My thesis is based on a qualitative study. The purpose of the study is to investigate whether the educationalist at an especially chosen school in Stockholm promotes the students multicultural background in the education or not.This is due to the fact that the Swedish school to a considerable degree reflects the multicultural Swedish society. The socio-cultural starting point is when people come together and meet. The language is the tool of the socio-culture and it is the dialogue, discussion and sympathetic understanding that makes people meet.The cultural concept is diffuse and very wide. Everyone has their own definition of it.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the discourses of concepts related to diversity and ethnicity in Swedish cultural policy. It focuses on how the society is presented in different contexts and how people with a different ethnic origin than the majority, are represented in the cultural policy of the Swedish State. The study is restricted to concern immigrants. Six governmental cultural policy documents, reaching over a time period of eight years 1995-2003 are examined as follows: Which key terms are used in the presentations? Which contexts and discourses can be distinguished? Have the discourses changed over the time period examined, and if so, how? The theoretical starting point in the thesis is the discourse perspective of Laclau and Mouffe.

The society of consumption exposes us to a lot of information, where advertisement constitutes an extensive part. Due to its expanding, advertisement receives a natural and obvious space in our everyday life. This study aims to investigate how social and cultural values can be mediated in advertisement. The focus has been put to ideas related to health and fitness in the advertisement of power drinks. The thesis takes social constructionism as a starting point, and combines image- and critical discourse analysis in purpose to analyze the pictures.Sociology of consumption, construction of identity, lifestyle and everyday life all constitute an essential part of my analysis.

Organizational democracy has been a popular research area in recent decades but the implementation in real organizations is slow (Kokkinidis, 2012; Verdorfer, Weber, Unter Rainer & Seyr, 2013). Several researchers (Schön Jansson, 2012; Falkheimer, Heide & Johansson, 2013) argue that communication practitioners have a key role in democratic processes and that because their job role is under constant change there are only a few modern studies regarding the subject. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how communication practitioners in private and public organizations experience their role in the process of internal communication and to what extent they are aware of, and work with internal organizational democracy.The practitioners we interviewed had a strong feeling that they were a support function for the business and the organizational management. As a result of the study it is clear that communication practitioners are very loyal to their employers and to the organization they work for. They are, therefore, not neutral in their professional role and argue that their task is to represent the management's interests.

Today Europe is faced with an identity crisis concerning its borders. Turkey stands at the threshold for an EU-membership while the EU-Commission is trying to formulate what constitutes a European identity. This identity seeking process will determine the future not only for Turkey, but also for immigrants now living in Europe.In this thesis a discourse analysis, underpinned by socialconstructionist theory, is conducted to explore how the European identity has been constructed throughout history up until today. A starting point is that identity always is defined through a dialectical relationship to "otherness". Therefore the analysis is focused not only on what a European identity consists of but also what and who it excludes.

The concept of function represents a major part of mathematics and becomes more significant in school during high school. Throughout history, it has been a difficult concept to define and may create challenges for contemporary students. This literature study aims to identify students' difficulties with the concept of function, as well as to account for how the definition of a function has evolved historically. The literature study has been conducted through database searches in ERIC, Education Research Complete and MathSciNet via EBSCOhost, as well as through chain searching. The study results in identifying that students' difficulties with the concept of function primarily include the graphical and algebraic forms of representation.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine and analyse how the public librarys mission is interpreted and formulated in a selection of library related journals. The journals are both international scientific referee journals from the LIS field and journals with a closer connection to the practitioners within the public library field. The idea is that these journals can be seen as windows to an academic theoretic perspective on public libraries, as well as to the practitioners way of talking about the librarys mission. The study also aims to examine if there is a difference in the way that the librarys mission is interpreted and discussed among theorists and among practitioners within the field. The theoretical starting-point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory, and the method is text analytic.

