For the past decades, culture has been given a role as a factor for local and regional development. But what is meant by development and in what ways culture can be of importance in this aspect can be unclear. This thesis examines the perception of the role for local and regional development of one specific cultural place and network – the cultural cooperative Not Quite in Fengersfors, Sweden. I study the way the role as developer is expressed and interpreted in the discourse of the cultural workers who are members of the network and in the discourse of public cultural policy in the region Västra Götaland and in Åmål municipality. The study shows that there are both similarities and differences between the discourses concerning how the role as developer is expressed. What differs is the focus on economic growth, which is expressed to be of great importance in the public cultural policy discourse. The cultural workers within Not Quite express a lack of interest in economic growth, or even a negative attitude towards it. They instead express a ”discourse of meaning”. For them, the main purpose of their artistic work is to create meaning and value for other people rather than economic growth. However, the practical effects of the differences seem quite small. There seem to be a balance between the different kinds of development Not Quite is expected to contribute to, and the cultural workers express a relaxed attitude to goals and expectations from the Västra Götaland region and Åmål municipality.

Czech cultural discourse in the Third Czechoslovak Republic The new situation occurring after World War II brought a number of changes, the reconsideration of values and searching for a new orientation in the social and political area as well as in the area of art and culture, which became the subject of often highly escalated controversy, usually conducted on the pages of the contemporary press. This diploma thesis is an analysis of the Czech cultural discourse in the Third Czechoslovak Republic that focuses not only on the textual statements themselves but even on their historical context, on the media environment in which they entered and on the positions of the actors and their access to the discourse. In the analysis, a network of interrelations between the statements, the processes of establishing key topics, forming a consensus, as well as taboo and the attempts for the appropriation of central collective symbols are monitored and reconstructed. The aim of the thesis is to become both a comprehensive characterization of discourse and a deeper insight into the diverse intellectual tendencies of the time.