AbstractAim: The aim of this essay has been to study how the Swedish church has created the image of their religious activity through media. This has been by studying the three commercial campaigns launched by the Swedish church during the years 2000, 2001 and 2003. Questions asked are: How has the Swedish church chosen to profile it self? Which discourses can be recognized in the campaigns? Which messages has been communicated through the campaigns? How has these discourses created the image of the Swedish church?Method: The methodological framework is critical discourse analysis inspired by Norman Faircloughs? three-dimensional model. Thirteen images all part of the campaigns are analysed using a semiotic method.

Management consulting firms are an important part of the knowledge economy and they capitalize on the analytical ability and knowledge of their employees. Much research have been made on large consulting firms and their management of knowledge, but little is known about how small consultancies manage their knowledge. Even less is known about the management of knowledge in small consultancies specialized in change management. These firms rely solely on senior consultants and focus on the human aspect of organizational development. This thesis aims to show how these firms manage their knowledge and also provide an understanding of why.

Syftet med undersökningen var att se om det fanns någon skillnad i Locus of Control och arbetstillfredsställelse hos män och kvinnor i privat och offentlig sektor. Antal deltagare i undersökningen var 60 där två urvalsgrupper använts bestående av privat (n = 30) och offentlig (n = 30) sektor i Blekinge och Skåne län. Mätinstrumenten som användes var ett arbetstillfredsställelseformulär och ett Locus of Control formulär. T- test, korrelationsanalys, multipel regression och tvåvägs-ANOVA användes för beräkning av data i SPSS. Slutsatser som kunde dras var att män generellt sett är mer tillfredsställda än kvinnor och att offentliganställda är mer tillfredsställda än privatanställda.

In an organizational change process, motivated employees are considered an asset. Work motivation can both be seen as situational and as a stable individual characteristic. The present study attempts to investigate how the employees at the Social Insurance Office in Scania experience the present organizational change by focusing on work motivation and well-being. Both questionnaires and interviews were adopted to examine the area of interest. Findings indicate that the organizational change is considered chaotic but necessary by the employees.

AbstraktI dagens mångkulturella Sverige, där invandringen har varit stor de senaste åren, är det mycket aktuellt att undersöka om det finns rasistiska fördomar bland svenska ungdomar. Vi bad skolungdomar på två skolor i Sydsverige fylla i en enkät för att undersöka hur egentligen ligger till på den fronten, då det inte finns så mycket forskning inom den åldersgruppen. Den ena skolan hade hög invandrartäthet, medan den andra hade låg invandrartäthet. Ungdomar med invandrarbakgrund hade i genomsnitt lägre värden på rasismskalorna än ungdomar med svensk bakgrund. En förklaring kan vara att rasismfrågorna handlade om invandrare och inte om svenskar.

The aim of this study is to describe a group of youths in compulsory care at a SiS institution in the south of Sweden. The study focuses on intelligence (measured with WISC-III) and self-report, i. e. what the youths think of themselves (measured with Jag tycker jag är). Attempts were made to see if background factors (based on information from the standardized ADAD-interview) seem to be coherent with intelligence and/or self-report and if so, what those background factors are.

Effektiviteten av manualiserad Motivational Interviewing prövades i en experimentell design. Gymnasieelever med hög frånvaro (n=89) blockrandomiserades till antingen två sessioner Motivational Interviewing eller någon av de två kontrollgrupperna, som erhöll validerande samtal respektive ingen intervention. Den beroende variabeln utgjordes av förändring i frånvaro som rapporterades av de deltagande skolorna. Utöver detta användes School Refusal Assessment Scale för att undersöka orsaker till frånvaron. University of Rhode Island Change Assessment användes för att mäta motivation enligt Prochaska och DiClementes förändringsmodell.

