“Participation is important, but—” Professional rationalities of balancing acts in publicly funded cultural institutions

Abstract

Cultural policy has seen a shift from attention to the producers of culture to consumers of culture, often called the participatory turn. Widened participation is a common argument for subsidising publicly funded arts; however, when realising participation as a policy goal, it can be fraught with tension. This paper aims to expand the knowledge of how cultural institutions resist participation. When is participation seen as problematic or undesirable, and why? How do cultural institution workers legitimise limiting participation? The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with civil servants and managers of publicly funded cultural institutions in Gothenburg, Sweden, focusing on rationalities of balancing values based on problematisations of participation and discourses around the institution's core mission. The respondents balance serving the public and the cultural field, popular knowledge and expert knowledge, and their professional and private roles. The article offers a model for understanding when certain balancing acts are more likely to occur than others. Ultimately, resistance towards participation relates to different ideas around the governance of culture.

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Copyright © 2023 Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0
License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Nordisk Kulturpolitisk Tidsskrift
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/nkt.26.1.4
ARTIKLER
“Participation is important, but—”
Professional rationalities of balancing acts in
publicly funded cultural institutions
Sofia Lindström Sol
Senior lecturer, Centre for Cultural Policy Research, The Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University
of Borås, Sweden
sofia.lindstrom_sol@hb.se
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4331-4950
Abstract
Cultural policy has seen a shift from attention to the producers of culture to consumers of culture, often called the
participatory turn. Widened participation is a common argument for subsidising publicly funded arts; however, when
realising participation as a policy goal, it can be fraught with tension. This paper aims to expand the knowledge of
how cultural institutions resist participation. When is participation seen as problematic or undesirable, and why?
How do cultural institution workers legitimise limiting participation? The analysis is based on qualitative interviews
with civil servants and managers of publicly funded cultural institutions in Gothenburg, Sweden, focusing on rationa-
lities of balancing values based on problematisations of participation and discourses around the institution's core
mission. The respondents balance serving the public and the cultural field, popular knowledge and expert know-
ledge, and their professional and private roles. The article offers a model for understanding when certain balancing
acts are more likely to occur than others. Ultimately, resistance towards participation relates to different ideas around
the governance of culture.
Keywords
public governance, cultural institutions, discourse theory, public engagement
Introduction
Museum worker: Last time, we discussed which pictures should be included in the campaign for the ex-
hibition…
Participant 1: Yeah, I liked the one with the men on the cliffs!
Museum worker: Unfortunately, the advertising company responsible for the campaign didn't like any
of your suggestions.
Parti cipant 2: Not any of them?
Participant 1: (scoffs) They've got bad taste, then.
Årgang 26, nr. 1-2023, s. 42–56
ISSN online: 2000-8325

43NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSSKRIFT | ÅRGANG 26 | NR. 1-2023
This scene is from a reference group meeting with a museum in Gothenburg, Sweden,
formed to influence a coming exhibition on fashion in the city. The scene reflects how par-
ticipation in cultural institutions is interpreted as citizen influence, but how that influence
is limited through decision-making based on professional ideals.
Over the last two decades, concepts such as participation, outreach, audience develop-
ment and public engagement have been buzzwords in cultural policy, marking a shift in
attention from the producers of culture to those experiencing culture as audiences, users,
and visitors (Ashley 2014; Bonet and Négrier 2018; Hadley 2021; Jancovich 2017a; Sørensen
2016). In Swedish cultural policy, cultural participation is part of a discourse on culture’s
ability to mitigate the negative impacts of globalised post-welfare societies, such as inequal-
ity and segregation (Lindström Sol 2019b). The policy interest in the arts and culture as
spaces for participatory activities is often critically studied regarding how cultural institu-
tions perceive the call to participation and what kinds of activities arise in response (Eriks-
son, Houlberg Rung, and Sørensen 2019; Hadley 2021; Jancovich and Bianchini 2013; Lind-
ström Sol 2019a; Sørensen 2016). This study adds to the current literature by theorising
how cultural institutions legitimise a resistance to participation, i.e., when participation is
understood as difficult or undesirable, and how the institutions control participation to
mitigate the undesirable aspects of participation as a cultural policy goal.
This article aims to outline how and why resistance to participation, often practised as
ways to control participation prerequisites in ways that limit the influence of audiences and
users, is legitimised in cultural institutions. In a more general sense, this aim relates to what
Jancovich (2017b: 130) calls “the politics of policy-making;” i.e. understanding the situated
practice of realising cultural policy goals in publicly funded cultural institutions.
The empirical example is interviews with civil servants and managers of cultural institu-
tions in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city with approximately 500k inhabitants.
Gothenburg is nationally infamous for a high degree of inequality between migrants and
ethnic Swedes. The local government has produced two official reports on the growing
problem of segregation, where all social sectors, including the cultural sector, are responsi-
ble for creating a fairer, more equitable city (Göteborgs stad 2014; 2017). The Cultural
Affairs Administration (hereafter CAA), governed by the City Executive Board and the
Cultural Affairs Committee, is responsible for running and supporting museums, libraries,
cultural centres, and public art and for supporting the free arts sector. In 2020, the Covid-
19 pandemic occurred, and this had consequences for Gothenburg’s publicly funded arts,
although these crisis effects are not the paper’s focus.
At t he time of w riting, the city’s cu ltural pol icy is summarised in the cultura l program me
(Göteborgs stads kulturförvaltning 2013) which is separated into three parts: cultural pol-
icy, arts policy, and city planning. In documents stating the CAA’s goals, participation is
often mentioned: “The museums build knowledge and administer the collections actively
but are also building relationships with the outer world to acquire more knowledge, more
voices and experiences” (Göteborgs stads kulturförvaltning 2018b: 3). The CAA’s slogan
also shows this ambition: “We open worlds. Culture is for all. When all can take part in arts
and culture, a meaningful city for all people across the globe is formed” (Göteborgs stads
kulturförvaltning 2018a: 6). Participation, creation, possibilities for influence and equal
access are essential concepts in all documents. An equality ethos grounds the cultural insti-
tutions led by the CAA (c.f. Valtysson 2016). Children and young people, the elderly,
national minorities, and people with a different mother tongue than Swedish are prioritised
in all documents. Thus, the cultural policy priorities towards increasing participation are
clear, and how this is interpreted by civil servants in the cultural institutions and imple-

SOFIA LINDSTRÖM SOL44
mented in actual cultural activities forms the article’s focus.
To study the rationality of resistance, I use balancing acts (Matarasso and Landry 1999;
Sokka 2022) as a concept to capture how the respondents deal with the demands of a chang-
ing professional role and values in relation to demands of widened participation. The study
asks: Why and how are respondents resisting participation in their work? How do they
legitimise the exercise of control regarding participation? Through the analysis of policy-
onto-practise, illustrated through a model in the discussion, this study can expand our
knowledge of cultural institutions’ strategies and discursive work when negotiating and
interpreting cultural policy goals.
Research context
In my previous study on the democratic meaning of participation in Swedish cultural policy
(Lindström Sol 2019b), I argued that a discursive shift has occurred from cultural demo-
cratisation to cultural democracy. This change stems from a growing discontent with the
failure of the national cultural policy goals of participation. As in our neighbouring Nordic
nations, Swedish cultural policy aims to support high-quality arts and culture and safeguard
the arts’ autonomy, and has the social equality goal of ensuring culture for all (Duelund
2008; Kangas and Vestheim 2010). Despite decades of policy attempts to break down barri-
ers to culture, participation rates follow predictable patterns of social class and educational
levels, patterns visible in most national contexts. Participation rates (where participation
equals the frequency of attendance at publicly funded cultural institutions) are consistently
related to socio-economic status, contrasting the policy goal of equal access to the arts and
culture (c.f. Vestheim 2007; Stevenson, Balling, and Kann-Rasmussen 2017; Myndigheten
för Kulturanalys 2020).
In studies on why some people do not participate in culture, where culture is interpreted
as publicly funded cultural institutions, barriers to the arts and culture are explained to be
psychological (lack of interest and fear of not fitting in) rather than economic or physical.
(Stevenson, Balling, and Kann-Rasmussen 2017; Jancovich and Bianchini 2013; Miles and
Gibson 2016). In their study of the non-user in Danish cultural policy, Balling and Kann-
Rasmussen (2013) state that the policy interest in the (non-)user is a result of the shift from
cultural democratisation to cultural democracy goals. Thus, a previous focus on the leisure
patterns of citizens has been replaced by attention to participation in cultural institutions.
Increased knowledge of inequality patterns in culture has prompted new demands for
widening participation and engaging with those that are traditionally “hard to reach” (Jan-
covich 2017a; C.f. Vestheim 2012). Citizen influence has become a means to achieve legit-
imacy and secure funding – i.e. to guarantee the survival of the institution. Cultural insti-
tutions strive to become democratised spaces where different cultural groups can “share,
negotiate and change perspectives on knowledge” (Ashley 2014: 262; c.f. Hvenegaard Ras-
mussen 2016). Audience/user engagement is understood as a solution to the problems of
cultural institutions’ falling visitor numbers and threats from decreased funding, although
not everyone is convinced that participation is the solution to this problem (Hadley 2021).
Libraries are an example of institutions that have changed in line with a democratic mis-
sion to act as spaces for social interaction (Jochumsen, Hvenegaard Rasmussen, and
Skot‐Hansen 2012).
However, cultural institutions have been criticised for being self-protecting and closed
to new ideas regarding cultural content and management/organisation, explained by values,
traditions, and norms that uphold the status quo (Ashley 2014; Jancovich 2017a; Kangas

45NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSSKRIFT | ÅRGANG 26 | NR. 1-2023
and Vestheim 2010). The reluctance towards change is explained by how cultural institu-
tions, especially prestigious art institutions, create content relevant to their core audience:
professional artists, curators, and journalists, while striving to be legitimised by politicians
and taxpayers (Kangas and Vestheim 2010) Thus, the core issue of cultural participation lies
in power relations among policy, institutions, and visitor-citizens (Carpentier 2015; Eriks-
son, Houlberg Rung, and Sørensen 2019).
Cultural policy researchers such as Belfiore (2002) and Gray (2007) are critical of what
they claim is an increasing instrumental policy tendency since the 1970s to link the value of
the arts to their social impact. Others point to how efforts towards “greater participation” or
“widened audiences” tend to be about the self-legitimisation of the institution (Nisbett
2013; Stevenson, Balling, and Kann-Rasmussen 2017).
From this perspective the 'problem' of 'non-participation' is not a 'problem' for those who are not partic-
ipating, but rather it is a problem for those organisations and activities that receive public subsidy and yet
attract a small percentage of the population to partake in what that subsidy supports (Stevenson, Balling,
and Kann-Rasmussen 2017: 101f).
Conceived like this, “participation” gains an instrumental meaning instead of being under-
stood more intrinsically as a fundamental democratic principle or basic human right (Lind-
ström Sol 2019b). The policy trend of participation becomes imperative for cultural institu-
tions that use participation strategically to reconceptualise their audiences as “objects of
representation” without changing the status quo of how things are done (Jancovich 2017a:
2; Sternfeld 2013). The institution keeps its power over decision-making, representation,
and participation terms. Participants lack the power to change the “game invented entirely
by others” (Sternfeld 2013: 1).
This article takes a slightly different perspective on the resistance towards participation,
and the attempts at control and retention of power in cultural institutions. Resistance is
analysed as rationality based on problematisations of participation and discourses that
legitimise control and uphold the status quo, while simultaneously adhering to discourses
in cultural policy that stipulate the participatory turn.
Theoretical framework for the study
In this paper, the concept of the institution is used to denote public cultural organisations
such as museums, libraries, and art galleries, rather than social organisations such as the
family or religion. Policy, according to Kangas & Vestheim (2010), is about how to act or not
to act in the face of societal changes and needs—the “legal-rational way of getting things
done” (Wedel et al. 2005: 37). This study focuses on the act of facilitating participation as a
policy goal in cultural institutions while maintaining professional autonomy. The construc-
tion of meaning and social norms around practice is studied through the lens of discourse
theory (Bacchi 2009; Foucault and Gordon 1980; Winther Jørgensen and Phillips 2000)
where expressions of problems arising in policy practice are seen to be based on particular
rationalities. Participation as a policy goal can cause practical and normative problems for
those tasked to enact the policy goal in institutional action (Jancovich 2017a; Lindström Sol
2019a). As participation is often defined as more than citizen presence—also as interaction,
influence, or co-creation (Carpentier 2015)—culture professionals may either encourage
the policy discourse or engage in negotiations on the way the concept should be interpreted
to safeguard power (Jancovich 2017a). Contestation or resistance from professionals is

SOFIA LINDSTRÖM SOL46
defined as professional rationality based on discourses on problems and interventions that
stem from knowledge about the legitimacy of the institution (c.f. Rose 1999). Through this
rationality, we can understand how public professionals contest and adhere to a policy
scheme of participation, or as Jancovich puts it how they “aim to share and hold onto power
at the same time” (2017b: 144). This rationality is based on discursive knowledge about the
purpose and needs of the institution, as well as the policy goals governing the institution. It
is a form of power that relies not on coercion but on the willingness of participants to con-
tribute and collaborate with the institution (Foucault 1991). Thus, the article focuses more
on the mechanisms and social function of “holding on to and sharing power” than its pro-
perties.
In their council of Europe report, Matarasso and Landry (1999) use the concept of
balancing acts to discuss strategic dilemmas in cultural policy. They argue that cultural policy
differs from other policy fields by balancing between “competing visions of the role of cul-
ture in society” (Ibid 1999: 7). These visions include understanding culture as the arts or as
a way of life, cultural democracy or democratisation of culture, culture as self-justifying
value or as development, and art as a public good or as a conditional activity. States, as well
as local governments, can place themselves somewhere between these poles in their under-
standing of arts and culture, thereby engaging in political balancing acts. Similarly, Sokka
and Johannisson (Sokka 2022) argue in their introduction to the Nordic Council of Minis-
ters report on Nordic cultural policy that cultural policy can be understood as a balancing
act between culture as a public service and culture as a livelihood and business for states and
for professional artists.
In my study, I use the concept of balancing acts as related to professionals within publicly
funded cultural institutions. Balancing acts are tools to construct participation as a value
competing with other important values (a strategic dilemma) that needs to be controlled
and power reinstated. The concepts of balancing acts and rationality allow me to explore
the unease expressed by my respondents when speaking of participation as a cultural policy
goal and frame it in a discussion of legitimate knowledge production and governance of
culture.
Methods and material
The study considers qualitative materials. Between 2017 and 2019, I visited the various cul-
tural institutions of the cultural affairs administration, such as museums, the city library,
the arts gallery, and the youth culture house to observe the flow of people and activities
inside their rooms. Throughout 2018, I participated in a reference group for developing an
exhibition at the Gothenburg City Museum; field notes were taken. I have read and ana-
lysed material produced by the institutions, such as video recordings of participatory pro-
jects, evaluations, and central policy documents. These form the background and under-
standing of the empirical context.
The main data material consists of interviews with the managers and civil servants at the
institutions run by the CAA from 2017 to 2019. All in all, I interviewed 53 people within the
administration1, 15 from museums, 15 from the library, and 23 from other parts of the
organisation, such as the director, people from Communications and Human Relations,
and civil servants from institutions not directly working with audiences or users such as
1. I also interviewed ten people from the social administration that collaborates with the cultural administration in
a project, and other public servants such as teachers who meet the cultural institutions in their work. These in-
terviews are not part of the material analysed for this study.

47NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSSKRIFT | ÅRGANG 26 | NR. 1-2023
Göteborg Konst, a division responsible for public art. For this study, focus is on interviews
with people working in the institutions with audiences/visitors, but all have been consid-
ered. The interviews were held in the respondent’s workplace, and took the semi-structured
form with pre-determined questions and follow-up questions for probing, and lasted
between 40 and 60 minutes. Two of the interviews were in the group form, with three civil
servants of the same work category who were invited to jointly reflect on the issue of partic-
ipation as a policy goal at their institution. All respondents were informed of the purpose of
the interviews and were allowed to withdraw their participation in the study at any time.
The interviews were transcribed by me, the researcher, and a third party. In the case of the
third party, the interviews were anonymised and coded for identification.
Following the aim of understanding how policy plays out in practice (Jancovich
2017b:130), the analysis is based on a discourse-methodology aim to understand meaning-
making, undisputed truths, and problematisations around cultural participation (Bacchi
2009; Winther Jørgensen and Phillips 2000). This kind of methodology does not offer a
manual for social analysis; rather, it poses the researcher as a bricoleur, seeking to decon-
struct the structure of problematisations (Torfing 1999). Questions and follow-up questions
were related to definitions of participation and how the respondents perceive the possibili-
ties and constraints in “doing” participation in their professional context. During the inter-
views, and the subsequent analysis, I noticed a tendency among the respondents to articu-
late the sentence “participation is important, but…” This “but” struck me as analytically sig-
nificant as it marked a need to express resistance. The further I got into the interviews, the
more the respondents constructed the concept of participation as laden with worries,
doubts, and fears, a form of dissensus in consensus. The analysis of this study turned to
understanding these expressions of resistance as professional rationalities grounded in dis-
courses about the value of arts and culture and of desired/appropriate public governance of
culture.
Results and analysis: balancing acts – the professional
rationality of resistance
In the analysis, I outlined three main balancing acts that relate to interrelating discourses
about the institution’s role: 1. A balancing act between serving the public and serving the art
world/established knowledge, which relates to a discourse of securing the existence of the
(local) cultural field, 2. A balancing act between expertise and lay knowledge, related to a
bildung discourse (“folkbildning” in Swedish), and 3. A balancing act between the profes-
sional and the private role related to a discourse of disembodied, neutral knowledge pro-
duction. In the conclusion, these are integrated into a model that aims to better visualise
why resistance to participation is more likely to occur in certain cultural institutions than
others.
My respondents often define participation as something more than inviting people to
visit the institutions. A respondent from the city library said it was “a direct influence on
our operations” by users/taxpayers. Explicit resistance to participation is not legitimate, so
it needs to be negotiated. The concept has gained status as a core democratic value, which
is why problematising it is like problematising democracy itself. However, expressions of
resistance occur, and when they do, they are often also expressions of loss of power. Parti-
cipation as a cultural policy goal means that civil servants in cultural institutions are asked
to share power in ways they have not been asked before. This expectation to redistribute
power is not necessarily unwanted but creates confusion about how to give up power and

SOFIA LINDSTRÖM SOL48
how much.
Civil servants are aware of their symbolic power and role in enabling the cultural field in
the city. However, the respondents have little or no power over political goals, regulation of
the public space, conditions for seeking external funding, governance documents, budget,
working environment, the constant remodelling of the administrations’ organisational
structure, termination of premises and warehouses for collections, and legislation regarding
collection procedures (Swedish archive legislation). Some resistance is related to these
administrative procedures and regulations. This point is made to stress that not all respond-
ents express resistance though having the power to do so; resistance can be an expression of
powerlessness. However, apart from being limited by regulations, when respondents have
the power to resist and control what participation can be, it is often done to protect some-
thing; the core mission of the institution, objects, “the public” beyond the participants, the
participants themselves, and other democratic principles that are, confusingly, equally val-
ued in cultural policy—primarily cultural policy goals about artistic autonomy and quality.
This section will outline how these values are discursively constructed and enacted through
balancing acts.
Balancing between serving the public and serving the cultural field
Civil servants of cultural institutions and managers of the CAA understand their core mis-
sion as securing the survivability of the local cultural field; this especially pertains to insti-
tutions showcasing art. The local cultural field signifies artists and cultural workers in the
region, working either as freelancers or being part of the cultural civil society; however, the
institutions also wish to secure the survivability of national and international artists. The
participatory turn in cultural policy has “forced” cultural institutions to be more proactive
in their audience engagement, breaking with a previous understanding that if the content
has high quality, the audiences/visitors will come (c.f. Hadley 2021). One sign of this change
is the increased importance of the museum’s pedagogical team, who previously were never
involved in the curatorial process but are now involved in exhibitions from the beginning.
This may cause analytically interesting problems as the educators point to an understand-
ing of the institution’s goal that may differ from the curators’: the pedagogy becomes cura-
torial, which threatens the curatorial team’s task to protect artistic freedom.
I want to safeguard the artistic process and also the ability of art to not target a certain group from the be-
ginning. To not have to think about the child perspective before they (the artists) are ready and done with
their process (Curatorial manager, art museum).
Librarians may also say that their role is to uphold the literary field, and history museum
workers can say that their role is to showcase established historical knowledge. A respon-
dent uses the term “parallel systems” to describe the understanding of the arts field as sepa-
rate from the public.
These are two parallel systems. But who are we then for? Because on one hand, it's a supportive infra-
structure for practitioners, and on the other hand, there's the category we are for, and how do they meet?
(Manager, cultural affairs administration).
This tension mirrors the double ambition of corporatist Swedish cultural policy; to create
an infrastructure for artists and to safeguard high-quality art (welfare for the arts) and the
cultural democratisation model of spreading arts and culture to all (welfare with the arts).
In this model, citizens enjoy the culture given by professionals. When participation

49NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSSKRIFT | ÅRGANG 26 | NR. 1-2023
becomes important, derived from a cultural democracy model with notions of valuing
popular culture and based on a more direct or participatory governance, citizens and artists
become separate entities with different logics whose needs a civil servant must satisfy
simultaneously—a contradictory task.
Questions the respondents asked me during the interviews that were related to this dis-
course of the role of securing the local cultural field were, for example, will certain types of
artistic expression be prioritised when participation becomes a goal? Is it just a trend? Is art
losing its character by being given a social mission it cannot perform? Do we risk “dumbing
down” the institution’s content to an audience that does not know art? The institution’s
democratic agenda is to provide professional artists with a way to exhibit their art and thus
a way for art to thrive and survive. In this discourse, the participant is constructed as some-
one that lacks sufficient knowledge or expertise for their influence to be legitimate. The
level of trust in potential or existing participants is low and attempts to preserve the status
quo are made by creating parallel activities where participation is carried out as “side-
tracked” temporary projects to respect the institution’s core mission (c.f. Jancovich 2017a).
An empirical example of participatory projects as sidetracked activities is the children’s
movie festival held by the municipal art gallery in 2018. To satisfy policy demands of
“reaching the unreachable”, the gallery collaborated with an elementary school in Angered,
a socio-culturally vulnerable area in Gothenburg. An educator at the gallery led the process.
The collaboration involved lessons held at the school and the gallery and culminated in a
screening at the gallery of children’s movies about friendship. The children selected movies
to screen and presented them to an adult audience.
To let art made by children take place in the gallery was understood to be “radical, in
terms of what kind of place this is” (educator, art gallery). The responsible educator men-
tioned that not all of the gallery staff agreed that space should be given up to children. The
curator agreed: “It may work (to exhibit children’s works) when you have larger premises so
that you can separate it, but there is a conflict in my opinion regarding our core mission,
which is to showcase contemporary art.” The children’s participation in the contents of the
institution thus threatened its core value and created a schism between the curators and the
pedagogical staff. The balancing act entailed separating the “core” and “participatory” exhi-
bitions into different rooms.
The core assignment of the institution can also be related to the showcasing of collec-
tions and objects. The discourse is thus expressed in fears that non-experts may damage
valuable, old objects. However, the conservation of objects often depends on donors from
the general public. The donors know these objects, and their knowledge is crucial to the
institution’s legitimacy, why trust in these participants—as in citizens influencing the con-
tents of the institution—is high. “The meeting is dependent on mutual knowledge, yes
really, it is important, and it also depends on the collections, that we have collections, that
is where we come from, that is our work” (Head of museums).
The introductory scene to this paper reflects how influence can be conditioned by pro-
fessional decision-making outside the cultural institution (the respondents had no influ-
ence over which advertising agency the museum should use for the campaign). One of the
museum workers reflected on how working with a reference group made her aware of the
opinions of the public in her work, besides the opinions of peers.
Another group that has a lot of influence 'in my head' are people I've met at the university, others in the
business who are 'museum-aware', possible reviewers, not that there are many who are reviewing us
(laughter) but p eople with opinions, professionals, they are like a 'ghost group ' who have very cle ar opin-

