Childhood as a social category is under strucural redefinition. In this thesis the child and childhood are understood as socially constructed phenomenons. Focus is laid upon the construction of the concept ?in the best interest of the child? wich in The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is defined as beeing the foremost important view to take into account when decisions wich affect children are made. As the thesis shows, a concrete and universall view of the best interest of the child is lacking in practice and would in many cases be unfortunate.

Title:Product abandonment ? A comparative study of five ABB-units Level:Master thesis in Business administration, spring 2011.Purpose:The purpose of this paper is to through a comparative analysis examine how different companies, within the same group, works with product abandonment and what factors influence the process.Problem:How important is situational and product specific factors in a product abandonment process in which the organizational factors are constant?Method:This study is based on primary as well as secondary data where interviews represent the primary data. Interviews, following the same interview guide, were made with five companies within the same group.Result:The results from the empirical studies presented in the text below recurring themes derived from the framework.Conclusions:Our conclusions are that the importance of product specific factors is of significant matters in a product abandonment process, even when organizational factors are constant. We base that on that although the companies are within the same group, under the same strategic direction and constructed according to the same organizational structure the product abandonment process is different for the respective companies.Keywords:Product abandonment, product deletion, product elimination, weak products, ABB .

This report is a case study of ?citizen forums? in the municipality of Uppsala. These forums are arranged to make people participate more in local politics. The aim of this study is to find out if the opinions and the wishes coming from the citizens are later involved in the planning process etc made by the authorities. The aim is also to explain why or why not the opinions from the citizens are of any importance.My empirical data come from interviews that I have made with seven different respondents, both politicians and civil servants.

This is a technical report about cement stabilization in general and the stabilizationprocess during the construction of a warehouse in Halmstad, Sweden in particular and iswritten at the section for economy and technology at Halmstad University incollaboration with NCC Anläggning.NCC encountered variations in compression strength in the stabilized material on the firstwarehouse that they constructed for the company Biltema. In our report we used thestabilization process of the second warehouse for the same company as a reference todetermine what could be done to get a more homogeneous result for future projects.We also looked in to what testing method is the most suitable to determine the result ofthe stabilization.After interviews with people involved in the process and visits on the work site we havecome to the conclusion that the most probable cause to the variations in compressionstrength is segregation in the ballast material. This segregation can occur in severaldifferent occasions in the process such as during the production, transportation andhandling on the work site.Other causes for the variation can be improper compaction, overlapping stabilization insome places and different duration of hardening of the samples that are tested.The best way to do in situ test of the stabilized material is to do seismic investigations asthose are non-destructive tests in comparison to taking core samples and you can discoverany cracks or air bubbles in the material..

The current paper is a study of the character Christian Grey in the EL James trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey. The main aim is to find out how masculinity, sexuality and gender are constructed in this erotic fantasy. More over terms as femininity, unmanliness and gender have relevance to the study. Several studies have been done on romance novels and Harlequin in particular from a gender perspective, but few of them from a masculine point of view. Hence, no earlier study has been done on Fifty Shades of Grey with masculinity studies as the main tool of masculinity, or with theories of romance.

Development and construction of an electronic Breakout box is the main work for this thesis. The box is a part of a test system for the component Fuel Flow Transmitter and should convert signals to be suitable for a frequency counter. A previously constructed Breakoutbox for this purpose is being old and needed to be recreated. So SAAB Aerotech, Aircraft services, the company for the thesis work wanted to construct a new, more sustainable Breakoutbox adapted to a more modern technology. The signals to the box comes from the transmitter and should be converted to suitable signals for a frequency counter so it can show pulse and time difference between the signals.

Although Sweden is considered to be one of the world?s most equal countries, studies show that social work to a large extent is characterised of stereotype conceptions about men and women. This implies that clients with addiction problems are treated by there gender belongings and not from there individual needs. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how aware the social services are regarding gender perspectives and equal opportunities among male and female addicts. The social workers that were interviewed had different opinions about what extent the gender perspective had in the treatment of the clients.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to describe how Swedish public libraries use the online social network Facebook and its functions. Our focus of this study lies on how the librarians use the network and what experiences they?ve made. The questions we wanted to answer were:? How do the libraries in this study work with Facebook and its services? ? What do the interviewed librarians think about working with Facebook as an instrument?? What pros and cons can be identified from working with Facebook?The methodology used for this study was qualitative interviews.