Kroppsmissnöje är mer utbrett hos kvinnor än hos män visar tidigare studier (Feingold & Mazzella, 1998) men även män börjar bli kroppsmissnöjda (Cash, Morrow, Hrabosky & Perry, 2004). Detta undersöktes tillsammans med självkänsla och kroppsjämförelse hos män och kvinnor och även de som har partner eller är singlar i ljuset av Social Comparison Theory och Cognitive Dissonance Theory. 133 personer testades med Body-Esteem scale, Figure Drawing Rating Scale, Self-esteem Scale och Universalistic Social Comparison Scale. Resultatet indikerar att båda könen är relativt nöjda men kvinnorna är något mindre nöjda med utseendet med sin kropp. Studien visar även att kvinnors idealbild är en smalare kropp medan männens idealbild är en muskulösare kropp.

Earlier psychological research on stress and its complex of problems has identified several factors which have shown a relation with the occurrence of a poorer mental ill-health. In this study some of these factors have been examined in 69 police officers from Stockholm, Lund and Helsingborg. In the study, police officers with high and low self reported ill-health were compared considering trait anxiety, alexithymia and posttraumatic stress symptoms.The results showed that police officers with poorer mental ill health had a significant higher degree of trait anxiety, the dimension of alexithymia difficulty identifying feelings and the PTSD-dimension avoidance and hyperarousal. The results also showed several positive relations among the variables that divided the groups. On account of the last-mentioned the results will above all be discussed in an integrating perspective..

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how the image of the girl and her environment in the Swedish youth literature has changed during the 1980s to the 2000s. We have focused on how the girls creates gender in fiction. The introduction chapter in this essay covers a short history over Swedish youth literature and how the Swedish youth culture has developed, followed by a description of how the girl in the real world relates to gender. The books we have chosen are written by Swedish authors and the plot partakes in Sweden with female protagonists. We decided to do a close-reading of the novels and analyse them by an analytical model, consisting of several questions.

During the last years a discussion has emerged around problems with Swedish state boards trying to influence the public opinion and even political bodies through different kind of information efforts. Several observers inside and outside the academy have studied how state boards increasingly use information as an instrument and also how political bodies increasingly have given such instructions to state boards. This essay put those studies into the context of both information political history and previous theoretical interpretations in that field of research.The analytical tool consists of four ideal typical ways ('state opinions') to arrange relations between the state and the citizen. Some critics focus on problems with too much political steering and how political majorities uses state boards to spread ideological propaganda. Others highlight problems with autonomy and bureaucratic organizations taking initiatives by themselves to spread normative information.

An environmental review has been carried out at FORIA AB, a transportation- and machine service company, to analyze the company?s environmental aspects from the transportation segment. This report describes the essential background and the methods of identifying and evaluate the environmental aspects. It also describes how the work with the environmental aspects often vary between different actors. The design of the ISO 14001 is intentionally broad in order to apply on all sorts of activities and organizations.

The purpose of this study was to examine how some young mothers, who previously have been in foster care or residential care, describe the way motherhood has affected their lives and identities. Narrative interviews were conducted with three teenage mothers and one mother aged 23. As tools for analyzing the narratives, theories about narrative psychology and how people present themselves through story-telling and language were used. The results of the study show that becoming a mother was life-changing in a positive way, according to the young mothers. They described how they, since becoming mothers, had become more mature and now lived less risk-full lives.

The present study examines the effect of a nine-hour Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) intervention for teachers who experience stress. Twenty-two teachers from four different counties in southern Sweden were randomly allocated to an ACT intervention (n=15) and a control group (n=7). The ACT condition received three three-hour sessions of ACT over a six-week period, and the control group received a three-hour stress lecture at one occasion. At a follow-up four-weeks after completed intervention, ACT participants showed significant in-group differences on stress, psychological flexibility, general health, and burnout. At a between group comparison, only psychological flexibility was significantly enhanced at the follow-up.

The topic of homosexuality was until recently a taboo in Russian public discussion, but has during the last years become a hotly debated issue. Analyzing what I call the new homophobic narrative I isolate and examine two ways of ?othering? homosexuals, constructing them as strangers, when sexual minorities are discussed in today´s Russia. Sexual deviants are portrayed as threats to the nation and are connected to the West and its influence. Using analytical tools from queer theory, security studies and postcolonial approaches I discuss different ways of configuring the relation between nation and sexuality, identities that are interwoven in the homophobic narrative.