen so that the entire Swedish-speaking area (including the Åland Islands) would be covered (cf. Heikkilä and Kahma 2008). The purpose was to interview groups of all age groups from all different social and professional groups in order to cover as wide a socio-economic profile as possible. As the groups were natural ones, typical groups interviewed were, for instance, exclusive clubs (of managers, doctors, etc.), choirs (with a large profile of middle class professions such as teachers or clerical workers) or workers’ associations (usually composed of manual workers or the unemployed).

The focus group analysed here is composed of Finland-Swedes, i.e., Swedish-speaking Finns that form a language minority in Finland, a bilingual country with, according to its constitution, Finnish and Swedish as its two official languages. The Swedish-speaking minority consists of about 290,000 people, making up 5.5 percent of the Finnish population, though at the beginning of the twentieth century it was around 13 percent. Despite its small and slowly diminishing size this group can be considered quite important: due to the historical circumstances, in the past Swedish speakers have formed the leading layers of Finnish society, and hence Swedish-speaking Finns have long traditions of upper class culture (Roos and Roos 1984). Still, statistically, the economic and social structures of the two language groups today do not differ significantly (Finnäs 2007: 27), nor do the lifestyles and cultural preferences of Finnish speakers and Swedish speakers (Heikkilä and Kahma 2008) turn out to be very different in contemporary Finland. Unlike most other language minorities in the world, Finland-Swedes have been considered particularly conciliatory³ even if the group has always had strong internal differences, i.e., old elites and urban middle classes on one hand, farmers and fishermen on the other (Allardt and Starck 1981). This positive image is corroborated by the above-mentioned conception that Finland-Swedes represent a more legitimate or ‘better’ lifestyle and taste. However, upper-class Finland-Swedes have not been an object of research before from this viewpoint.

Although the socio-economic differences between these two language groups at the general level are not that large, the specific object of our analysis here is a distinct group that represents the very upper layers of (Swedish-speaking) society, the contemporary upper class (as distinct from the upper-middle class; cf. Lamont 1992: 14) – in other words, the stereotypical Swedish-speaking elite of Helsinki in its natural habitat. Thus, the underlying factor of this group is its richness in economic capital. From the background information forms filled in by the interviewees of the focus group interview, we are able to form a picture of their social standing and confirm their gentility.

Our focus group is composed of six women from 45 to 55 years old, four of them independent artists of some kind, one art historian working in a museum, and a businesswoman. Some of them could also be called cultural entrepreneurs. Most of them have an upper class family background, and they were or had been married into wealthy and renowned Swedish-speaking families that partly also guaranteed money to maintain their artistic professions. However, two of them had rather an upper-middle class background, but had moved more or less to an upper class status by themselves or through their partners. All live in spacious flats of 200 to 400 square metres in the most expensive neighbourhoods of Helsinki. In accordance with this information it might even be appropriate to speak of a ‘Swedish-speaking cultural elite’ rather than a ‘Swedish-speaking upper class’. As we shall see in the next part, both groups have cultural tendencies; on one hand many are artists themselves, others, for their part, are more business-oriented, either in their own right or through the financial status of the family. However, none of them held a very influential position in the Finnish-Swedish field of culture, nor were they part of the cultural avant-garde.

The group is relatively homogenous and a natural one (cf. Wilkinson 1998) meaning that the interviewees knew each other beforehand, in this case for years; they were friends who had the custom of meeting every month ‘just to gossip’. Essentially it was an informal female friends’ group meeting. As mentioned above, the group was recruited for the interview through some personal contacts in our research group.

The interview was conducted by one of us (Rlie Heillilä) in Swedish, and it took place in May 2008 in an elegant bureau of a Finnish-Swedish cultural organisation that one of the interviewees had arranged for the meeting. We were originally supposed to meet at her luxurious centre-based flat (the women took turns to invite each other to their homes), but as her husband had just returned from the US and was suffering from jet lag, it was not possible. The members of the group were meeting for the first time in a while, and at the start it was somewhat difficult to reunite them for the formal talk. Nevertheless, when the tape recording finally started, the group proved to be very keen on talking, and seemed to be in no rush whatsoever to end the focus group interview (unlike almost all the rest of the groups in our data that had to hurry back to work or to their families).

The habitus of all the group members was almost strikingly upper-class: even if the interviewees were prepared for ‘only’ a focus group interview, they were dressed as though for a cocktail party, wearing clothes from several recognizable exclusive fashion houses. Before the interview started, the interviewees took a moment to check out and compliment each other on their appearances and clothes and ask where they were bought from – along with exchanging kisses on each cheek, something which is considered very ‘continental European’ and sophisticated in Finland.

Despite the willingness to discuss, the group was, maybe surprisingly, somewhat contemptuous about the interview at the beginning, perhaps because it interrupted their conventional way of meeting. Overall, this focus group interview was a somewhat special case in our entire data (see Heillilä 2008, Heillilä and Khama 2008). Throughout the focus group interview, the group held a strong position in relation to the interviewer. For instance, before starting, the group sneered at the tape recorder and possibly the interviewer too: in their eyes, she must have looked like a fairly young girl from a different, possibly somewhat lower social milieu. Because of this, the interview sometimes looked more like a commonplace discussion than a classical focus group interview in which the interviewer moderates the conversation. Still, in this article we will refer to our data as a focus group interview and to the two parties as the interviewer and the interviewees.

In fact, many studies on the elite (cf. Kezar 2003; Conti and O'Neil 2007) emphasise the impact of the interviewee(s) on the interviewer (as distinct from the classic problem of the interviewer having too much power in comparison with the interviewees), and that impact was clear to see in our focus group, too. Despite some embarrassment, we interpret this attitude to be fruitful in the sense that the interviewees felt completely at ease and did not have to prove their cultural skills in the eyes of the interviewer (the case in many other focus groups; see also Silva and Wright 2005), but only in each others' eyes.

In tune with the overall proceeding of our focus group interviews, we chose to speak with the group about cultural capital in terms of literature and art. In addition to these two topics cultural practice (events and participation) and taste in particular were also discussed. Additionally, all the Swedish-speaking groups in our entire data were asked about the identity and self-image of Finnish-Swedes (see Heillilä 2008 for an analysis of this data), but in this particular group, discussion on taste was so tightly intertwined with talk on the Swedish-speaking minority that it is practically impossible (and in the frame of this article, unnecessary) to separate them. In the following section, we go through the interview in that same order, focusing first on literature, then art and finally taste. All names have been changed to protect anonymity.

Susanne, the member of the group who was initially in contact with our research project, was enthusiastic about the idea of talking about taste from the beginning, and had apparently prepared the others for a lively discussion on issues of taste. This led to a minor misunderstanding concerning the topic of the interview; talking first about literature and art was something of a disappointment for the group. The result could be seen in the slight stiffness of the discussion in the beginning and a growing ease and willingness to talk towards the end.

Even with the misunderstanding concerning the topics of discussion, the group followed without any doubt what Warde and Bennett (2008: 243) would call a certain taken-for-grantedness of talking about legitimate culture: a certain level of cultural consumption is compulsory, leaving no one outside of the sphere of reading, for instance. The discussion on literature in the group thus began with a very conventional listing of the books that the interviewees had just read or were currently reading. The books mentioned were quite conventional, too: the interviewees mentioned several biographies on Finnish or Finnish-Swede writers, classic novels and essays. As literature was the first topic of discussion, the atmosphere was almost careful and focused mainly on making a good impression on the others, possibly even showing off one's cultural skills. A good example of this careful and alert atmosphere is the following excerpt:

Lilli's confusion tells a lot about the dynamics of the group: even though others are politely listened to and carefully supported, the interviewees were eager to show their superior knowledge.

Bad literature for the group means a clear contrast with the canon of classics and biographies of (other) cultured people that were mentioned above. As examples of non-interesting books, the group mentioned without great passion whodunits, clichéd romances and sci-fi: it seems like ‘bad’ literature is simply not read. If the ‘language is barren’ or ‘you don't get a grip of it’, the reader just gets tired and stops reading. Susanne also made a point of finding literature that combines form and meaning interestingly: a book perfectly written and structured might prove to be totally uninteresting, whereas a book which is badly or strangely written might be ‘fascinating, interesting to read because […] they can express something unique’. Uniqueness and unity, as we shall see, are the common denominators of everything that is liked or appreciated by the group; it is a clear contrast to the commonplace art or taste of the masses.

When the discussion turned to art, the atmosphere clearly relaxed; it seemed like the group was more comfortable and familiar with the subject than any other group in our entire data. The beginning of this part on art is a good example of both the superior status of the group towards the interviewer on the one hand, and the willingness to speak about art on the other:

A similar attitude characterises the entire focus group interview: several of the interviewer's questions were questioned and openly made fun of. Interestingly, not many concrete examples of good or bad art were mentioned, possibly because the interviewees were reluctant to be criticised by the others. The emphasis is on the cultural activity of the group. Susanne, for example, claimed to see 20 theatre premieres a year, most others ‘only’ 10, and all interviewees were convinced they see more art than ‘people on average’.

