This essay will try to analyze how Syria?s official news agency, SANA, describes events taking place in Syria in the days between 1.4 and 18.4.2012. This will be contrasted with how BBC and CNN describe the events. These other two news agencies were chosen, because they represent media from democratic countries in Europe and the USA. This rebellion became a full scale civil war over time.

This thesis is an attempt to shed light on how the authors of the Swedish Government Official Report, SoU 1999:83, speak about how the globalization affects democracy. The method used is critical discourse analysis and ideological analysis, with the main emphasis on the former. The results of the analysis are then interpreted with central parts of Jürgen Habermas? The theory of communicative action. One of the main conclusions is that an absolute majority of the authors, talk about how the globalization affects democracy in terms of the economic market and the European union.

The purpose of this paper was to describe how a phenomenon is constructed into being a social problem, by studying articles on honour killing in the Swedish daily press and in the technical journal Socionomen. The main questions were: can different discourses on honour killing be identified, and if so, have they changed over time, and are there differences between the discourses identified in the daily press and in Socionomen? The method used was a qualitative analysis of discourse influenced by Faircloughs Critical Discourse Analysis. The main conclusion was that honour killing has been textually constructed as a social problem in the studied media. There was one main discourse which clearly pointed out groups as bearers and victims of the social problem.

This study illuminates one part of the mathematic teaching in school, which is mathematical problem solving in groups. It examines teacher?s and student?s ideas about what conditions it takes to be able to learn in groups. Further on, it studies the importance of group structure when it comes to working with mathematical problem solving in groups from a process focused and/or a product focused learning. Through observations of student groups and interviews with the students and the mathematic teachers, the material has been compiled and analysed under three different headings: conditions for learning in a mathematical problem solving situation, importance of group structure in a mathematical problem solving situation and process versus product.

"The Value of Knowledge - Towards a Virtue Epistemological Position" The classical question, first posed in Plato's Meno, concerning the value of knowledge constitutes the starting point of this essay. Value analysis has long been neglected in epistemologist's accounts until its re-emergence with the tradition called ?virtue epistemology?, in particular with scholars following Ernest Sosa. Like virtue ethics virtue epistemological accounts changes the focus from the object to the agent, i.e. from knowledge to intellectual virtue.

Denna uppsats redogör för hur sociologin samt svensk självmordsprevention konstruerar självmord som problem. För att ringa in detta har socialkonstruktionistiska teorier om sociala problem och förklaringar använts. Dessa teorier har i analysen applicerats på ett varierande material bestående av sociologisk litteratur samt intresseföreningar, socialpolitiska åtgärder och dokument som hör till dessa. Resultaten av denna studie har visat att självmord som avvikande handling ofta är i behov av förklaring. Dessutom framgår det att sociologin koncentrerat sig på självmord som teoretiskt problem vilket medfört konsekvensen att lösningar till stor del uteblivit.

Abstract: The purpose with this study is to analyse the political debate about freedom of speech in Sweden and Denmark, after the caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed that the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten published in September 2005. For this debate four political parties have been chosen. These are: Socialdemokratiska Partiet and Moderata Samlingspartiet in Sweden and Socialdemokraterne and Venstre in Denmark.An idea analysis has been chosen as method, and dimensions as an analysing tool. The overall result of the analysis is that right- and left political parties in Sweden and Denmark are more alike, than different in their political debate about free speech. They all wish for total freedom of speech, and see that as the foundation of the democratic society.

This thesis analyzes the media debates generated by the election of Omar Mustafa to the board of the social democratic party, and the appointment of the conservative Minister of Labour, Elisabeth Svantesson. More specifically, the aim is to analyze newspaper material through a discourse analyze, to see if and how religious affiliation effects the possibilities to act as a political representative. Theories of othering and intersectionality serve as theoretical points of departure. Further, chains of equivalence from Laclau and Mouffe?s discourse theory are used to study how categories as ?us? and ?the other? are constructed in the material, and how these processes of categorization relate to the intersection of religion, gender and ethnicity.

