The purpose of this essay is to examine how administrative officers at the Swedish social insurance agency experience and deal with the goal conflicts they may experience. Furthermore, the purpose is to gain a greater understanding on how they perceive their role in the implementation process, and their position as the link between the citizens and the state. Two potential conflicts are examined; between quantitative goals and performance measures and those more qualitative and hard to measure; between economic values such as cost efficiency and productivity and democratic values such as the rule of law. The other conflict examined is that between implementing and following the laws set forth, take into account the individual needs and interests of the citizen. The theoretical framework consists of Lundquist?s theory on public officers as the guardians of democracy, which means that they should not only implement laws and rules according to political intentions, but also make sure that the democratic values and principles are followed in the relationship between state and citizen.

2012 was the year when the podcast had a breakthrough in Sweden. As media corporatehouses developed, they adopted new forms to mediate journalistic material, whereas the podcasts was one of them. The podcast has had a rather informal reputation in Sweden in contrary to The United States and Great Britain, where it holds a higher sense of prestige and professionalism. It is therefore relevant to investigate what happens when media corporatehouses i Sweden embraces the podcast through themes such as tabloidization, commercialism, convergence and divergence. We chose to investigate the content of the podcast in the tabloid press Aftonbladet, and in the serious press, Dagens Nyheter.

The aim of this Master thesis is to delineate the ideology behind the public library politics in Gothenburg, during 1945-50. The study is an archive survey. To be able to account for the public library politics in Gothenburg during the period, the author has studied documents in the archive of the public library board in Gothenburg. The description of the politics is the source for the research papers analysis. The thesis principal issue, is on what ideological basis the public library politics has been formulated in Gothenburg, during the period of interest? The concept of ideology is defined as a coherent system of norms and values.

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the everyday work of school counsellors in the City of Stockholm with a gender perspective by studying the school counsellors ? talk about masculinity and femininity. The aim was to reach an understanding of how parts of the counsellors everyday work are influenced by gender through the perspective of the school counsellor. The study was conducted using qualitative methods. Six school counsellors, five woman and one man, were interviewed.

The purpose of this thesis is to assist the Swedish energy company NIBE Energy Systems in their studies of adaptive regulation applicable to electrical water heaters. Due to coming energy classifications of these appliances in the European Union, NIBE Energy Systems needs to use adaptive regulation, called Smart Control, to keep their products in the best possible energy class and remain competitive to the market. By using this Smart Control regulation a 2-3 % improve-ment of efficiency can be credited the system. This is a small number, but heavily needed, since the energy classes are based on the idea that the European Union is provided with electricity from coal condensate power resulting in a 40 % maximum efficiency. Furthermore, doing noth-ing will result in some water heaters not being approved to use on the market from 2015 due to low efficiency.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks, the landscape of the freedom of religion has changed. The issues now facing freedom of religion varies greatly from the issues that the drafters of the universal declaration of human rights faced after World War II.In the light of the new issues that States face in the intersection of religion and societal interest, scholars have criticized the European Court of Human Rights to give too much leeway to the States in determining how the human rights should be implemented, by using the doctrine of margin of appreciation. Critics of the margin of appreciation claim that it is based on culture relativism and that the doctrine undermines the universality of the human rights. In order to decide if the margin of appreciation has indeed led to a relativization of the human rights I compared it to the jurisprudence of the UN Human Rights Committee and its use of the Syracusa principles. My conclusion is that the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights cannot be considered to be based on culture relativism.

The drug treatment staff attitude towards needle exchange is what investigates in this study. The aim of this study is to see what?s affecting the standpoints in the needle exchange issue and also to investigate if the needle exchange is compatible with Swedish drug policy. The study has a qualitative approach and it?s based on eight semi-structured interviews with drug treatment staff.

The general contract law principle of loyalty between negotiators, in deliberation, leads to a duty of disclosure for negotiators. The extent of this duty of disclosure is influenced by many different factors; amongst others the type of agreement, the negotiators knowledge and opportunity of procuring knowledge. The general duty of disclosure is both a part of the contract law principle of loyalty between negotiators in negotiating a contract, and an indirectly statutory obligation, that, if neglected will lead to nullification of the agreement. The legislator has stated that the general contract law, Lag (1915:218) om avtal och andra rättshandlingar på förmögenhetsrättens område (avtalslagen), should be used to regulate negotiating of contracts, including the negotiation of contracts of employment. In arbetsdomstolens judging, additional factors have been weighed in, and the judgement is done also through the use of a concept taken from employment law, the concept of ?saklig grund för uppsägning?.

