Increasing immigration to Sweden has transformed a culturally homogeneous society into a more heterogeneous one. As a consequence intercultural communication and interaction have been increasing. Child health care agencies have encountered these increases. The aim of this study was to examine what the health care professionals experienced and communicated in these intercultural environments. Eight interviews with child health care nurses were carried through at four child health care centers in the south of Sweden.

The purpose of this study is to improve the understanding of the dynamics behind Chinese-Western buyer-supplier relationships. The study takes on a partially inductive approach by commencing with exploratory in-depth interviews. The main body of the study consists of a cross-sectional survey. Data has been collected through an on-line questionnaire. The theoretical review consists of industrial relationships with specific accounts on the role of adaptation, trust and commitment; a stream of literature in cross-cultural relationships deriving from Hofstede?s culturalist legacy with specific reference to Chinese-Western relationships, including studies on relationship bonding, and the role of guanxi.

The name of the study means ?The short arm - a study in diversity and arm?s length in the cultural collaboration model?. Right now there is a reform in the Swedish cultural administration where the responsibility for handing out state funds and grants to cultural organizations is changing from the state government to the local regional governments. The purpose of this study is to map the organisational changes caused by the reform and investigate how this affects the regional policies concerning cultural diversity and the arm?s length principle.

This two years master?s thesis in Library and Information Sciences aims to investigate and put the services of 118100 Svar På Allt (SPA, an SMS mobile question and answer service) and Fråga biblioteket (FB, a library operated e-mail reference service) into the context of the reference encounter. Questions sent to SPA and their subsequent answers are analysed, and part of these questions are forwarded to FB for comparative studies. Both of the formats are compared to the reference encounter as a whole. The framing of the question originates in the assumption that there may be a need for further negotiation of the questions submitted to the aforementioned formats.

The overarching aim of this paper is to study the professional encounter in its complexity. The requirements for receiving welfare is set by the professional and it's the professionals decision if they are met in the proper manner. This makes the assessment of the clients conditions and the correctness of the assessment hence important. There are several levels which is necessary for the social worker to take into consideration.We have therefore made a socio-analysis by using a theoretical model of Johansson (2006) where he uses the Social Psychology of the encounter to create a model with four levels, which is always present in the professional encounter: structural, positional, relational, and experience level.  Our base was that the one responsible for handling these levels was the professional which led us to search for literature concerning the professional approach.Our study is formed as a qualitative case-study. Our empirical data consist of qualitative interviews with four social workers handling social allowance.The results shows that the complexity of the professional encounter requires a professional approach.

This paper examines the concept of heritage and which factors that determines how we evaluate and select what should be considered cultural heritage. This has been examined using a qualitative study involving interviews with seven people working within different parts of the cultural heritage sector. The purpose was to get a picture of what the public sector?s cultural heritage consists of and why so. The research question was: What gives the status of cultural heritage? This was examined by looking at further questions: What defines the concept of cultural heritage? Who decides what should be considered cultural heritage? What is significant when discussing cultural heritage? One conclusion is that the concept itself is experienced as diffuse but that the meaning can be summarized as the traces we leave behind to be preserved by future generations.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine the use of the concept cultural heritage in Swedish governmental cultural policy. Ten official reports, reaching over a time period of seven years (1997-2004) are examined in the following way: What is cultural heritage? What functions/ values does the cultural heritage have? Whose heritage is a cultural heritage? With some simplification you can say that there are two different views on cultural heritage in the documents. The most common way to refer to cultural heritage is a category of chosen historical objects whose preservation is motivated by their function as sources of information and knowledge about the history and development of the Swedish society.

The aim of this thesis is to create an understanding about how and to what extent a Swedish expatriate manager needs to adapt his/her leadership in accordance with the culture of the host country. Thus shall different managers? perceptions of experienced management overseas be studied. To accomplish our aim, three different problems have been designed. These are as follows: In what way does the manager?s earlier experiences and knowledge about expatriation affect her or his leadership in a new cross-cultural context? How does the culture of the host country affect the expatriate manager?s leadership? How does the expatriate manager handle contradictory demands: that is differences in expectations from subordinates and the higher management? We have chosen to use an abductive approach in order to do a qualitative study and we have therefore conducted eight case studies to create a foundation for distinguishing patterns.The case studies are based on eight Swedish managers with experience from expatriation. The theoretical framework is structured upon three main themes including; knowledge and skills a global leader needs to possess, the relation between the leader and subordinates, and contradictory demands.

