Research and innovation are areas that have been evolving quickly during recent years. However, it has been difficult for individual countries to make progress on their own. To solve this problem the European union have launched the most expensive research and innovation program to this day. By combining national governments throughout Europe, the EU wants to create cutting edge technology that will strenghten the region and make the union able to compete on a worldwide stage. However, trying to combine national governments has not been easy, the programs struggle with byrocracy and member states of the European union are tentative about supranational institutions. By engaging in the program national governments have been afraid of how this will affect their sovereignty.

This bachelor thesis explores the conditions for a harmonized EU gender equality policy. Recently the maternity leave directive has been introduced by the European commission and seeks to improve the conditions for pregnant workers. The controversial subject of this maternity leave has illustrated many of the problems connected to the development of a social dimension in EU. First of all, the debate concerning the maternity leave directive in the European Parliament has shown that both sides in the parliament seem positive towards creating legislation in this matter on EU level. However, parties at the right tend to disagree to many of the amendments in the proposal, such as the maximum entitlement.

To support, enhance and, in the future, develop the activity within the county councils in Sweden, IT support systems are currently used to a large extent. The need to document is central to the health care organizations and the counties have come a long way in the introduction of electronic patient record systems (EPR). The aim of the EPR systems is to support the care processes and the clinical professions in their work.This is a master thesis in the area of human-computer interaction (HCI), Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University. The aim of the thesis was to describe and compare the five most common EPR systems in Sweden. The comparison will focus on some usability aspects and on how well they support the users in their clinical practice.

Reverse logistics is getting more and more attention both from companies and the public. It is an area with the possibility for companies to do good in the eyes of the public. This work focus on the return system of a one-way handling material called the loading ledge. The loading ledge is developed by IKEA as a substitute for the EUR-pallet in transports from suppliers with a long distance and even flow and in transports from suppliers with short distance and uneven flow. The loading ledge is made out of 100 % recyclable plastic.The purpose of this work is to find the most efficient set-up for recycling of loading ledges within IKEA on a European level from a transport and handling point of view considering aspects like cost, environment, time and, from an administrative point of view, user-friendliness.Who will the participants of the set-up be, where will they be located, which transports are needed and which income and costs does the set-up generate, are questions that will be answered.

ABSTRACTThe EU as a normative power in Belarus ? a critical caseBy Anna JohnssonUniversity of VäxjöSchool of Social SciencesSpring semester 2007The European Union?s identity is a much debated topic. Some say it?s a unique actor in the international arena because of the different tools it has at its disposal. Ian Manners claims that the EU is what he calls a normative power.

The VAT Directive (2006/112/EC) does not regulate Member States? opportunities to intervene against tax evasion. The European Court of Justice has clarified the situation in case C-255/02 Halifax. This case establish that the universal principle against the abuse of rights applies to VAT, which means that Member States have the opportunity to redefine transactions not involving a breach of law but nevertheless goes past what the legislature envisaged at the introduction of the provision.A debate has risen as to whether the principle against the abuse of rights is equally ap-plicable in Swedish domestic law on VAT. The administrative court of appeal in Go-thenburg, Case No.

The first aim of this study is to examine what the differences are between the Classic directive (directive 2004/18/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 31 March 2004 on the coordination of procedures for the award of public works contracts, public supply contracts and public service contracts) and the Revised Classic directive (directive 2014/24/EU of the European Parliament and of the council of 26 February 2014 on public procurement and repealing Directive 2004/18/EC) when it comes to social considerations in public procurement. The second aim is to examine if the revision of the directive has solved the prior existing problems regarding social considerations in public procurement. In this paper a traditional European legal method is used. The examinations show a number of things, including the Revised Classic directive involving codification of case law, references to other sources of law and some clarified rules as well as new provisions. The regulations regarding reserved contracts, technical specifications, and selection criterion are satisfied in the Revised Classic directive.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine the ways in which culture and cultural policy are being articulated in the process of Lund's application to become Sweden's European Cultural Capital of 2014.I have used Dorte Skot-Hansen's three cultural political rationalities: the humanistic-, the sociological- and the instrumental rationality, as well as and Jenny Johannisson's extension of those into three cultural-political discourses, as sensitizing concepts in my analysis. The questions raised are: How are the three rationalities/discourses articulated in the chosen central documents and in the process surrounding them? Which themes and arguments dominate the chosen documents?The main objects of my study have been four texts that have been produced in the applicationprocess: a Prestudy, a Plan of action, a Broschure and a Cultural policy. Along with them local political protocols, newspaper articles and other related material have been used. The research method applied was a qualitative eclectical textual analysis with emphasis on the content and on tracing the way the rationalities were expressed in the material.The rationalities were all found to be articulated in the four texts.

