Erling Bjurström

The struggle for ethnicity - Swedish youth styles and the construction of ethnic identities

The struggle for ethnicity - Swedish youth styles and the construction of ethnic identities

Cultural policy and the meaning of modern and post‐modern taste, with concluding remarks on the case of Sweden

The article scrutinizes how the relationship between the reformation of taste, descending from the middle of the nineteenth century, and the modern and post‐modern art revolutions in the twentieth century has affected cultural policy. By the dynamics and life‐cycles, but also enduring traits of these reform and art movements, and especially after the post‐modern art revolution and the coinciding decline of the Great Reformation of Taste, taste has become a bypassed and arduous subject in cultural policy, as can be discerned in the case of Sweden, which is highlighted in the last part of the article. Furthermore, without the solid and unanimous ambitions to reform taste, which the Great Reformation of Taste embodied up until the 1950s and 1960s, cultural policy makers can no longer rely on – but also find themselves more independent of – civil enterprises to reform taste. One plausible outcome of this is that cultural policies, more or less unintentionally, will enhance the subjectivization and privatization of taste.

The Relational Politics of Aesthetics: An Introduction

This introductory chapter presents the basic idea and topic of the book—the relations between aesthetics and cultural policy. We understand cultural policy as the organized, mainly but not exclusively public support, economic or otherwise, of the production and distribution of cultural expressions. The chapter gives some introductory answers to these questions: What kind of relations are there between aesthetics and cultural policy? And, furthermore, how can concepts from aesthetical theory shed light on cultural policy practice? The main argument of the chapter is that cultural policy is a practical and pragmatic operationalization of aesthetic theory. This vantage point has analytical relevance both for the analysis of cultural policy and for an empirical discussion of central concepts from the aesthetical canon.

Musical Nation Bildung: The Twin Enterprises Concerts Norway and Concerts Sweden

By exploring and comparing the history of the twin enterprises Concerts Norway and Concerts Sweden from the 1960s up till today, Bjurstrom and Hylland show how efforts to democratise and make high ...

Reviews : Andreas Häger: Religion, rock och pluralism. En religionssociologisk studie av kristen diskurs om rockmusik (Religion, rock and pluralism: A study of Christian discourse on rock music from a sociology of religion perspective) Uppsala universitet. Teologiska institutionen, religionssociologi, 2001

Andreas Hdger’s Religion, rock and pluralism is at least to my knowledge the first study which aims to grasp the Christian discourse on rock music in its entirety. However, this is also embedded in a further aim, namely, to understand how Christian institutions and groups have reacted to competitive world views and rival definitions of reality in a modern pluralistic society. Therefore, Hdger states from the outset that rock music is merely used as an empirical example of a more general process. But nevertheless, in this way Hdger’s study gives a good overview of Christian reactions to rock music in the 1980s and 1990s.