Childhood as a social category is under strucural redefinition. In this thesis the child and childhood are understood as socially constructed phenomenons. Focus is laid upon the construction of the concept ?in the best interest of the child? wich in The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is defined as beeing the foremost important view to take into account when decisions wich affect children are made. As the thesis shows, a concrete and universall view of the best interest of the child is lacking in practice and would in many cases be unfortunate.

Background: There might be a risk that family members experience limited possibilities to act, participate and influence the end of life care for the elderly in the nursing home. For family members it could be the first time they face death which can imply a lot of questions and existential needs. Aim: The aim of this study was to examine the needs of family members in the patient terminal care in a nursing home. Research methods: The study implemented a qualitative approach and data was collected through four interviews and through a literature review were 17 articles were selected. The results were processed and analysed with a qualitative content analysis and two main categories, participation and assurance with subcategories were identified.

Central in this paper is Olof Johansson, Swedish minister for the environment, there the focus lye on his resignation from this duty which occurred in 1994. This essay is a case study there I?m trying to identify which ethical reasons which lye behind his resignation. The relationship between politics and ethics is an interesting aspect to investigate and my ambition with this paper is to analyze that relationship in this specific case.The analysis has its focus built on the occurrence of role conflicts and the making of ethical decisions. Aspects like personal ethics versus organisational ethics, objective responsibility versus subjective responsibility etc.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare mass digitization and qualitative digitization, to see how the digitization process and the digitalized material differ. The study emanates from the mass digitization as it is performed at the National Library in Norway, and the qualitative digitization at the Royal Library in Sweden. The method used is document studies combined with mail interviews. The focus is upon the practical operation, to which counts: ?purpose & selection?, ?preparation, image capturing and processing?, ?metadata & text encoding?, ?quality assessment?, ?storage of digital originals and copies? and ?display?.

The aim of this paper is to make a plan for local treatment with Klucel® G of a book with moulddamage. The biggest problem concerned handling the book without loosing fragments and tohandle pages that were stuck together. In some places as many as six pages where stuck togetherand it was not possible to separate them without loosing material or breaking them. The otherproblem concerned the use of waterbased adhesives that might cause tidelines and paperdistortions as seen in another volume. The use of Klucel® G dissolved in ethylalcohol functionedvery well as strengtheners and also as an adhesive for lamination.

The purpose of this essay was a follow-up of four female drug abusers with several mental problems ten years after my initial meeting with them at Korsaröds Behandlingshem. Using a qualitative method and interviews with the women, knowledge was obtained regarding their current vital conditions and their subjective experiences of the treatment at Korsaröd. Their perspective on the ethical as well as their desired relationship with staff within social services was also accounted for. When contacted the women lived a content and drug free life in their own flats. The women stayed at Korsaröd approximately five years, and they said that without the treatment they would not be alive today.

The purpose of this study was to examine in which way personnel who work with LVM approach their client?s integrity, autonomy and their participation in decision making. We used a semistructured interview when we interviewed three social workers, one placement secretary and four care personnel who work at institutions for LVM. In the theoretical approach of this study we used the total institutions and the user influence by clients. The study has shown that personnel?s considerations to their client?s integrity, autonomy and participation in decisions are a convoluted problem.

This study aims to explore managers? experiences and perceived conditions for exercising leadership in both hybrid and physical work environments. The empirical material consists of eleven semi-structured interviews and four policy documents. The sample includes eleven managers, of whom six work in a physical environment and five in a hybrid setting. The study follows an inductive approach, where the interviews were first collected and later analyzed by identifying patterns and connecting them to theories on different leadership styles, monitoring, and trust.

The purpose of this thesis has been to explore the topic of business simulation from a theoretical foundation in social constructivism and theories concerning leadership as the management of meaning. The most important findings are that business simulation can be used for strategical leadership by management to create a common vision in the organisation members, which affects their perception of the business and the decisions and actions they make, which in turn can lead to a more efficient organisation that becomes better at meeting set goals. This can be viewed in different ways from different theoretical viewpoints: as inducing targeted changes in mental models to create changes in decision making and actions; as a secondary socialization process where the vision of management is externalized as a business simulation that is in turn internalized by the organisation members that participate in the business simulation, or as a way to frame and define the reality of the organisational members which creates a shared reference point against which a feeling of organisation and direction can emerge. In the future, business simulations may become increasingly used by organizations to create a common vision or to communicate a new decision to the organization members..