Equality between men and women has as an ideal won an increasing impact on the contemporary Swedish society and has established as a factor influencing all areas of society from politics to business and private life. The focus of this essay is to explore the impact of equality on hegemonic masculinity and relations of masculinities. The aim of the essay has moreover been to investigate the consequences of an increased focus on men and critique of masculinity due to a growing influence of feminism and women?s movement in Sweden. The study is based on interviews with four members of staff working in a men?s clinic for sexual and reproductive health in Stockholm, Järva Mansmottagning.

Pairs trading is a relatively new trading strategy, the strategy has only been used during a couple of decades. A study made on the American stock market has shown that the strat-egy has generated a positive result. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if pairs trad-ing has been able to create a positive result on the Swedish stock market during the time period of 1995-2004.The data required for this thesis was collected from Stockholm stock exchange and is ad-justed for splits and issues.The pairs trading strategy involves two stages ? identification of pairs and trading signals. The pairs were identified during a period of 12 months.

The purpose of the essay was to investigate the way four different educators, at a pre-school with a bilingual profile, work towards strengthening the children?s bilingualism as well as their identity. The research questions concern which guidelines are being used, the educators perceptions concerning children?s bi- and multilingualism and in what way they believe that their pre-school distinguishes itself from others.Qualitative individual interviews and observations were conducted and the empirical data was analyzed using a theoretical framework, constructed of theories concerning language development, ethnicity and identity.The result presented in the study shows that the pre-school not only follows the national curriculum but also their own guideline. The guideline states that there should be both Spanish- and Swedish speaking personnel and that they are ?responsible? for the education in their own language.

The aim of this essay is to show if and how group identities are being constructed in maindocuments from three political parties in the Swedish parliament, focusing on class, genderand ethnic identities. The three parties who?s documents are being analyzed are theModerate Party, the Sweden Democrats and the Left Party. The conclusion of the essay isthat the Moderate Party is so focused on the individual that they are not promoting groupidentity based on class, gender or ethnicity. The Sweden Democrats are mostly discussing,and therefore creating a discourse of, cultural identity, where Swedish, Nordic, Europeanand Western culture are being created as the ?us?, and others are being created as ?them?.They are also promoting difference between men and women, therefore dividing the sexesin groups.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how six fantasynovels reflects or breaks the heteronormativity in society bylooking at how gender roles and sexuality are described.The theoretical framework is based on Judith Butler's theoryabout the heterosexual matrix which requires two separategenders and a compulsory heterosexuality and YvonneHirdman's two principles about dichotomy and hierarchy.The method used was idea analysis where dimensions basedon the theoretical framework were constructed. Thesedimensions were: behaviour, tasks, relationships and roles.The result shows that all of the books both breaks andreflects the society's values on gender and sexuality. Thereare some stereotypes present, for example that intuition isassociated with femininity and physical strength withmasculinity. However, the books also offer characters ofboth sexes that break the gender stereotypes, such asstrong women and emotional men.

The aim of this thesis is to expand the understanding of 16th century Flemish art by approaching paintings by artists Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575), Joachim Beuckelaer (1533-1574) and Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525-1569) from a different perspective. This is done by extending the discourse of art history, into a discourse of literary history and primarily 16th century novels by authors such as François Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes. The paintings are studied in relation to these 16th century novels, by comparison and as a testament of this specific time period. A widening contextualization is also constructed in which a connection to the expression of the carnivals ambivalent form, as well as the notion of lower classes is explored.

Background: As a result of the financial markets ever ongoing product innovation a new derivative was introduced in the USA in 1997. A derivative that derived it's value, not from the price of an underlying asset, but instead from a climate factor. It's been known for a long time that revenue in certain industries are affected by weather conditions. The suppliers of weather derivatives claim that these weather sensitive businesses can user weather derivatives in order to lessen weather risk. Purpose: To do a critical evaluation of how weather derivatives can be used by companies as a risk management tool.