Thid thesis concerns pre-Roman religion in Gaul, taking as its starting point Caesar's De bello Gallico. Caesar's account of the Gauls and their religious customs is compared with the accounts of Lucan, Pliny the elder and Ammianus Marcellinus. These are also compared to, and contrasted to, the archaeological evidence. There is some discussion of the nature of the common interpretations of this evidence. The concept of 'the Celts' is touched upon, since much of the relevant evidence has, in our time, been thought of as Celtic.

This thesis takes as its point of departure the Swedish governmental family policy and the debate on the proposed reform ?vårdnadsbidraget?. The supporters of the reform present it as something that will increase the freedom of choice for families and benefit the children, whereas the opponents warn for decreased equality and a return to the male breadwinner-model.From a constructivist perspective, language is closely related to power through defining and ascribing meaning to reality. By applying a feminist political theory on the debate within the Swedish national parliament 2007/2008 and conducting a discourse analysis, the aim of this paper is to analyse which concepts are used and how they construct to what makes a family within the political debate ? is there any difference or similarity between the view of the opponents and the supporters of ?vårdnadsbidraget??The main conclusion of this paper is that even though the political ideal and rhetorical concepts differ between the supporters and the opponents, they still constitute the heterosexual nuclear family as an obvious norm in family politics.

This study analyzes the discursive content of four history textbooks in order to demonstrate how national identities are formed and how they differ from each other. This was done through discourse analysis guided by social constructivism and John M. Hobson?s dichotomy of East and West. The study shows that textbooks mainly construct national identities in three ways; first by making a clear distinction between ?The Self? and ?The Other?, second by preserving a world order based on the notions of the invariant hegemony of the nation-state, and third by utilizing stereotype based dissimilarities in order to accentuate existing differences between nationalities. Implicit ideals and values in the historical discourse play an important part in the construction of identities; however sends a contradictory and ambiguous message.

The aim of this essay is to examine how people living in the Swedish countryside looked upon changes in the interiors through modernization in 1850-90. For the first time, there was an abundance of objects available in stores in the countryside that the majority of the population had money buy. Many novelties were introduced in the interior decoration of ordinary peoples´ homes. This study focuses on the introduction and use of wallpaper and is based on a questionnaire about wallpaper sent from the Nordiska museet, National museum of Culture history in Sweden, to people all over Sweden in 1948. 148 people responded to the questions about use and attitudes toward wallpaper during the second half of the 19th century.My theoretical perspective is cultural diffusion, the spread of cultural items, more specific the diffusion of innovations from larger to smaller places, often influenced by social elites, hierarchical diffusion, and between individuals, contagious diffusion.The analytical perspective used for the analysis is based on the concepts of basic and variable modernity, initiated by the historian Sven-Eric Liedman.

This essay examines how the critical reception of French nouveaux réaliste-artist Raymond Hains 1961 exhibition La France déchirée has been articulated at two historically separate occasions.In her 2010 book Nouveau Réalisme, 1960?s France and the Neo-avant-garde, art historian Jill Carrick examines the fundamental impact the founder of nouveau réalisme ? French art critic and theorist Pierre Restany ? has had on the movement?s historical reception. According to Carrick Restanys writing established an interpretive framework that remained more or less intact for several decades. In addition to a closer analysis of the movement?s critical reception during the 1960s?, Carrick provides a set of new, alternative readings of a number of nouveaux réaliste artworks, which all originates from a position outside of Restanys interpretive framework.

As a result of global competition, companies within the automotive industry are required to improve their production systems to achieve sustainable and competitive production. To attain operational excellence, companies have adopted concepts like lean and World Class Manufacturing (WCM).In order to deliver, companies need to increase the availability and reliability of production equipment. This demands focus on both operational and strategic maintenance, and efficient equipment acquisition and management. The main objective of this thesis is to identify processes and success factors that are necessary for improved maintenance performance. By conducting a case study and by performing a literature review, the following has been studied: 1) how companies within the automotive industry work with maintenance and maintenance strategies, 2) implementation of maintenance strategies, and 3) new acquisition and spare parts management for maintenance. The results show that basic maintenance concepts and related terms are well defined in the literature.

 This thesis is based upon the assumption that in Swedish school today it is a wide gap regarding the information flow when pupils are switching school. This was one of the reasons Skolverket published a report clearly stating that this is the case. The purpose of this thesis is to examine and describe how teachers are working in a teacher team at transitions to see and understand what their work may mean individually, in a group and to the school as an organisation. The questions at issue is to see how the teachers cooperate during transitions and how they notice students in need of extra support and students level of knowledge during transitions. The two last questions at issue is first to see how teachers approach parent?s expectations on the school and the teachers, secondly it is to examine what implications their work will have on the school.

