Marketing research has acknowledged the concept of authenticity. It is argued that consumers in modern society increasingly search for something real, in contrast to what they perceive as mediated and distorted. Producers of regional food brands has acknowledged this trend, and started to market their products as being authentic. Given the potential practical and theoretical contributions in studying the concept of authenticity in this context, this study aims to explore how consumers perceive these claims of authenticity. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to extend knowledge on how consumers come to perceive a regional food brand as authentic.

This essay deals with ruins from the perspective of their cultural values ??and the impact of add-ons, protective add-ons and caring actions affect these values. The issues in the essay are; What are the cultural values of a ruin?  How have ruins been used?  How are ruins treated today?Initially the definition of the concept ?ruin? is discussed, what is a ruin? A building has an architectural biography: the creation, destruction, change and the decay. The concept of ruin is considered to be a state of this decay, rather than a dead building.

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.

The aim of this bachelor thesis has been to examine and develop our own understanding about how young people in Sweden (16-29 years of age), take part in cultural activities. As librarians it is important to know what kind of activities and interests this particular group has. With Pierre Bourdieu?s theoretical framework towards habitus and capital we are interested to see if there is a connection between one?s cultural use and background, if different access to capital with or within groups has an affect or not. With both statistics and interviews with people within our target, we believe this data has been sufficient enough to conduct a good and valid study.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to study various views of sponsorship in relation to public libraries as found within three cultural policy documents. The main objective is to discover which ideas are considered relevant in the partnership between the Swedish retail chain, Åhléns, and the children?s public library, ?Room for Children? (Rum för Barn). In 2005, Åhléns provided SEK3.14 million in sponsorship to ?Room for Children? at Kulturhuset in Stockholm.

Young women with immigrant background are generally looked upon as victims of patriarchal structures and cultural determinism.The purpose of this bachelor thesis was therefore to have a salutogen perspective. We investigated how young women with a transcultural background are affected by and how they use their experiences from different backgrounds in their creating of identity.We based our essay on qualitative interviews and current research on the subjects of multi culture, identity and youth. The interviewees were seven young women with experience of multi cultural background and performing different kind of artistic activity.The theory and empirical material combined and compared resulted in three themes: affinity, cultural hybridization, and salutogen factors.We saw that for those young women affinity functioned as a basis for creating identity and that their double background enriches them in several aspects. The three major salutogen factors that the interviewees had in common, and we emphasize, are their struggle, open mind and awareness of freedom.The global youth culture has a great impact upon the young women and to some extent we could recognize cultural hybridization. We consider this neglected subject urgent and very relevant for social work in the multi cultural society of Sweden..

Local cultural environment planning in Sweden often comes to rely on municipal heritage plans. These plans are meant to facilitate management of local cultural values, work as a tool for local planning and increase awareness of cultural environments for the public. In the last decades public participation in planning has become more and more of the ideal strategy, challenging the idea of cultural environment planning as an expert-led field. The idea of the field as one that implicates public participation as a strategy has been fortified in Sweden through national goals, government bills and conventions. Nevertheless the implementation of public participation in municipal heritage plans remains quite uncharted. The aim of this study is to explore public participation in regards to how municipal heritage plans are developed and the perception of public participation in cultural environment planning amongst professionals, comparing bigger and smaller municipalities.

This paper examines difficulties that heirs to swedified sami persons experience when learning about how colonialism forced a lot of people to hide or dim their sami identity. The purpose is to examine what genealogy can mean for these people and how it differs from the ?regular? genealogy; what makes these heirs willing or not willing to call themselves sami and how the cultural traumas and family wounds can be understood as dark cultural heritage and how these can be resolved. With cultural heritage and history usage theories, Hall?s theories of hybrid identities, and Aarelaid-Tart?s trauma model, I have analysed material from six interviewees and some of my autoetnography to conclude that sami genealogy is an important factor in shaping a more complete and decolonized view of history and one?s identity, that descendants of samis won?t call themselves sami because of a lack of sami ?capital? but want to as a way of not letting colonialism win, and that cultural traumas and family wounds heal through talking about them ? not hiding from them. The dark heritage is a necessary part of the sami identity build. I have also concluded that sami identity have always been nuanced, there isn?t one correct way to be sami..

