Synopsis
Hva er historiske eliteinstitusjoner, og hvordan er det å være en del av dem i det som betegnes som en særpreget egalitær kultur? Der hvor tidligere studier av eliter i Norge har gått kvantitativt til verks, og sett på sosial reproduksjon, tar denne avhandlingen en kvalitativ tilnærming og ser på kulturelle aspekter og konkrete erfaringer knyttet til å være en del av historiske eliteinstitusjoner. Halvorsen ser på eliteskoler og litteraturkritikk som eksempler på eliteinstitusjoner, det vil si institusjoner som har knyttet til seg visse kulturelle forestillinger om "elite". I studien finner han en rekke ulike måter aktører forholder seg til det å være del av historiske eliteinstitusjoner. Han finner blant annet at det å være del av en institusjon med elitetradisjoner ikke nødvendigvis innebærer at man interesserer seg for elitekultur eller kommer til å inneha en eliteposisjon selv; snarere er det slik at både eliteskole-elevene og litteraturkritikerne som er intervjuet strever med disse forestillingene og heller knytter seg til den egalitære tradisjonen. Slik sett argumenteres det i avhandlingen for at egalitære tradisjoner ikke er et slør for å skjule elitetilhørighet, men at forståelser av elite i Norge er sterkt preget av den egalitære tradisjonen.
Discourses on equality and elite formation in Norway have been developed and shaped by social scientists, historians and authors over the centuries. Thus, the knowledge practices mobilised in this study are not only observers of, but also participants, even agents in the social world that is studied. This chapter will outline how authors, historians, and sociologists have discoursed on equality and helped shape the self-understanding of the Norwegian public. The need for a chapter like this appeared as soon as different conceptions of equality and nationhood appeared in the material from the interviews.
The chapter serves multiple purposes. Firstly, it will offer historical information and review literature and debates that are important to this study, but that may be less known to an international audience. Secondly, the chapter will help situate the study in a certain intellectual context and help the critical reflection of both author and reader.
The approach is to read national literature, history, and sociology[i] as self-proclaimed expert discourses on equality, discourses that have played decisive roles in the construction of national identity centred on conceptualising Norway as being a uniquely egalitarian nation. Historians, authors, and sociologists claim to know, each in their own way and for their own reasons, who the Norwegians are, and they all have proclaimed that Norway is the land of exceptional equality. Authors know this because of their artistic sensibility and their intimate relationship to the “mother tongue”, historians because they know the sources and origins of the nation, and sociologists because they are able to see and muster the totality of social facts. It is worth noting that the connection between historiography and the nation-state and nationalism is not (solely) a matter of ideology or agenda, as Krause (2021, p. 43) pointed out, but has “mundane institutional and material vectors” (as well). The chapter will describe from a second order perspective how this construction of national exceptionalism has been going on from the founding of Norway as a modern nation state through the Constitution of 1814, up until contemporary sociological debates. In summary, they have established different traditions, constituting repertoires of references that are available to actors in making sense of Norwegianness.
National character, conceived as a fixed mental set, is a myth; but as Michael Walzer pointed out “the sharing of sensibilities and institutions among the members of a historical community is a fact of life” (Walzer, 1983, p. 28). National identities, as well as the role and standing of cultural professionals and intellectuals in a nation are shaped through the activities of scholars and artists and codified and institutionalised by the school system and through the cultural and political institutions of the state and civil society. When identity discourses are institutionalised in this manner, notably through the schools, that may endow them with surprising inertia. For the major European nations –notably France and Germany the cultural power houses of the 19th century – these processes have been examined in detail and comparatively by historical sociologists Fritz Ringer (1969, 1992), Jürgen Kocka (1990, 1995) and Christophe Charle (2015).
As in other countries, in the 19th and 20th century, Norwegian artists as well as social scientists, engaged in the interwoven and conflictual processes of democratisation and national identity formation. Authors, historians and social scientists were poets in the original Greek sense of the term in the sense that they created a certain register for national identity, which Norwegians consider uniquely Norwegian. It has been pointed out for example by Kocka (1995) as well as Hroch (1998), Anderson (1991), and Kuipers (2012) that though people tend to understand themselves as unique, national identities are remarkably similar. Modern nations see themselves in the light of the key positive values of modernity – equality, freedom and solidarity – as well as pride in cultural achievements, natural beauty and some degree of military prowess, and they claim to be deeply rooted in history. Arguing that equality is a national trait is not specifically Norwegian, but the general depiction nonetheless has a Norwegian version.
2.1 Inventing the nation
Europe was the birthplace of the nation-state at the end of the eighteenth century, and “took the lead in inventing (and propagating) nationhood and nationalism” (Brubaker, 1996, p. 1). The Enlightenment thought of the 18th century, notably the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), established equality as the key value of society, along with liberty and the sovereignty of the people. The American and French revolutions of the late 18th century and their corresponding constitutions put this into letter and practice. The Norwegian Constitution of 1814, parts of which remains valid today, established the same principles for Norway. The movement of 1814 was a dual or triple revolution, which established liberal constitutional government, abolished privileges and the nobility (formally only in 1821) and established an autonomous nation state linked to neighbouring Sweden only through the person of the king and a shared foreign policy. Throughout the 19th century nationalist energies were, however, ignited by the fact that Sweden was clearly the dominant partner in the loose union, controlling the joint foreign policy, with the king largely residing in Stockholm.
In Norway, as in other European countries, the 19th century was the great age of nation building. A nation is here understood as an imagined community, that is a socially constructed community imagined by people that consider themselves to be part of it (Anderson, 1991). In such an understanding, nations do not become substances and entities, but institutionalised forms, practical categories and events (Brubaker, 1996, p. 16, Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983). According to Anderson, the imagined community of the nation takes place in connection with the development and generalisation of print culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, with journals and daily newspapers, publishing houses and compulsory schooling, a perspective which holds true for Norway.
Independent Norway began in 1814 as a civic nation on the French model, stressing formal civic and political rights. During the 19th century cultural nationalism of the Herderian model became more influential (Sørensen, 1998). Narratives of Norwegian nation state building often start with the members of Norske Selskab (“the Norwegian society”) in Copenhagen. In this developmentalist narrative, the beginnings of the Norwegian nation state started with their patriotism and cultural mobilisation, which came to fruition with the uprising in 1814 and the constitution of May 17th. The Norwegian Constitution of 1814 provided the senior civil servants, in Norwegian called embetsmenn, with central roles. It is described as a tightly knit status group, in Weberian terms. The lack of both nobility and a wealthy bourgeoisie with political authority in Norway, allowed a period of relatively meritocratic rules of academics. In many ways it was a rule of upper middle-class people. Schola Osloensis, which was established in 1153, became very influential in this period, providing the educated elites, the mandarins, with the perfect preparation for university. First, by providing priests and senior civil servants to the autocracy before 1814, and afterwards to the constitutional government. Contemporary historians, following Jens Arup Seip (1905–1992), called it embetsmannsstaten (1814–1884) – the civil servant state, or the mandarin state, a regime for nation building and modernisation from above, run by civil servants. The historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810–1864) and the poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807–1873) were two of its central ideologists along with the jurist and economist Anton Martin Schweigaard (1808–1870). Munch and Welhaven idealised the farmer, thereby making themselves “invisible” as a ruling group. National romanticism was the ideology of embetsmannsstaten.
The modern parliamentarian breakthrough in 1884 took place as a revolt, in opposition to embetsmannsstaten. In contrast, the French democratic breakthrough in 1871 was at the same time a breakthrough for a meritocratic society based on education. In the 19th century the Royal Fredrik’s University in Christiania [Oslo] was the only institution of higher education in the country. The revolt against the ancien régime of the embetsmannsstat was therefore necessarily also a revolt against the university and against the academy style literature of Welhaven and his followers. From this point on there is a distinct connection in Norway between anti-intellectualism and democracy, and it has become something that academics and intellectuals have had to manoeuvre around from early on (Jakobsen, 2011).
Norwegian intellectuals of the 18th and 19th century drew models and arguments from the European intellectual discourse of the time, notably the populist discourse of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johan Gottfried von
Herder (1744–1803), cherishing the authenticity and cultural vitality of peasant culture. Early in the beginning a discourse developed, which was sceptical of an imported general European culture, stigmatised as finkultur (Jakobsen, 1995, 1997). Originally developed as a form of national romanticism by authors and historians affiliated with the ruling embetsmenn of the urban centres, this populist ideology was soon turned against the mandarins by later liberal and socialist movements.
When the embetsmannsstat ended, opposition groups merged in the party Venstre [the Left], and introduced parliamentary government based on political parties. The opposition had been building all the way since the 1860s. The historian Ernst Sars (1835–1917) was a key ideologist, along with the author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910). The two idealised the oppositional activities of author Henrik Wergeland (1808–1845) in the 1830s and helped create a politically effective “Wergeland myth” and the concept of “poetocracy”, which I deal with in the next part on literature.
2.2 “Poetocracy”
“Poetocracy” seems to have originated as a pejorative and satirical term in the late 19th century. It was Johan Ernst Sars, however, who in 1902 turned the pun into a serious concept. It aimed at explaining the position and role of authors in Norway at a formative period in the 19th century and up until around 1900. He claimed that authors, in their cultural creativity, defined what Norwegian culture was, and had an enormous impact on public as well as political life. Not only did they impact decisions, but they actually made them through their implicit and explicit work. Sars wrote this in an article about Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s influence on Norwegian politics, as a digterpolitiker [a poet politician], but also used Henrik Wergeland as an example.
Wergeland is generally considered the finest Norwegian poet ever. By the time Sars wrote about Wergeland, he was already well on his way to be canonised as the poet of the nation, in a role similar to that of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in Germany, Victor Hugo in French republicanism, or Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. Unlike the national romantics of the previous generation, Sars stressed the political radicalism of Wergeland, his role as one the leaders of the opposition to the dominance of embetsmennene. Wergeland, in short, was depicted by Sars as both the symbolic founding father of modern Norway, and of the patriotic Venstre-coalition of farmers and liberal townspeople who brought down the rule of the embetsmenn in 1884, making the Government accountable to the parliament. Wergeland edited Statsborgeren [The Citizen (of the State)], the leading opposition newspaper of the time, and he was active both in the student, farmer and working people organisations.
Wergeland was a tremendously prolific writer in all genres, notably poetry and drama, in addition to being a historian. Unable, due to his radicalism, to get any position in the Norwegian civil service, the king would eventually try to appease the situation by arranging him a post as national archivist (Storsveen, 2008). His father, Nicolai, was one of the writers of the Constitution of 1814, an eidsvollsmann, and patriotism and Rousseauian radicalism ran thick in his family. Kåre Lunden (1995) explicitly names Henrik Wergeland as one of the most influential thinkers in Norwegian historiography, amongst others due to his Norges Konsititions Historie [The History of the Norwegian Constitution] (1841–3), even though he was “hardly an empirically outstanding researcher”. He played an important part, together with Keyser and P.A. Munch, in shaping the Norwegian national narrative of the 19th century. Despite, or perhaps because, his notoriety with the authorities, and despite living a short life, he was something of a media celebrity, with a huge crowd following him to his grave when he died at age 37 in 1845. Wergeland wrote a huge number of letters and newspaper columns that have been the basis for several literary studies, and the largest collection of his writings is at the library of the high school he attended, namely Schola Osloensis. Sars named the period from 1830–1845 “the Wergeland period” and claimed that Wergeland personified what went on at the time (Fulsås, 1999, p. 254).
Whereas Wergeland represented the youthful and enthusiastic lust for a new national culture, Bjørnson represented the full-grown and responsible version, according to Sars. They both had a need to be agitators and public intellectuals as well as authors, but in a mutually reinforcing manner, where the different activities advanced each other. The most important for them was to “take hold of matters in life”. Understanding the farmers was of vital importance for them both if we are to believe Sars. The historian holds, however, that where Wergeland was an enthusiast who wrote for and about farmers, but never understood them, Bjørnson managed to paint “true and touching images of the Norwegians farmer’s inner life”. Wergeland and Bjørnson were also separate in their views on Scandinavianism, where Bjørnson in his youth was clearly in favour, while Wergeland was a Norwegian patriot and a cosmopolitan. In the 19th century, politicians had to deal with poets “and prophets” entering the political stage with their “fantasies and moralism”. Sars creates the impression of politics as an almost bureaucratic and grey chore, in need of external injection of fantasy and moral, which was what the authors provided. “Big targets are not achieved through small measures”, he writes polemically. In other words, we get the impression that authors could bring “big words” and great ideas to a political debate that lacked temperature.
The stride between Wergeland and Welhaven is well known in Norway, as it is a part of the curriculum for everyone in the Norwegian education system. Wergeland’s free and avantgarde poems are read with Welhaven’s bourgeoisie (“finkulturelle”) rhyme-based ones as a contrast, and in many ways, they are exactly that. They were contemporaries, and they explicitly disapproved of each other’s artistic visions. In many ways this can be read as an example of Bourdieu’s distinction between avant-garde culture and bourgeois culture, that is between preferences for the heavy and the light, left and right bank theatre, and so on. Welhaven constitutes the autonomous pole of the literary field, which was being created, whereas Wergeland pioneers the heteronomous. Welhaven and his circle, which was happy to let itself be known as “intelligensen” [the circle of intelligence], pioneered a new continental style of educated urban life, where both genders met in clubs or salons to drink wine or tea, converse and enjoy culture. Wergeland would often wear peasant clothing and indulged in the traditional drinking bouts of student life. Wergeland’s mix of avant-garde poetry, popular dress, bohemian lifestyle, social engagement, and patriotic fervour, and his claim to be authentic in defiance of conventions – his most famous poem is Mig selv [Myself]; it all came together and set a model, a habitus perhaps, on which the Norwegian field of literature has drawn ever since. Every pretender to a hegemonic position in the Norwegian field of literature is measured in light of “the Wergeland myth”. With the great influence of Wergeland’s model, and the limited influence of Welhaven’s, it may be that literature fits the Bourdieusian model less neatly in Norway than in some other European countries because of the prestige of heteronomous literature. The legacy of the poetocracy is literary avant-gardism in favour of equality and common culture (a similarity with the American literary canon, exemplified with Emerson and Hemingway for instance, whereas the French, German and English literature rests on altogether different conceptions of literature and culture). Norwegian literature might as such be an anomaly (Tavory & Timmermanns, 2011; Vassenden, 2018), in that heteronomous literature in many ways inhabits a higher position than theory would assume. However, the examples that do not neatly fit in with theory, provide an opportunity to theorise and discuss theorising in sociology. The position of Wergeland is connected to the close link between nationalism and liberalism in Norway, that enabled cultural expressions of societal matters and gave them a priority it lacked in some other countries. This is what Sars meant by “poetocracy”, which did not occur to such an extent in Denmark and Sweden because they were old, well-established nation states, where liberalism and nationalism were more distinct, according to Sars. On the other hand, Sars tended to overlook the less flattering aspects of the authors and reduced them to characters in his own storytelling.
As the section on historical accounts will show, there have been noteworthy elites in Norwegian history, and also in cultural life, but elitism, and culture that is not rooted in egalitarianism, has had a hard time getting accepted (Stenseth, 1993). In other words, it could be so that elitism, even when meritocratically grounded, has an especially weak position in Norway compared to other countries. Another cultural influence worth mentioning in this regard is the Haugianism, after the Norwegian lay priest Hans Nielsen Hauge, who won great popular support for a Norwegian version of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, while challenging the authority of the educated elites (Myhre, 2004, p. 129).
The concept “poetocracy” has become part of Norwegian self-conceptions. It has been expanded to include other central authors such as Henrik Ibsen and Alexander Kielland. They all wrote in a period often explained by the Danish literary historian Georg Brandes’ formulation of the objective of literature in society: “to set up problems for debate”. Central works from this period dealt with the role of bourgeoisie families, and public life – the break from a traditional period, towards a modern phase. Alexander Kielland wrote from the city of Stavanger about the challenges of merchants and ordinary folks. His novel Arbeidsfolk [Labourers] from 1881, is in many ways an articulation of standssamfunnet [The Society of Status Groups], where the different leaders of parts of the work organisations use the highest title when they refer to each other. By doing this they underline verticality, and rank. Another central novel by Kielland is Gift [Poison] about the teaching of Latin in school, which Kielland criticises. Also in this novel, we find a break with the traditional (Latin as a school subject), and an emphasis of modern society, where school is supposed to be more open. Ibsen wrote about women’s position in society in Et dukkehjem [A Doll’s House], the role of religious belief in Brand and the role of dissidents in political cultures in En folkefiende [An Enemy of the People], for instance. Jakobsen (2004) claimed that Ibsen raised the literary field in Norway to higher levels of autonomy, in an analogical manner to what Flaubert did in France, according to Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art. They self-objectivated themselves, using the literary tools at their disposal to capture various forces at play in the field of literature; thus, providing reflective autonomy in relation to those forces.
In 1970 “the poetocracy” was declared “dead”, by the young philosopher Gunnar Skirbekk. It should be borne in mind that he was a social philosopher, a follower of Jürgen Habermas and a self-proclaimed speaker for the social sciences. It was the death of important culturally radical authors, such as Sigurd Hoel, Helge Krog and Arnulf Øverland, that made him claim this. Allegedly, they were the last bearers of “the poetocracy”. Newly established social scientific disciplines, such as sociology and political science, were populated by people who took on the role previously held by the bearers of “the poetocracy”. In short, Skirbekk proclaimed that public intellectuals were more likely to come from this background than a literary one.
In 2004; Gunnar Skirbekk revisited his prognosis about the death of “the poetocracy”. He restated his views on fiction playing a vital role in Bildung and maintaining a political culture. Fiction “develops codes of meaning, self-conceptions and values [… it] teaches us to see ourselves and the others” (p. 438). He also reinstated the importance of literature in Norwegian history alongside the popular movements, “The discrete charm of the North”, as he calls it, but he ends on a concerned note. Not only is the poetocracy dead, but this time he is also concerned for the future of philosophy and social sciences which he considers differentiated and specialised, and no longer preoccupied with public culture.
2.3 National history – egalitarianism as a national narrative
The historians were pioneers for the critical study of elites in Norway, as well as contributors to the discourse on Norwegian identity. In this part, we will look closer on a couple of influential historians and their work. “Norwegian historical scholarship has primarily been a national historiography”, Hubbard, Myhre, Nordby and Sogner (1995, p. 6) pointed out and drew our attention to notable examples of Norwegian historians, such as Rudolf Keyser (1804–1864), Peter Andreas Munch (1810–1864), Ernst Sars (1835–1917) and Halvdan Koht (1873–1965). The first academic historian to frame a major narrative around the theme of Norway as an exceptionally egalitarian nation seems to have been Rudolf Keyser. Together with P.A. Munch, he was the leading exponent of what Danish historians with some sarcasm called “The Norwegian historical school” (a pun on the famous “German historical school”). Based on speculative philological and no archaeological evidence, Keyser and Munch claimed that Norwegians (and some of the Swedes) were a Norse group, who had wandered in from the North, while the Danes and southern Swedes descended from Germans. This is known as “the immigration theory”, constituting Norwegians as a unique people. This “theory” was soon to be accepted as truth in the Norwegian population, according to Dahl (1959, p. 51). Rudolf Keyser and P. A. Munch are understood as national romantics (Kjeldstadli, 1995). They explicitly connected Norwegian culture with values such as democracy and freedom and highlighted the foundation in the allodial right (“Odelsretten”) as a building block for Norway, providing freeholders with absolute authority in political meetings, the “ting”, and making farmers a unifying force in the history.
The historical interpretations by Keyser and Munch of Norwegian national development have strongly influenced public debate and self-perception (Dahl, 1995; Melve, 2010). Marte Mangset (2009, p. 424) argued that these formative decades not only formed the content of historical research, but also how Norwegian historians perceive themselves as disciplinary agents up until today. They were preoccupied with explaining how Norwegian culture and identity was formed, and doing so in a culture they themselves were a part of.
