Sponsorship of culture and funding of culture : a study of discoursive change in four governmental cultural policy documents.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of funding and sponsorship of culture within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards funding and sponsorship of culture by comparing the discourse of cultural policy in the 1970s with the discourse of cultural policy in the 1990s. The theoretical and methological starting point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory. Another theoretical starting point is Danish cultural policy reasearcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of the development of cultural policy in the Nordic countries, and Norman Faircloughs, of critical discourse analysis, theory of the marketization of discourse. Four governmental cultural policy documents, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s, are analysed through a model loosely based on Laclaus and Mouffes idea of nodalpoints and elements constituting a discourse. The analysis shows that there has been a change in discourse comparing the discourse of the 1970s with the discourse of the 1990s. The discourse of the 1990s is strongly influenced by a market discourse and has a favourable attitude towards sponsorship of culture, whereas the discourse of the 1970s generally has a very negative attitude towards cooperation between culture and business. However, the analysis reveals that the change in attitude is rather only applied on a linguistic level and not in the ideology of cultural policy.Uppsatsnivå: