Cultural Capital? - On the view of culture and cultural policy in Lund's application process to become Sweden's European Cultural Capital of 2014.

Sammanfattning: The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine the ways in which culture and cultural policy are being articulated in the process of Lund's application to become Sweden's European Cultural Capital of 2014. I have used Dorte Skot-Hansen's three cultural political rationalities: the humanistic-, the sociological- and the instrumental rationality, as well as and Jenny Johannisson's extension of those into three cultural-political discourses, as sensitizing concepts in my analysis. The questions raised are: How are the three rationalities/discourses articulated in the chosen central documents and in the process surrounding them? Which themes and arguments dominate the chosen documents? The main objects of my study have been four texts that have been produced in the applicationprocess: a Prestudy, a Plan of action, a Broschure and a Cultural policy. Along with them local political protocols, newspaper articles and other related material have been used. The research method applied was a qualitative eclectical textual analysis with emphasis on the content and on tracing the way the rationalities were expressed in the material. The rationalities were all found to be articulated in the four texts. I found that the third instrumental, marketoriented, rationality had attained a status of hegemonious metarationality. The overall goal of the project is city development and economic growth through cultural means. The metarationality's ideas have become "common sense" and are rarely being questioned. The other rationalities are not descibed as being in conflict with this metarationality's goals and means, instead the marketoriented rationality is pictured as creating the necessary conditions for the other two. The many unclarities about the project's goals or inner priorities, which are typical for large extraordinary projects according to Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson, make possible attraction of many groups of interest and people who are in favor of different rationalities, who might be able to use it as an instrument to achieve their own goals.