Our group showed very similar features to the British elite interviewees (Warde and Bennett 2008) when talking about art. Besides the fact that going to museums, exhibitions and plays represented an extremely important social activity in both studies, neither the British nor the Finnish-Swedes liked avant-garde or almost any kind of more recent art. Even if the interviewees were keen to show their good cultural attitude, most admitted disliking video installations and other ‘incomprehensible’ pieces of experimental art. A recent exhibition on objects and cultural products made out of sugar lumps was mentioned and thoroughly pondered upon. As Elisabeth put it: ‘I asked myself: “Why?” I felt … I didn't understand what kind of art it was. And why!’

One noteworthy feature related to art which concerned our focus group was the fact that the group was art-oriented; when discussing art, the only visual artist (with an education in a French art school), Lilli, took a leading role that the others clearly accepted and appreciated. As might have been expected, her own artistic work also emerged in the discussion, but it was the others who brought it up in a highly appreciative tone, as an example of what good art (as distinct from the previously mentioned ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘terrible’ sugar lumps) is:

It is clear to see that the discussion of ‘good’ art clearly conforms to the conventional frames of ‘beauty’, ‘harmony’, ‘uniqueness’, and ‘experiencing something special’. Contemporary experimental art is not liked, but on the other hand the group seemed very careful in its critiques on art, possibly to avoid conflict or not to look inexperienced in the eyes of Lilli.

Visiting museums abroad was commonplace for all the interviewees; all travelled a great deal, and museums seemed like the natural leisure choice when travelling abroad. Lilli, who led the conversation, made a point about visiting museums abroad, and gave a lengthy account about taking (or ‘dragging’) her 10-year-old son to the Parisian art museums and how he reacted to different exhibitions. Doing that, she offered an excellent example of the often-emerging role of the wife or mother of the family as an important converter of economic capital into symbolic capital through cultural taste and participation (Lovell 2000), or the cultural mobiliser of the family which was also found in the British study on the elites (Warde and Bennett 2008)

All in all, the group was marked by a strong desire to talk about art and great ease expressing opinions about it. As we shall see next, discussion on taste was met with an even stronger feeling of expertise.

As noted above, the group had its mind set on talking first and foremost about taste, and for them it was a clear disappointment to begin by talking about literature and art first. This part on taste, therefore, covers more than half of the entire interview and proved to be so lengthy that the group ended up talking for almost two hours, longer than any other group in our entire focus group data. In this sense, discussion on taste proved to be much more revealing than the talk on specific cultural areas. As Ian Woodward and Michael Emmison (2001) point out in their Australian study on conceptions of good and bad taste, taste does not necessarily have to do with aesthetic values alone but reveals important moral, ethical and communal undertones as well. Susanne wished to start the whole discussion with the following solemn words:

What the group emphasised from the very beginning of their discussion on taste was a very specific aesthetic attitude to life, something that they thought they possessed but that ‘ordinary people’ clearly lacked. Good taste was considered something that was extremely personal; a thrilling and delightful quest to follow culturally accepted values in one's own, personal way. For our group in question this immediately links good taste to an aesthetic perception of the world. Good taste means just that: having both the willingness and the knowledge to strive for ‘beautiful things’. The group put great emphasis on creating one's own taste, something that is unique and unified at the same time.

The group was animated by the fact that taste is something you build and construct by yourself, and the joy of finding was highlighted by almost all the interviewees. Taste is something that you have within you, and thereafter you can start looking for things and objects that fit that specific taste. It is clear to see that this conception of taste strongly contradicts the fact that it is culturally inherited instead of being individually ‘built’. Also it is, perhaps surprisingly, very anti-abstract and material; almost every example of good taste has to do with new things that could possibly be purchased: home decoration, towels, clothes, shoes, even jewellery – all in all, very feminine areas. The delight of seeking and finally finding was well described by the idea of ‘tentacles’ that came up in the discussion:

In all of the accounts, as seen above, the idea of ‘unity’ or ‘something that fits’ is often insisted on in the focus group. This fits well with the old idea of the upper classes desiring classical harmony in their tastes that was put forward in Bourdieu's theory. According to the study of Woodward and Emmison (2001) notions like quantity, composition and quality were more important for women and people with a higher education.

