What kind of international actor is the European Union and how shall we define it? These are questions that many have tried to answer often by addressing the apparent uniqueness of the EU itself. One of these theories is Normative power Europe. A theory whose main argument is that the EU is best perceived as a changer of norms. My aim with this thesis is to test this claim and to see if the Union should be regarded as a normative power.

In the recent years auditing scandals all around the world, deficient internal control has attracted a lot of attention. This has contributed to further requirements on insight and internal control. Those scandals have seriously damaged the auditor?s profession and contributed to a reduced trust among the public. Therefore an extensive work to recover and stringed the trust was started all around the world.

In 1989 the United States choose, after years of conflict, to carry out a military intervention in Panama, to remove Manuel Noriega, convicted for drug dealing and for threatening the lives of the Americans living in Panama. The aim of this study is to examine whether George H. W Bush?s arguments for the military intervention comply with the principles of the just war.The method chosen for this study is a qualitative literature study, based primarily on secondary data. It is a case study with two complementing theories, the theory of the just war and the world system theory.The result showed that the American intervention both can be justified and unjustified following the principles of the Just War Theory.

Rapid development in the realms of electronic publishing has had a profound impact on information services in general and the academic library in particular. Since mid 1990´s an increasingly number of scholarly journals and other information resources have been made available electronically. Electronic books are the newest electronic service in the hybrid library and can be seen as the third wave in the digital library. Although electronic books have for a long time existed as electronic texts such as digitalized classics or other texts in the public domain, it is not until recently that e-books have been distributed and packaged in a commercial form. As more e-book models are being developed, libraries are being forced to take e-books into consideration when planning their information services.The aim of this master thesis is to describe the first stage of implementation of the new electronic media, the electronic book or e-book, in Swedish academic libraries.

The aim of the thesis is to investigate to what extent the pedagogy process has been affected by the close collaboration between librarians and teachers when it comes to education on the information search process. The thesis shows that the librarian is seen as an acting intermediate for information, and is regarded as a part of the learning process. The issues covered comprise of how students, teachers and librarians perceive that the students becomes information literate, how they perceive that the subject fields are covered, and how information has been transmitted, and how all this has been affected by the fact that the librarian is actually less available in person. Also, the following questions are discussed; how do librarians, teachers and students interact through the homepages of the course and "the landscape of studying"? And in what respect have the old library halls changed into that, which is available 24 hours a day, with different kinds of meeting opportunities where the search of information has been integrated with group projects? The foundation of this study is built on an evaluation of a project comprising of virtual study environment at the University of Linköping.

The aim of this thesis is to describe the development of profitability and capital structure in Swedish quoted companies during the period of 1990 to 2004. Further, the aim is to determine the relationship between profitability and leverage in order to conclude whether the choice of capital structure supports the pecking order theory or the trade-off theory of capital structure. The findings show that return on assets fluctuates between 3 and 11 percent and that return on equity fluctuates between 3 and 22 percent during the period. Further, the leverage and the cost of debt have decreased. This indicates lowered financial risk in Swedish quoted companies in the period between 1990 and 2004.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is a difference between the respondent groups preparers and non-preparers position in IASBs question if a reversal of previously impaired goodwill should be prohibited. The background is an exposure draft sent out by the IASB and we examine the answers, in form of comment letters, sent in by the respondents to reach our purpose. Our method is positivistic in the sense that we study already existing theories when we create our hypothesis which gives our assumption about how the result of the respondent?s answers will be. Our data, which we have collected from the comment letters, is qualitative secondary data.

To assure good quality the software needs to be tested to find errors and to verify that the programme meets the customer?s expectations. Traditional methods are usually used in software development and means that a number of predetermined steps are followed. By using agile methods the development can more easily be adapted to the changes on the market. With these methods the testing is carried out continuously throughout the project.

