The purpose of this thesis is to study the level of democracy within the European Union (EU). To do so the following issues were examined: How the EU works and the efforts it has made to improve levels of democracy; and the degree to which the EU fulfils the criteria set by Robert Dahl in his theory of polyarchy.The study is based on a qualitative text analysis. The focus of the analysis is documents released by the EU that can be connected to democracy, and human and fundamental rights. The theory of polyarchy proposed by Robert Dahl and Joseph Schumpeter?s theory of democracy are the principal theories applied.

The development of five individual pupils? writing abilities, as reported by six of their teachers, is analysed. The thoughts and reflexions inspired by the everyday interaction between the teacher and the pupil suffering from some kind of reading and writing disability are presented. The purpose is to capture what was unique and characteristic in the measures that triggered a positive response in the pupils. Some of the questions answered in this study are: How does the phenomenon of reading and writing disabilities manifest itself in the classroom, and what are the consequences for the individual pupil of the various pedagogical measures available?One conclusion that may be drawn from this study is that there is no cut-and dried method for working with pupils suffering from reading and writing disabilities.

In today's society social movement are dependent on media as a channel to com-municate their political message and their discourse. Media is an arena for dis-courses but at the same time, along with Attac, one of the actors who struggle to be part of the dominant discourse of the society. This struggle is uneven due to media and the relationship is to some content hegemonic.Attac Sweden was constituted in January 2001 and got an enormous amount of attention in media. But after the riots during the Göteborg European Council in June 2001, that Attac was partly blamed for, the attention in media has faded out. This paper shows that the images of Attac in media hasn?t been favouring the movement, especially during and after the meeting in Gothenburg.

This thesis examine if social voluntary organisations are independent or if they are being regulated by the public sector. We ask how free the organisations are since they get so much support and funding from the municipality. This is examined by looking at the homogenisation pressure, which means that organisations are being exposed by a pressure to become more similar. The control that the municipality has over the organisations is another aspect in this paper. The study focuses on the relation between the municipality of Linköping and three social voluntary organisations and their characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a deeper understanding about the acceptance of wind power. Our basic assumption is that local conditions are important and can explain how the acceptance of change at different stages of establishment. The main purpose is to see if there are differences in the acceptance of wind power in different stages, and examine the factors that influence acceptance. That includes how people in three different areas of study estimates that they value their environment and how it is affected by wind turbines. The project was conducted interdisciplinary geo-targeted and consists of three parts.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine what intentions handbooks, laws and regulations have had about children and childrens literature, as we think that they can serve as guiding principles for childrens libraries in Sweden. The questions are: what signals have the childrens libraries got from the documents concerning the view of children and childrens literature during the 20th century? What has the social opinion about children been during the 20th century? How have children been seen during the 20th century? The method we used is a qualitative source analysis of mention above documents seen from a hermeneutical point of view. This analysis is woven together with the social opinion on children during the 20th century. Our results show that the aim of childrens literature before 1945 was a pedagogic and moral one.

Evaluation of joint swelling is an important part of the orthopedic examination and can be used to follow a patient?s progress during rehabilitation and therapy. Usually a swelling is assessed by palpating the joint but a more objective, but still easy to use, method would be preferable.This study seeks to increase the knowledge in veterinary rehabilitation by validating four different measurement tools (three recognized and one novel) for the assessment of elbow joint swelling: palpation, tape measure (circumference and figure eight measurement), slide caliper (craniocaudal and mediolateral positioning) and tonometer. This was achieved by calculating the inter- and intra-rater reliability and correlating the results from the different measurements with each other.The methods with best inter- and intra-rater reliability as well as good correlation among themselves were shown to be slide caliper with craniocaudal positioning, circumference and figure eight. Additional studies, with a larger and more diverse material, ought to investigate these methods further..