In his overview over Norwegian historiography and central actors, Lunden (1995) wrote: “All of these looked for the essential Norwegian history and Norwegian nationality among the farmers”. He dates Norwegian egalitarianism to the farmers’ “Storting” [parliament] of 1833 and 1836, and the 1837 law of on municipal councils. The main point is that the Norwegian society was not feudal as in Sweden and Denmark, and thus were more open and egalitarian. However, one can question this depiction of Sweden, which like Norway has a continuous tradition since the medieval ages of free, self-owning farmers with parliamentary representation, and which unlike Denmark and Norway, never turned into an autocracy (Bengtsson, 2019; Piketty, 2019), but this seems to be of lesser importance to Lunden. For Lunden, a fundamental trait of these early historians is an evolutionary perspective and a teleological conception of history as progressive towards the better. He dates it back to Henrik Wergeland’s writings: “[H]e developed the main lines in theories which later became more known through Ernst Sars” (Lunden, 1995, p. 33). The historical work laid the basis for the work of a national cultural revival, played out by Per Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, who gathered and wrote down popular fairy tales, Welhaven, Bjørnson and Ibsen, who wrote plays that thematised Norway and Norwegian identity, Johan Christian Dahl and Adolph Tidemann, who painted landscapes from around the country, its fjords and mountains, and Ole Bull, who composed music with elements from traditional cultures. This period (ca. 1840–1870) is known as the national romanticism (Dahl, 1959, p. 44), where international influences from Johann Gottfried von Herder, gave inspiration to develop their own national works rooted in Norwegian folk culture. Central was the search for culture among farmers and common people, and the high culture of earlier times in Norway was disapproved of, according to Lunden (1995, p. 37). As will be mentioned several times throughout this book, the period of national romanticism has been influential in creating a self-conception of the Norwegian society, where equality and sameness is central, and inequality and eliteness under-communicated. The reason for this is thought to be the need for proving a national identity to oneself, because of the Norwegian state and society’s weak position internationally at the time (Dahl, 1959, p. 44).
In addition to Herder, influences from Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich von Schelling are put forth by Kjeldstadli (1995) as important for the national romanticism, and he points out an affinity for ethnographic approaches. Despite being influenced by these international references, Kjeldstadli (1995, p. 55) claimed that they looked “upon theory as a necessary evil or even a nuisance”. Norwegian historiography was known for emphasising the craftsman’s ideology in favour of a more theoretical approach. Dahl (1959, p. 19) also pointed out that common European isms such as “romanticism”, “nationalism”, and “liberalism” also influenced different generations and schools of historians, but as “unreflexive and unobtrusive schemas of thought”. Kjeldstadli (1995) describes Sars as believing in a step-by-step progress towards freedom. Sars’ writings are described as having four traits: (1) evolutionism, (2) belief in progress, (3) idealism and (4) searching for explanatory laws. Dahl (1956) described Sars as a positivist. The inexplicitness of theory goes through other important historians as well, such as Halvard Koht, Edvard Bull Jr., Sverre Steen, Jens Arup Seip and Andreas Holmsen. Kjeldstadli nonetheless interprets their works in order to explain the theoretical underpinnings of their writings. There are differences, but mostly there is unity, a “quarrelsome unity” (Kjeldstadli, 1995, p. 52). The one that stands out is Ottar Dahl, who wrote the only purely theoretical work produced by any major Norwegian historian, a study on causation in historical research (Dahl, 1956). All the way up until the 1970s, Norwegian historiography have been considered evolution-optimistic, and one reason for this might be the long-standing Norwegian tradition of writing the nation’s history for the general reader in large works of many volumes to be found in every educated Norwegian home (Lindblad, 2010; Sejersted, 1995). Also, there is a great interest in local and regional history in Norway, providing work for many historians outside of the universities. In Sweden and Denmark, national history has not enjoyed the same popularity, and thus, history might have been academized to a greater degree.
Probably the most influential Norwegian national narrative has been written by Ernst Sars. He belonged to the what is called the Lysaker Circle, a neo-elitist group of liberal intellectuals who reframed and modernised the Norwegian self-image towards the end of the 19th century (Stenseth, 1993). For Sars, the relation between elites and democracy was dialectic. He described elites as drivers of history, that fulfilled their historical mission when the culture they created was democratised and the elites themselves absolved in the totality of the nation.
The industrial and capitalistic breakthrough towards the end of the 19th Century saw an increase in wealth, and the formation of an elite in Norway as well. The Oslo Commerce School was founded during this period, in 1875, providing at the time the highest commercial education in the country. Not long after, in 1889, a law was passed that claimed that all children had an equal right to elementary education (Folkeskoleloven [the Law of the Volksschule]), and with it the subject of “Norwegian” that solidly founded literature as important for all to read and learn. A democratic literary ideal was founded through the reading books of Nordahl Rolfsen, where everybody was supposed to read the same, and literature was supposed to make the pupils into “decent Norwegians” (Gujord & Vassenden, 2015, p. 285). This literary ideal in what later became known as the “One School for All” policy of Norway has persisted up until today, and at the same time at least some canonised texts have been central (Gujord & Vassenden, 2015).
Halvdan Koht is particularly interesting for being the first Norwegian historian influenced by Marx, in that he focused on divisions between classes in society. However, he read it into a question about integration, the different “classes” throughout history became integrated into the nation: first, the farmers in 1884, and then the workers in 1935, when the Labour movement came to power. He is considered a central ideologist of “Arbeiderpartiet” [The Worker’s Party], and from 1935 to 1940 he was Minister of Foreign Relations.
According to Myhre (1995, p. 227), the establishment of social history at the University of Oslo was a watershed. This was mostly due to the research project “The development of Norwegian society, circa 1860–1900”, which was a collective organised around Sivert Langholm. They produced four books, many articles, and over 50 master theses. They studied specific groups, instead of the nation, and used quantitative methods, hitherto uncommon.
In the second part of the 1970s, Knut Mykland edited a fifteen-volume history of Norway, which is considered the first example of social history in Norway. The use of social theory expanded, and “sociology was the main supplier” (Myhre, 1995, p. 225). Edvard Bull Jr. named the last one, the chapter on the 1970s, “The New Insecurity”. This signals a shift from the positive and general account of historians to a sensitivity towards the “invisible” in history. The projects were more specific than the general narratives of former historians, but they still had the modernisation of Norway as a contextual frame. Kjeldstadli and Olstad wrote about the transition from an estate society (standssamfunn, as in the Weberian “Stand”) to a modern class society.
The social historians, like the Norwegian sociologists at the time, took little interest in the study of elites and the educated middle classes. A critical perspective on elites was, however, offered in the very influential work of the historian Jens Arup Seip. Seip ostensibly continued the Rankean tradition of studying high level politics through the scrutiny of written sources. He did, however, give this venerable form of history writing a new twist by focusing on how political life in democracies systematically hides what according to Seip is really going on; the monopolisation of power by elites, and the struggle between and within elites. Seip conducted a critical analysis of Norwegian 19th Century elites in his study of embetsmannsstaten, and he also did so in a critical take on Norwegian social democracy (from 1945 onwards), which he named the “one party state”, pinpointing the tacit alliance of the labour party machine with technocratic and bureaucratic elites. Seip, in short, was the realist who deconstructed certain national mythologies that had hitherto been propagated by the profession of historian.
Despite introducing social issues, and providing, in the case of Seip and some of his followers a more realistic understanding on the nation and its politics, the historical accounts are still known to rely on the national level, with a focus on the characteristics of Norwegian society. Sejersted (1993) called this the Norwegian Sonderweg, where ever since 1814 the state fostered economic growth on behalf of the citizens, compensating for the lack of a capitalist class with authority. An historical anthology with contributions from the five Nordic countries and an American editor used the phrase of Alexis de Tocqueville as a descriptive title for the egalitarian ideology underlying these societies: “A passion for equality”. Central for the Norwegians were support of social harmony, and compromises in situations of conflicts of interest (Graubard, 1986). The Norwegian contribution was written by the historian Hans Fredrik Dahl, and called “Those equal folk” (Dahl, 1986).
This very brief outline of Norwegian historiography provides a background for understanding egalitarianism. The tradition of writing history from the perspective of the nation has been particularly influential in Norway, often highlighting exceptionality. A belief in Norway as the land of self-owning farmers characterised by unique equality since medieval times has been perpetuated. There is, however, no clear statistical support for the widespread belief that Norway in the nineteenth century was more egalitarian than other European countries. Income taxation was non-existent or minimal; ship owners and other businessmen made fortunes, while the salaries and accumulated wealth of the embetsmenn were such that it also made them something of an economic elite. In fact, historical data on wealth and income inequality show that the Norwegian levels are far from exceptional (Aaberge, Atkinson, & Modalsli, 2016). At the same time hundreds of thousands emigrated to America because of the lack of opportunity in Norway. Except for Ireland, no other European country lost a larger portion of its population to overseas emigration. One hypothesis that has been posed by Jakobsen (2019) is that emigration would not have reached such levels if wealth had been more equally distributed.
In sum, one could say that the national narrative about Norwegian egalitarianism contains mythic elements, or at least not a detailed and accurate description of societal relations, but it is a highly effective and historically powerful narrative.
I will here mention two supplemental aspects of the development of history as a subject in Norway. The first aspect is an increasing sensitivity for questions of inequality. Ericsson, Fink and Myhre (2004, pp. 8–10) were the first to study the middle classes, and they wrote: “[Scandinavian] societies were distinctively coloured by their middle classes, and yet these groups represented a shadowy and almost anonymous presence in both contemporary and historical analysis”.[ii] Now, after their middle-class project, the conditions changed. Myhre (2004, p. 107) claimed that one reason for the absence of the middle class(es) in Norwegian historiography might be that up until the 20th century it was a small and rather unimportant group, and also that historiographical developments reflect contemporary society. Most attention was given to the working classes and the farmers, as well as the upper class. In the beginning of the 19th century, exporters of lumber, metal and fish were referred to as “lumber patricians”, “lumber nobility” or “Christiania nobles”, even though Norway did not have any formalised nobility. According to Myhre they were considered a cultural elite. When it comes to lifestyles however, Myhre (2004, p. 135) found that the middle-class lifestyle was “more or less an imitation of that of their social superiors”, but also that “take it to the extreme” and overdo the lifestyle “out of social insecurity” was common.