Den här studien använder Agency-teorin och Stewardship-teorin för att undersöka hur motiverande ett Resultatandelssystem (RS) är för de anställda på en mindre svensk bank. Mer specifikt så undersöks hur påtagliga så kallade Free rider-problem är och vilka bakomliggande orsaker som påverkar vikten av sådana problem. Detta bygger på en rent kvalitativ undersökning baserat på intervjuer med anställda på Leksand Sparbank. Resultaten visar att förekomsten av Free rider-problem inte är så vanlig som Agency-teorin antyder och att detta beror främst på att monetära belöningar inte är den primära motivatorn på banken. Resultaten visar också att RSet inte motiverar på det sätt som det är tänkt, RSet har dock en del andra positiva egenskaper..

The purpose of this study has been to examine how the image of the gambler is described by studying a report published by Folkhälsoinstituet [FHI] and a number of chosen articles from the Swedish Evening Press. Discourse theory has been used both as theory, together with social constructionism, and as a research method. The main conclusions of the study are that three different discourses can be identified: the normal gambler, the professional gambler and the problem gambler. The image of the problem gambler is described as a deviant and problematic minority characterized by loss of control, irrational thoughts and dissociative behaviour. The construction of the problem gambler fills three possible purposes for the state: As a solvable problem to handle criticism against negative consequences of gambling, as an argument to avoid competition on the market and as an individual characterized by loss of control in order to legitimize and make the construction of the normal gambler possible..

The Swedish public inquiries and most of the political science advocate reforms in the spirit of participatory democracy to strengthen the democracy. Although it is striking how limited and narrow the scientific documentation is in analysing the effects of participatory democratic reforms. Still, many of the local governments in Sweden are reshaping their organisations according to the participatory democracy model. Is it a trend and a symbolic action or a veritable action of good-will of the politicians?The paper argues that the idea of participatory democracy has become popular and widely spread.

This essay captures the process toward a democratic transition in South Africa and tempts on analyzing the efforts made by civil society before the negotiation with the government in the beginning of the 90´s. The method used is a case study.By applying the theory of Elisabeth Jean Wood about the importance of continued mobilization, I try to answer the question: to what extend did civil society influence the democratization process. The focus of the study lies on the years of intensified popular mobilization, from the start of the 80´s until the beginning of the 90´s.The results following this study shows that COSATU, Congress of South African Trade Unions) and ANC(African National Congress) played both a crucial role for the democratization process in South Africa. UDF, however played a role in the process, but not in the same significant way that COSATU and ANC..

Citizenship information is defined as the information the citizen needs to be able to take part in and influence the society. Since it is a democratic issue that information concerning the citizens role in society really reaches the citizens, it is of importance to study how the citizens proceed when they have a need for this information. The aim of this Masters thesis is to investigate how our eight informers proceed when they experience this need in a non-work situation. We performed qualitative interviews. The most important part of our interviews was the introduction of some fictitious problems to the informants.

I detta examensarbete behandlas synskadade personers upplevelser kring sociala interaktioner. Synskadade personer kan uppleva olika problematiska situationer i sociala interaktioner på grund av sin funktionsnedsättning. Syftet var att, via en kvalitativ metod och intervjuer med tio synskadade personer, ta del av deras tankar, åsikter och erfarenheter och kunna finna strategier, som dessa personer använder sig av för att hantera och förebygga de problem som kan uppstå. Vidare, hur synskadade personer upplever sitt eget och andras bemötande i sociala interaktioner, vilka problem de eventuellt har upplevt i dessa situationer samt hur de har hanterat dessa problem undersöktes. Resultaten visar på olika problem som synskadade personer någon gång har upplevt i sociala interaktioner.

Denna rapport behandlar vissa problem associerade med utnyttjandet av vindkraft för batteriladdning. Grunden till de problem som beskrivs ligger i svårigheten att anpassa laddeffekten till vindens effektvariationer vid varierande vindhastigheter. Aerodynamiska effekter hos turbinen ger problembilden en ytterligare dimension. De bakomliggande orsakerna beskrivs teoretiskt. Olika designmässiga val för att anpassa vindkraftverket till de dynamiska problemen tas även upp..