Rapid Social Change, Value Transformation, and the Field of Culture. The City of Stavanger as a Prism, 2013

During the last few decades, the city of Stavanger, Norway, has experienced fundamental changes. The city has taken a dramatic step from being a relatively isolated counter-culture petit bourgeoisie city on the losing end in the 1960s, to becoming a first-line city of late modernity in the 2000s. The social changes experienced in this city are changes characteristic of late modernity across the globe, including liberalisation, pluralisation, aesthetisation, globalisation, commercialisation, and individualisation. Whereas these changes generally occur relatively slowly, the transitions between different discursive, historical and socio-spatial structures (religion, oil, culture) have occurred quickly in Stavanger. This situation informed the research design of this project, wherein the city of Stavanger was used as an analytical prism for identifying and analysing the transition to late modernity. Various aspects of culture were used to illuminate social change. Using Pierre Bourdieus theoretical framework, as well as theories on cosmopolitanism and omnivorism, as starting-point, we conducted an ambitious empirical study. We triangulated historical material, surveys and qualitative interviews. For the latter, we employed innovative visual methods (photo elicitati on), interviewing people from two cohorts, born in the periods 1945-1950 and 1975-1980, respectively. The qualitative data formed the main empirical emphasis of the project. To test the hypothesis that following rapid social change there will be increased openness, which in turn leads to transformed principles of cultural valuation, we constructed four comprehensive cases within the main case. These are about culture and aesthetics: Architecture, literature, home decoration and visual arts. Sociology and various disciplines of the humanities constituted the transdisciplinary researcher group.