This essay revolves around partnerships established between local authorities and civil society to promote integration in segregated urban areas. The main focus is on who is active in formulating the local integration policy in these partnerships. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with representatives from the local public administration and from different parts of civil society in Rosengård and Södra innerstaden in Malmö. The conclusion is that local authorities to a large extent decide the content of integration policy. The authorities, in having the major responsibility of the integration projects, decide what parts of civil society to involve and what projects will promote integration.

Almost all Swedes today have access to the Internet, if not through the home then via the library or work. Despite this, around 20% of the population stand outside the information society in that they lack in knowledge, assistive usability tools or positive attitude towards technology and its influence on society. The main factors influencing the digital divide in today's society are age, disability and education, while the main reason for staying outside seems to be disinterest.The question about digital inclusion is important as we now stand on the breaking-point between a society where the industry has had a prominent position for private as well as national economy and a digital society where access to the Internet is no longer about prestige, but where significant differences between users' knowledge levels can create a power gap. Gaps in access and use not only reflects already existing socio-economic conditions, but can also maintain and enhance these.It is crucial for the future expansion of Internet usage how today's non-users feel about becoming users. To understand what underlies the motivations not to use computers is one of the keys to get non-users to embrace becoming users.

This survey is a text analysis of 4 teaching books during a ten years period in Social studies from a multicultural and intercultural perspective. Taking as a starting point that society and the school in today?s Sweden are multicultural and in need of more intercultural teaching I explore teaching books in social science to se how they relate to Sweden as a multicultural society and their way of relating to intercultural teachings and compare them. The questions asked are: How do the different books describe the multicultural society in Sweden? What kind of intercultural tools are found in the books? And are there any similarities or differences among these books? The theories used as a starting point are reformulated by the author after theories of Von Wright and Lahdenperä to fit in to the context of a text analysis of teaching books and the method used is a content analysis with its purpose of describing how the books are constructed.

This masters thesis aims at a discussion about whether the public library will be an educating and cultivating society institution in the future. The method used is a combination of interviews with library staff in leading position and studies of the public librarys relationship to cultivation and adult education in a changeable society. The work concentrates on two main questions. One is about what, and in which way, changes, that are important for the public library and that take place in society now or within the next ten years, affect the future activities of the library. The other is about the public librarys relationship to cultivation in general and in the future.

The aim is to develop a new decision-making model for credit-loans. The model will be specific for credit applicants of the OKQ8 bank, becauseit is based on data of earlier applicants of credit from the client (the bank). The final model is, in effect, functional enough to use informationabout a new applicant as input, and predict the outcome to either the good risk group or the bad risk group based on the applicant?s properties.The prediction may then lay the foundation for the decision to grant or deny credit loan.Because of the skewed distribution in the response variable, different sampling techniques are evaluated. These include oversampling with SMOTE, random undersampling and pure oversampling in the form of scalar weighting of the minority class.

Using Varshney's theory about intra- and interethnic networks, this thesis examines how civil society in southern Thailand is built up.During 2004 the violence between Muslims and Buddhists rose in southern Thailand. The government tried to fight the insurgency using violent police and military forces, resulting in hundreds of deaths and part of reason why Thailand is loosing rank in Freedom House's democracy index. Varshney means that a civil society built up on intraethnic networks works favourable to violence between different ethnic groups. Sorting out and defining what is meant by ?ethnic? and ?civil society?, this thesis shows why to look at the insurgency in southern Thailand as an ethnic conflict surviving partly because of an intraethnic civil society.

The purpose of this essay ("Gateway to the Past. An archaeological quality controlled subject gateway as a resource for higher education in Lund") is to examine how a quality controlled subject gateway could increase the quality of the information supply for the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University. The essay gives a brief background to subject gateways and also describes the Department and its subjects (prehistoric archaeology, medieval archaeology, osteology and classical studies) . The essay consists of a questionnaire distributed to parts of the target group as well as an investigation of three particular subject gateways: NordArk, ARGE and The Labyrinth. The essay also contains an exposition of how archaeologists seek information, of the structure of the archaeological subjects and of classification systems for quality controlled subject gateways.

This case study examines the new media presentation system in Alby public library. The aim is to explore if the contemporary Zeitgeist, wich according to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, could be described as liquid modernity, has affected how the system was formed. The purpose is to find out how that would affect users and staff of public libaries of the contemporary. Interviews were conducted with the library staff, and plans and documents concerning the media presentation system was examined.The empirical part of this thesis starts with a study of the process that resulted in the new presentation system while the second part examines the system as such. I discovered that both the media presentation system, and the process which preceded it, contained aspects that could be traced to liquid modernity.

