World wide globalization and the rapid development of the Internet have lead to significant changes for companies around the world. The world has ?shrunk? and increased supply of goods and services has lead to a more intense competitive situation. As the market changes, so does consumer behavior. Today?s consumers do no longer wish to be treated as a group, rather they are looking for products and services that specifically fit their personal values.Recent years, the consumption of digital consumer electronics has sky-rocketed.

A radical change is taking place in the world today: some former colonies are now booming economically while several former colonizers are suffering from economic crisis. Postcolonial theory states that old structures from the colonization are keeping the South poor and the North rich. Today there?s a shift in these structures as former colonizers Spain and Portugal are forced to ask for economical support from their former colonies.The colonial discourse separated white from black and depicted the population in the colonies as the absolute antithesis of the Europeans. In Portugal circulated also lusotropicalism, an ideology that claimed Portugal as absolutely free of racism, a statement with great influence in the postcolonial Portugal.On the basis of semi-structured focus groups I will in this paper do a discourse analysis of young, university educated Portuguese identity/ies in relation to the former colonies and the changing relations to these countries.

Bakgrund: Livmodertransplantation ?r en behandling mot ofrivillig barnl?shet som beforskats vid bland annat Sahlgrenska Universitetssjukhuset de senaste decennierna. Absolute Uterine Factor Infertility (AUFI) inneb?r en avsaknad av livmoder. Livmodertransplantation inneb?r att kvinnor som lider av absolut infertilitet f?r en m?jlighet att motta en livmoder fr?n en donator f?r att kunna b?ra och f?da sina egna barn. Tidigare har det inte funnits n?gra behandlingar mot denna typ av infertilitet och d?rf?r har adoption eller surrogatmoderskap varit de enda alternativen f?r dessa kvinnor. Livmodertransplantation ?r fortfarande i forskningsstadiet i Sverige men kommer med stor sannolikhet att erbjudas som behandling inom snar framtid.

Actors deliberately change their preferences, contrary to the assumptions of rational decision models. This study shows why, and to some extent how. Preferences are necessarily ambiguous and unstable. Rationality is a regulating myth which has had a profound influence on Western conceptions of what an actor is.The aim of this study is to help individual actors understand the theoretical grounds of their actions. The analysis provides tools for examining decision methods and preference changes.

This thesis is a part of the DySCAS (Dynamically Self-Configuring Automotive System)project which has the overall purpose of creating a middleware for the electronics in an automotive environment. The thesis has been made with collaboration with ENEA AB who is a member of the DySCAS project. ENEA AB has developed a demonstration platform to test the fundamental ideas which the DySCAS project is built on.The purpose of this thesis was to design and implement a GPS application to be added to the demonstration platform. This was done by adding a GPS receiver to the original DySCAS demonstration platform and designing and implementing an application to be able to extract the information from it. The resulting application is able to present cur- rent position and absolute time to the DySCAS networks as services to be used by other applications or by the network it self.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine the virtual reference service Ask the Library [Bibblan svarar] from a postmodern perspective. Ask the Library is a Swedish online reference service that is run by the country?s public libraries. The postmodern theories of Jean-François Lyotard are used to study how information is managed and transmitted within the service.

The purpose of our master?s thesis is to study the diversity discourse, used in Sweden, particularly the so-called ethnic diversity at the work place discourse.Our aims are to map and analyze the conceptualization of difference used in the diversity rhetoric. We intend to pursue our aim by studying the rhetoric of diversity, used for diversity promotion in the private and public sectors. Also, we will investigate into what conceptualizations of difference are used in the organizations in the name of ?diversity?.

Recent statistic shows that about 28% of adolescents living in Stockholm drink alcohol at such a high level that their consumption counts as risky drinking. The correct term to use in this matter would be binge drinking adolescents.  In the more wealthy areas of Stockholm this group of binge drinking adolescents counts for as much as a third of the population. In contrast, the adolescents living in exposed areas do not drink nearly as much. Binge drinking adolescents in these areas only counts for 15%, nearly half as much as in the wealthy areas.In light of this the intentions of this study is to investigate which explanatory factors that can clarify the range-rated differences in binge drinking between adolescents in Stockholm.

Aim: The aim of the study was to investigate 1RM and what power could be generated in bench-press and half squat concentric at certain percentages of 1RM. Special interest was put to evaluate men (M) and women (K), strength trained (ST) verses non strength trained (EST) in generating absolute power as well as power relative to 1RM.Method: In total 59 subjects mean (± SD) age 24.9 ± 4.1 years divided into four test groups: 20 male non strength trained GIH-students (EST M), 20 female non strength trained GIH-students (EST K), 10 male strength trained - sprinters on national/regional level (ST M), 10 female strength trained - sprinters (ST K) on national/regional level. They did two tests on 1RM and power in events of concentric bench-press and half squat in a Smith machine. In the first test session 3 ? 5 lifts were made to measure 1RM in each event.