Interestingly enough, being ‘a mother’ was mentioned several times along with standard professions when the interviewees introduced themselves at the beginning of the interview, apparently to legitimise the fact that at least some of them had no connection with the labour market, which in Finland is unusual. Children, therefore, are repeatedly mentioned, and not only as a possible threat to the aesthetic harmony of the home, but also as inheritors of the social markers or cultural distinctions in their socialisation, which fits well together with Simon Gunn's argument that the influence of the mother has not been given enough importance in the discussion on cultural capital and that in fact women have been an essential source of transmission of cultural values and norms (Gunn 2005):

Talking about the inheritance of ‘social signals’ or ‘codes’ – that is distinctions – implies that the interviewees accept and, to some extent, subscribe to them: Elisabeth spoke rather proudly of her teenage daughters who are able to distinguish different ways of being a Swedish-speaking, upper class high school student. It also reveals another interesting feature: when Lilli referred to the interviewer as someone who ‘knows about’ social codes, she actually admitted that one's outward appearance, or habitus, is something that you build yourself (even accentuating it, like Beatrix suggests in her comment), and that the outer signals confer important messages about the social position of the person. The discussion ends with Anna's somewhat laconic observation of what the freedom of constructing your habitus implies: as a teenager from a traditional Swedish upper class school, ‘you can choose yourself’ when it comes to lifestyle and taste, but always within the rigid frames of your upper class tradition.

This notion, on a larger scale, moves the discussion towards more moralistic tones. Good taste is something positive and personal; bad taste something that disturbs its perfect harmony, be it the chaotic and aesthetically ignorant family or more threatening groups like those mentioned in the following excerpt:

As can easily be seen, the group shows a strong dislike of the ‘ordinary’ taste. Buying clothes along with food in the hypermarket is only one example of the numerous faults of people who ‘forget about the aesthetics’, something that the group found quite repugnant. The aversion is very concrete and was represented throughout the interview by physical imitations of vomiting; this comes very close to what Bourdieu means by ‘visceral intolerance’ towards the tastes of other people (Bourdieu 1984: 56). When the group got deeper into the discussion on bad taste, criticism was directed towards practically every group possible, from the ‘ordinary man’ to the Russian nouveau riche female tourists in Helsinki, with ‘legs long enough, heels high enough, enough gold, and enough arrogance’.

In the light of our entire data, Swedish speakers do not seem very different from Finnish speakers when it comes to questions of tastes and lifestyles and the language groups rarely make references to each other (Heikkilä and Kahma 2008). However, our upper-class group mentioned Finns as yet another group to be distinguished from. The Finns were accused, among other things, of not respecting the traditional, old culture (in renovations of houses and public places) and of trying to imitate something artificially luxurious, very much in a ‘nouveau riche’ style.

Many other comparisons across the language groups were made, and many of them were allusions to cultural products or entire brands, some of them surprisingly low-key: Swedish home decoration magazines were thought to be more stylish than the Finnish ones, the Swedish IKEA was considered more stylish than the Finnish furniture chain Vepsäläinen,⁸ H&M better than the Finnish low-price clothes shop Seppälä. Unlike most other groups, this group wanted to emphasise their special connection and closeness to Sweden; possibly to accentuate their cosmopolitan lifestyle and the explicit distinction of not only ordinary Finns but Finns in general. An interesting example of this is the following story about a Finnish cultural celebrity that Susanne shared with the group and that others respond to, either emphasising the fact that Finns (as opposed to the Swedish speakers) clearly do not have deep historical roots and therefore a system of distinction, or speaking up for the Finnish speakers, stating that they too can be educated and that Swedish speakers are capable of having being tasteless, too.

As seen above, bad taste, for this focus group, covers a plethora of areas that all have to do with breaking the aesthetic ethos that they are so strongly attached to. Woodward and Emmison (2001) found that even if the definitions of good taste were often aesthetic or personal, the definitions of bad taste were typically communal and moral, putting much emphasis on issues like behaviour. Our group, interestingly, did not allude to behaviour once. Aesthetics was the common denominator of both good and bad taste from beginning to end, and as we have seen, it worked as an extremely efficient and even cruel tool of exclusion. This aestheticising by our group completely penetrates their everyday life covering their personal lifestyle as well as their interior world, i.e., their feminine taste culture.

