Finland/ 2. General objectives and principles of cultural policy  

2.2 National definition of culture

There is no official national definition of culture in Finnish cultural policy. However, as regards official cultural statistics, culture is defined both in a wider and a narrower sense.

In the narrower sense, the term "culture" covers first the arts, which means creative and performing arts, the work of individual artists and related branches of the culture industries (fiction publishing, feature film production, classical music recordings, and the record industry, broadcasting, video and multimedia production) with sufficiently high level of cultural content. Secondly, this narrower definition covers the main domains of cultural services (public libraries and cultural programmes of adult education institutions) and cultural heritage (historical monuments and buildings, cultural sites, historical and art museums) and international cultural co-operation. General arts education (for children, youth) is usually included, while professional arts education is usually excluded for administrative reasons (they belong to the jurisdiction of higher education and science, as do the National Library and scientific and research libraries, archives and related information services).

The wider definition includes all culture industries irrespective of content, professional education in the arts and culture and all museums, scientific libraries and archives.

The recently developed EUROSTAT frame for cultural statistics is based by and large on that broader conception of culture. The framework omits crafts, public broadcasting that is financed by license fees, advertising and cultural tourism, which could also be included in the wider definition. The even wider definition would include these domains and so-called tax expenditures, the monetary estimates of tax relief to the arts and culture.

There are recent attempts to submit the arts and culture under broader categories of creative industries, creative economy or knowledge intensive industries. For instance, the national task forces which drafted, in 2004, the preliminary national creativity strategy did not assign any particular role for the arts in their final report. There have also been studies which have tried to prove that professional artistic activities are in the transformation process of becoming "KIBSes", that is, knowledge-intensive business services (like design and architecture).

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