What is a city? What do we mean when we describe something as urban? In what way should we build the city so that we can achieve a good environment for our own generation and for generations to come? These questions are constantly of interest and they are frequently discussed. It is also important to have considered these questions when working with city-planning. This essay contains a description of and reflections about the recurrent questions in today?s debate about the city and city-planning.

In this essay I have chosen to explore how computers are used in preschools. The study was done as a survey. How does preschool seize the children´s culture? In today´s society ICT and computers are a big part of children´s everyday life and reflects on their upbringing.Since I am using computers as a pedagogical tool in teaching the children at my preschool, I find this topic interesting to explore.Are the teacher´s using computers for an educational purpose with the children at preschools or are they using it in other ways?Do the teachers think they have the required knowledge to computers usage in teaching the children in a pedagogical way?What is the teacher´s attitude towards computers in preschool?The essay starts with a introductorial background section where I talk about my own experiences of using computers with the children in my preschool, and then referring to the society then and now, school law, curriculum, teachers' computer skills, media situation amongst children and young people, computer use in preschools/schools and health effects. I have composed a survey based on the answers of 50 teachers in 30 different preschools and in nine different municipalities.The result of the survey is reported and concludes with a part of discussion, where the results are put up against the introductorial background section.

The focus of this study is the ways in which the discourses of the three largest right-wing populist parties in Scandinavia ? Danish Dansk Folkeparti, Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet and Swedish Sverigedemokraterna ? are articulated and on defining which individuals they include and exclude. The discourses of the three parties are compared and analyzed to determine whether they constitute specific nationalist and culturally racist discourses. The problem is addressed by applying a social constructivist theory of nationalism and cultural racism, and specifically the binary opposition ?we? and ?them?, on a material consisting of the respective parties? member magazines from 2007.

In today?s individualistic society, I experience a need to bring forward the importance of collaboration. From a sociocultural perspective, I have chosen to highlight the positive and negative aspects of collaborative learning, with the intention of illustrating the effects for the individual learning and development. I have therefore made an interview with an educationalist, who?s been a teacher all her grown up life, with the intent of illustrating her thoughts on collaborative learning.

The recent development in several countries? legislation and best practice recommendations in relation to corporate governance in general and audit committees in particular have affected Swedish listed corporations in the form of the Swedish Corporate Governance Code and the coming EU-directive. This paper aims to discover what factors affected Swedish listed companies to form audit committees when this was entirely voluntary. We collected data from the annual reports of 121 Swedish listed companies and formed eleven hypotheses as to what factors we believed affected the voluntary formation of audit committees based on Agency Theory, economies of scale and circumstances specific to the Swedish environment. We then analyzed the data through the use of a multivariate logistic regression model.

Our increasingly globalized world has contributed to that more Swedish companies has expanded their business to more distant areas. One of these Swedish companies that now stands before their first international expansion is the Swedish fast-food chain Max AB. Max has chosen to start their expansion in Saudi Arabia, a country far away from Sweden, not only in terms of geographical distance but also in cultural. The cultural differences that Max will encounter may affect the business and result in to various adaptations that must be done in order to establish successfully. The thesis investigates the existing circumstances for the fastfood business in Saudi Arabia and shows which adaptations international fast-food chains should or must do as a result of the cultural distances they encounter.

Purpose/Aim: The purpose of this essay is to see how the media, through the newspaper, "Vi föräldrar?, produces family and parental roles, and to investigate how the image changed over time.Material/Method: The material consists of a number of selected texts from the years 1968, 1988 and 2008. The method used is a discourse analysis based on the three level model by Norman Fairclough. The three levels are the text, the discourse practise and the sociocultural practise. In this study two of the levels, text and sociocultural practise, are used in analysing the texts.Main results: Family and parenting in the texts from 1968 can be linked to the structural functionalist theory in which the core family is central and women and men are assigned to specific roles.

