This study puts emphasis on an international discourse describing how cities frequently compete against each other, and also describing factors that cities should enhance to make themselves more competitive. The discourse in this study has therefore been used to seek understanding how three different municipalities Borlänge, Karlstad and Malmö strive for growth by applying central factors from the discourse on the municipalities strategic documents. What the study shows is that the central factors from the discourse strongly imprints the strategic documents, but the presence of the factors varies between the municipalities and also to what meaning that lies behind the strategic goals..

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the Swedish municipal welfare system, in their capacity as discourse makers, construct Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in the relationships of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people. A discourse analysis of their official plans of action regarding IPV and the information directed towards their citizens through their webpages showed that the discourse surrounding IPV revealed a gender dichotomy, where the victim was mainly constructed as being female and the perpetrator as male. As a consequence of this, gay and bisexual men were rendered invisible from the discourse surrounding victims of IPV, although they could be included in the construction of perpetrators of it. Lesbian and bisexual women were often included in the understanding of victims of IPV, but in the discourse surrounding perpetrators of it they were made invisible. The discourse about IPV also excluded the experiences and vulnerability of people who identify as being transgendered.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the constructions of sexuality, which are produced when judgments concerning asylum are made, based on an asylum seeker?s sexual orientation. The question formulations are the following: Which constructions of sexuality are produced when necessary condition, fear of persecution due to sexual orientation, is applied in judgments regarding refugee status? Furthermore, how constructions of sexuality differ in the judgments where the asylum seeker has been consented and rejected is investigated. The empirical material consists of 13 judgments, which were announced between the years 2009-2013 by the Migration court.

The concept of the work-first principle (arbetslinjen) might be considered old, but still serves as the main principle as well as an instrument in the Swedish labour market and social policy today. The original idea was that work and willingness to work was to be rewarded, especially due to a common opposition against the passive receipt of grants. The general definition of work, today, is that it is something desirable that should be achieved and that unemployed primarily will be offered training or work rather than grants and subsidies. When the Moderate party re-launched themselves as Sweden's "workers' party of today", in the beginning of the 2000's, the concept was brought back into the spotlight. In the elections of 2006 and 2010, the labour market was widely debated and become a controversial issue, with the concept of the work-first principle playing a major role.The purpose of this thesis is to analyse and problematize how the concept was presented and explained in the nationwide newspapers Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet during the 2010 elections, this in order to increase the understanding of the concept?s contemporary definition and policy implications.

The purpose of this essay is to study the two cases ?The hijacking of a bus in Årdal? & ?The double murder in Ljungsbro? from media ethics aspects.  The aim for this study is to clear up if the the Swedish newspapers have reported according to the mediaethic rules and to see if there is any differences between the newspapers reporting. The following theories has been used to reach the objective: the journalism task, news values, the liberty of press and speach, media ethical rules and discursive discrimination. The study has used a critical discourse method formed by Teun a. van Dijk to analyse the material, mainly through macro- and microstructures.

The Act Prohibiting Discrimination and Other Degrading Treatment of Children and School Students (2006:67) entered into force on 1 of April 2006. The purpose of this Act is to promote equal rights for children and school students and to combat discrimination on the five discrimination grounds of sex, ethnic origin, religion or other belief, sexual orientation or disability. This Act also has the purpose of combating other degrading treatment. According to the Act the organiser of the activity shall insure that there is an equal treatment plan that aims to promote the equal rights for children and school students irrespective of the five discrimination grounds. Discrimination is a result of the social norms which tends to exclude people who does not fit in and therefore considerers as being abnormal.

 Prostitution has been intensely debated in Sweden for nearly four decades. Two major investigations have so far been initiated by the government and numerous propositions have been put forward in the Swedish parliament resulting in the sexköpslag from 1999 that criminalizes purchase of sexual services. The law aims at punishing the buyer and protecting the women in prostitution, thus making it possible for women to be helped by various social interventions rather than punished. Swedish society has undergone major changes in these decades. Globalization, the internet and the membership in the EU have changed the Swedish society and influenced the discourse on prostitution.This paper has a twofold aim, on the one hand investigating if and how these changes have had an impact on the prostitution discourse in texts produced by the government and analyze how female and male sexuality in connection to prostitution is constructed.

Today many separated children and youth up to 18 years - children in the sense of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child - flee from war and armed conflicts around the world. Many of them come to Sweden for protection and to apply for asylum.The aim of this study is to examine how the national Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå - TT - constructs the image of separated children and youth. The main research questions have been: How does TT construct the image of the separated refugee children? The more detailed questions put to examine this main question have been: what are the issues being focused in the reporting and what discourses, voices and sources are let into the journalistic material?The theoretical perspective should be considered as social constructionistic where the basic idea is that the image of the separated child also constructs the way society looks upon them, their rights and their needs, affecting how these children will be welcomed and treated when thay arrive in our society. The empirical study is a qualitative analysis of text, produced in the span 2007- April 20th 2010.