How do special educators work to include children with special needs in preschool? That was the question that our thesis proceeded from, and the purpose was to get an insight in the methods used by the special educators to achieve inclusion. Our questions were: ? Is Swedish preschool a place for inclusion? ? How are special educators work organized and focused? ? Which experiences do special educators have working with children with special needs in preschool, and what role do they mean that inclusion plays in this work? Our procedure in this enquiry was to perform semi-structured interviews with 5 different special educators in two different cities. Interpretation and analyis proceeded from three different theories: Urie Bronfenbrenner?s ecological systems theory, John Bowlby?s theory of attachment and Karsten Hundeide?s sociocultural theory. The result showed support for the idea of the Swedish preeschool as a place with many opportunities for inclusion. We have also seen how both money and political decisions has an impact on which possibilities the preschools receive to work with inclusion. In addition it became apparent that the methods used by special educators differed depending on both cities and districts.

The purpose of this master thesis is to map and analyze the appropriate valuation approaches used for Intellectual Property rights and develope a model for valuing patents. This project has been executed on behalf of Electrolux?s Group Intellectual Property and is intended to be used for managerial purposes.Project limitations include patents that doesent concern technology oriented products and services, real option methods, financial forecasts, decisions concerning patents taken by the R&D division, patent applications in general and taking into account unexpected future management decisions regarding patents.Electrolux?s Intellextual Property team applies, manages and protects the groups Intellectual Property rights including patents, designs and trademarks. With an increased globalization and the rise of emerging markets, incentives have increased further to protect and safeguard the group?s innovations.Mainly there are three different valuations approaches for valuing intellectual property rights, these include the income based approach, cost base approach and market based approach.

The company Sol & Energiteknik wanted to examine the possibility to make a standardhouse totally energy independent. Based upon this I have, during the spring of 2007,examined the possibilities available at the market today through litterature studies, contactwith several companies and reading reports at the internet.The first thing to examine has been to determine the energy consumption for a standardhouse, and find out if there are better technologies to be used for energy conservation.My conclusion in this matter is that there are possibilities today for building a house moreenergy efficient.When I had reached the point at which my design for the house was decided, I also hadto choose the different products to use to produce energy as well as to store that energy.To produce heat and electricity to the house I decided to use a wind turbine and a solarwater heater.The most difficult part of designing a house that is energy independent is that theproduced energy must be stored somehow. Storing the heat is relatively easy beacuse theheat can be stored in a large water tank. The electricity is a bigger problem beacuse itmust be stored in batteries, which today are too expensive to be used in a standard house.In the future producing and storing hydrogen might be used to produce electricity, buttoday that technology is both expensive and not tested enough.My final conclusion is that a standard house can not be built to be totally energyindependent today, unless it is very expensive to connect the house to the electricitynetwork. As an alternative solution I came up with a proposal for a house which isconnected to the electricity network and have some amount of own produced energy.This house prooved to be a good investment if you choose to build it today, and it couldbe a very good investment in the long run beacuse energy prices increase every year..

The intention of this essay has been to investigate how the new digital technology has affected the tourism industry and marketing, as well as how travel agents and tour operators adapt to this. We also aimed to get a broader view of how the future might look like when it comes to marketing and virtual service landscapes. We decided to base our research according to these following four questions:? What affect travel agents? way of adoption to the technical development?? What purposes do the travel agents have for building up their virtual service landscape?? How much does the travel agents emphasize on digital marketing?? What can travel agents do to better adapt to the technological development in the future?We have chosen to use a qualitative research for this essay. The reason for choosing a qualitative research was to gain a wider understanding that would represent a big part of the changes of technology development.

Conditions for Swedish forestry are expected to change in the future due to the climate. Among other things, increased production is expected in a warmer climate, mainly because of a longer growing season. With the changing climate risk of damage by such as insects, fungi and storms are expected to increase. Hence, it is of highest importance for private forest owners to spread these risks in the way they cultivate their forest. In this study a qualitative method was used to examine ten private forest owners with forest properties within Kronoberg county, Sweden in their attitudes and actions to prepare in terms of climate change and if they have been affected by the climate change debate in their forest decisions.

The main object for this thesis is to study how students in library and information science at Högskolan i Borås search and valuate documents in the process of writing a paper. The study is based on a series of interviews with 12 students. Our methodology is also based on studies of their final product. The goal of the study was to map out how the students make their decisions during their search process. We studied the students use of search words, relevance judgements and how their need for information changed trough out the writing of their paper.