The aim of the study was to examine what workers in social services considers physical child abuse and in which way social services work with children who have been exposed to physical child abuse. The study also examines which interventions are available and how physically abused children assimilate these. I've interviewed four child-welfare officers and for those interviews I've used the qualitative semi-structured method. The results shows that all my respondents have different views on on the definition of physical child abuse. The result also shows that the municipality which the children belongs to plays a major role in which children can get help with their problems.

The aim of this study was to explore and gain understanding of the situation between managers in different forms of human service organizations. I chose to use a qualitative method and conducted semi-structured interviews with five professional middle managers in the public sector. To accomplish my purpose, I worked on the basis of several questions. The questions dealt with the role of middle management and what it involves, how it is perceived and what the middle managers think of the specific requirements for them and their leadership in organizations that provide services relating to people.  As a result of the analysis I have used the theory of social roles that describes the meaning of the different roles and role conflicts that arise in connection with various and conflicting expectations. The review of the results shows that middle managers in human service organizations experience to have to deal with a complex leadership role.

The aim of this bachelor?s thesis is to develop knowledge about how librarians experience their professional identity, argue for their competence and describe their profession based on their professional skills, tasks, and status. The method that is used to answer the questions of the study is semi-structured interviews with five public librarians. The theory used in this essay is Ørom?s six librarian identities plus Schreiber?s experience intermediate identity.

The purpose of this essay was to study the implementation of a policy document, which concerns questions of integration, in a municipality with an indirect government. I have especially focused on issues regarding how civil servants describe the usage of a specific policy document and to what extent their autonomy and the indirect government have had an impact on implementation, and to what extent signals from surrounding institutions have had an impact on the creation of the policy document. The study was based on qualitative interviews in groups, pairs and with single individuals with twenty-seven civil servants and politicians working with issues concerning the specific policy document.One of the conclusions of my study is that the reason for producing the document in the first place is that the municipality as an organization strives to acquire a sense of legitimacy. The intentions of the document have only partly been implemented by the civil servants and politicians, since the document is not used in their daily work. Here, their autonomy has played an important part, as the choice to not use the document is the servants' own.

With abroad education of arts, textiles and nowthe upholstery there were nota long step to become interested inthe visual withinthe upholstery trade. I have chosen to highlight the shapethe world with boththe artist and thecraftsman's eye. I have explored hownew expressions canbe created from traditional methods and materialsfrom upholstery andrelated crafts suchas tailoring for Royal andsaddler. These craftsmake up a webof technologies, materials,and to some extent tool returns and borrowed.By looking at afew items fromthese crafts haveI let myself beinspired and made ??use of knowledgehow to buildforms and eventransfer them tonew areas inan aesthetic andartistic direction.

In Scandinavia today many old harbour areas are developed into residential and commercial areas. For example are both Helsingborg city and Malmoe city in south Sweden planning to restructure some of their harbour areas to accommodate shops, schools, offices, residences et cetera. In Copenhagen in Denmark new plans for Nordhavn is also underway. In almost every plan proposal to redevelope an old harbour area the harbour activities are set a side to give room for new development. In Reykjavik, however, this has not been the case.

Intangible assets are often a significant part of Swedish companies? assets. Most of these are accounted for as goodwill, arising from acquisitions. After EU:s decision to adopt IFRS as the new accounting standard, intangible assets will to a larger extent be recognized separated from goodwill. This thesis aims to quantify this change and to analyze what specific intangibles are affected most by the transition to IFRS.

The aim of the thesis is to study young peoples, defined as boys and girls between 14 and 16 years old, attitudes to library in two municipalities. Notwithstanding the fact that young people, and children, often is given priority in library work, the reality often seems to be another. Attitudes are founded primarily in childhood and therefore it is of great importance to examine how young people regard libraries. Besides studying former research about young people and libraries that has been performed on library and information science, we also have been using concepts and theories from social science. We give a brief outline of youth research and its development and look at official records and legislation to see if and in what context young people are mentioned.