ABSTRACT Title: the Power distance star ? A study on how cultural power distance affects the business relation between Japanese and multinational companiesLevel: Final assignment for Bachelor Degree in Business AdministrationAuthor: Therese Elofsson and Anna NyströmSupervisor: Jens Eklinder Frick and Jonas MolinDate: 2015 - JanuaryAim: The purpose of this study is to compile available research regarding the cultural aspect power distance, as it is being displayed and handled in business-relations between Japanese and multicultural business contacts. The culture in Japan differs from the culture in the western world and several companies testify that the Japanese market is difficult to act and expand upon. This study aims to provide explanations to these difficulties from a power distance perspective.Method: This study has compiled the theoretical knowledge and research in a model called ?the Power distance Star? (Figure 1), which is created and designed for this purpose.

Since the 1990?s the Swedish school system has undergone major and recurring structural reforms. Two of the most comprehensive changes has been the shift of primary schools as an integral part of the welfare state to the responsibility of the municipalities as well as the introduction of free school choice for the students. Through two months of participant observations and semi-structured interviews this thesis seeks to answer the question of how these reforms has come to effect the work of teachers in a medium sized public school in a small municipality in the outskirts of Stockholm. Earlier research has shown that public schools in socio-economically vulnerable areas are disadvantaged due to the reformation of the school system (Beach & Sernhede, 2011; Östh, Andersson, & Malmberg, 2013).

This degree project is based on my personal relation and engagement to the small-scaled cultural landscape. My viewpoint is the village Torpa in Östergötland. My observations of the changes and development together with the stories of the village people has lead me to the questioning about the future prospects of the small-scaled cultural landscape. The rationalization of the society and our urban culture has lead to big changes in the cultural landscape and the people have reduced to a small crowd. Fewer and fewer hands are managing the small-scaled cultural landscape and fewer and fewer young people have connection to this kind of landscape and its management.

 Abstract: Facebook in the Public Sector - qualitative interviewstudy with The Swedish maritime Administration, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Swedish prison and Probation services and the municipality of Katrineholm about their precense on Facebook.In my bachelor?s thesis I have studied how three government authority and one municipality uses or don?t use Facebook in their communication towards the citizens. I have chosen to study four different cases, to see if there are any significant similarities or differences between how the different services are working with their communication. I have chosen to explore my cases through semi-structured qualitative interviews, where I met communications officers of every organisation face to face.I have found out that there is not one right way to communicate through Facebook, every organisations decisions must be based on their own mission, aims and objectives. And I have seen that both the transmitter and the receiver need to mature into the new acting of this new channel - Facebook..

The purpose of this essay was to investigate which factors the individuals found important in the process of becoming a person with a drug-free life. The framing of the questions we had were to get the experiences, thoughts and wishes of the drug users. The survey was based on thematised qualitative interviews and focused in the personal stories of the interviewees. We interviewed four women and five men, all of which had several years of drug-abuse behind them. We found similarities and patterns and we could identify that the three most important things was the own motivation, will and that the drug-abuser had the possibility to change their social network and had the ability to find other important things in life..

Uppsatsen undersöker med konstformen ljudkonst och den konstnärliga hanteringen av ljud i fokus en interaktion mellan finkultur och populärkultur. Fokus ligger på aktörer inom populärkulturen som använt sig av konstnärliga strategier med rötter i finkulturen. Undersökningen spårar ljudkonstens historiska bakgrund och främst de förlopp som bidragit till att det är en gränsöverskridande konstform. Den populärkulturella konstvärldens etablering som en social organisation där konstnärlig verksamhet är möjlig undersöks..

The aim of this study is, from a norm-critical approach, to find, investigate and analyse human representation in the visual culture of one preschool in order to understand if the children enrolled are represented or not. The research questions are: In what ways is there imagery of human representations in images and materials designed for play? What skin-colors and origins are dominant in the data collected?We carried out a qualitative study in the form of visual ethnography. This method allowed us to use a combination of different data collection tools such as photography and ethnographic field notes to collect our data. The photographs we took of images and material used for play, was then analysed through semiotic picture analysis.