The second aspect is the shift in focus from Norway to a wide diversification of subjects with different methodological and theoretical approaches. The subject of history is considered to be less unified today than before. The new method for defining the discipline of history appears to be the method of elimination, that is to draw boundaries towards what cannot be considered history, rather than being on a quest for defining the absolute core of the subject (Halvorsen, 2016b).
2.4 Sociology – a sensitivity for inequality
There are few studies of when, how and why sociology emerged in Norway, but the narratives about the emergence often start with key figures. The key figures that are claimed to do sociology before sociology was formally institutionalised are Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) and Eilert Sundt (1817–1875) (Engelstad, Grennes, Kalleberg, & Malnes, 2005). They were both initially theologians. They are reckoned as founding fathers of social sciences in general in Norway, but Sundt has been of greater importance for sociology’s self-understanding. Sundt was also a priest, and wrote studies based on ethnographic approaches in between the 1840s and the 1860s (Stenseth, 2000). He wrote studies about urban poverty, rural farming, and health among other things. His focus was on specific disadvantaged groups, and he divided the population into two groups: the propertied and the non-propertied. Sundt overlooked the middle classes just as the historians of his time did. After him, several decades passed before sociological studies were undertaken. In the 1950s, sociology began its formal disciplinary history in Norway, through an initiative by students in Oslo, surrounding Nils Christie (1928–2015) and at the Institute for Social Research. Similar to other European countries then, it is hard to find the origin of sociology in Norway, but the formal organisation of it begins after the second world war (Wagner, 2001). The first introductory book in sociology was written in 1964 by Vilhelm Aubert (1922–1988), and simply named Sosiologi [Sociology]. Sociology from the founding period in the 1950s and 1960s is called both the “golden age” and the period of “problem-oriented empiricism”. Central works are Ottar Brox’s study of Northern Norway, Sverre Lysgaard’s study of “The Workers’ Collective”, Thomas Mathiesen’s study of inmates and Harriet Holter’s study of women’s role conflicts in industry. The historian Fredrik W. Thue (2006) provides an extensive account of this period in his thesis, and what Holst (2006) has called the “critical-normative backsliding“ of the period. Golden age sociologists were influenced by empiricist philosophy (especially by Arne Næss), American surveyresearch, and structural functionalism (Mjøset 1991, p. 150), but most importantly they wrote about Norwegian matters, and became “the guilty conscience of the welfare state’. Central to this notion is, on one hand, the task of measuring the intentions of the welfare state to provide equal opportunities and fairer distribution, and on the other hand pointing out that the basis for the welfare state lies in a system based on inequality. As Mjøset (1991, p. 162) wrote: “[T]he sociologist [of this era] is a populist because his starting point is the community, and the welfare demands of the family”. However, the elites and the educated middle class were not studied in this period, but rather specific groups and institutions oriented towards integrating members into society.
Sociology has followed the tradition of historians in writing large-scale works about the Norwegian society, and one of those works is actually called exactly that, Det norske samfunn [The Norwegian Society]. The first edition was published in 1968, edited by Natalie Rogoff Ramsøy, who was educated at the University of Chicago, but at the time associate professor at the University of Oslo. The second edition, from 1975, was edited by Ramsøy and Mariken Vaa (also at UiO). It established that Norway has an egalitarian stratification pattern (Torgersen 1975, p. 524). A third edition was published in 1986, with Lars Alldén added to the editorial team, and after that the editor was changed completely. Ivar Frønes and Lise Kjølsrød, both sociologists at the University of Oslo took over, and have edited the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th editions of the book, where the last edition had so many chapters that it was separated into three volumes. The book has often been read as a representative example of, and even “mirroring”, developments within Norwegian sociology (Aakvaag, 2011; Pedersen, 2015; Slagstad, 2016). When summarised, the story that this book series tell, is a story of ambitions of describing the totality of the Norwegian society, strongly influenced by functionalism, towards an increase in topics and a rejection of describing what holds the society together. There is no clear unity in theoretical inspiration, and maybe even a lack of theorising (Aakvaag, 2011). A trademark has been “a sensitivity for inequality”, which I think can be extended to describe the general trend within Norwegian sociology (Pedersen, 2015). However, the last edition received harsh criticism for excluding a chapter on class and inequality, and it has been claimed that the expansion of the project reflects the discipline’s lack of identity (Slagstad, 2016). Slagstad’s criticism begs the question: when sociology no longer defines itself with reference to inequality, what is it then?
Else Øyen’s introductory book from 1976 has a telling title: Sociology and Inequality. She states that there is no “official policy for the amount of equality – or inequality – there should be in the Norwegian society” (Øyen, 1992, p. 23). This underpins the sociological normative position of having the perspective of the disadvantaged. It also shows a strong connection to “official politics”. To a large degree this characterises the sociological ambition of research during these decades: inequality was on the agenda, to deal with these issues in a political manner.
The general depiction of the Norwegian society by the sociologists was in other words pointing out how the social democratic ideals of equality were not realised, or at least not as successful as sometimes described. Through telling an evolutionary story about the development of Norwegian society, these aspects were assumed to gain less attention than they deserved. One consequence was that the more “idealistic” sides of the culture of equality in Norway were studied by other than the sociologists, namely the anthropologists, especially Marianne Gullestad. In the 1970s, they started doing fieldwork in “their own societies”.
Gullestad (1984, 1991, 1992) has been of vital importance to the understanding of equality from a social scientific perspective. Her anthropological accounts of everyday life in Bergen have emphasised the layperson’s understanding of equality as sameness, in addition to highlighting the importance of equality as a value in Scandinavian countries. Gullestad (1992, p. 6) summarised the egalitarian ethos as under-communication of differences. She finds this in her material when she sees that the working-class mothers she studies do not protest, they rather “turn their backs on politics and bureaucracy by creating their own worlds and these worlds can be analysed as a more indirect resistance to “the system”. Another anthropologist that has been working on Norwegian society and the concept of egalitarianism, is Hallvard Vike (Bendixen, Bringslid, & Vike, 2018; Henningsen & Vike, 1999; Lien, Lidén, & Vike, 2001; Vike, 2018). He claimed that Norwegian political culture is characterised by a moral elite control, where the elites are sanctioned morally and thus not able to transcend cultural restrictions that are a part of Norwegian culture.
Also worth mentioning, is two Government initiated studies of power in Norwegian society, with sociologists in central roles, the “power investigations” (Götz, 2013). The first was led by Gudmund Hernes from 1972 to 1982, and the second by Fredrik Engelstad and colleagues from 1998 to 2003. Both had an ambition of describing power relations within Norwegian society, and thereby providing important information both for public discussion and political deliberation. The second investigation, Makt- og demokratiutredningen [The power and democracy investigation] had an explicit focus on the democratic (legitimate) exercise of power. The first is considered to be influenced by American political science and positivism, whereas the second had a broader methodological approach. The second investigation also had internal disagreements in the leadership group, where Hege Skeje dissented based on gender issues and methodological nationalism, and Siri Meyer dissented based on disagreements about the concept of power. Two social scientists and the sociologist (all of them men) formed the united conclusion: Øyvind Østerud, Per Selle and Fredrik Engelstad.
Up until today a research group has studied elites from a similar kind of perspective as the “power investigations”. They use the positionality method, by selecting people in important positions, instead of the reputation method or the decision method. Survey research seems to be the preferred method. The latest result from this strand of research is Trygve Gulbrandsen’s Elites in an Egalitarian Society (2019), which found that elites are well integrated in Norwegian society and strongly support the labour unions, and the anthology Eliter i endring [Changing elites] (Engelstad, Gulbrandsen, Midtbøen, & Teigen, 2022).
The study of inequality focusing on taste and lifestyle differences has been one in which sociologists have excelled. On the one side, we find studies of taste, aesthetics, and culture, and on the other side studies of inequality, hierarchies, class, and mechanisms of reproduction (Jonvik, 2018). Many studies have also analysed the connection between, how tastes, preferences, and cultural valuation are connected to and/or reflected in other social inequalities. A typical discussion here has been the question of whether the inequality levels in Norway have similarities with trends in other countries, or whether egalitarian aspects of the society make it less suitable for analysing with concepts that are derived from studies of other societies. In this latter vein, we find Arild Danielsen’s (1998) critique of the conceptual translation of cultural capital from French to Norwegian societal relations. In his view, the different modernisation processes of the two nations mean that the content of a concept will differ, especially that the status of continental high culture is very different in the two countries.
There is also a strong tradition of studies of inequality and wealth, and the end of the 1990s is maybe a starting point for this. One could roughly say that this research has been preoccupied with economic issues, lifestyle, housing, the upper classes, power, and the accumulation of different types of capital – especially through studies of register data. Many of these contributions and contributors are represented in Eliter og klasser i et egalitært samfunn [Elites and Classes in an Egalitarian Society], which developed an Oslo Register Data Class scheme (Hansen, Andersen, Flemmen, & Ljunggren, 2014), categorising different professions, summarised in the table below.
Figure 2.1 The Oslo Register Data Class scheme
Professors, and successful artists are some examples of the members of the cultural elite, classic professions like law and medicine constitute the professional elite, while wealthy owners, and leaders in business make up the economic elite. The middle classes are divided in similar categories, whereas the bottom is horizontally divided between people on benefits, farmers and the working class. The authors were especially preoccupied with social mobility in and out of these categories, as well as symbolic boundary work and closure.