With a larger awareness of the climate changes and increasing electricity prices, energy efficiency measures in the industry have become more common. By rationalize the activity and by the same time decrease the emission of greenhouse gases the company can both save money and reduce negative environmental impact. For the Swedish industries the electricity price have traditional been relative low, which has resulted in a considerable larger usage than other European countries. By a deregulation of the European electricity market the electricity price will level off between the countries, which will cause a higher electricity price in Sweden than we are use to. To prevent that the Swedish industry don?t lose competitiveness against the other European countries, it will require energy efficiency activities in all different forms.ABB Sweden has decided to decrease their total energy usage with five percent in two years.

Based on the Migration Board's statistics report, the number of children that has gone missing within a time interval of 4 years (2010-2014) comprises 1331 children in total, of whom 146 are girls and 1185 are boys. A rising interest about what has happened to those children created a fundamental platform for this thesis. By reading Åkerman?s report from 2012, and the book De förlorade barnen: en rapport by Mikkelsen and Wagner (2013) the curiosity grew deeper. The research questions that were established were divided into three parts.

Distributed system development is a common occurrence in today?s technological and global world. Because the consequences of its geographically distributed nature it creates barriers between people that affects their communication and collaboration efforts in the distributed context. Despite a lot of technological breakthroughs over the last decades and the occurrence of video-conference applications and other tools for communication and collaboration, cultural and geographical issues have so far not yet been completely resolved. In this study I have made a literature study over distributed system development to form a set of central factors that affects the distributed development process.

This thesis aims to investigate SAAB AB´s possibilities to use synthetic instruments in their test systems. The reason for this is reducing costs and the risk of obsolescence which is common when test systems operate for several decades.The market around synthetic instruments has been explored in the search for suitable hardware and software. Software has been developed in LabVIEW and synthetic instruments have been created with the help of IVI-drivers. The hardware consisted of PXI-instruments (Waveform generator and Digitizer), connected to a computer using a fiber optic link and PXI-chassi. The created instruments was then compared to common instruments used today, and the comparison turned out well.

The economic development and competitiveness in Europe is heavily dependent on an efficient transport system. Movement of goods and people is essential for a competitive industry and successful trade. As a result of an intensified transport business, consumption of fossil fuels has increased dramatically. As a consequence, there are increased emissions of dangerous greenhouse gases. Transports are often mentioned as an area with high impact on the environment.

This paper discuss the possibilities to improve the Swedish political nomination system. It brings up some of the values and norms that can be used to change the existing system. Values as openness, the demand of responsibility and also if there is values from the American spoils system that can be used in the Swedish system. A minor purpose is to discuss the part of the parliament within the nomination process. To investigate this I have some theoretical starting points and a self constructed analysis tool.

Muslims and islam are unquestionably a part of European social life. In recent times, however, different events, such as the enlargement of the EU and the fact that muslims to a higher extent demand their rights, have brought a number of questions to the fore concerning muslims and islam in Europe. Moreover, we can see an increasing level of islamophobia in contemporary Europe, but also that the EU has launched several programs to increase both the diversity and the unity throughout the Union and to combat islamophobia. However, most of these programs focus on islam as religion and muslims in general, and such a narrow viewpoint runs the risk of missing important issues.In this new context it would be interesting to widen the scope and ask what place not only the muslim community and islam, but also sharia (an important element in islam), may have in future Europe ? especially when it comes to muslim identity?My main objects are to see how the concept of sharia is constructed in the debates in the European Parliament, how that discourse relates to a social practice ? the increasing islamophobic ideas in Europe ? and what effect this may have on muslim identity in a European context.The results shows that the Parliament constructs sharia as, for example, something archaic, threatening, inhuman and misogynistic.