”En extra grej på biblioteket” : Skrivarverksamhet på folkbibliotek

Sammanfattning: The aim of this master thesis’s is to examine what functions writing activities can have in the public library. Some public libraries offer their visitors writing activities, for example courses and camps. The public library is an institution with a particular identity, with special norms and properties which participants within the institution construct and reproduce. The main question of this thesis is to investigate how writing activities can be a part of the public library’s institutional identity and what functions writing activities in the public library can have. The sub-questions are: How do individuals, like librarians, writing-leaders and participants, describe the writing activity? In which way do the individuals justify writing activities in the public library? In what way does the writing activity reproduce the public library’s institutional identity? To answer these questions a qualitative perspective has been added which mean that the primary information consist of interviews with individuals that have diverse experiences of writing activities in the public library. The theoretical basis of this study is a cultural policy model designed by Dorte Skot-Hansen, consisting of three rationalities: humanistic, sociological and instrumental. The rationalities explain what functions culture can have within the society. In the study the instrumental rationality has been modified into a market-orientated one, because the other two rationalities also can have instrumental properties. The findings of the study show that writing activities within the library can have different kinds of functions. Writing activities can have a self-developing popular-adult-education function, it can function as a cultural-agent, as a social-agent, it works like recognition for amateur-culture, it can be a meeting-place and a cultural experience. These functions show also how the writing activities reproduce the public library’s institutional identity.