Cultural policy, leisure and voluntary organizations in Norway

Abstract

This article argues that the new Norwegian cultural policy, launched in the mid 1970s, strongly emphasizing cultural democracy and administrative decentralization, has had important unintended consequences. Stressing the value of activity as a crucial part of the new ‘comprehensive concept of culture’, the policy has supported exactly those tendencies it was meant to counteract, i.e. cultural standardization, individualism, privatisation and commercialization. The new relativistic and ‘anthropological’ perspective taking as a point of departure that we all ‘have’ culture regardless of social status, geographical setting and ways of life, implies that real planning becomes impossible, because nobody can argue from a cultural perspective that certain types of activities are more important than others. As a result the new local cultural administrations have to a large extent become service institutions for voluntary organizations.