The aim of this investigation is to explain present and historical differences in the Swedish and Danish unemployment rates between 1976 and 2005 with a broad framework, making use of neoclassical and post-keynesian economic theory. The influence of the rate of investment to GDP, and various institutional factors are assessed in quantitative analysis. It is suggested that the crude answer of the question asked in the title, ?What is it that Denmark does that Sweden does not??, is that Denmark invests. This investigation suggests accordingly that the main reason of the relative labour market success during the 90?s in Denmark was a rising, and rapidly recovering, rate of investment to GDP, and perhaps not primarily its flexible labour market institutions.

This essay intends to provide an understanding of the developments in the right of public access and recreational activities in the forests of Sweden, and which factors and prerequisites that have affected this development. The forest and its history, along with recreational development has in many ways shaped today?s rights of public access, but there is also an age-old tradition of public access that has affected how we have used the forest, and that also has enabled the development of outdoor recreation. Many are unaware of this, which causes misunderstanding to appear around the rights of public access and how it is supposed to be used.The essay opens with historical descriptions of public access, the Swedish forest and outdoor recreation, to thereby provide a picture of how these three fields have influenced each other over the centuries. This is followed by a description of the current access rights and the problems associated with those, and a description of other countries' equivalent of the right of public access.

The purpose of this study is to investigate five teachers? opinions on the work with individualization with focus on above-average pupils. I have issued four questions based on the purpose of this study: - How do these teachers define the theoretical concepts of individualization and above-average pupils? - How do the teachers reason about the concept of individualization with focus on the above-average pupils? - How do the teachers reason regarding the work with individualization in the Swedish language? - Do these teachers consider that there are difficulties to individualize the work so that it will challenge above-average pupils?The method used to conduct this study was a semi-structured qualitative interview with five teachers in primary school. The theory and the theoretical concepts this study is based on is: what defines the above- average pupils, the zone of proximal development, the concept of individualization and motivation and the importance of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities.The study shows that the theoretical concept of above-average pupils is hard to define and it shows a difference between how the teachers choose to define it.

The purpose of this essay is to further the understanding of contemporary management theory by conducting an analogy-study of the source to many of the terms today used in knowledge-intensive companies. The way a football club deals with knowledge work differs from how a conventional company deals with it. However, many of the terms, such as teamwork and coaching, are shared by the two types of organization. By using the analogy-method we hope to create a wider understanding for the shared concepts. We have used a hermeneutic perspective throughout the essay, which first and foremost means that we focus on understanding and explaining social phenomenons.

This master?s paper first presents some of the principal theories and concepts developed by the poverty researchers Rowntree, Titmuss, Townsend, Sen and Lister. These theoretical frameworks are then related to two documents from the EU and Sweden concerning combating poverty and social exclusion, bearing on the establishment of the ?Year 2010 against Poverty?. Finally, I discuss the value in practice of these theories and policy documents, as regards reducing poverty in Europe.It has become clear in this investigation that the theories and concepts from earlier research are still relevant to the formulation of contemporary policy programmes, and that earlier research helps us to avoid old traps in fighting poverty.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine the discourses about Malmö public library that can be identified in several documents published by the library, articles, and various WebPages. Furthermore, our intention is to study the relation between the library?s identity, image and profile. The questions posed in the study are: Which identity discourses are Malmö public library giving expression for? What kind of conflicts between these discourses can we find? How is the identity, image and profile of the library in relation to one another? How does Malmö public library profile and market itself as a non-profit organization? Our theoretical and methodological building ground is in the discourse analytical field, with Enesto Laclau?s and Chantal Mouffe?s theories about discourse and society, as a starting-point.

The aim of this study is to describe how nature is portrayed in swedish poet and critic Aase Berg?s two earliest poetry collections, Hos rådjur (1997) and Mörk materia (1999), and how it relates to notions of humanity, culture and civilisation. The concept of ?nature? is problematized in a short survey of how it has been used by and critizised in ecocritical literary theory, which is used as the main theoretical framework for this survey, with an emphasis on selected theoretical concepts by Donna Haraway. As a methodological starting point, ?nature? is tentatively defined as ?that which does not let itself be subsumed under the human, culture or civilisation?, and this definition is contrasted with how the concepts are handled in the texts.The investigation shows that the relationship of nature to the human is a fundamental theme that provides a structure for both poetry collections.

Uppsatsen undersöker om den rashygieniska ideologin även florerade i 1920-talsfilmen, med tre valda närläsningar..