Our purpose was to investigate if Swedish University educated social workers, living as active Christians, in any way might be influenced by Christian values. The main questions; Can Christian values be a factor in the choice of career to become a social worker? How does a personal belief in Christ impact the relationship towards the clients? Is Christian belief a support in the work? In this paper we used a qualitative method and interviewed eight persons, with a background as above, four of them employed by a church organisation and the other four working in the social sector. The result we present is that the eight Christian social workers Christian belief influenced their work very individually. How much this supported them was a choice about how official and open they wanted Christian values to be.

This master thesis investigates attitudes toward electronic publishing of fiction among the key participants authors and publishers in Sweden with the overall purpose of analysing the nature of these attitudes and what sort of tensions that exist between the two groups. The major areas of concern were formulated as: what sort of attitudes do authors and publishers display toward electronic publishing of fiction?, how do these attitudes affect the way the two groups relate to electronic publishing and to each other? and how do they perceive the future of this practice?. Everett Rogers diffusion of innovations theory was applied to characterise electronic publishing as an innovation cluster, and to investigate innovation attributes in form of relative advantages and disadvantages, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability. Data was gathered using quantitative questionnaires, but respondents were also given the opportunity to elaborate freely on some of the questions.

This thesis concerns the mesolithic relation towards animals and hunting habits among people in Skateholm, Tågerup and Vedbæk - Bøgebakken. The aim is to look at the societies from a cultural point of view and demonstrate that the people living there identified themselves with animals and adapted their lives, their hunting and their burial customs according to rituals and believes concerning animals in their surroundings. The result is convincing and clearly shows that animals where treated differently in manors which can only be explained with specific cultural relations towards different kinds of animals..

In the 10th of April 2010 the Polish Presidential plane crashed outside of Smolensk in today?s Russia. 88 passengers and 6 crewmen died a tragic death, among them the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczy?ski. A national week of sorrow was proclaimed and citizens all over Poland went out on streets and markets to honor the newly deceased President.

This Masters Thesis is about the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs and the arms length principle. The principle is used to explain the separation of power between two parts with a common interest. The main purpose is to elucidate if, and if so in what way, the arms length principle can be used to explain the relation between the National Council for Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Culture, i.e. the Swedish government, but also to examine the structures of power and relations within the Council. In the thesis we show that in the field of cultural policy the content of the arm lengths principle varies due to the many interpretations of the meaning.

The purpose of this research is to examine some historical aspects of Robert Putnam?s thesisabout voluntary associations and social capital. According to a micro perspective theory ofsocial capital the trust and reciprocity required and created by associations is important toexplain the disparity between institutional performance and socioeconomic development ofsocieties. The social patterns governing this therefore set a precedent for the future. Using themutual sickness benefit societies in Sweden as variable for voluntary associations around1884, the essay discusses the possible links between social capital, associations and long termeconomic development.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the European Union (EU) is one of the oldest fields of cooperation within the European Union. During the past decades the different Commissioners have made several proposals about changes in the CAP and many of them have not been passed but renegotiated. The present Commission has however published a report in 2011, which emphasizes that the CAP has three alternative ways to go in the future. This study aims to predict which one of these three alternative ways it is most likely that the CAP will take according to the historical institutionalist theory. When to be able to predict this text analysis is used.

The aim of this essay is, firstly, to ? through a text analysis ? compare the curriculum of Waldorf education in Sweden (in the essay referred to as ?WL?) to the Swedish national curriculum ?Lpo 94?, to uncover possible differences and similarities between these documents, and, secondly, to present the roots and educational philosophies that these two curricula, respectively, are based upon. The purpose hereby is to be able to trace, describe and explain the differences between the pedagogical practices of Waldorf education and that of conventional Swedish schools.In the essay, a historical investigation of the main traditions of ideas behind the Swedish national curriculum is briefly carried out, where I swiftly present the educational philosophies of John Dewey (1859-1952) and Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934). Next, an investigation of the worldview and philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is effectuated, where I attempt to bring to light Steiner?s anthroposophical and holistic worldview ? a worldview that throughout the 20th century has developed into an international and wide-ranging anthroposophical movement ? as well as his concepts of knowledge, science and educational philosophy.