”Our last democratic living rooms” : A discourse analysis of the public libraries operational mode debate in Swedish media during the autumn of 2018

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to examine how perceptions of the public libraries’ operational mode are expressed in the media debate in the autumn of 2018. The 31 articles analyzed were retrieved from Swedish daily newspapers and Internet news sites. Questions posed in this study are: which discourses about the public libraries’ operational modes are visible in the debate?; how do the discourses portray private and public operational modes of the public libraries? and which subject positions are visible in the statements? To answer these questions Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory was used but since they don’t provide any explicit method on how to use their theory inspiration was sought in other academic papers which previously used the combined theory and method. The discourses found were named the privatization positive discourse, the privatization negative discourse and the operational mode pragmatic discourse. The privatization negative discourse is dominating in the debate due to the quantity of statements and the capability to dismiss the statements claimed in the other discourses. The analysis reveals that journalists and authors have a prominent position in the privatization negative discourse and can therefore form the discourse and the content of the debate as a whole. The position is that privatization will lead to dismantling the unique collaboration between the libraries which in turn will lead to lower quality and in the long run perhaps erode democracy. The study concludes that the debate is rather polarized itself due to different ideological perspectives