The purpose of this study was to examine how social work professionals view their professional role and how they think about the concept of social work. I also wanted to investigate what they believe characterize a professional social work. For the purposes of this study, I chose a qualitative approach in which I interviewed five people linked to the social work. The theories which I have assumed in the analysis of the results are power theory, organization theory and professional theory. The results of this study show that the respondents believe that a professional social work is performed by someone who has training and experience in the field.

The public sector in Sweden has in recent decades undergone a large change due to market and liberalism impact. This change has meant that marketing communication and its concepts have been adopted by administrative authorities. In this thesis, we used governmentality, social constructivism and an interpretive perspective to examine the staff at the County Administrative Board in Kalmar County and their experiences and opinions of the concepts ?customer? and ?trademark?. The study was designed as a case study with qualitative interviews.

This thesis examines the regional part of the Church of Sweden. Existing as a Lutheran evangelical church since the declaration in Uppsala in 1593, the Church of Sweden became completely separate from the state in the year 2000. Apart from a small piece of legislation by the Swedish parliament, the now former state controlled church were to act on their own. This development can be seen as a result of several decades of discussions. The author is raising the question about the roll and function of bishops and dioceses in the Church of Sweden.

Entrepreneurship as playing a important role for economic growth has been discussed by a number of theorists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Israel M. Kirzner. William J. Baumol developed these theories as he considered that all entrepreneurship doesn?t lead to economic growth, some entrepreneurial activities may even lead to stagnation.

The purpose of this research was to examine the current field of management in non-profit organizations, mainly focusing on managerial approaches, but also the impact of organizational size on the shaping of governance. Non-profits are widely discussed in contemporary research, particularly due to the increasing external pressure on voluntary organization to professionalize the way they work in line with standards in the private sector. Due to this our thesis aims to investigate whether professional, Bureaucratic approaches are useful when governing a non-profit organization, or if social structures are enough to ensure goal congruence and efficiency. To conduct this research qualitative interviews were carried out and a case- study was made, using the Swedish Karate Federation as object of study. Results show that formal and more professional structures are useable to achieve efficiency and prevent inertia within the organization.

The purpose of this study was to examine divergences in assessments of social assistance in one big and one small social welfare office in the municipalities of Malmö. To examine this we used a qualitative method. We held interviews with social workers and their superiors. At the end of the interviews with the social workers we presented two vignettes, describing different cases of first time applications of social assistance. The social workers was asked to assess whether the application should be granted or not, and motivate their decisions.

Theoretically, when an organization grows large it has to formalize its structure and exercise control by more regulations. The negative side effect might in turn be demotivated employees (machine bureaucracy). However, practice seems to contradict theory. Therefore, we decided to investigate how a large company, in this case Microsoft, succeeds in creating motivation despite some machine Bureaucratic tendencies. The essential findings are that the employees feel motivated by the fact that they are allowed freedom with responsibility.

AbstractThe purpose of this thesis is to highlight the organization's importance to teachers' working environment. Through a survey conducted at a primary school in New Zealand and at a primary school in Sweden, teacher perceptions of their psychosocial work environment were compared. This study has answered the questions: ?How does a teacher at a school in New Zealand and at a school in Sweden view their psychosocial work environment from an organizational perspective?? and ?What are the similarities and differences in psychosocial working environment between a school in New Zealand and a school in Sweden?? The results were analyzed based on Karasek and Theorells demands-control-social support model. The study shows that teachers at both schools are experiencing high demands, but that New Zealand teachers are experiencing greater demands.

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.

In the essay, the view of mistakes and disciplinary sanctions within the military aviation and health and medical service, are compared. The comparison shows that military aviation and health and medical service could have several points in common on how mistakes may occur, but that the present view of mistakes is different betwen the sectors. The view of mistakes and disciplinary sanctions is explicit within military aviation, and is based on a clear ideology on how mistakes occur, which is characterised of a systematic approach. Within health and medical service, an explicit and unequivocal ideology on how mistakes occur is missing, but, however, there are implicit ideas about infallibility and perfection. The comparison indicates that the view of mistakes is also, possibly directed by a Bureaucratic model (instead of an ideology on mistakes), which aims to legitimacy, but that this may happen on the expense of not taking surrounding circumstances into consideration.

This study is about state officials who handle applications for sickness benefits and about municipal officials who handle applications for financial assistance. The purpose of this study is to explore the differences between the two professional roles regarding their conception about their exercise of authority, in terms of flexibility, individual adjustment, empathy and legal security.The study has a qualitative approach and is based on structured interviews with two state officials and two municipal officials. The questions that this study aims to answer are:- Is there a difference between state officials and municipal officials regarding their experience and use of flexibility? - Is there a difference between state officials and municipal officials regarding their perceptions of legal security, individual adjustment and empathy in their exercise of authority? - What kind of bureaucracy can you find in the two organizations?The results show that the state officials in this study have very limited flexibility due to legislation which makes their exercise of authority neither empathic nor individual. The municipal officials in this study state in their turn that the law entails broad flexibility and the opportunity for them to be empathic and to make individual decisions.

The Motor Group of the European Council was commissioned in the autumn of 1997 to prepare a proposal for a new European Bus and Coach Directive. In the beginning, most of the Member States did not have the accessibility requirements as their main concern; still a smaller network with actors from the National delegations from Britain, Germany and Sweden would influence the other National delegations in the Council group to finally agree to retain the requirement of accessibility of the Directive. Within the EU decision process, the European Disability movement acted as a strong player during the whole negotiation process using the proposal to a new Bus and Coach Directive as a tool to influence key actors to go towards a Directive with a strong approach for accessibility.Policy Transfer and Policy Transfer Network are used as analytical tools to understand and structure the transfer of the question of accessibility during the negotiation process. Actors understanding how the Bureaucratic process works within the EU decision system have a chance to contributing for the changes in the directions they wishes for within a range of policy areas. The principal aim of the Directive was to guarantee the safety of passengers and to provide technical prescription in particular to wheelchair users.

This bachelor thesis investigates the discourses on violence among pupils in a school environment. The overall aim is to gain knowledge on how it is researched, interpreted and understood. The methods employed are genealogical analysis, discourse analysis and intersectional analysis. The analyzed texts consist of research reports, articles, dissertations and government authority guidelines. The theoretical framework drawn upon is post modernistic theory, social constructivism and intersectional theory.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine how exchange students experience looking for information in their new life situation during a semester in Prague. A further purpose is to investigate what barriers they have faced and how this affected their information behavior. Six qualitative interviews of students constitute the empirical foundation for the study. The interviewees are from six different European countries, were all participating in the Erasmus program, and all had social sciences/humanities/art as their main subject.

This is a case study on the functioning of political parties and the aim was to explain ?how? and ?why? the Swedish social democratic party changed their policies in the Middle East politics. I wanted to explain this process of change by using Angelo Panebianco?s framework for the analysis of political parties. Angelo Panebianco´s hypothesis is that all parties must be viewed as organizations to understand their functions.