In 1998 a new regional development policy was introduced by the Swedish government. A central feature in the policy was the formation of partnerships at the regional level. The partnerships were meant to consist of local and regional stakeholders, representing a great variety of interests, who would collaborate in order to improve regional development. The new policy was promoted, besides being more efficient, as a way to broaden political participation and to break male-dominated structures.This thesis discusses whether the regional partnership actually favours ?women's interests?, in terms of how the relationship of power between women and men is constituted by the model.

There are some hazards associated with mediating dogs for adoption to Sweden from foreigncountries. Contagion is considered to be one of them, but this report focuses solely on what adoptionsmay signify to the dogs concerning animal welfare. The aim of this study is to investigate how thebusiness in Sweden is run and what this can imply to the adopted dogs. Websites of the organizationswhich perform mediation of dogs, has been examined to show which information is available. A webquestionnaire was sent to these organizations to learn more about their standard procedure.

When an organisation is going through a work of change, it is highly important that both management and employees has a healthy communication in order to make everybody feel involved. It is then important to be observant for both the managements and employees thoughts and ideas.This study has been performed on an upper secondary school which is performing a work of change. The change has divided the employees in three different groups. One, which thinks the change have evolved the organisation to something better. The second group of people means that it is preventing individual development of competence.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how employees in the financial sector perceive the leadership behaviors of middle managers, and if these perceptions differ depending on the manager's gender and if so, in what way. The study is based on a social constructivist perspective and theories of gendered organizational structures. It is based on 15 semi-structured interviews with employees who have either female or male middle managers from different companies in the Swedish financial sector. The results show that gender often acts as a framework for how leadership is evaluated and understood. Female middle managers are frequently associated with relationship-oriented qualities.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to explore what learning potentials there are in Demoteket. Demoteket is an on-going project that preserves and exhibits young people?s artistic creations. The idea is that public libraries receives and lends out the young people?s artistic creations.

Our study aimed at gaining insight of co-workers experiences of different factors that affects the verbal communication and leads to dialogue and misunderstanding between co-workers and their managers. The empirical material was gained from semi-structured interviews with co-workers at various departments within the same organization. We used a hermeneutic interpretive approach and our data was analyzed concerning different factors affecting communication. The result has been interpreted using the theories of deliberative conversations and dialogue competence. We have also used Illeris theory of learning.

The purpose of this study is to examine how outdoor education (friluftsliv) in upper secondary school is perceived by both students and teachers, and to identify the conditions that influence their motivation and commitment to participate in outdoor education activities. The study also aims to analyze the significance of students previous experiences on their perceptions of outdoor education in school. The following research questions were investigated: ? ? ? ?Which factors do students and teachers believe promote or hinder students engagement in outdoor education in upper secondary school? ? ? ? ?How do students and teachers explain the ways in which previous experiences of outdoor activities affect students engagement and motivation in outdoor education? ? ? ? ?How do students and teachers perceive that organizational conditions and teaching design influence the possibilities of creating meaningful outdoor education? The study is theoretically based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and Sense of Coherence (SOC) (Antonovsky, 1991). SDT was used to understand how autonomy, competence, and solidarity influence student?s motivation, while SOC highlights how comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness shape student?s experiences of outdoor education.

Tillgång till sanitet är en mänsklig rättighet och en förutsättning för liv och hälsa. Trots det lever miljontals människor världen över med bristande sanitet. Den här uppsatsens syfte är att studera hur sanitetssituationen i informella bosättningar kan se ut och hur den upplevs av de boende, samt hur det är möjligt att förbättra den situationen. Genom att utföra en intervjustudie i den informella bosättningen Kibera i Kenyas huvudstad Nairobi, har de boende där fått ge sin bild av hur de upplever sanitetsproblemen och hur det gått till när sanitetslösningen Peepoo introducerades i området. I den här uppsatsen står själva förändringen i centrum och Kurt Lewins teori om förändringsprocessen används som teoretiskt verktyg.

The aim of this study is to look at censorship and attempted censorship of books about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual (GLBT) people in public libraries in the USA. People from the public can submit formal challenges to a book at the library when they find the material offensive which can lead to those books being taken away from the library shelves. The questions asked are why GLBT- literature is being challenged, and sometimes banned, and how do the libraries deal with the challenges to the books.It is nowadays the people from the public, rather than the government or the librarians that are behind many cases of removal of books with homosexual themes. The study presents some of the fictional GLBT- literature that has been cause for much controversy in the USA. All the five examples mentioned are children?s books concerning GLBT- themes and are among the most challenged books in American libraries in the past twenty years.

A Road project?s frame is built up of a decision- and consultation process, where the results of the preparatory studies are being discussed. The aim with a consultation process is that all theopinions and knowledge from the operators' will be taken into count in the basis of information, that is needed in order to the different involved operators' to take a decision.The aim of the essay was to investigate how the decision- and consultation process for a road project, the E4 section between Uppsala Läby, turned out. The aim is also to bring up how theprocess could have been done more correctly. The study was carried out through a qualitative method with an analysis of materials from the National Road Administration's archives, the associated Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and through interviews of the different operators.My theoretical basis has been a Stakeholder Analysis and its principles, and theory about different executions of social planning.The result showed that the decision- and consultation process has been bursting in democracy and consideration taking of the different operators' opinions, has been poor from the developer?s, in this case the National Road Administration's, side.

Today the ability to swim is taken for granted by most people. Most of Sweden?s adult population can swim which is reflected in the reduced number of accidental drownings. About 1900 AD when Sweden?s population was about five million the average drownings per year was 1100.

This study, entitled A constant balance ? Gender equality work in an organisation dominated by women and an organisation dominated by men focuses on attitudes towards gender equality issues in two organisations ? one that is dominated by women and one that is dominated by men. The study is based on the Doing gender theory, which primarily means that gender is something people do, it is constantly changing and it depends on the surrounding context.The organisations in the study are both working with gender equality issues, but the attitudes towards gender equality work are ambiguous. The primary gender equality issue in both organisations is to increase the number of employees of the non-dominant gender. The gender equality work in both organisations is formally supported but it is also being met with informal resistance.

Radio Frequency Identification, RFID, is a convenient way to enable contactless identification which does not require any physical nor optical contact. As with any radio-based communication the signal can be intercepted, thus making the technology vulnerable to several kinds of attacks. Interception of communication is not the only threat. Since RFID tags might contain personal information or information that will grant the owner access to secure areas, skimming and spoofing attacks are also major threats against this technology. In this thesis report,  the perspective of an adversary is portrayed in an RFID-enabled environment by presenting where RFID is used and how it could be abused.

The purpose of this report was to investigate what characterizes a good psychosocialwork environment, and whether it may have impact on a vessel's safe voyage. Thisreport is proposed to increase the understanding of what creates a good psychosocialwork environment and its potential effect on safety at sea. In order to find out thesuccess factors for a good work environment group interviews were conducted in socalledunstructured focus groups. During these conversations, the participants discussedfreely by the question "what is a good psychosocial work environment for you?? Thesuccess factors were thereafter applied on selected accident reports, to investigate theextent to which they were represented and taken into account.The results of the study show three categories of factors: colleagues, communicationand competence, where colleagues are the main contribution to a good psychosocialwork environment.

Theoretically, when an organization grows large it has to formalize its structure and exercise control by more regulations. The negative side effect might in turn be demotivated employees (machine bureaucracy). However, practice seems to contradict theory. Therefore, we decided to investigate how a large company, in this case Microsoft, succeeds in creating motivation despite some machine bureaucratic tendencies. The essential findings are that the employees feel motivated by the fact that they are allowed freedom with responsibility.