Turkey?s nearly fifty-year-old aspiration for admittance to the European Union took a crucial step forward with the signing of the Ankara agreement in 1996. The aim of this thesis is to examine the trade effects that evolve from the creation of a customs union. Our objective is to study how Turkey?s trade patterns adapted to the liberalized trade by examining the effects on resource allocation, specialization and welfare.

The purpose of this study has been to investigate which factors are important with foster home placing, to achieve a positive result for the child. The questions that we have focused on is the importance of the child's earlier experiences and relations, the foster homes attitude and approach, the social service organization and the cooperation between these concerned parties. We have also looked at the importance that the relation between the biological family, the child and the foster home can have. This study has been carried out using qualitative interviews with several foster homes, social welfare secretaries and a researcher in the area. We have also chosen to separate the foster homes on the basis of two foster homes only accepting teenagers while other accepting younger children.The theoretical concepts we have chosen to use are connected to attachment theory and the ecology of human development point of view.

This essay aims to examine and compare Swedish and Norwegian social work with children. It is a comparative study between two social welfare offices, in districts with similar population and problems, one located in Stockholm and one in Oslo. The main questions were; how is the work organized and carried out, what type of help and assistance is available and what kind of discretion and powers do the social workers have. In our essay we used qualitative methods mostly based on interviews, vignette questionnaires and documents, but also written research. In our analysis we used modern organisation theory and street level bureaucracy to seek explanations.The two welfare offices have similarities and differences.

The definition of an expectation gap is, when the local municipal politician and the audited apprehensions and expectations gets apart about what auditors are going to work with and what they are going to accomplish.Svenska Kommunförbundet writes in their publication Fullmäktige och revisionen (2004) that the communication between the auditors and the audited is important so the final result becomes great. Apart from the communication, the recurring information about auditing is important to increase the knowledge and understanding. Are there expectations on what the auditors are going to review and discover among the audited, when there probably are expectations from the inhabitants on the auditing. This leads us to our purpose of our essay which is to investigate and describe if there exist an expectation gap between the auditors and the social welfare boards in the primary municipality. The method we used to collect our data was a guided telephone interview with 66 persons.

About 29 000 different services was given by the Swedish welfare state to children with disabilities within the ages 0-22 years before October first in the year 2008. Studies about children with disabilities and their experiences of their situation have rarely been done and it is therefore difficult to know how they think and feel about their lives. Both Swedish law and the UN:s convention about children?s rights states that children have the right to tell their opinion in matters that are of their concern. Thus, we don´t know much about if and how the Swedish welfare state maintain this right towards children with disabilities.

Studies on wild boars have shown that piglets at 10 to 12 days of age can be introduced to pigs outside the litter without fighting. In today's production systems, the litters are kept in separate pens until weaning. At that point, the litter is divided and the piglets are placed together with piglets from other litters. This usually leads to aggressions among the piglets and may cause stress. This literature review aims to find out how piglets perceive other pigs in their surroundings.

Today many sociologists speak about the modern world and the god and bad that it brings. In association to this discussion there is a tendency to speak about an increased individualization, a process that often also means more choices and possibilities. But in addition to this follows a big responsibility for how we choose to live our lives, since our choices not seldom also influences other people, both locally and globally. The aim of this essay is to investigate the importance of non-profit organizations with social direction in our Swedish welfare society and thereby also in a modern world where people's individual choices are becoming all more important. In order to answer my main issue I have implemented thirteen qualitative interviews, of which ten of the informers are from different non-profit organizations and three from different stately authorities.

Title: The life is too soft to accord in to tariffs: an essay about youth and families with children who are recipients of economic support, their experience of their financial situation and the reception towards the social welfare.Author: Ana Becovic & Kerstin Olsson         Supervisor: Erik WesserInstitution: Humanvetenskapliga institutionen, Högskolan i KalmarType of Essay: Degree project, 15 ECTS                     Date: December 2008The aim for our study has been to examine how youth and families who are recipients of economic support on long term basis experience their contact with social welfare. The starting point for the question at issue has been the client's experience of their financial situation the reception and expectations towards the social welfare.In our B-level study we carried out qualitative interviews with social welfare officers to find out how they applied the "child perspective" in granting financial support and to what extent they felt that they succeeded in meeting the need of the client. The conclusion was that there is still room for improvement in this field and particularly a wish to focus more on the child's situation and development. The officers told us that they tried to pay closer attention to the child's situation through asking about the children and by visiting the families at home.They expressed awareness of the importance to a child's well being the financial situation of their family. They also expressed the need for the child to be able to take part in leisure time activities and having an active social life.In this study our research method is based on qualitative interviews.

