The view on market-led culture within Swedish governmental cultural policy from the 1970s and the 1990s : A contextual ideological study

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of market-led culture, focusing on literature, within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards cooperation between culture and business by comparing the attitudes and ideas expressed in the governmental policy documents from the 1970s with the governmental policy documents from the 1990s. To illuminate, and with an effort to explain, these attitudes and ideas expressed in the documents their political and social context has been studied as well. The theoretical starting point is two political ideologies, and Danish cultural policy researcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of cultural policy in the Nordic countries. The methodological starting point is two variants of analyses that are textual ones. An ideological approach is made of the governmental cultural policy documents whereas the analysis of the material of the political and social context is based on an analysis of wholeness. The ideological analysis of the four governmental cultural policy documents, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s, shows that there has been no significant change in attitude towards cooperation between culture and business when comparing them. The analysis of the political and social background shows, however, that there has been some political and social changes by comparing the 1970s with the 1990s. Though political and social change during these years no significant change seems to have happened concerning the cultural policy and the governmental attitude towards market-led culture.Uppsatsnivå: