Understanding the discourse of creative economy and its international dissemination: The case of the Czech Republic between 1999 and 2017

This thesis explores the relation between culture and the state and presents a critical analysis of the proliferation of new cultural policy discourse, the discourse of creative economy, in the Czech Republic between the years 1999–2017. Drawing on post-structuralist ontology and language-focused analytical methods, the thesis analyses 12 national and city policy documents, and transcripts of 40 interviews with Czech and foreign cultural policy actors, such as public officers, policy consultants, artists and directors of arts institutions. The thesis reveals the interrelations between the agency of policy actors and the trans-national institutions’ turn towards creative economy and explains the social, political, and ideological logics of the creative economy discourse in the Czech cultural policy field. The analysis exposes and critiques the rhetorical strategies of the Third Way politics, such as the shift towards an instrumentalist rhetoric, appeal on consensual interconnection of antagonistic political positions throughout the cultural sector and the acts of foregrounding the use value of the arts for economy. Based on a detailed analysis of argumentative structures, metaphors and narratives, the study reveals how ideological beliefs embedded in common sense combined with specific circumstances such as extremely precarious working conditions in the cultural sector, socio-economic spatial differentiation, corruption and ‘informal politics’ lead to ideological closures and help to constitute and maintain hegemonic power of neoliberal cultural policy regimes.