SOFIA LINDSTRÖM SOL50
ions about how banal and ridiculous things are. And now I feel, 'you are not the target group'. These (the
reference group) are the people who are the target group', and that group now has a 'face' that makes
them influence me in my work (museum worker).
This excerpt illustrates a kind of “double audience” that the civil servants of cultural institu-
tions are taking into account, where participatory projects can level the kind of implicit
symbolic power other professionals exert over the processes of creating content in the insti-
tutions (c.f. Kangas and Vestheim 2010).
The balancing act between serving the public and serving the cultural field rests on a dis-
course of the institution’s core value as serving the public through safeguarding the exist-
ence and values of the cultural (professional) field. Participation as a cultural policy goal
challenges this taken-for-granted value, which is why the civil servants’ rationality is to keep
the institution’s core value while engaging in participation in satellite projects. In this pro-
fessional rationality, the civil servants do not trust participants’ ability to add to the institu-
tions’ legitimacy and relevance. In some cases, participation is constructed as threatening
the institution’s societal role. When and why this happens will be elaborated on in the con-
clusions, where I present a model for understanding rationalities in cultural institutions.
Balancing between popular knowledge and expertise knowledge
Participation as a policy goal has heightened cultural institutions’ awareness that they have
lost a monopoly on knowledge in a time where knowledge and information are found
everywhere (Lindström Sol 2021). These institutions need to be knowledge-collecting insti-
tutions as well as knowledge-producing and knowledge-disseminating institutions, a tradi-
tional model of governance in culture where those within the cultural sector are the only
voices heard (c.f. Jancovich 2017b). Confusion arises about the changed status of profes-
sional knowledge when popular knowledge gains status.
This balancing act is about safeguarding power over selection processes. It is legitimised
concerning having professional skills and expert knowledge: “I think participation is good,
but you also have to see that... we have a professional experience and an education for this,
that we also have to choose a part ourselves. But I definitely think you should take in... opi-
nions from the public” (civil servant, museum). The problematisation is whether the insti-
tution’s educational role or knowledge-forming mission will be abandoned and whether
understanding of professional practice will be lost. “When do we stop being a library, when
do we stop being a librarian?” (librarian, city library).
As previously mentioned, in 2018 the City Museum planned the exhibition “Gothen-
burg’s Wardrobe” with the help of a group of citizens found mainly through social media in
a humorous campaign where the museum asked for help “to become less boring”. The
museum engaged people from the parts of the city demography that generally did not visit
the museum; young people from the socio-economically vulnerable suburbs of Gothen-
burg. The museum wished to convey how clothes are time-bound bearers of signs such as
social class, age, and gender; thus, the theme, place, and time for the exhibition were set, but
the participants were encouraged to influence the exhibition regarding subthemes, texts,
and design. The museum workers wanted the public to help them see what was interesting
and how it should be presented while they understood their professional duty to know what
people wanted, controlling timeframes, and reminding them of things that could not be
negotiated. “We don’t wish to gatekeep the notion of what’s interesting” (museum worker).
The museum workers asked the reference group questions like, “Is this understandable, is it
boring, is it fun or interesting?” The influence was enacted by providing the museum with

51NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSSKRIFT | ÅRGANG 26 | NR. 1-2023
opinions on pre-defined themes, and as such, the museum retained control of the scope and
limits of participation. Resistance concerned issues such as understanding what was
required to run a cultural business and arranging an exhibition, i.e., the schedule, budget,
and parts of the process. “It cannot be left to the groups involved because that’s our thing to
do, in my opinion” (civil servant museum).
The best meetings with the reference group were described as when the museum workers
set alternatives regarding an issue where the participant group could decide, although it “felt
rigged.” The museum workers agreed that it was not a good idea to invite citizens to the brain-
storming phase of the exhibition; this should be done after you had reached a few conclusions
about what the exhibition should be about and consequently could provide the participants
with set limits for input. Participants were offered influence in a top-down, controlled fashion
where “influence” became giving opinions about something pre-defined by the professionals—
which could be interpreted as the opposite of participation (Jancovich 2017b). Participants
were invited to help the museum finalise a qualitative product. The institutions controlled how
and why participation should occur and thereby maintained a clear we/them relationship with
the public. This focus on making good products happened as the museum needed to provide a
certain percentage of its total funding through ticket sales; as the exhibition was a product to be
bought, the responsibility for quality rested on the museum professionals.
This kind of resistance is based on a problematisation of participation as threatening the
status of expert knowledge, which leads to the rationality of controlling influence. It rests on
a discourse typical for cultural policy in Sweden; the societal role of these institutions is to
educate the people, (c.f. Ekholm and Lindström Sol 2020). This discourse, described by sev-
eral respondents as “giving the visitors something they didn’t know they wanted,” places the
professionals and public in a hierarchical position of giving and receiving, of having and
needing knowledge.
Professional knowledge is often formulated in terms of being able to “see wider”, thus
framing citizens as subjects unable to see beyond their horizons. The importance of work-
ing with professional, educated artists also lies in their ability to shape issues and themes
that do not directly affect them. Here, somewhat paradoxically, “the public” can be relied
upon as an important party to consider when resisting participation: the expert knows how
to create content that appeals to the wider public, whereas the participant will try to secure
their narrow interests. Thus, limiting certain citizens’ influence is necessary to serve all.
Respondents can also compare themselves with other professions, such as doctors, to legi-
timise limiting participation. “Others do not go to a surgeon and say, cut a little more to the
right” (manager, cultural affairs administration).
Realising this discourse is challenged, some respondents expressed a changed definition
of bildung where perspectives replaced the professional focus on quality. There was an
understanding of official history—art, literature, or cultural heritage—as a selection of per-
spectives, which is why showing breadth or diversity becomes the institution’s mission.
I think they (the public) need to be affected... sometimes to get an aha experience. The aha experience,
on the other hand, does not have to be based on... shaped by professionalism or expertise but the aha ex-
periencecan build on a variety of viewpoints. It does not have to be based on me having spent x number
of years at an art school or that I have taken so many university classes but... aha: it can come from several
directions (manager, c ultural affairs administration, my italics).
This and other attempts at conceptual shifts can be theorised in terms of how Gothenburg’s
cultural policy begins to move from cultural democratisation to a cultural democracy para-
digm (c.f. Bonet and Négrier 2018; Lindström Sol 2019b).