This paper focuses on the Swedish migration discourse and investigates if and to what extent it is dominated by a security perspective. Analysing a number of official texts and documents I want to show how the discourse describes migrants and what implications this carries with it for the migrants and for the Swedish migration politics. Through discourse analysis I have analysed whose security that is prioritised, the Swedish or the refugees, who is the refugee and the asylum seeker, and who is the illegal migrant in the Swedish official migration discourse. As a theoretical frame for the analysis I have used theories on migration and security. These include theories on the securitisation of politics, the globalisation and the creation of political identity from the nation state perspective and theories on the connection between migration and security.My results show that a security discourse is dominating the Swedish official migration discourse and is therefore defining our reality and the identities of refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants.

This thesis examines the relationship between OECD-DAC and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) within an aid efficiency context. The ability for these two actors to cooperate is highly important and determines the outcome for a major part of the development aid in the new millennium. The development agenda for the new millennium emphasizes aid efficiency as a key to a more successful aid, and this requires increased cooperation between all actors. The analysis made is a discourse analysis. The discourse of aid efficiency is analyzed, both its preconditions and results.The analyze finds out that there is a gap between OECD-DAC and CSOs in terms of how to handle aid efficiency.

The purpose of this article is to describe the discourse in which public-private partnership (PPP) resides, within the Swedish parliament, in the field of infrastructure. I have chosen to look at the latest three years deliberation where PPP appears in parliament bills.This case study is based upon discourse as a qualitative method. Five indicator signs which is history, comparison, geographic location, vision of growth potential and solution controls the context of PPPThe result of the analysis was that a clear discourse was unravelled. A first rather surprising conclusion shows that it is possible to disconnect the discourse from PPP. PPP is not important by itself, the result shows that it only play the part of possible solution to the problems related to the discourse and does not have any value in its own.This result lead the conclusion that PPP is no more than a tool for politicians to get as much out of their infrastructural aims as possible, as rational vote-maximizing actors.

For years the northern parts of Sweden, Norrland (translated: North land) has been considered mystified and exotified by the southern, more urban parts of the country. The rural Norrland ? though 60 percent of Sweden ? is seldom a part of the common conversation, meaning that most of the people living in the southern parts simply have no idea what is happening in the north. The one million people living in Norrland, on the other hand, every day gets to know what happens in the south on the evening news. The question about this possible structural relation between the urban and the rural became a large matter of cultural debate in the spring of 2015, If this thesis is true, we have a problem on our hands; can the national news be considered national if half the country is misrepresented? That question is what this essay is trying to find out by analyzing two of Swedens largest national newspapers.

The fact that we apprehend certain phenomena as more convenient than others generate questions about what constitute and decide what we think of as normal and appropriate. The aim of this thesis is to explore the immense conception of power and authority through a narrower approach that focuses on the EU.With this in mind I examine the penetration of the neo-liberal ideology in the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe to see if there are any implications for hegemony. This is achieved through a discourse analysis which is strengthened with empirical cases of EU policies.The result of the discourse analysis of selected parts of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe reveals that there are in fact tendencies which indicate that our society and reality is dominated by a neo-liberal hegemonic discourse. Subsequently the contemporary discourse broadly infiltrates the entire European Union, and therefore also its member states..

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the extent to which Swedish compulsory school tends to rely upon, and to further reinforce, ideologies that from a theoretical platform of deep ecology can be identified as ?ecologically unsustainable conceptions of reality?. Mainly, this will purport to an examination of the (explicit as well as implicit) prevalence of anthropocenthrism, individualism, ethnocenthrism and rationalism in a) the Swedish National Curriculum; and in b) biology text books. Methodologically, the study makes use of Fairclough´s approach to, and method for, critical discourse analysis (CDA). The main results are that the National Curriculum indeed expresses a high level of individualism, as well as (although to a lesser extent) traces of rationalism and ethnocenthrism.

 Prostitution has been intensely debated in Sweden for nearly four decades. Two major investigations have so far been initiated by the government and numerous propositions have been put forward in the Swedish parliament resulting in the sexköpslag from 1999 that criminalizes purchase of sexual services. The law aims at punishing the buyer and protecting the women in prostitution, thus making it possible for women to be helped by various social interventions rather than punished. Swedish society has undergone major changes in these decades. Globalization, the internet and the membership in the EU have changed the Swedish society and influenced the discourse on prostitution.This paper has a twofold aim, on the one hand investigating if and how these changes have had an impact on the prostitution discourse in texts produced by the government and analyze how female and male sexuality in connection to prostitution is constructed.