Slovenia and Latvia are two examples of countries which have gone through a successful democratic transition. They were both under authoritarian rule and command economy up until their declarations of independence in the early 90s. Today they have a functional market economy and political pluralism. I have examined transition theories highlighted by Jonas Linde and Joakim Ekman and from these theories sought the explanations to what lies behind the successful transitions of these two countries. The transition in Slovenia was affected by liberalization from within the ruling communist party which then controlled much of the transition process. A relatively large civil society and the fact that Slovenia was not involved in the Balkan War also contributed to the short process.

The purpose of this case study is to see how all the involved parties; students, custodians and teachers look upon ?A meeting of learning ? personal development dialogue that is led by children and young people?, on a school south of Stockholm. Our questions at issue were to see what the students had learned from their personal development dialogue, if the custodians had received all the information they expected to get from a personal development dialogue, and last but not least if all the involved parties; students, custodians and teachers, wanted to continue with this model? We used interviews and paper questionnaires to collect answers to our case study and the questions at issue. In both the interviews and paper questionnaires we could see that an overwhelming majority had a positive opinion about students leading and ?owning? their personal development dialogue, especially the students themselves.

Politicians Week in Visby has since the late 1960s developed to be a fairly unique concept in Swedish politics, which even in recent years has begun to be exported to other countries in Europe. Curiosity and interest around the arrangement of activities and actors have in the past decade become increasingly both nationally and internationally. The purpose of this study has therefore been to find out how ?Almedalsveckan? as a political arrangement emerged and developed. The question that the study mainly tries to answer is how ?Almedalsveckan? became a concept of the open democratic meeting between politicians, citizens, journalists and various organizations in the Swedish society.

The objective of this study was investigating social worker?s perspective of how alcohol consumption can affect, and what elements in the social environment that may be of significance for, alcohol consumption and development of identity. The questions at issue were: Do social workers experience any positive effects from alcohol consumption in 16-17 year-old girls with problematic alcohol consumption and what influence do the effects have on self esteem, self image and development of identity? What do social workers experience are the negative effects from alcohol consumption on self esteem, self image and development of identity? How important do social workers find the social environment and how do they believe the social environment affect the alcohol consumption and development of identity? This was investigated with a qualitative approach from a social worker?s perspective, hence social workers were interviewed. The study?s theoretical basis was Symbolic Interactionism and Erikson?s theory of Psychosocial Development.

This masters thesis is a study of official political documents in order to discuss privatisation and the Swedish public libraries. In the 1990s public libraries became placed on contractors, and that was said to be one form of privatisation. The main issue for this study concerns driving forces and obstacles for privatisation of public libraries. Another issue concerns advantages and risks. We will also discuss how the future of public libraries will be in this context.

Democracy has been a part of the Swedish society for a long period of time and it is also a part of the Swedish elementary school curriculum, in which you can find a number of statements that expresses that the Swedish elementary school should socialize the children into becoming role model citizens. This also conjures with the available research that describes schools in general as socializing. This led me to a question that hasn?t been answered: How much of the curriculums reasons for socialization the pupils are based on democratic values and how much of it can be dated back to events prior to the curriculum?The methodological approach is an analysis of ideologies as described by Sven-Eric Liedman and Ingemar Nilsson in Ideologi och ideologianalys. The text is focusing on the fact that a text has two layers; one is the manifest which is roughly the same as explicit or present in the text.

In an effort to strengthen democracy in the union, the EU in 2005 took a new approach to communications policy to reach out to the citizens. The strategic document "Plan D for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate" was accompanied by two other documents, and the three of them were the core of this policy. Both democracy and communications work means at EU level a higher complexity than in the nation-state arena. Objective of this study is to examine how the implementation of Plan D has turned out in a democracy renewal perspective. To achieve that answers are sought to questions concerning the goals of Plan D, how they are still present today, what happened in practice regarding the efforts that are highlighted, and how the substance of the activities can be judged from a democratic theory perspective.