Within media and communications studies, questions of taste have often been associated with the dichotomy of high versus popular culture. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has also used mass media products in his studies of class determined tastes and dispositions. In this paper the author uses the theoretical framwork of Bourdieu to examine aspects of social class and legitimate taste in the interior design magazine "Sköna Hem", a market leading magazine within it's genre of lifestyle magazines in Sweden. A specific type of feature article, where a real-life home is portrayed, is studied using the critical discourse analysis of Norman Fairclough. The homes portrayed are predominantly affluent and display elements of conspicuous consumtion as mediated through legitimate taste and cultural capital.

Muslims and islam are unquestionably a part of European social life. In recent times, however, different events, such as the enlargement of the EU and the fact that muslims to a higher extent demand their rights, have brought a number of questions to the fore concerning muslims and islam in Europe. Moreover, we can see an increasing level of islamophobia in contemporary Europe, but also that the EU has launched several programs to increase both the diversity and the unity throughout the Union and to combat islamophobia. However, most of these programs focus on islam as religion and muslims in general, and such a narrow viewpoint runs the risk of missing important issues.In this new context it would be interesting to widen the scope and ask what place not only the muslim community and islam, but also sharia (an important element in islam), may have in future Europe ? especially when it comes to muslim identity?My main objects are to see how the concept of sharia is constructed in the debates in the European Parliament, how that discourse relates to a social practice ? the increasing islamophobic ideas in Europe ? and what effect this may have on muslim identity in a European context.The results shows that the Parliament constructs sharia as, for example, something archaic, threatening, inhuman and misogynistic.

Muslims and islam are unquestionably a part of European social life. In recent times, however, different events, such as the enlargement of the EU and the fact that muslims to a higher extent demand their rights, have brought a number of questions to the fore concerning muslims and islam in Europe. Moreover, we can see an increasing level of islamophobia in contemporary Europe, but also that the EU has launched several programs to increase both the diversity and the unity throughout the Union and to combat islamophobia. However, most of these programs focus on islam as religion and muslims in general, and such a narrow viewpoint runs the risk of missing important issues.In this new context it would be interesting to widen the scope and ask what place not only the muslim community and islam, but also sharia (an important element in islam), may have in future Europe ? especially when it comes to muslim identity?My main objects are to see how the concept of sharia is constructed in the debates in the European Parliament, how that discourse relates to a social practice ? the increasing islamophobic ideas in Europe ? and what effect this may have on muslim identity in a European context.The results shows that the Parliament constructs sharia as, for example, something archaic, threatening, inhuman and misogynistic.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the reasons a religious minority leader has to convert to a larger religious group and how the leader chooses to communicate this event in certain daily press. In March 2014 the leader and founder of the Christian and charismatic movement ?Livets Ord? (Words of Life), Ulf Ekman, announced his decision converting to the Roman Catholic Church after a 10 year long process of thinking. The communications of Ekman?s linguistic language in the articles are discussed through two discourse analyzing perspective, Laclau & Mouffe?s and Fairclough?s.

This explorative study focuses on young, university attending males (22-27 years) and their understanding and pratice of the classic tail coat. It is based on five qvalitatively interpreted interwievs with a total of six participants, and through open questions regarding individuality and identicalness, limits and possibilities and inclusion and exclusion, a masculininty of a less contemporary hue takes shape. These conversations have revealed the tail coats potential of respresenting a male stereotype that can set a foundational and minimal standard for inclusion. Above this layer these males can then manifest and negotiate their masculine position in a homosocial hierarchy which decides the amount of passage, privilieges and confirmation of self- worth received for the wearer. These negotiation is performed by value bearing symbols (such as medallions, cordons and the like) allowed by the wearer and by the actions that systematically ensure that the lines of the tail coat are watched and unbroken.

This paper analyzes the Swedish labor market during the interwar and early postwar period within the framework of modern labor market theory. The development of unemployment during this period - according to the commonly cited source of labor union reports - represents a conundrum for research. The unemployment rate rose after the initial diverse shock of 1921 and stayed at a permanently higher level for the rest of the interwar period. This development was reversed after World War Two when the unemployment rate decreased and stayed permanently low for the rest of the postwar period until the oil price chock of the 1970s.In a first step the available sources of unemployment statistics is investigated and compared. The general conclusion is that the labor union reports overestimate the level of economy wide unemployment while being a reasonably good indicator of movements in the rate.