Webexhibits is a growing but unexplored, cultural phenomenon that indicates a new use of the Internet for cultural communication. In the essay two quantitative methods, logganalysis and websurveys, have been used to study the visitors in 5hus.nu. The purpose is to generate knowledge about webexhibits as a cultural manifestation and medium by studying the experience and actions of its visitors. To achieve the aim the paper explores the methodological questions of how to study webusers. Theories about the exhibition as a medium and the web as a virtual area of exhibits have been used to understand and interpret the results.

How can you do a right measurement of culture as well as with other social sectors and with what can culture contribute when it comes to a town´s development? We found out that in Linköping the regional federation Ostsam recently (2005) started mapping the region's creative centers in order to look into the spreading of the culture in the county, and then use the uniqueness of the culture as an advantage in society- planning contexts. The reason was that both municipal - and State directions detected that the culture has a broader importance when it comes to building up society and infrastructure than earlier considered. This is called Cultural planning and is the foundation- method that Östsam used when working with their new projekt The creative sector. The outcome of the Östsam study resulted in an exciting study basis to work further on with and to examine through own demarcations and directions.This research manages the matter of the creative sector as an extension to the cultural sector.

The purpose of this study is to investigate which types of cultural capital gives high status in the current field of ?the creative industry? ? a group which could be seen as a new power elite in Gothenburg ? and how people with the ?right? cultural capital is included in the field. The author is invited to several free events within this field, and is investigating the process of inclusion with an auto-ethnographic method. The study will show that the process of inclusion is working quite absolute in the field of the creative industry, and that the audiences are mainly homogenous: masculine, white, middle class, has a taste disposition of the ?eclectic omnivore?, has entrepreneurial knowledges and is an active social media agent.

The purpose of this master thesis is to study sponsoring of culture. The questions asked are: What are the reasons for sponsoring? What are the advantages of sponsoring? What are the disadvantages of sponsoring? What is the relation between public grants and sponsoring? The thesis is based upon studies of literature and a case study in Malmoe. Malmoe Public Library received about a million SEK over a period of three years from the foundation of Foreningssparbanken Skane. The money finances two projects, one with new books, Nyhetstorget, and one with strengthened information for small companies, Projekt Förstärkt Näringslivsinformation.

This essay focuses on Finnish immigrants living in Sweden and their experiences of educationof literature in Swedish upper secondary school. It concerns the fact of how education ofliterature can be used to strengthen students? formation of cultural identity. The essay tries toidentify obstacles as well as possibilities in the teaching of literature with a view to deepenand enrich this process. The method consists of a phenomenological approach includinginterviews with a group of Finnish immigrants living in Sweden.

The main domain in which eating disorders are defined is medical, whereas socio-cultural perspectives are less common. Because social workers seeks to explain different problems taking societal factors into account, we asked ourselves if social workers have a way of understanding eating disorders, that is different from a medical point of view. Two focus group interviews were conducted; the one composed by social workers with experience of working with eating disorders, and the other by social workers without that experience, which enabled comparisons. The interviews were analyzed using socio-cultural and feminist perspectives. The result showed that the social workers use socio-cultural perspectives in explaining eating disorders.

The purpose of this work has been to explore what ecosystem services a small green area in an urban environment can offer and whether specific trees can be used to maximize regulatory ecosystem services in a cultural-historical environment. Additionally, it investigates whether there is any difference in ecosystem services depending on whether these trees, or trees that better fit into the cultural-historical environment, are used. Through simulations and comparisons with existing trees in Pommerska tomten, Mariestad, Sweden, a pocket park within a national interest area, different hypothetical tree planting options are analyzed and evaluated. To measure ecosystem services, the website My-Tree, developed by the US equivalent of the Department of Agriculture, was used. By inputting data about the tree, such as location, species, vitality, stem diameter, and solar exposure, My-Tree calculates some of the ecosystem services the tree provides.