In 2007; Ove Skarpenes conducted a study of the Norwegian middle class. The crucial question was the status of “symbolic violence” in Norway. Skarpenes claimed that the middle classes exerted symbolic power, and not the elites as earlier assumed in research. The top-down distinction known from France, was not present in his data, and more specifically he found the interviewees were reluctant to ranking, because it could be regarded as moral hierarchisation of people. The study was undertaken in collaboration with Rune Sakslind and Roger Hestholm. They follow Danielsen’s (1998) point about institutions providing national character to the culture they objectify, and that this might be founded on sports, instrumental or technical knowledge, richness or moral, and not necessarily high culture as in France. If there is one characteristic trait to Norwegian legitimate culture, they claim, it is morality.
In their study of literary preferences and practice, Gujord and Vassenden (2015) found three supplementary points to Skarpenes. Firstly, the middle class does not use literature in their symbolic boundary drawing, which supports Skarpenes’ findings. Secondly, they argued that this cannot be generalised to a critique of logics of distinction as such because people do use for instance architecture, design, and other aesthetic products to draw symbolic boundaries. This goes against Skarpenes, they argue. One reason for this, they argue, is the central position of literature in the school curriculum, something which is less the case for music, art, design, and architecture. Thirdly, the explanation for the reluctance to use literature in boundary drawing might be as much about the ideology of the school (pedosentrism, where the students define for themselves what quality is, and that the value of the object lies within the relationship to the reader rather than in the object), as about the general ideology in Norway (egalitarianism). This point allows Skarpenes and his critics to be both right and wrong, they argue. A remaining question, for instance, becomes whether it can be described as reluctance or downplaying, the former giving an impression of something less strategic than the latter. They end by developing an interesting concept of “estetisk lystprinsipp” [aesthetic pleasure principle] (Gujord & Vassenden, 2015, p. 302), which means that readers disregard the hierarchy within literature because they do not want to care about it. They thereby define for themselves what good literature is, and do not care about potential disagreements on the matter.
Summed up, I would categorise these last three types of studies as: (1) Class studies, (2) Pragmatic studies, and (3) Situation-centred studies. The first is built on a classical sociological tradition of revealing and criticising power and domination, whereas the second has focused on actor’s creativity and reflexivity in use of culture. There have been wide disputes on methods (Heian, 2018, p. 18), typically centred around the question of “saying vs. doing” (Jerolmack & Khan, 2014a, 2014b), which seems to be one of the reasons for the third type to appear. The third type (3) tries to combine a critical perspective focusing on power and hierarchies, and a cultural sociological perspective focusing on individual meaning-making, with a sensitivity for how this is presented in, and affected by, situations.
Attempts at sorting out the egalitarian-inequality paradox include conceptualisations such as: elitist egalitarianism (Ljunggren, 2017), egalitarian individualism (Gullestad, 1991, 1992), inegalitarian egalitarianism (Bendixen, Bringsvold, & Vike, 2018) and populistic elitism (Henningsen & Vike, 1999). This project does not have any preconceptions about whether this really constitutes a complex or not in social life, but of most importance here is that it is firmly established as such in research and thereby becomes part of a repertoire that actors can use in making sense of society. These are questions we grapple with together as a society.
2.5 Concluding remarks
In this book, the accounts told by authors, historians, and sociologists are treated as part of repertoires of knowledge that are available for actors to draw upon in their sensemaking of society. These accounts contain central concepts that are sometimes not defined, or, perhaps most often, defined differently. In other words, this is not a coherent scientific tradition working cumulatively as a community. The different traditions provide building blocks mostly within their own tradition. Rather than trying to unify them, the aim in this chapter has been to present the reader with some of the influential discourses on equality and elite formation in Norway that also are available to and referenced by the interviewees in the interviews.
[i] One could of course also include law and other social sciences, but since the empirical studies to a very little degree deals with formal or legal matters, this is not included. A good introduction and overview over questions of more legal and formal matters, see Pedersen (2018).
[ii] However, this strand of research lacks a unifying definition of “middle class.”
This chapter will provide a view into how life unfolds in two elite arenas and is communicated by those who are a part of them. It will start with a brief tour of the schools, and then focus on the rituals the students talk about and the meaning they ascribe to them. The interviews are typically about their experiences from their first year at school and follows the first period of excitement and curiosity to the last where groups and friendships have been established. The ambition is to describe the culture at the different schools and the way in which elite identities (Khan, 2012) are formed at the schools. In academic articles I have analysed masculinity at the Oslo Commerce School (OCS) and unease at Schola Osloensis (SO) and OCS, and oftentimes have pointed to their names when describing their elite status (Halvorsen & Ljunggren, 2021; Halvorsen, 2022). Unless there are historical reasons for upper-secondary schools having a special name, such as both OCS and SO, they are named “videregående skole” in Norway. Both of the schools here have historical names – Schola Osloensis in Norwegian is called “katedralskole” – literally cathedral school – showing its earlier connection to the church, and OCS is called “gymnas”, deriving from the ancient gymnasion, introduced in Norway via Germany and up until 1974 the official name for upper secondary schools. Of importance for a cultural sociology of upper secondary schools in Norway is the graduation celebrations, which informally can start early after beginning for some students, but formally lasts during the last months of their third year and especially around the Norwegian Constitution day, 17th of May. Allan Sande (2000) studied this, known as “russefeiring”, as rites of passage, in a perspective inspired by cultural sociology and anthropology. The celebration has long historical roots, but the first known example of today’s where the students wear uniforms is from 1905 when students in Oslo wore red hats, and SO were probably among the first schools this occurred. At OCS however they began with a slight distinction when celebrating to mark their economic orientation, by wearing blue hats. The term “blåruss” has since been a strong signifier in Norway, and as such it is interesting that OCS is its place of origin. In this chapter I will attempt to provide an ethnographic account, where I will draw more explicitly from the data from the participant observation I conducted at the schools – mostly in the canteens, school yards and libraries.
5.1 Oslo commerce school: “The only private school where you don’t have to pay tuition”
Oslo Commerce School, founded as Christiania Commerce School, lies in the city centre of Oslo, close to the Royal Castle, the National Museum and the National Theatre. It’s a functionalist building which has housed the school since 1946; it sorts of blends into the surroundings and first becomes fully visible when you enter the school yard. The main entrance is through the school yard and consists of an impressive assembly hall with staircases visible from the entrance. The assembly hall has several statues, pictures, paintings and on the largest wall there is a frieze by the German-born artist Sigurd Winge (1909–1970) with a motive about the phases of life, which appears to take inspiration from ancient Greece or ancient Greeks[i]. It is 15.5 meters long and contains figures 4.5 meters high and was begun in 1948 and finished 8 years afterwards. This is where the main events such as graduation occurs. The aula also has an organ, with its pipes at the 3rd floor, and for OCS it is a tradition to play “Pomp and Circumstance”.
Inside the assembly hall there are staircases that are important for the social life at the school. A certain area is called “the third-years’ stair” and is considered a space for only the third-year students. This also goes for an area in the school yard, and generally it is the third-year students who decide, and the younger students have to accept their zones. Eva says: “There’s certain rules at this school. When you’re a first-year you can sit on the benches in the assembly hall. Not the third-years’ stair”. Asked about how strict these informal rules are she says that it is something everyone follows, and that one should not breach them.
When spending time at the school this also becomes apparent as there are clusters of students at different areas. In addition, the earlier rectors have portrait paintings of them hanging on the walls in the stairs, as well as photos of all former OCS students from the first class of 1876.[ii] This makes the students aware of the history, and several of the students are aware of the impressive alumni, counting amongst several the finance ministers Siv Jensen (Progress Party) and Per Kristian Foss (The Conservative Party), the minister of foreign affairs Knut Frydenlund (The Norwegian Labour Party), the actor Knut Wigert and in the later years artists Chirag Rashmikant Patel og Magdi Omar Ytreeide Abdelmaguid from the group called Karpe, and member of parliament Khamshajiny Gunaratnam (The Norwegian Labour Party).
Figure 5.1 & 5.2 The stairs where the photos of former students hang, and the aula seen from above
Figure 5.3 & 5.4 The class photos from 1876–1879, and from 1913–1916
The first-year students have classrooms at ground floor, whereas the secondyear students are at first floor, and third-year students at second floor. According to the 125 anniversary book, a Festschrift (Hestmann, 2000, p. 46) that was published about the school: “The students literally advance upwards in the system …, just as in the business life. The higher status you have in the system, the bigger the possibility is for gaining a spot at the top floor”.
In the 34 interviews we touch upon this aspect of being a part of a school with such a visible history and symbolically important things. Preben describes the school as having a “solemn atmosphere”:
The school is a museum, in a way. Every Thursday there are pensioners here visiting the bunker underneath. There are glass reminders everywhere with old “russeluer” from 1900, and pretty many cool things. There’s also pictures of all the classes from 1876 or something. That’s pretty different from a lot of the other schools. It’s cool, it’s proper.
The bunker Preben is talking about is from during the second world war when the Germans used the building as a headquarters during the war. The Reichskommissar for Norway during the German occupation Josef Terboven had his office there and the bunker was their command central. As such, part of school actually works as a museum, but both Preben and other students I interviewed use the word museum about the school as such, and in a positive way.
To be an OCSer (based on the name Oslo Commercial School), as the students call themselves, means to fit in at school and promote the school values. “Tradition and innovation”, which is the vision of the school, is referred to by several of the students. According to them, the school tries hard to make the students promote the school values.
After he equalled Oxford and Cambridge in England with OCS in Norway as elite schools in the sense that they make you “become something”, Magnus said:
Because everybody that – most of those who have attended OCS have their life partly planned for them: study, travel some, get a job, get married. And we live in Norway, and come from families with money, so there isn’t any… We are not going to have any special… We will not end up on the street anyway.
Magnus is reflexive in his answers through the entire interview. He constantly corrected himself as he does in the beginning here when he says “everybody”, and then corrected it to “most of”. This sort of awareness was apparent in many of the informants’ answers. Asked whether OCS can be considered an elite school, many say yes with reference to the school’s historical or symbolic sides. They acknowledge their privileges as white, West End students, but they also problematise what elite in this context would mean.