SOFIA LINDSTRÖM SOL52
Balancing between the professional and the private role
The participation turn problematises the lack of representation of minorities in cultural
institutions which made visible the private body. Many of my respondents made jokes about
being white, middle class, and living in Majorna, an area known for its white, cultural mid-
dle-class population: the opposite of the demography they hoped to attract. Thus, the par-
ticipation turn in the cultural institution made “visible” whiteness as an invisible norm of
the institutions, and their white bodies became signs of the problems of representation –
cultural institutions do not mirror the city’s population. There was an increased awareness
of what feminist scholars call situated knowledge (Haraway 1988): professional practice of
different bodies creates varying knowledge perspectives. Knowledge and the subject, the
bearer of knowledge, have long been seen as separate, and questioning that order is politi-
cal. At the same time, the prevailing order is unsustainable and increasingly non-legitimate.
While some institutions implement measures to increase diversity at their workplace,
others are reluctant to value diversity higher than other values, primarily expertise.
This balancing act was primarily expressed concerning marginalised groups and how
they “should be included”, something only possible to say in homogenous institutions
regarding the staff and the collections of those institutions. This resulted in feelings of
unease, even if the individual respondent was not part of the white, middle-class hegemony,
as it made visible how certain bodies have been made to feel natural or expected in these
spaces, and certain others have not.
The institution's purpose is to democratise the arts. But art rests on something that is deeply undemo-
cratic. 'Come here and watch the oppression of you'. That's kind of what we're asking for. 'Look, you're
not in the whole house... and look, your story is not told. Interesting, isn't it?' (Educator museums).
This balancing act reveals the relation between the private and the professional role, which can
result in unease, but may also form the basis for new relations and meetings with participants.
Sometimes when I've met high school students or at some point SFI (Swedish for immigrants) groups,
I've been able to say that I came he re as a ref ugee. Then you get a completel y dif ferent kind of attention
because I also say, “I’m standing here now working in museums and doing this and my parents came
from there when I was a year old.” All of a sudden, you have a whole different meeting, which I can have
with them, that group, and things like that I think are valuable because you get these role models, or you
just see t hat it's p ossible (civil servant, museums).
Concerns that motivate this resistance were expressed in relation to work environment issues.
As I have earlier theorised, participation is constructed as relation-making processes (Lind-
ström Sol 2019a; c.f. Eriksson, Houlberg Rung, and Sørensen 2019). Respondents spoke of the
time-consuming effort of participation projects and the fatigue and vulnerability they experi-
enced. “I felt like I went in with myself as part of the exhibition” (museum worker). Many said
that they needed recovery after intensive participation work because of the emotional effort
and responsibility for the integrity and feelings of participants. “How do we finish the pro-
ject?” was an often-asked question in the interviews that relates to the relationship-creating
process of participation—how to, and whether to, maintain relationships. “We’ve talked a lot
about this with the producer team about doing this project, and then? What happens next? Do
I no longer care how she (the participant) feels when we open the exhibition?” (museum
worker). When working with individuals (as actual, corporal entities) in contrast to the “pub-
lic” or “citizens/taxpayers” (as an abstract entity), work was done in ways that required new
forms of practice that blurred the professional and private roles.

53NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSSKRIFT | ÅRGANG 26 | NR. 1-2023
Conclusion: The rationality of resistance–protecting (other)
democratic values
In this study, cultural institution workers’ ambivalent utterances about participation (“par-
ticipation is important, but—”) is analysed as professional rationality based on discourses
around the core values and role of the institutions. This rationality resulted in balancing
acts between serving the public and the cultural field, popular knowledge(s) and expert
knowledge, and professional and private bodies. These balancing acts relate to discourses
on securing the existence of the (local) cultural field, a bildung discourse, and a discourse of
(white) disembodied, neutral knowledge production. Participation causes discomfort
because it blurs boundaries between the private role and work and challenges the notion of
the habitual, known type of expert-professional practice. This unease sometimes results in
the rhetoric around participation being repeated by cultural institutions but remaining
sequential to their goals (Jancovich 2017a; Sternfeld 2013). Participation as a cultural policy
goal becomes a dilemma when it is perceived to clash with other democratic norms – pri-
marily those that relate to artistic quality, artistic autonomy, and professionalism/expertise.
The autonomy of the arts field, of which cultural institutions are a part, has officially been a
core democratic principle in liberal democracies since the advent of national cultural policy
goal formulations post-WW2 (Vestheim 2012). This principle, often exemplified by the
arms-length principle, has sought to protect the arts from the market and undue political
influence as seen in totalitarian regimes.
Based on this analysis, I have developed a model to outline when resistance (and con-
versely, support) towards participation is likely to occur (fig. 1). Resistance is a sign of low
trust in the participants’ ability to bring legitimacy and relevancy to the institution—typical
of cultural institutions that form their goals in accordance with discourses of securing the
existence of the (local) cultural field, a bildung discourse, and a discourse of the disembod-
ied, neutral knowledge production. These institutions often work towards producing pro-
ducts meant to be sold in the form of tickets to exhibitions or shows.
Figure 1: Model of focuses, knowledges, levels of trust, and balancing acts in cultural institu-
tions, Gothenburg, Sweden.

SOFIA LINDSTRÖM SOL54
Conversely, institutions aiming to secure democratic spaces for cultural activities are
allowed to understand the relation-making processes as an end rather than a means to an
end. They have high trust in the ability of participants to contribute legitimacy and rele-
vancy. Participation can also be seen as a means to create qualitative processes for professi-
onal artists to contribute to their communities, no matter the product.
This model explains the contrasting ways of resisting or embracing participation in the
material, but most will end somewhere in between, or at the top right/low left corners of the
model. The point of this model is that the resistance to participation among cultural work-
ers in publicly funded institutions’ relate to structural constraints rather than individual
resistance towards specific values, and that balancing acts enable certain aspects of “doing”
democracy while safeguarding other democratic values. Perhaps, if cultural policy encoura-
ges these different ways of “doing” publicly funded culture, institutions need different cri-
teria for assessing their participatory work. Understanding participation as the number of
visits relates to the traditional cultural democratisation model, while understanding parti-
cipation as influence and shared power relates to a cultural democracy model. In the cultural
policy documents and among cultural workers, these balancing acts between democratic
values are what cultural policy is all about (Matarasso and Landry 1999; Sokka 2022).
Discussion
It may seem tempting to label employees who defend other democratic norms than parti-
cipation as elitists. Still, the truth is that all these norms—participation, artistic quality,
autonomy and the importance of expertise—are equally valued in official cultural policy. As
discussed in the empirical context of these institutions, the respondents were operating
within the frame of a cultural policy that itself balances different democratic ideals (c.f.
Matarasso and Landry 1999) of safeguarding the autonomy of the arts through the arm’s
length principle and direct democracy ideals of popular influence in policy and institutions
(c.f. Jancovich 2017b). Depending on how the concept is interpreted, participation as a cul-
tural policy goal can come dangerously close to breaking with the arm’s length principle of
undue political influence over the content of these institutions. However, all respondents
fear diminished relevancy of the institution and hope that participatory practices can
secure the citizens’ interest in the institution—i.e. its survivability.
Thus, although this article focuses on problematisations of participation as a cultural
policy goal, statements on participation and its purpose are considered integral to the insti-
tutions’ survival. Participation contributes to institutions in two ways: legitimising deci-
sions around content and establishing trust between experts and the citizens through a
greater understanding of perspectives, knowledge, and concerns. The ideal situation for my
respondents is a meeting where the participant trusts the expertise of the cultural workers
but shares a desire for dialogue and curiosity in the exchange of knowledge. The participant
can, in doing so, contribute to the relevance and legitimacy of the institution.
Policies aim to shape behaviours, preferences, and subjectivities by understanding legit-
imate democratic governance. Historically, Swedish cultural policy had a folkförbättrande
ambition–cultivating the people. In the discourse of folkbildning, we see the surviving
rationality of enlightenment in cultural institutions. Lately, the policy field has increasingly
been asking the cultural field to become agents of governance by being part of the solution
to social problems. Public cultural institutions are no longer agents of democracy in their
own right but have to act as actors of social change in societies understood to be fraught
with tension, an expectation that causes unease among cultural professionals. With this

55NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSSKRIFT | ÅRGANG 26 | NR. 1-2023
study, I wanted to add to the theory of why these feelings of unease arise—after all, this is
where policy becomes politics (Carpentier 2015; Jancovich 2017b).
Acknowledgements
This article is part of a research project co-funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (dnr.
RMP17-0979:1), the University of Borås, and the administration of cultural affairs, Gothen-
burg city. Parts of the article have been reworked and translated from Lindström Sol (2021).
The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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