In 2002 the local council of Lund, Sweden, decides to implement the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. A number of actors, such as the state, the civil society, the political society and the bureaucracy, participate in the political process with different authority and points of departure. This thesis studies the actors´ interactions from an inside perspective by applying concepts such as political power, democracy and implementation. The methodological departure is action research from within, a local NGO, the local board of Save the Children Sweden. The results of the study indicate that governance and steering of the implementation process at the communal level is weak.

The purpose of this essay was to reflect on previous made research, on examining how youth?s identity is formed by living in an area that society looks at negatively. The theoretical benchmarks that have been used in order to provide a better understanding are: identity, exclusion, ethnicity and adaption. The study is a qualitative study, since there is an aspiration in increasing the knowledge and understanding, of the conception that these individuals experience, as deviants in the society. This is a literature-based study, focusing mainly on written analysis, which consists of reports, theses and case studies.

Our purpose with this report is to create a structural basis over how to improve handling with international freight at ITAB Shop Concept (further mentioned as ITAB). We have through interviews with employees at ITAB and observations identified problems that have caused difficulties at handling with international freight, from the time when an order is placed to when it?s delivered to the customer. We have also interviewed shipping companies.We have in the theory chapter written about shipping conditions for international freight and a main part of our theory is about NSAB 2000, which describes the obligations and rights shippers and consignee has.In order to improve the efficiency ITAB has to be aware of the problems in the company and try to solve them.The problems we have identified are described in the result chapter. One of the problems is that employees at the warehouse don?t know when gods is supposed to be shipped.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to through a theoretical analyze, investigate the conditions and the challenges for a consolidated democracy in Egypt from 1952 until after the revolution of 2011. The central question in this thesis is what opportunities and challenges are there for the democratic consolidation in Egypt, with respect to civic, political and economic conditions. How have the conditions developed between 1952 and 2011? How has the transition government/military government handled the central problems in the transitions phase after 2011? The theory used in this analysis is Linz and Stepans famous five arenas (the political society, the economic society, the civil society, the bureaucracy and the state of rule, whit focus on the three first). Through a qualitative case study we have analyzed the conditions in Egypt from 1952 to after the revolution 2011.The empirical material shows that the arenas in Egypt are both historically and current very weak, and they are not supporting democratic consolidation as they are challenged by several enormous problems.

AbstractHomosexuality is surely accepted in today´s society - or isn´t it? Many things have changed, for instance laws, which are in favour for homosexuals, have been introduced, in Sweden that is. As we although know, many things are not only dependent on what laws tell us to do. The society also contains values and norms and they furthermore exist in individuals. Regarding sexuality, the norm is heterosexuality.How much does the norm affect our way of living? In what way is it encouraged? What happens to people who don´t live up to the norm? How is it to be homosexual in today´s society? These are some of the questions that we look upon in this paper.

The purpose of this Bachelor's thesis is to study the reasoning behind classification, cataloging and shelf arrangement of nonfiction graphic novels in public libraries. The aim was to examine which aspects of accessibility influence in which collection nonfiction graphic novels are placed.With qualitative semi-structured interviews we learned how six librarians motivated their choices concerning nonfiction graphic novels. We also interviewed a cataloger from Bibliotekstjänst to examine how nonfiction graphic novels are classified. In our analysis we compared our results to theories and practices concerning alternative shelf arrangements in libraries and legitimization of graphic novels. We found three types of shelf arrangements for nonfiction graphic novels: graphic novel shelf, nonfiction classification code and a mix of the two.

This thesis aims at studying representatives from three groups in the Egyptian society with an ethnographic method and with regards to their experiences, reflections and stories of the Egyptian revolution. The material of the thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork and on interviews.The purpose of the study is to explore different themes in the informants? stories related to society, freedom, social justice, human values, peace and civility. The purpose is also to examine the informants' stories with emphasis on various informal learning processes that occurred in the Egyptian social change.The study finds that according to the informants a society should be characterized, among other things, by human values, social justice, non-violence and peaceful methods and approaches. Various informal learning processes involving both individual citizens and active members of civil society and NGO groups were found to be practiced to be able to accomplish these changes in the Egyptian society to create a better future.The degrees of involvement of the various learning processes not only reflect differences between informants regarding the social and cultural background.