Our purpose was to research the new reform amendment" Lag om etableringsinsatser för vissa nyanlända invandrare", and whether the establishment of the reform is good and if it was a necessary amendment. For that reason, we have chosen to answer our purpose in these issues with this question formulation; how can the change of the law establishing operations influence the newcomers in the labour market, the problems the law intends to address, how the new change in the law is different from when the municipality "kommun" was responsible, and how the law can be discussed based on theories of social capital and weak ties. The method used in this study is from a adductive approach where the research is based on both empirical evidence and existing theory that interact between these two. The results that emerged in our work was that the newcomers within the labour market has been remote, the way the municipality?s addressed the problem did not work and the result of this was a new reform amendment, where a new participant established.

The thesis aims to describe the current sales climate in the context of complex sales in business-to-business. The purpose is to increase the clients knowledge of sales and test the clients hypothesis that the sales climate is changing from Solution Selling to Insight Selling, further the thesis aims to contribute to the scientific debate of sales. Solution Selling is characterized, as the name suggest, by selling of solution to the customers needs. With Insight Selling the seller has a provocative approach towards the customer and the seller is searching for customers in the need of change. This is a qualitative study conducted with eight interviews and one focus group.

There are several ways of conducting software testing where some may include users and others may include personnel whose work task is to execute test on systems. Although most developers and project managers understand the point of testing the system, it is not always being done and the most common reason is that there is no time for it. However, this is a false assumption as it may instead cause some bugs in the system that would not have been there in the first place if tests had been there to prevent bugs in the code.My purpose for this thesis was to find suggestions for changes in the development process in an ongoing project used by Acino and Svenska Försäkringsfabriken in order to increase the quality of the system used. In this thesis, I have approached the purpose by pursuing a case study of the two companies through observation and interviews. By doing this I acquired the relevant information to make suggestions for change.

As most developed countries Norway has an ageing population meaning that the number of pensioners is predicted to grow rapidly over the coming years. As a consequence the Norwegian pension system will not be able to provide for these future pensioners. Meanwhile, a rising number of early retirees and disability pension claimants is diminishing the real retirement age. Also the individual pension amount is growing while the pension system itself reaches maturity. In short, major reforms are needed in the Norwegian pension system.

Suicide and attempted suicide frequently occur in society today and represent a major public health problem. In inpatient psychiatric care the nurse have a central role when caring for suicidal patients. Few systematic studies exists that address the nurse?s practical work with these patients. The purpose of this study was therefore to describe the nursing care of suicidal patients as it was perceived by registered clinical expert nurses.

In today?s society, safety in a workplace is an important factor to any organization. Focus on improving the working conditions by making them safer through technology is taking us into a time where we rely on technology to keep us safe. How well developed the technology may be, it is still not enough to keep us entirely from harm. Human error will always be a factor in the human interaction with a workplace.

In this thesis we will discuss the importance of human resource development in smaller companies and if it will change from when the Swedish economy was in an economic boom and later on came to be in a recession. We choose to use a more qualitative approach for this research in order to conduct a more in-depth study of five smaller sized companies located on Gotland, Sweden. In order to limit our research we had as an ambition to answer these following questions:? What obstacles are there when it comes to human resource development and knowledge transference within smaller sized companies?? What can simplify or enable human resource development and knowledge transference within smaller sized companies?? Does the teaching process change to a more tacit human resource development between co-workers when there is less room for conventional human resource development?The result of the research came to show that the biggest barrier, when it comes to competence development within smaller companies, is time. However, our research also showed that a majority of the companies has changed from a more external educational plan to a more internal educational plan which focuses on keeping the human resource development within the company.

This study aims to explore how employment of people with intellectual disabilities has grown from only a few participants in the 1960 to be a statutory right. The aim is further to describe the progress and how theories about disability, normalization and social integration relate to the activity. Particular attention is given to the conditions of the labour market and how it influences the activity. Does the ambition to get activity closer the labour market changes and if there are changing, in what way? Is it important that employment resemble or can lead to a common work? The method is to study and analysis periodicals and newspapers articles and make interviews.