Homelessness and homeless people is something that is described and explained in different ways over time. Since the 1950s, two discourses about homelessness and its causes has been competing with each other. One discourse hold the meaning that homelessness is caused by housing shortage and the other focus on individual shortcomings that make homeless to unsuitable tenants. In the media, homelessness and homeless often is associated with crime, addiction and mental illness, this reinforce the public perception of homeless people as deviants, which separates the homeless from society even more. The purpose of this study is to examine whether media representations of homeless and homelessness in an evening paper and a morning paper, has changed in the 2000s, and if these representations are consistent with those found in the reports of homelessness from The National Board of Wealth and Welfare. In order to achieve the purpose of the study and answer our research questions, the authors have used a discourse analytical approach using some key analytical tools from both critical discourse analysis and discourse theory in the analysis of the empirical material.

The EU has had a special agreement with their former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands, the ACP-countries, for almost 30 years. This has granted the ACPs with preferences on the Europen market, which have been excluded from other countries. The agreement is now beeing re-negotiated to make it more in terms with the rule of the WTO?s most favoured nation-principle. The new agreement will differ from the present one as it will be a mutual free trade agreement where the ACP countries will open their markets to the EU as much as the EU opens up it?s market to them.

The purpose of this study was investigating the means which rule the social worker?s choice of institution placing youths and how they match the youth?s individual need compared with the type of home. The questions were: Which significance has the characteristics of the youth and their family for the placing? Which significance has the characteristics of the institution? Which significance has the social workers? way of working, investigation, theories, economy etc.? A qualitative way of interviewing has been used. Eight interviews were done; six with social welfare secretaries who place youths and two social workers who work with coun­selling and placement.

Foods that stimulate health and satisfy consumer expectations are needed. In a consumer´s perspective, products that provide several kinds of health benefits, without any call for major changes in their behaviour are needed on the market. With this increasing interest in health promoting food product, one of the biggest challenges for the food industry is to find the conditions and right position on the market and find the opportunities to enter the market successfully. New products with added health values can be developed to cure and counter welfare diseases as in this case for diabetics type 2. Swedish food companies have a desire to respond to welfare diseases and one welfare disease is diabetes type 2. Many of them have an ambition to develop new products to respond to the growing population and find a supply that could suit their customers.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the success of theconcept of empowerment in the field of social science can be explained by referring to it as the new paradigm replacing the former paternalistic era. Therefore, I investigate if the character of its history, domicile and practice has the same distinguishing features as the scientific progress. The analysis is based on Thomas Kuhn's definition of a scientific paradigm through the concepts of consensus, crisis and revolution. I also look for alternative ways to explain the sudden appearance of empowerment at the world agenda. Due to the lack of a uniform definition of the concept and the absence of common approaches in the stimulation of empowerment it's difficult to argue that the situation is marked by consensus.

Our main purpose has been to describe and compare two community's ways of organising and executing the social welfare sectors drug and alcohol abuse programs. We also wanted to explain the similarities and differences we found with the help of an organisations theoretical perspective. A second purpose has been to try to find out if the difference affects the clients possibility to receive equal care.To find out how the community's organise and execute their drug and alcohol programs, we interviewed two social workers in leading positions in Landskrona and Ängelholm. We have further more, to find out if the differences we found influencing the clients possibility to recieve equal care, completed an inquiry with fictional cases that all of the involved social workers, at each community, built an opinion upon.Our main result showed more simmularities than differences in our two community's ways of organasing and executing their drug and alcohol programs. We judged the clients possibility to adequate care to be equally sufficient no matter where he sought care, since our study showed that the social workers choice of approach did not differ significantly between the two communities, even though we found differences in their way to organise and execute the social welfare sectors drug and alcohol abuse programs..

This thesis aimed to describe how the ideological dividing line concerning the welfare state has changed between the two largest governmental parties in Sweden, the Social Democrats and the Moderaterna, during 1990 to 2010. The scientist Mark Blyth points out that ideas are important instruments for structural and institutional change by identifying ideas as weapons, blueprints and cognitive locks, which were being used in the theoretical framework. The empirical data was made by a qualitative analysis of the parliamentary speeches and debates from both parties held every year. The results shows that the budgetary law passed in 1997 became a new institutional blueprint, which changed the political conditions for the Social Democrats. Furthermore, the results point to a change in the Moderaterna?s rhetoric concerning the welfare state to a more pragmatic view. .