All in all, when discussing taste, the group acted almost perfectly in accordance with Bourdieu's theory: it had no difficulties whatsoever in defining taste (unlike in many other groups of our data) – even the initial problem of reluctance to speak about literature and art were quickly forgotten in the lively and wide-ranging talk on taste. In questions of taste, then, the group had strong self-esteem. A revealing example of this occurred when Susanne mentioned that she and another friend of hers had the idea of opening a consultancy bureau that would comment on all questions of taste: ‘It would be this kind of, “we who know best”’. Our group could indeed be called ‘ladies of taste’.

In the light of this discussion, an important final remark is that the Swedish-speaking world in Finland is not a valid identification or an unbreakable unit of distinction. As we have seen several times, the exclusive mechanics of the group are directed towards almost everybody: the ‘ordinary people’ clearly represent bad taste, but so do Finnish speakers and Russians, for example.

Amongst all the Swedish-speaking groups of our overall data, this group was an interesting exception: mocking other tastes is clearly what unites and brings people together, and distinctions are made even towards nearby groups. This comes clearly out in Beatrix's description of her mother's visit to the opera with another relative of theirs:

Beatrix added that ‘according to our taste’, the woman herself was dressed horribly. Beatrix did not define who those ‘we’ are, but clearly there is not much solidarity among the Swedish speakers as such, even if they are apparently from the same class or at least the same family. Susanne's comment draws together well this idea of an omnipresent distinction that is directed almost everywhere:

In this article we have addressed the question of cultural capital and taste among the Swedish-speaking Finnish upper class. In particular, we were interested how cultural distinctions and social differences were expressed. For this purpose, we have used one very specific focus group of six Swedish-speaking upper-class women in Finland. As noted earlier, the group was looking forward to discussing taste and was probably prepared for that in particular (rather than discussing different areas of culture or the Swedish-speaking culture).

As we have seen, the group distinguishes itself from almost any other group and class; exclusion and distinction are clearly at work. Nevertheless, the group avoided strong conflicts (typical of other high status groups even if they had been a group of friends like our group in question, cf. Heikkilä and Kahma 2008). On the contrary, the group was overly polite towards each other, praising Lilli's art and mostly backing up the opinions of others. This finding is completely opposite to Fern's (2001) notion of the conflicts usually which usually arises in high status focus groups. In that sense, our group represents what Hydén and Bülow (2003) call true ‘groupness’: a mutual world is confirmed throughout the discourse. It should also be borne in mind that the group was composed of Swedish-speakers; even if the language was not considered a culturally unifying element per se, at least it was another thing that the group had in common.

Speaking about taste and aesthetics was, for the group, a central sphere of life, and the interview was a much-anticipated event. Talking about taste, going to cultural events and enjoying art was something that was very natural for the group. In fact, the interviewees frequently made the point that an aesthetically oriented lifestyle was ‘something that unites us’. Culture, in that sense, was central to the lifestyle of most interviewees. Here they differ interestingly from the British elite group (Warde and Bennett 2008), which was of course quite different in composition. The British group admitted that culture was to some extent a social imperative and that they would have preferred to do something less legitimate, like watching football for instance, if the choice had been theirs. This could also be due to the fact that the British elite group was a mixed group of men and women, whereas ours was an unmixed group of females. This also tells much about our group itself: many were artists of some kind or at least aspired to a certain culturally oriented life. On the other hand, none of them was really a producer of avant-garde culture; they were instead consumers of (non-avant-garde) culture. In other words, in our group a clear cultural good will typical of (upper-) middle classes in Bourdieu's sense was found, but it was primarily matters of taste they were interested in.

Even if social capital seemed to be more closely tied to family and to other kinship circles than to anything else, cultural capital can also be seen as a link to social (and economic) capital: all kinds of ‘contacts’ or networks were important, and the artist present in the interview (Lilli) was exuberantly praised.

Our group, in a similar way to the British elite interviewees (Warde and Bennett 2008: 249), still shares the traditional upper class preference for classical, legitimate culture – as distinct from avant-garde ‘taste cultures’ (cf. Gans 1999). The group liked classical historical novels and socially accepted great art, but not video art or any kind of experimental art. It is also interesting to note how family-oriented the discussion is in many ways; the interviewees take clear positions as ‘mothers' or ‘wives’ and often underline that ultimately they are the cultural and aesthetic head of the family – very much like the wives in the British study which found that the cultural participation of some men was encouraged and eventually assured by their spouses (Warde and Bennett 2008: 254). Even if their economic dependence on their husbands might be significant, the interviewees do not mention it; instead, the role of the cultural leader of the family was assumed to be something to be proud of, even if it sometimes means conflicts with the rest of the family.

The dislikes of the group are numerous and seem to be directed towards a large part of mundane cultural consumption, the taste of ‘the ordinary man’ that Anna mentions with great disgust. Here they are quite similar to what Michèle Lamont found in France: members of the French upper-middle class tended to draw cultural boundaries to define themselves in opposition to the vulgarity of the français moyen (Lamont 1992: 101).

In comparison to international studies on the elite or other audiences with a highbrow profile, usually characterized as culturally selective but open to a certain degree of cultural diversity (Ollivier 2008; Warde and Bennett 2008), our group was surprisingly hostile towards other tastes and lifestyles and therefore other classes and/or social groups. In Britain, clearly more of a class-based society than Finland, the elites did not explicitly show almost any kind of aversion towards lower status groups (it is obviously also politically incorrect). In our focus group, by contrast, antipathy towards both the ‘ordinary people’ and distinct groups was clearly pronounced. The Britons were interviewed individually, which obviously has an effect, as judging from our study a group interview obviously provokes stronger and bolder opinions; still, one might be truly surprised at how distinction works in the Swedish-speaking old upper class and to what extent its outspokenness concerning cultural superiority flaunts political correctness. Such arrogance and outspokenness in a confidential focus group interview would certainly not have been acceptable in the general public. The difference from all the other focus groups of our study (cf. Heikkilä and Kahma 2008) is marked, whether we compare the Finnish or the Swedish groups. Contrary to Daloz's (2007a) findings, the outspokenness of our Swedish-speaking Finns in matters of distinctions is striking, and quite extraordinary in the egalitarian context of the Nordic welfare state. One would instead have expected that it would have been more typical in the British context with a stronger class culture.

As mentioned above, several studies on the elites (cf. Kezar 2003; Conti and O'Neil 2007) point out that when interviewing high-status individuals the interviewer is often in an inferior position to the interviewee in hierarchy, very much in contrast to what happens in the ‘average’ interview in which the interviewee(s) try to impress the researcher, who in their eyes represents the middle class (Silva and Wright 2005; Skeggs et al. 2008). As we have seen, in this interview the power relationship was reversed: the group was clearly in control and was not afraid of emphasizing it on a number of occasions. Lastly, it is important to notice that the notion of ‘class’ was not mentioned even once even though it was clearly implied by the focus group interview, and by the entire existence of the group that was interviewed. It would seem that class was too natural even to be mentioned; in this context, one can indeed speak of an internalised class habitus in Bourdieu's sense (Bourdieu 1984: 468).

When we add these findings to the overall content of the interview, we can argue that in this specific group there is a double-distinction: not only are Finnish speakers looked down upon and despised regardless of their class position, but the same applies to almost any other group, including even the class that the group itself belongs to (cf. Beatrix's comment about her ‘tasteless’ relative). ‘We who live in the centre’ or ‘we who know how to appreciate aesthetics’ are more powerful epithets than ‘we who speak Swedish’. In the context of Swedish-speaking Finns, this confirms the earlier conception (Allardt and Starck 1981): this Swedish-speaking world is anything but a unit; it is composed of separate, sometimes very exclusive enclaves. But what is even more important, the unity or ‘class cohesion’ (cf. Ostrower 1998) of the upper class itself is based on a specific taste culture (cf. Gans 1999) as expressed by these ‘ladies of taste’ with their refined aestheticising of lifestyle. Moreover, most surprisingly in a Nordic welfare state like Finland, they do not hide their feelings of cultural superiority. In this sense, this case is more or less a case par excellence of Bourdieu's theory of distinction.

Riie Heikkilä, MA, Bsc. Sci, is a doctoral student in the Department of Social Research at the University Of Helsinki. She is finishing her doctoral thesis on the lifestyle and cultural capital of the Swedish-speaking Minority in Finland.

Keijo Rahkonen, D.Soc. Sci, is Adjunct Professor of Social Research (pro: Social Policy) and Head of the Department of Social Research at the University of Helsinki. He is director of the research project ‘Cultural Capital and Social Differentiation in Contempory Finland: An International Comparsion’ funded by the Research Coucil for Culture and Society at the Academy of Finland. He has published widely on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, social theory, and the future of the welfare state.