In order to answer the question in the title, a cross-cultural analysis of two countries was done. Countries chosen were the Republic of Latvia and the Kingdom of Spain. The need for this research was suggested by increased cross-border business activities inside the European Union, and the lack of previous studies involving new Member States. The aim of the research was to see what environmental factors influence advertising adaptation in the European Union, as well as to evaluate the applicability of a standardisation approach. According to the theory, there are three external factors that influence the creation of a global advertising.

Many organizations strive to be transnational. This means that individuals with different cultural background will work together. Countries around the world have their own culture, which mark the way individual?s think and act. Different values between leaders and their subordinates are often a key factor to misunderstandings and conflicts in transnational organisations.

The EU-funded project European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) aims to integrateresources from various domains within the field of cultural heritage, and make them availableon the Internet. To accomplish this integration it is necessary to describe the various resourcesin a way that will achieve cross-domain interoperability. This description of digital resourcesis commonly referred to as metadata. The most well known and used metadata standard is theDublin Core Metadata Element Set, a general standard developed for the purpose ofdescribing all types of digital resources. Since the mid-1990's a large number of specializedstandards have emerged in different communities, for example IMDI, designed for detaileddescription of language resources.This thesis aims to examine the possibility of combining a general and a specialized metadatastandard to achieve cross-domain interoperability and at the same time provide a sufficientlydetailed description of language resources for researchers within the field of linguistics.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to study how Catalans´ identifications, with respect to their city (Barcelona), their region (Catalonia), their country (Spain) and Europe, are related to each other. Furthermore it deals with whether they use cultural or civic notations when they speak of their identification with the different territorial levels.The thesis is based on a qualitative method with interviews with ten Catalans living in Barcelona, aged from 18 to 58. The result showed that Catalans´ identifications with different territorial levels vary in how they relate to each other. This variation can be classified using three models, namely; ?The Russian doll model? which implies that the identities are ranked hierarchically, ?cross-cutting? that is people can identify themselves with the different levels depending on various situations, and also ?The marble cake model? which means that the different identities are so intertwined that they cannot be separated.

This two years master?s thesis in Library and Information Sciences aims to investigate and put the services of 118100 Svar På Allt (SPA, an SMS mobile question and answer service) and Fråga biblioteket (FB, a library operated e-mail reference service) into the context of the reference encounter. Questions sent to SPA and their subsequent answers are analysed, and part of these questions are forwarded to FB for comparative studies. Both of the formats are compared to the reference encounter as a whole. The framing of the question originates in the assumption that there may be a need for further negotiation of the questions submitted to the aforementioned formats.

As self-service technologies become more common in service provisions, a deeper understanding is needed of how customer satisfaction is affected by automated service encounters. Drawing from theories of customer satisfaction, human interaction, and the dynamics of complex service provisions, the differences between automated and interpersonal service encounters in the initial part of a service provision are examined in terms of customers? evaluation of the service encounter itself, overall satisfaction, as well as the service encounter?s impact on global evaluations and evaluations of other non-dependant service encounters. The study was performed on people travelling by air on Swedish domestic routes. Passengers were asked to evaluate the airline?s performance on different attributes of the air travel they had undertaken, as well as to form an overall evaluation of the service.

Denna studies centrala syfte är att undersöka rollen som informationsteknik spelar samt de problem som inte gå att komma undan i så kallad tvärkulturell och gränsöverskridande samarbete genom att undersöka fallet mellan den svenska staden Borlänge och den kinesiska staden Wuhan. Arbets- och utvärderingsmetoden som används i studien bygger på är den vetenskapliga forskningsansatsen hermeneutik och det innebär utvärdering av intervjuer på ett kvalitativt sätt som handlar främst om observationer, förståelse och sökning efter mönster och samband. Genom detta sätt fick författaren resultat som visar att informationsteknik spelar en avgörande roll för samarbete mellan Borlänge och Wuhan men har vissa barriärer som har svårt att komma undan såsom skillnader och avvikelse i kultur, geografi, tid, språk, arbetsvanor och politik..