This paper is an inquiry that is trying to establish four young musicians' views of art and music.To define the boundaries of music and art and explore the possible similarities. The musicians were confronted with an artwork by Marcel Duchamp and a composition by John Cage, and have recieved a questionnaire where they were asked to express their views. They were also asked to point out qualities that define music and art and their boundaries. Follow up questions then try to futher clearify their definitions. The findings show that the group has a similar point of view where emotion and feeling rule over intellectualisation in relation to the creation of art..

Abraham is the original patriarch. How does his leadership compare with a modern day popular culture patriarch with his roots in advertising, the shopkeeper Stig, star of the ICA advertising? The essay compares the leadership and masculinity of two male leaders from different backgrounds and settings, and discusses similiarities and differences.

Meat and fish was the most important food for the Sami people in northern Scandinavia until the beginning of the 20th century. It is not so well known that the Sami people also used a lot of wild plants as food and medicine although that kind of food was relatively common among them until the end of the 19th century. The purpose of this master thesis has been to describe which plants the Sami people used in general and also which plants were the most commonly used, and when and how these plants were harvested. I also wanted to measure the quantities of Angelica archangelica and Rumex acestosa within traditional harvest sites. Furthermore I wanted to find out if the plant use differed among Sami groups geographically.

This essay is an examination of the examples in Kant?s Critique of Judgement. The examples which I have focused on all converge in an idea of wildness. These examples of the beautiful are illuminated by a culture-historical perspective, where the literary and scientific travelogue genre is of great importance. Apart from being exegetic and culture historical, my method is also analytic.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how social procurement can be a further development of public-private partnership. This is done with interviews and a case study of the social procurement Mitt Gröna Kvarter and its labor effort Boendebyggarna. The theoretical framework used in the thesis consists of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility. It tries to answer the following questions:What does this social procurement mean by the concept of public-private partnership?What does this social procurement mean for the participants involved?How can social procurement be seen as a further development of public-private partnership?The thesis uses the theory development around the concepts of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility and shows that social procurement does indeed have similarities to public-private partnership and could very well be a further development of it..

AbstractA Problem to Every SolutionThe Corrymeela Community, René Girard and the ambiguous pluralismThe main purpose of this study is to examine how Girard´s ideas of society, culture andreligion have become part of the reflexion in the praxis of Corrymeela Community through the work of Roel Kaptein and how this praxis can shed light over the work with dissonances of faith and values in education in RE, Social Studies and other subjects.In earlier publications I have studied how dissonances of faith and values can beunderstood in educational settings and in connection with issues of interreligious dialogue.The extensive discussion of how differences in culture, religion and value in a pluralisticsociety are to be analysed and treated in pedagogical reflexion seems to increasingly occupyactors in different parts of the educational system. It is obvious that these issues also arebrought into focus as an important field of research. My main interest in this paper is to study how a reconciliation group in the middle of the conflict in Northern Ireland has developed a view of conflict reason and conflict resolution under the influence of the French researcher René Girard and what aspects of this study that can improve the reflection over pluralism and dissonances of faith and values in everyday praxis in education.For a period of more than a decade I have been in contact with actors in the peace process inNorthern Ireland in connection to different educational projects. The attempts to analyse the different aspects of ?The Troubles? and the efforts to find ways out of conflicts and civil war are many and the literature on subjects related to these tragic history of social, cultural and religious conflicts is difficult to survey.

The purpose of this thesis is to deepen the understanding of our contemporary description of digital literacy using the perspective on knowledge from the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. I have chosen to deal with the problem using a hermeneutic approach. The method of inquiry is based on close reading of the selected literature. The selection itself has been made after a strategic selection regarding perspective on knowledge and digital literacy. It appears in the thesis that there are substantial differences but also similarities between our contemporary description of digital literacy from Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning and the perspective on knowledge from the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.Still, the result has been possible to use for the purpose of the thesis since the problem has an answer and a deepened impression of the understandings of digital literacy..

The subject of this thesis is how a suspected criminal has been described in written swedish media. The topic of the articles is the investigation of a man suspected for murder and for dismembering the victim during the winter of 2011. The purpose of this thesis is to try to answer the question of what the newspapers actually write to describe a suspect before he or she has been trialed in court. For the analyse of the articles, published in four of Swedens largest newspapers, critical discourse analysis has been used. The results have been compared with other analyses made on other cases and have been discussed with Pierre Bourdieu?s theory of action.