Esben talks about the school as traditional, preppy, like a museum and therefore prestigious, but at the same time, he holds back from fully accepting the elite status. “Tradition and all that”, shows an awareness, but also a kind of lack in interest. He is not traditional in the same sense, seems to be his message. Knut also depicts the school as a museum: “Yes, it really has this museum-vibe”. Traditionally elite schools have been homogenous, and this still accounts for OCS. When asked about the lack of diversity of students at the school, Geir says it is “built on a very traditional white structure, in a way”, and talks about some of the traditions at the school with the annual opening speeches by the rector in the assembly hall, as a symbol for the traditional sides to the school. He also explains how it is important to have a family history with the school, and many of the informants we have interviewed can talk about family members urging them to attend the school. Alice told me “The reason I attend OCS is that my father went here”, and she also explains that her elder brother and sister went to the school. According to Geir, family connections contributes to a sort of belonging, but what about those who do not have family in these photos? The students do consider the school an elite school in the interviews, but that does not equal them using the label about themselves. As Khan (2012, p. 480) pointed out: “The culturally important shift in the elite identity has been from being a “class” to a collection of individuals – the best and the brightest”. The elite institutions, lineages and associations are supposed to play a lesser significant role within the formation of elite identities. The students still talk about the history of the school and lineages traditionally having formed an identity attached to the school but ascribe it an historical role. Both they and their teachers are more “casual” and “chilled-out” (they use exactly these English words) than the former OCS students. They describe parents who are former OCS students who comment the students of today as preoccupied with partying and out of touch with the history of the school. The traditional dress code at the school, where teachers wear suits and ties and the boys dress preppy, has changed towards more informal clothing for instance (Hestmann, 2000). As Knut explains, it is easy to have an impression of the school as “snobbish”, but when attending it you get another picture.
A difference between Scandinavian elite schools and the international literature on elite schooling, mainly from the U.S. and England, is the type of schools, where the Scandinavian are not boarding schools (Persson, 2016). The students we have interviewed spend less time at the school physically than the informants of Khan (2011) and Gaztambide-Fernández’ (2009), which makes the combination of ethnographic inquiry and interviews especially suitable to grasp how they refer to the school with regards to their elite identities. Through the interviews, we also get information on how they make sense of what happens outside of school, such as with the family and at weekend parties. Another difference for the Norwegian case especially is that there is no particular private sector of upper secondary schooling, the public schooling is free of charge and also still has the most renown schools.[iii] With that in mind one student at OCS says, in the Festschrift of the school, “OCS is the only private school in the country where you don’t have to pay tuition”. This is said as a joke, and the word private is used not literally but to demarcate that the school functions as a private school, in that it for instance has the same type of exclusivity. Another funny remark in the Festschrift is the proud claim of OCS as “the school which skipped 1968!”.
In Gustav’s account both large houses and “cool” cars, typical examples of material well-being, are used to describe the surroundings of the student. Gustav might have some interest or admiration for those things but describes himself as lucky to have been protected from extreme family wealth. Gustav himself comes from a wealthy family, but he self-reflexively distances himself from the status of “outdoor pools”, “private skate parks” and such. The students describe how they learn through their peers that wealth in itself is not impressive. You will be made fun of if you are focused upon showing that you have money.
The stereotypes about wealthy people and people from West End Oslo also serves as a topic they use to define their identity. OCS is associated with the west side, and to be an OCSer means that you have to negotiate these stereotypes, which the students do by showing reflexivity and openness. However, when asked about the stereotypes they often distance themselves and draw symbolic boundaries towards others, whether “they” are East End youth, “hipsters”, girls or “immigrants”.
Ole first started at OCS in 2nd grade, after having done 1st grade at another school in the city centre. He describes his way to OCS as a way of coming home to “the guys”, and explicitly uses the masculine culture at OCS as a reason why he changed school.”
5.2 Rituals at OCS
First day of school is marked by a special ritual at Oslo Commerce School; all new students have to pass through a “corridor” of the older students. They are typically aware of this before the school day, and they talk about this as making it even more important what they wear at first school day, for instance. The knowledge of this ritual is typically passed down through siblings and friends, but also the limited recruitment basis, the fact that OCS mainly recruits from the west side, probably eases the dissemination of this knowledge. Aidin, one of the few students from the east side of Oslo, says:
I took the rear entrance. I took the metro and came via Solli square, thinking that they might have left since I was a bit late. I think it would have been a bit scary with the third-years, in that corridor, yes. I don’t mean any harm, the welcome week was very nice, but I don’t know. The OCS-thing, that the school is preoccupied with traditions, right. So good initiative, very openminded people and helpful.
He is very positive towards the school in general throughout the interview but is also very open about not participating in much of the social activities connected formally or informally to the school. In this way he distinguishes himself from the rest of the sample, and as such provides another perspective on the rituals.
The corridor is not the only ritual the students have to partake in during their time at the school. Of course, all schools have rituals such as the official ceremonies at the end of the terms, but OCS has several unofficial ones as well organised by the students and some of them also unpopular at the school. This especially goes for the activities surrounding the first period at the school, resembling the perhaps equally controversial tradition for “fadderuke” when starting university (Vigen & Tjora, 2023). At OCS it was also called “fadderuke” at an earlier stage, but it has been rebranded as “the welcome week”, in order to underline positive intentions. It has attracted national media attention together with the annual school revue. The latest article from 17th of February 2017 had the title “We have heard that people do blowjobs in order to get to participate in the revue, but we don’t know of any personally” and followed up on a report on sexual culture among youth in Oslo (Aftenposten, 2017). As the boys in the sample explain it, the events have undergone a historical transformation from being extreme initiation rites (hazing games, as some of them call it themselves) to become harmless events. This can also be understood as classical elite institutions aimed at creating a common identity losing their position. Some welcome this change because it gives them fewer concerns, while others are a bit negative towards the weakening of this identity formative arena. Such as Knut who selfreflexively makes an object out of himself in such situations:
My perspective is that objectively it is instructional to experience exclusion. I am not saying that I would welcome being rejected by a group that I wanted to be a part of. That would have sucked.
But objectively, I will encounter social exclusion anyways, whether it is now or later in life. I don’t see any reason to not experience it early when I will encounter it again anyways. It is much easier to cope with when you know, or when you have experienced it.
He explains experiences of exclusionary practice as unavoidable, and therefore appreciates them as enabling him able to cope with it later in his life. This positioning of oneself as a potential object for an unpleasant practice, but nevertheless supporting the practice was found among several of the students.
When I asked Ole about the ritual at Frognerparken he said: “I think we – we do move close to the edge of what is acceptable and not, but I think we’re good, in a way”. This shows the interest in transgressing, but also within certain limitations, and in other words that they are aware of how the activities will be perceived “outside”.
At OCS it is especially one group/association that is important and that is Mercur. Mercur was founded in 1877, has its own office, and has been arranging debates, meetings, parties, Valentine’s Day, easter egg hunt and the annual Christmas ball in the assembly hall. Esben, who I interviewed, was a part of Mercur, and said that he had been at a meeting with rector and got a message that it was not accepted that Mercur was a part of the Frognerparken ritual.
Me: So, you were not there?
Esben: I have been there both years, but not officially. Officially no one is there. What happens is that a third-year student sends a message to a guy in first grade and gets him to organise Frognerparken.
Me: And this is often someone who is a little brother?
Esben: Yes, something like that. And they have to write that they will take upon them all the blame if something happens. In that way we make sure that it is not the third-years who organise it.
As for what goes on at Frognerparken he says it’s a circle where people are dared to do things in the centre. He mentions rap battles and dance battles, and says it is generally fun, and that everybody gets embarrassed. Whereas the corridor and most of the welcome week can be considered the frontstage of the school landscape, the Frognerparken ritual belongs to the backstage (Gaztmbide-Fernandéz, 2009, p. 140). Being an unofficial event also means that many students do not participate, as for example Aidin from the east side, who says that he wasn’t interested in taking the trip back to the west side at the evening to attend, and that: “I won’t say I was scared, but the first week I keep a low profile”. Eva tells about several of the “dares”: “Make out with as many as possible in one minute”, “Eat a banana from the crotch of this guy”, og “make a chain of clothes”. “It becomes very embarrassing”, she said, “but I think it was fun. The making out was a bit strange, but eating a banana from the crotch, that’s “ha-ha, it looks like a penis”, childish humour, so I don’t think that’s a problem”. Eva is also one of the students who attend the school having an older sibling at the school before, and she says that if she had only been two years younger than her sister, attending the school at the same time, it would have been guaranteed that she would have been picked do something in the ring. This also shows that students without clear connections are handled more carefully in the rituals.
The school revue gets a lot of attention, and is structured around different groups, such as the actors and writers, costume, rig/amphitheatre, a group called “Kos og stemning”, responsible for providing a good atmosphere around the work, and a group called “raid”, responsible for organising parties. This is typically something which involves mostly the third-years, but the second-year students are also to some degree part of it, and supports the view that this is a status arena for the students. The revue gets reviewed in national newspapers alongside other school revues, and OCS is known for getting a good reception.
When it comes to the graduation celebrations, the “russetid”, OCS have very many active students. Eva says the planning starts on the first day of school, whereas other students actually start even earlier, before they start school since they already know that they will attend OCS. The celebration is centred around organising groups and buying a bus, which they spend time on constructing. The buses all have different concepts, songs, and clothing, and they hire their own drivers. In order to be accepted as a part of a bus one is allegedly in need of a two-thirds vote from the present members of the bus. The cost of these buses is significant, one of the students estimate that it is about 30–40,000 NOK per student. Not all students participate on a bus, and the ones who do not are explicit on feeling a bit excluded when they are not. The buses open up for others joining on the bus for a night or a period, but this is for a fee. Many students have part-time jobs in order to pay for participation at a bus, and they also do collective work for the bus. As such the organising of the “russetid” at OCS has a certain gründer spirit to it, and they conceive of it in this way as well. They learn how to run a kind of business, in a way. The buses are practical in many ways, but especially because they become autonomous spaces for the students, providing them a ”party on wheels” (Fjær, Pedersen, & Sandberg, 2016). Here they do not have to worry about showing ID or being subject to guards, such as at a club. Anne tells about staying awake for 18 hours on constitution day, and partying pretty much every afternoon in May. The prestige amongst OCS students is to still perform well at exams while partying hard.