Rapid urbanization causes competition over land use between green area preservation and urban development in cities and greatly affects ecosystems as well as human well-being. This conflict is significant all around the world as many cities are now replacing existing green areas with new developments. The area around Dag Hammarskjöld's väg in Uppsala is currently experiencing the same conflict, as the need that the city has for new housing represents a threat for the many valuable green areas that are in the site. The purpose of this project was to understand how the need of urban development and the preservation of green areas could be balanced. This understanding would thereafter be used to make a design proposal for the area around Dag Hammarskjöld's väg.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union was a vast experience, not solely for the former members and inhabitants of the Soviet Union, but also for the rest of the world. This thesis examines Estonia and Uzbekistan's different experience with transition. By examining three different aspects of transition I seek to explain Estonia and Uzbekistan's different outcome of transition. Estonia has since their independence been fully aware of the process that started with their independence. They have reformed both the political and economic system, the industry is privatized, institutions democratic and Estonia is today a member of the European Union.

This qualitative study aims to examine what career opportunities the Swedish employment service Arbetsförmedlingen can provide, as well as how the employees perceive their career development opportunities. Furthermore, we have touched on what it is that makes employees feel satisfied with their job and workplace, and also stay in the organization. The study was conducted on one of Arbetsförmedlingen?s offices in northern Sweden and the informants consisted of six employment agents, an executive assistant and a head of division. The result of the study has been analyzed using theories within the field of career development.

Public libraries have an important roll of making information accessible to all people. This democratic right supports the cultural development in our society. When public libraries build websites offering information and services it can sometimes cause obstacles for impaired users. It is therefore our purpose to evaluate a selection of websites and library plans to examine how the libraries work with accessibility for these users. This thesis is based on theories of cognitive and human computer interaction, and information architecture.

The aim of this essay has been to find out whether the individual development plan does make it easier to teachers to discover any needs of the students to get education or material changes and by that make adjustments in the classroom. I chose to seek information by interviewing special educators at four compulsory schools, since they have an overall apprehension of how the work is carried out at the school, especially the work with students in need of any form of extra support.All students at the Swedish compulsory school shall have an individual development plan. The purpose with the plan is, besides that the student is to be given possibilities to form his own pedagogical and social goals, that the teacher shall get early signals if a student may be in need of getting education and materials changed and adjusted for to easier manage his studies. The individual development plan of the student should have the function as a tool to the teacher to facilitate for his students.The answer of my question can be sum-up in a no, the inherent potential in the individual development plan is not utilized by the teachers that seem to have the apprehension that the plan is for the student all by him/herself. The teaching staff has obviously not understood the use they can get out of it. .

In modern, Swedish political science there are different ways of looking at ?democracy?. A very common distinction is that between three groups of democratic theories: electoral democracy, participation democracy and deliberative democracy.The nowadays frequently used concept of electoral democracy is often used as synonymous with the older concept of repre­­­­sen­tative or indirect democracy ? frequently regarded as a contrast to the direct democracy of ancient Athens. However, there are also important differences.

Sustainable destination development has in recent years become an increasingly important concept for tourism destinations. A destination must take into account the environment if it wants to continue being a successful tourism destination in the future. This essay investigates what needs to be developed on theislandofSandhamnfor that the destination can be more attractive in the off season and how the players on Sandhamn integrate to develop Sandhamn in a sustainable manner. One market research and interviews with five different players were made. Through these interviews grew an understanding for how the cooperation between the municipal and the private party looks like and how the history of Sandhamn is the foundation for the islands tourism development.

The increasing complexity in the development of a configurable real-time system has emerged new principles of software techniques, such as aspect-oriented software development and component-based software development. These techniques allow encapsulation of the system's crosscutting concerns and increase the modularity of the software. The properties of a component that influences the systems performance or semantics are specified separately in entities called aspects, while basic functionality of the property still remains in the component. When building a real-time system, different sets of configurations of aspects and components can be combined, resulting in different configurations of the system. The temporal behavior of the system changes and a way to ensure the predictability of the system is needed.