Bildning as a Central Concept in the Cultural Policy of the Swedish Government : From Arthur Engberg to Alice Bah Kuhnke
Harding, T. (2015). Bildning as a Central Concept in the Cultural Policy of the Swedish Government : From Arthur Engberg to Alice Bah Kuhnke. Nordisk Kulturpolitisk Tidskrift, 18(2), 161-181. https://www.idunn.no/nkt/2015/02/bildning_as_a_central_concept_in_the_cultural_policy_of_the
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Nordisk Kulturpolitisk TidskriftAuthors
Date
2015Copyright
© Centrum för kulturpolitisk forskning, 2015. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license.
This article explores bildning as a central concept in the development of the
explicit cultural policy of the Swedish government. It takes its point of
departure in how the concept of bildning was interpreted by Arthur Engberg,
the minister responsible for cultural policy in the Social Democrat governments
1932–1939. In his interpretation bildning was liked both to upholding the high
arts and the national culture and to the idea of re-invigorating these through
cultural policy and education. The article continues by looking at the role and
the interpretations of this concept in the later government reports and
government bills aiming to cover the entirety of Swedish cultural policy, i.e. the
government bills of 1974, 1996 and 2009, and the preceding reports. I suggest
that the concept of bildning – and specifically Engberg’s interpretation of this
concept – contributed to shaping the specific form taken by explicit cultural
policy in Sweden under Engberg’s leadership, and that this approach has
influenced later Swedish cultural policies, including the cultural policy bill of
1974. In more recent decades, more pluralistic approaches to cultural policy
and bildning appear to have started to replace this path dependency in cultural
policy, but the focus on established cultural institutions still remains. The
reasoning in this article is based on the concept of path dependency, in the sense
that historical decisions are considered to limit possible decisions later in
history, thus steering history on a path, which may or may not be in line with
the intentions of the original decision-makers.
...
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Högskolan i BoråsISSN Search the Publication Forum
1403-3216
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