The purpose of this study was to do a narrative survey of the discussion about violence in partner relationships that is held in research literature. The question at issue was: How do research literature discuss violence in partner relationships, with focus on heterosexual relationships? The eight primary documents that have been chosen are written by researchers, professional therapists, National Counsil for Women's protection (Nationellt Råd för Kvinnofrid, NRK) and Swedish Government Official Report (Statens Offentliga Utredningar, SOU). To investigate the theories, discover the similarities and differences between them and how they can complement each other, the documents statements has been analyzed with a dialectic-hermeneutic approach and social constructionism and discourse theory.The research findings showed that the gender perspective theory, the psychodynamic theory and the social psychology theory have a few things in common, but that they on the whole are different and contradict each other. The gender perspective theory dominates the discussion but needs to be combined with the other theories to give a more all-embracing understanding.

Changes in the society engender changes in the practice of the auditor profession. Stricter laws, more detailed recommendations, and demands from the auditor?s clients have increased. The auditor constitutes a profession and therefore it is important that there is a trust since the auditor is the one that certifies the quality of the company?s economical information.

The purpose of this study was to bibliometrically investigate and describe the research area called ?extrasolar planets?. The research questions were: Which authors were mostly cited within the area when the first authors (and their co-authors) were considered? Which authors were found in most co-occurrences? Did particular author collaborations emerge? To which institutions were most authors affiliated and did the size of the institution have an influence on whether an author was cited? What was the geographic distribution of authors and institutions and were there any patterns of collaboration?Did the image of dominating institutions and countries depend on the viewpoint?How applicable was Lotka?s law on the collected data? The data was collected from citation lists in documents from the database Arxiv.org. The documents were extracted by using the search term ?extrasolar planets?.

This master thesis aims to examine how public libraries in Sweden are practically and ideologically equipped to deal with e-books, outside of the dominant distributor Elib. The study also aims to find out what?s required of the book market and the public libraries to make further progress in the question of e-books. In Sweden e-books are still representing only a small amount of all the library loans and an even smaller amount of the commercial book market.The methodological and theoretical ground for the thesis is Grounded Theory, and the survey is based on interviews with publishers, librarians and distributors.The conclusions of this thesis are that the public libraries lack resources to invest in e-books, and that they also lack in knowledge about the media and its readers. It also exposes that both internal and external collaboration efforts need to be further developed.

Partnering is a collaboration method where the contractor and the client work together, based on a mutual trust towards each other and with a common goal for the project. The method originates from the United States where it was early adapted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It later spread internationally where the United Kingdom and Denmark were early in Europe to see the potential with partnering, to help aid with the issues they were having where construction projects kept running late, going over budget and lacked in quality. By using partnering you can achieve a shorter building time, improved work relationships and enhanced efficiency and cost effectiveness.

The overall aim of the study was to take part of teachers' experiences and work force mother-tongue education and literacy development in the Sámi School. The study was conducted through interviews with twelve teachers who teach at two Sámi schools. The focus has been on looking how to work with native speakers teaching at the Sámi School, what factors promote / hinder students' development of their first or second language, and the importance of collaboration between the schools` various professions work with multilingual students reading and writing skills. Through interviews of various categories of teachers, I have tried to visibility problems of the education of minority language children and their reading and writing skills. I discuss the teaching, the importance and the lack / availability of communication and consensus between different categories of teachers.

Under tidigt 80-tal växte olika sorter av kommunikationsmodeller fram, bland annat Daft och Lengels, Media Richness Theory. Denna teori var baserad på den tidens kommunikationsmönster. Idag nästan 20 år senare har vi sett explosionsartad IT-utveckling vilket har medfört förändringar i det dagliga kommunikationsmönstret. I denna uppsats undersöker vi om Media Richness Theory fungerar på ny teknik med hänsyn till dagens utökade kommunikationsmetoder. Vi studerar bland annat användnings- och påverkningsmönster ur ett abduktivt perspektiv, det vill säga både kvalitativt och kvantitativt.