Today the right of the child to participate freely in cultural life and the arts is a goal on the political agenda. As a consequence, in 2011, twenty-six government agencies and institutions of culture were assigned to formulate strategies for activities for children and young people. These strategies are the empirical basis of this thesis. The aim of the study is to elaborate and problematize three issues concerning children’s culture from the viewpoint of a social constructionist understanding of childhood as constructed in various, often political, practices. -How is childhood constructed in the strategies? -Which consequences for childen’s culture can be traced? -What is the role of the UN Convention on the rights of the child in this process? I perform a critical discourse analysis of the child perspective in the strategies. The discourse analysis indicate two general discourses, one superior concerning child perspective as consideration and one inferior posing child perspective as a form of standpoint. The superior discourse is argued to maginalize children’s culture, while the inferior claims the position of the child and thereby also children’s culture. However, these categorizations can be problematized further. Together with the constructions of childhood, the discourses regarding the child perspective indicate yet another level of childhood construction. One in which the child is constructed as an individual with special needs or as one with a certain perspective. Over all, the child is constructed in close relation to the specific context in which it is being described and is constructed according to ideals of dependence and competence, ideals recurrent in the Convention on the rights of the child. It is also argued that the Convention in itself can be regarded as a construction of childhood in which power and generational structures can be problematised in various dimensions. It is concluded that childhood and children’s culture are in very close relation. They construct and position each other. It is also made clear how concepts like child perspective and children’s culture are multifaceted and often used in imprecise manners.

This study examines the construction of children and children’s rights in the context of corporate responsibility. Businesses often work with children in their philanthropic work, but have not been expected to integrate children’s rights in their core activities. The relationship between businesses and children is therefore poorly understood. This study aims to develop a better understanding of this relationship by studying the construction of children in corporate responsibility policies and website presentations. The point of departure for the analysis is that children are a minority group, meaning that they share certain characteristics and face shared problems. In order to do this, CSR theories and previous CSR research is presented from a children’s rights perspective, which provides a theoretical framework for the empirical analysis. The analysis examines cases of current relationships between businesses and children. This is done by analyzing the construction of children in the corporate responsibility policies of six companies. In order to structure the analysis, a categorization system is used which defines six distinct relationships between business and children. The study found that the internal disagreements within the field of CSR has significant implications on children’s rights and their resolution is necessary for true integration of children’s rights into CSR. Further, the children were constructed vastly differently between the companies as well as between the categories. The relationship is also contingent upon the general recognition of responsibilities by a company.