Kulturskolens mange samarbeidskonstellasjoner som verdidrevne sammenvevde avhengighetsrelasjoner

This chapter explores the collaborative constellations that Kulturskolen has in its own municipalities, and how these collaborations are experienced by Kulturskolen’s leaders and owners. The purpose of the chapter is to contribute to more thorough understanding of who Kulturskolen collaborates with and the intentions behind these collaborations. The study adds to the field of Kulturskolen-related research in expanding the focus on collaboration to include not only schools, kindergartens and cultural organizations, but also health services, local associations, businesses and all other partners in the municipality. The data material for the chapter is comments and free text answers made by leaders and local municipal authorities (school owners) from two nationwide surveys in Norway conducted in 2018. The study is designed as a grounded theory study, where the analysis and theory development are operationalized through constant comparison and synthesizing of the data material (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Through this approach and inspired by the theory of resource dependence (Aldrich & Pfeffer, 1976; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), we recapitulate the developed insights about Kulturskolen’s local collaborations as the theory about value-based intertwined dependency relations (VSA in Norwegian). VSA describes Kulturskolen’s wide range of partners as relations that are both interweaved and interdependent and illustrates the distinctions between original intentions for collaboration and intentions brought about through these relationships as intangible and seamlessly enlaced.