5.3 Questionnaire
All of the 34 students we interviewed at OCS filled out a questionnaire that we gave them, providing us information on where they lived, their parents occupation and information on cars, bedrooms, computers, books and money at disposal. The fact that the schools are elite schools does not automatically entail that the students are elite students or come from elite backgrounds. In sociological research on Oslo there has been consistent findings about a division between east and west, where the west is well-off and the east less well-off. Among the students we interviewed only four were from the east, and three of them from the inner-city east, leaving a domination of students from the west side. Apart from two parents all the parents have prominent positions. 20 of the students belong to families with two or more cars, equalling 59%. As a comparison, in the general population of Oslo only 18% have access to two or more cars.[iv] All except one have their own bedroom. When it comes to vacations two responded to not having been on vacations the last year, three had been on one vacation, eleven had been on two vacations, and the rest (18) had been on two or more. Nine of the students reported having more than 1000 books at home. Nineteen of the students have two or more computers at home. We also asked them about money at disposal, meaning how much they could spend according to their own wishes during a month, and got the following result:
Table 5.1 Response to the question: “How much money do you have at your desposal monthly?”
| NOK | Nr. of students |
|---|---|
| 100–499 | 3 |
| 500–999 | 5 |
| 1000–1999 | 11 |
| 2000–2999 | 5 |
| 3000–4999 | 5 |
| 5000 + | 5 |
As the table shows, the students have a considerable amount at disposal. The result of the questionnaire provides more information on who the students we met were, but also on what type of students attend the OCS and especially in contrast to SO, where we got answers to the same questionnaire.
5.4 Schola Osloensis – the school for diversity, the school for you
Schola Osloensis attracts students from all over Oslo and is considered a school for smart students. It is therefore known as a school where many different students meet, but meet as equals at a knowledge level and this is considered a strength at the school. This is why one of the results of the research project this was a part of is called “Revenge of the Nerds” (Pedersen, Flemmen, & Jarness, 2018). One of the first things you are struck with when talking to a student at SO is the openness, they have towards being “weird” and talking about having experiences with being bullied at lower secondary school. Asked about how she would describe SO Amalia says:
I think that we are a collection of people who want to be a bit weird, and that wants to… that express ourselves as we want. I think very many students find themselves during their time at school, to be a bit stereotypical, it is such an open environment for weirdos that people can do whatever they want and not get any judgmental looks.
As examples she mentions a trend of walking bare feet at school and dying the hair blue or orange, but generally the point is to “be yourself”. An example that several students bring forth as typically SO is playing quidditch in the school yard in the breaks, this is also an impression of SO by the students at OCS (“They play quidditch”). The experiences of being weird is in contrast to “society outside”, since it is normal to be weird at SO. An example of this might be the plethora of student groups which are organised around different activities, such as fandom around Harry Potter, Game of Thrones or “fabelprosa” (fable prose)[v]. Some groups are organised around social issues, such as the “nature and youth” group, or the “queer at SO” group. The “fabelprosa” group centres around board gaming, role playing and “zombie living”. Another activity that is organised as a group is Model United Nations, which have been studied in elite school context in Scandinavia before (Persson, 2016, 2023). David says in one of the interviews that it is a big thing at SO, and that it allows them to travel to other countries. He participates one evening every week in that group. Generally, the students are very concerned with embracing different expressions, diversity, and this along with their form of “weirdness” is also observable in the classrooms:
Figure 5.5 One of the walls in a classroom contains this poster of The Beatles, and the messages: “No one was surprised when I wanted to join 3A”, “The class for diversity”, and “The class for you”
One of the classrooms are filled with LPs on the walls (Jesus Christ Superstar, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon amongst others), and has a shelf with different books and DVDs that the students have compiled, making a kind of class library. Their preoccupation with music from the 60s, 70s and 80s goes well with the typical story of SO-students as dressed in secondhand clothes and typically with a bit more alternative style. The library of SO also has this community feeling, it is usual to encounter students sitting for themselves reading there, and on the walls, there are discussion boards where the students might recommend books to each other. When I was there the recommendations were: Augustin – Confessions, Dumas’ Le Comte du MonteCristo, Thoreau’s Walden (“Should be read by all technological people!”), and “everything by Percy Jackson! – important to learn some Greek mythology”.
Also, there was an invitation to attend the society for free poetry’s meeting at the nearby cemetery, illustrated with images from the Dead Poets Society film.
Figure 5.6 Poster for the society for free poetry
On the one hand there is this impression of students hanging up posters and making the school theirs, while on the other hand it also has the classical and historical side. The building itself is from 1902, the same year women were allowed as students. Inside there are marble boards with the names of notable former students engraved, and a large portrait of the poet Henrik Wergeland. The school also contains a special library with the collection of Wergeland’s writings, adding to the impression of being a museum since it explicitly has preservation as its raison d’être. In 2012 the building was partially reconstructed, and an assembly hall was built underneath the school yard. Underneath is a picture from the school yard where the entrance is from this new construction:
Figure 5.7 SO seen from the school yard to the left of the entrance there’s a chess game, and to the right there are students playing ping pong
To the right in this picture is the canteen, which is a free-standing building in the school yard. Underneath the school yard there is an assembly hall where, for instance, the graduation ceremony is held. When I went to it the hall was filled with about 600 hundred family and friends, and it included music by the choir called “Pebling” who wear cloaks. Their repertoire includes for instance singing an excerpt from Messa di Gloria by Puccini (Pedersen et al., 2018). Afterwards there was speeches and awarding of diplomas from national competitions such as the Physics Olympics and the National Philosophy Tournament. On the cloaks of the Pebling choir is the seal of the school, which is also a part of the stained-glass window in the staircase:
Figure 5.8 The seal of the school in stained glass window. It says: “Schola Osloensis
AD 1153–19”
Another stained-glass window, in the assembly hall where the theatre group have their rehearsals, has a quote by Goethe in German, contributing to a mood of bildung and culture.
Figure 5.9 The stained-glass window in one of the assembly halls at SO contains a quote by Goethe in German: “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht” [The one who strives]
SO is preoccupied with its literary aspects, and the theatre is a good example of this. Whereas the other schools in Oslo have revues with songs, jokes and comedy, SO put up plays (sometimes based on novels) such as Crime and Punishment by Dostojevskij (2015) and A Dream Play by August Strindberg (2016). The theatre and revue groups seem to perform some of the same social functions albeit with significantly different content. In the library there is a poster of “The Literary Disciples of SO”, meaning former students who are authors, and includes notable authors from the 18th and 19th century, as well as Theodor Caspari and Arnulf Øverland, for instance, who were important authors in the interwar period, and then notable authors from the last decades, such as Jostein Gaarder, Jan Kjærstad and Inger Elisabeth Hansen.
Literature is also prevalent in the interviews with the students, they actively talk about literature they read and want to read, which marks a significant contrast to OCS. As Pedersen, Jarness and Flemmen (2018) documented the students at SO are clearly oriented towards the legitimate cannon, and use the Bible, Homer’s The Odyssey and The Illiad as well as Sylvia Plath, Gabriel García Márquez and Elena Ferrante who are mentioned in the interviews as examples. It is not necessarily the type of literature that is read that is important, as Sofia notes about first day of school when everyone was expected to mention what they were preoccupied with, and a lot of people answered what they were reading, but one of the students:
Then there’s this guy sitting very correct at his chair and was like: “I read Hemingway”. It made me laugh. He didn’t just read Hemingway, he “read Hemingway” [mimicking a self-indulgent voice]. Haha.
The point here is that the way of presenting your interests were also the subject of attention among the students.
Asked about the elite status of the school most of the students hesitate and self-reflexively allow a discussion, such as Cecilia who does not really want to use the word “elite”: “I think it’s a difficult word to use. Yes, we do have good results. But I feel “elite” is such a negatively loaded word.” She elaborates indicating that she understands why the question is posed: “There is something with the tradition and consciousness about it, that it has always been [an elite school]”. On the other hand, there are several students who connects the elite status to high performing students and not any negative aspects. Serina from the east side says: “You get very much [from attending SO]. The “Oh, you’re one of those, one who attends SO”. It does mean something.” She elaborates: “A lot of social networks are created here, and you get a lot of opportunities.” Julie also talks about the notion that at SO you get the impression that some of your peers will become something big, they will “end up on the board” (referring to the board in the staircase with the names of notable earlier students). As Pedersen, Jarness and Flemmen (2018) also have shown, the students try to neutralise the elite aspect of the school, especially when it is defined broader than with a focus on academic orientation or results. I have underlined that this neutralisation, or disavowal of elite status does not appear as clear or strategic, but rather as a way of connecting stories about their own school to widespread ideals in Norwegian society, such as egalitarianism (Halvorsen, 2022). The way the students make meaning of the school is tightly connected to the national narratives presented in Chapter 2 and the “code of modesty’ that Gullestad (1992) claimed is significant for Norwegians, as also mentioned by Pedersen, Jarness and Flemmen (2018).
Figure 5.10 A classroom with a wall painting of a building with Latin inscriptions
At SO students encounter different social milieux because of the wide geographical recruitment, and one of the typical distinctions that appear is between houses and apartments, and east and the west side. As Anette says when asked about fellow students from the west side:
They have so much space, and so many things, in a way… It is obvious wealth. Even though they say: “No, we don’t have that much money”, they actually do. You can only look at the vacations they go to. Even though they maybe do not use a lot of money on a daily basis or enjoy showing off, they do have a lot. That is pretty obvious. And it is not so [much] fun to have the feeling of not having a private life, because we have such a small apartment.