The major environmental problems that we have today are frequently mentioned in the media today. One example is the ongoing debate regarding global warming and its causes and consequences. There are also several other problems in our society such as segregation and social tensions. Most agree that we must do something to solve these problems and that we must try to achieve a sustainable development for the entire planet. But how should it actually be done and what trade-offs, compromises, sacrifices and changes must be made?The purpose of this paper is to examine how these issues are being dealt with in Swedish city planning.

Ever since Lipsky wrote about street-level bureaucrats in 1980 the main belief has been that certain characteristics of their jobs make it exceptionally difficult to severely reduce their discretion. However, discretion comes at a price and if public servants abuse their power the legitimacy of government is at risk and ultimately even the democracy.This thesis address this question by analysing the Swedish employment service which in the beginning of 2001 started a project called ?Af Sverige? trying to improve internal rule of law. By comparing two local and fairly equal jobcentres and how the street-level bureaucrats within use their discretion, I seek to find support for my hypotheses that organizing local jobcentres according to the principles of machine bureaucracy plays a significant part in reducing discretion.My findings show that a jobcentre characterised by strict rules, few units, good communications and a forthright manager who delegates formal power to the employees results in a stricter and more uniform application of regulations among the street-level bureaucrats. My conclusion is therefore unambiguous.

This thesis presents a study aiming to identify the selection criteria for the digitization of posters at the National Library of Sweden (Kungl. biblioteket). The theory is that cultural heritage institutions are empowered to decide how our cultural heritage is presented as they select what items (or, as in this study, posters) will be digitized. The poster is studied as it is an interesting media form which historically was an important means of communication. The poster can represent and reflect historical events and opinions in society.

The aim of this paper is to describe, visualise- and analyse media’s discursive representations of female politicians in Swedish printed media. The focus of the analysis is to show if, and how these images can be understood and interpreted in terms of a socially constructed gender stereotyped suborder. The paper takes it's theoretical and methodological departure in the discourse analysis, which is combined with feminist political theory. Feminist political theory is concretised in the use of what Yvonne Hirdman calls the "gender system" which arranges the sexes into their respective genders and is based upon two rules/principles/logics: 1) the rule of distinctive separation, and 2) the male norm. Closely related to the aim of the paper lies also the critical theoretic assumption that people has to be aware of their own part in the production and reproduction of the discourse in order to change make a change.

This is the end report of my final exam at Medieteknik. It covers the planning, work process and review of a Flash based web application that I set out to do. The goal was to create a user friendly, interactive e-shop with embedded functionality for playing music, displaying rich media content and researching possible payment solutions, to enable buying music files online. The project involved creating the user interface, the programmatic functionality of a Flash client (an SWF file). Also, setting up an Apache HTTP Server and establishing a working ?bridge? between the Flash client and the web server with Flash Remoting components and AMFPHP.

The thesis has investigated how Sandvik Coromant could implement the SMED principle on one of their grinders groups and what improvements it would lead to. The aim of the thesis is to identify the current situation and investigate how their setup times would be affected by SMED. The work initiated with a literature analysis about the SMED principles and then proceeded with an analysis of the current situation where the activity was time mapped. The analysis consisted of time trials of the process that the thesis would include. The time studies revealed opportunities for structural improvements to create environment for a more structured process.

The persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority population in southwestern Burma has come to the fore in recent years. The aim of this study is to first analyse the degree and respects of biopolitical control in the case of political oppression. Secondly, the aim is to compare the similarities and differences when it comes to the causes, mechanisms and expressions of the two theoretical starting points in the case.Giorgio Agamben´s biopolitical theory, which tries to reconnect state control over life and death with modernity, forms the basis of the analysis. Will Kymlicka´s liberal theory on minority rights serves as a theoretical comparison tool. Methodological starting points to the specific bilateral purpose will be both of the textual and discursive analytical tradition.