She also says she gets provoked when they visit her and call their apartment “cosy” and “cute”. As such these elite schools provides encounters with inequality which are quite unique (Halvorsen, 2023).
The embracement of diversity at SO nonetheless have some borders, and one of the boundaries is feminism. At SO it is unaccepted to not be a feminist. Another might be vegetarianism or veganism, if one does not accept vegetarianism or veganism, one is define outside of the SO community. Pedersen, Jarness and Flemmen (2018, p. 62) argue that this symbolic boundary drawing against those who do not conform to these values might function as elite distinction: “Liberal values, it seems, are not necessarily synonymous with egalitarianism and openness”.
5.5 Rituals at SO
First day of school at SO consists of meetings with the classes in their classrooms, and less focus on the ritual aspects than OCS, but it nonetheless is experienced as special by many of the students. As Anette says:
It was almost like entering Hogwarts, there were so many hallways and staircases that you cannot imagine, and it leads to, for instance the assembly hall [with the Goethe quote], that is a very strange place, right, imagine that we have a place like that. Inside there were lots of groups, such as the Harry Potter group. And the teachers we met were really cool. At this school it is the natural sciences teachers who are the coolest … It seemed so good. So right. It was like something more than a school.
Sofia also tells us about the special atmosphere at school the first day, with a slight nervousness because of many new people:
It does not play any role whether we were friends beforehand or not, we were only alone then, so we got together and had that community. That I remember. That everybody was friends, and everybody was equal. Precisely because everybody was as alone as the others.
The warmth the students of SO describe the school with is daunting. They describe the school as a place which they belonged to and were met with open arms. The first week of school is especially centered around these groups since it is a recruitment period for them, but this does not equal any particular competition or hierarchy between them, according to the students. The only slight exception might be the theatre group which many said has a certain prestige and know it themselves. Amalia says the theatre group “has status, or not exactly status, but you know who they are”. When asked about which students have prestige or status at SO, David answers that it is:
The politically active who are on television and on the radio at times. They are high up. And then it is the people in the theatre, but I’m not sure it’s right to put it in a hierarchy like that.
This self-reflexive distancing from or resistance towards constructing hierarchies is prevalent in many of the accounts. It goes along with the general attitude of embracing diversity.
Apart from the recruitment of the groups, the first week also includes outdoor activities organised by third-year students for the first-years, and it also is about doing humiliating things together. The students at SO however do not speak particularly much about this, and it seems of lesser importance. The third-year students are not ascribed any particular role regarding the first-years. They also have informal gatherings, typically in parks such as St. Hanshaugen, but is not a ritual in any meaningful sense of the term, since the students do not really embrace it:
It was fun, and we played the “Never have I ever” drinking game, and all the second years were like “yes, we’ve been there everybody”, and they had alcohol, and then the first years are like “cool, but I have not really been able to obtain any alcohol”.
There is a lack of enthusiasm around these activities that make them less important when it comes to creating cohesion, and the cohesion is typically not across cohorts at SO, but within. Another game that is played the first weeks at SO, that has a stronger commitment, is called “the Ninja game”, and is a kind of role play where all the participants get a “victim” they are supposed to “kill” and this also entails that everyone has to avoid getting killed themselves. When you are about to “kill” someone you have to put on a ninja mask by tying a black t-shirt around your head and there are several ways to kill someone but in common for all of them is that the victim is not supposed to notice this before it happens. One way is to put a sock over the victim’s hand, another is to put almond essence on the victim’s food This goes on at school time and only at the school area but is not allowed during class. It often takes several months before a winner is crowned.
When it comes to graduation celebration, the “russetid”, this is obviously not important at SO. It is like a reversed world from OCS. The students do wear the (red) “russe”-uniforms, but they do not organise around buses, and the celebration is in a kind of contrast to the way of doing it at OCS. As Anette says:
A: Last year there was a bus, but it was not real. They were only pretending. So, yeah, that is telling.
Interviewer: So, you’re celebrating ironically, in a way?
A: Yes, at least those with the “bus” last year. A lot of people participate, but it is a very different attitude towards it. The “russetid” isn’t everything.
In other words, Anette says that the celebration is more important other places than at SO, where they typically value schoolwork and intellectual activities more than partying. However, they are allegedly one of the two schools who participate in the parades at constitution day, showing a more traditional approach to the celebration. Anette says that their participation at the constitution day is defining:
It’s a shared mentality. “We are SO students, and we do like this. Everyone else has to follow behind”. We participate in the constitution day parade we have a choir and we play quidditch in the breaks. It’s very open, it’s something for everyone. I have never heard about anyone who is dissatisfied with their choice [of school].
Interviewer: You participate in the parade. Is that special?
Foss also does, but we are the only upper secondary schools who do. We are the last ones in the parade, so many people join in behind. We have breakfast at school together first, and then the choir sings at the cemetery in front of everyone before we leave for the parade.
This is a very typical activity for the constitution day in Norway, but many of the upper secondary schools and their students prioritise their specific “russetid” and do the constitution day celebration in a less formal way.
The theatre marks a very different interest for performing arts at SO than the revues that are common at many of the other upper secondary schools in Oslo. There are some views upon it being a bit more challenging to attract audience and get it reviewed in the newspaper, and as such less appealing than the revues, but it is nonetheless backed by most of the students. They are proud of the theatre and that SO is different from the others, even though it might be perceived as special. This also resonates well with the diversity embracement, and a general view that those with interest for revue can attend other schools. There is interest for revues at SO nonetheless, and Sofia tells about an interesting encounter when she and three friends went to see the revue at OCS: “We felt so lonely, we were standing in a group, we were entirely normal, wearing what we usually wear and was just about to see the revue. But it was like being in… communism! They were looking exactly the same.” Then she goes on to praise the revue saying she was surprised and that it really was good, both the jokes, the performances, the show and pretty much all its aspects. Especially she was impressed with how timely and political the jokes were. But there is one thing she did not like: “I did not like their program. They had a program, and it was filled with typos and it was completely terrible to read. So, my prejudice was correct after all, OCS was back to the way one supposes OCS to be.
5.6 Questionnaire
At SO we interviewed 39 students and got response to the questionnaire from all of them. Again, this is information on where they lived, their parents’ occupations, and information on cars, bedrooms, computers, books and money at their disposal. Comparing to the four from Oslo east at OCS, the sample at SO is clearly different. There are 21 students from Oslo east at SO, and 17 from the west – leaving one student out of the count. This student actually lived outside of Oslo, but registered as living at her grandmother’s apartment in Oslo in order to be able to attend SO. It is only one example but shows a clear ambition about where to attend school. The parents all have prominent positions with a slight lean towards cultural sector – there is a film producer, several artists, architects and authors among the parents. Twelve students claimed to have more than 1000 books at home (31% compared to 26% at OCS). Ten of them reported having access to two or more cars, equalling 26% – half of the amount at OCS, but still higher than the average in Oslo. Only one reported not having access to a car. All except two have their own bedrooms. Two of the students reported not having been on vacations the last year, where seventeen reported having been on one vacation. Eight students reported having been on two vacations, whereas eleven reported having been on two or more vacations. This is a slightly different picture than from OCS, where many more had been on several vacations. Thirty of the students have two or more computers at home. When it comes to money at disposal during a month for the students at SO, the numbers are as following:
Table 5.2 Response to the question: “How much money do you have at your desposal monthly?”
| NOK | Nr. of students |
|---|---|
| 100–499 | 6 |
| 500–999 | 16 |
| 1000–1999 | 7 |
| 2000–2999 | 6 |
| 3000–4999 | 2 |
| 5000 + | 2 |
This is much lower than the money at disposal for the students at OCS, probably having consequences for life at school.
5.7 Conclusion
Persson (2016, p. 1) and several Swedish researchers (see for example Börjesson et al., 2015; Bihagen et al., 2013) have claimed that the notions of egalitarianism in the educational debate actually obscures the fact that institutions for elite schooling exist in Scandinavia, and historically has been a part of the societies. Agreeing with this claim, this is an attempt that hopes for allowing more research on elite schooling in Scandinavia and the mechanisms of social stratification at work within the institution.
Rather than taking a critical approach focusing on the distinctions made by the students, I have been preoccupied with trying to understand their surroundings and how they relate to them. They are not merely products of their background but exist and participate in a cultural context which they negotiate in different ways. The rituals, as symbolic sequences of action repeated as tradition with specific dates, places and participants, are a part of this institutional setting the students negotiate, and as such provides a good entry point for understanding the arenas. Gaztambide-Fernandéz (2009, p. 136) have pointed out the importance of rituals for elite schools in creating shared experiences and the self-understanding of the students as distinguished from other adolescents; “it generates implicit boundaries around entitlement and gives students a sense of certainty about their future”. The importance and intensity of the rituals regarding, for instance, creating identity and/or community varies, as this chapter shows, according to how people negotiate them. I hope to have shown how the meaning-making activities of the students at SO and OCS are deeply cultural and more than the strategical image of an elite student that is most often brought forward in the sociological research.
The presentation of the strikingly different school cultures at SO and OCS have hopefully shown how different paths towards elite identities exist in Norway. The knowledge of and experience from these cultures provide the students with advantages in their life afterwards, and especially the symbolic mastery of being part of an elite institution in an egalitarian society such as in Norway can be considered an asset of importance to which they have had privileged access.
[i] Also exhibited in the halls is a letter from the author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson dating from 1926 and a large globe, allegedly dating from the second world war, according to the students.
[ii] There is one former student who is excluded from this display, and that is the person who at the time was known as Anders Behring Breivik, and who committed the Norway terror attacks of 22nd of July 2011. His picture has been removed, according to one of the interviewees.
[iii] There are some private schools, and local examples where these actually compete with public schools for the best students, but the general picture is one of a primarily state-run schooling system.
[iv] https://www.toi.no/getfile.php/1340016-1427184703/mmarkiv/Bilder/7020-TOI_faktaark_bilreiser-3k.pdf
[v] An umbrella term for fantasy, science fiction and horror literature developed by the Norwegian authors Jon Bing and Tor Åge Bringsværd.