The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine the virtual reference service Ask the Library [Bibblan svarar] from a postmodern perspective. Ask the Library is a Swedish online reference service that is run by the country?s public libraries. The postmodern theories of Jean-François Lyotard are used to study how information is managed and transmitted within the service.

The purpose of this essay was to inquire how workplace conflicts are managed at a number of public social services offices in south-western Skåne. This essay's main research questions were: What organizational factors determine how conflicts arise and are managed in a work environment? To what extent are such factors prevalent at the above-mentioned social services offices? Are certain conflicts typically prevalent in the public social services? If so, what are they? How does the workplace in question manage the conflicts that arise? The inquiry was conducted among the staff of three public social services offices, applying the vignette method. According to previous research, certain system conflicts are typically prevalent in public sector organizations, which adversely affect the work conditions of social workers at the organization's professional level. Two examples each of this conflict type and of interpersonal conflict were included in the inquiry.

This report describes the development of a RESTful web service for mobile applications. The web service makes resources from an existing system called kompetensdatabasen ("the competence database") available. Kompetensdatabasen holds information about the capabilities of consultants and about assignments carried out at the IT consultant business Nethouse AB.The web service was developed according to the principles of REST and ROA (Resource Oriented Architecture) which puts focus on making resources available. The resources are made available through the HTTP protocol and the methods associated with it. This means it was designed to use the same technologies as the world wide web.

Social enterprises make up one of the groups of participants that provide welfare services financed by public funding. The object of this study is to describe and analyze from a theoretical point of view which conditions, in what fields, by which division of responsibility and finally through what decisions these social enterprises are allocated a place in the market for social welfare services. The company that has been the object of study offers services in the field of social welfare and in employment. In the study a triangulation of qualitative methods has been used: studies of literature on the subject, recurrent interviews and observations and also reviews of documents. The results have been analyzed from theories on the space available on the market for social services, on social economy and on social capital in the form of strong, weak and bridging bonds.

When Sweden acceded to the European Union in 1995 the term social economy was introduced to the Swedish context, gradually replacing the term civil society. This replacement can be seen as an indicator of a changing meaning of what the concept of civil society used to stand for.The aim of this essay is to study if it is possible to identify changing perceptions of the role of civil society for democracy in Sweden in government bills between 2002 and 2008, and, if so, what effect does this have on the delineation between the civil society and the government.An analytical model is proposed consisting of two dimensions which both capture the roles of civil society for democracy and the model examines how those roles relate to the government.The conclusion is that the government still sees the main function of civil society as a democratic school and a change agent for democracy. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that the civil society is increasingly regarded as more of a welfare producer than a fosterer of democracy..

The aim of this study is to understand and describe school staff´s view on the legal obligation to report child maltreatment. With this approach I will get a better understanding how child maltreatment can be caught up in the Swedish community. Previous research shows that school is one of the authorities who report most children to social services. Previous research indicates that cooperation between school and social services reduces the time of the investigations, and gives a better understanding of what is to be reported. The result shows that a functional cooperation between school staff´s as well as between school and social services is important for children to be caught up in the community.

Marlot Company Limited is a company in the sector household services. It is a new company where the owners, and also the clients, felt that the company was in need of a distinct platform where they could communicate with their current and prospective customers. The assignment was to create a platform consisting of a graphic profile and a Wordpress site for the company. The graphic profile's task was to distinctly profile the company in the market, and visualizing the conceptions that the company wants to be associated with. The purpose of the Wordpress site was to create a showcase for Marlot towards their customers, and thecompany itself could manage after completion.These two products have been created with the help of a pilot study which included an analysis in which the competitors in the market has been scanned, and reports of the household services sector has been studied.

The purpose of this study is to explore professionals? view on why men purchase sexual services with a focus on heterosexual prostitution where the man is the buyer and the woman is the seller. To achieve the studys? purposes and to be able to examine professionals? views a qualitative approach is taken with semi-structured interviews. Six professionals who work or have been working in the organisation KAST (Buyers of sexual services, own translation), who are situated in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm, have been interviewed.

The aim of this master thesis is to study the students usage and experiences of the reference services at the university library at Linköping University. The four questions that I seek answers to are: - What kind of help do the students most often ask for at the reference desk? - To what extent do the students use the reference services for their studies? - What are the students experiences of the help they receive at the reference desk? - What are the students experiences of the treatment they receive from the librarians at the reference desk? I have studied literature that describes reference work and evaluation of reference work. I have also studied Christian Grönroos theory of service quality. I have distributed questionnaires to students at Linköping University.

This Masters thesis is analysing four Swedish novels written by first time authors published between 1993-2002. The purpose is to make the fictitious main characters illustrate what conditions and obstacles there can be for the individual of today to create a self-identity. Anthony Giddens ideas about the self in the late modern society are used as a theoretical framework. In the core of Giddens theory is the concept of reflexitivity which means that the self must be constructed in a continuous fashion because the overall conditions in society are subject to constant change. The questions posed in this study are dependable on Giddens in general and the concept of reflexivity in particular.

The aim of this thesis was to describe the services offered to students with dyslexia, and from a service- and quality perspective describe how the consumers of these services experienced the supplied services. Dyslexia refers to certain problems with the written language. With the demand for students in higher education to accumulate much knowledge through reading, this becomes a question of vital importance. A qualitative descriptive approach was used, and a case study was conducted. The case study covered 'Student support' at the University of Borås and how dyslectic students at the university experienced the help from 'Student support'.

The purpose of this essay was to study how school welfare officers cooperate with other school staff, regarding children in vulnerable positions, and how the school staff apply their obligation to report to the social services if they have concerns regarding children at risk, according to the law of social service, SoL.We have especially focused on questions concerning cooperation, both between the school staff, and between the school and the social services. We also wanted to identify some of the restraining factors and dilemmas that could come up during the process of reporting children at risk to the social services. The study was based on qualitative interviews with ten school welfare officers from the same municipality.Our conclusions of our study are that there exists a well-developed cooperation between several organizational levels, including the school welfare officers, other professions in the schools and the social services. There were though opinions among the school welfare officers that they wanted to increase their professional claims in relation to the school nurse, due to their larger competence in talking to children. Regarding the formal responsibility to report to the social services, a majority of the school welfare officers felt they had access to the support they needed from both their principal and the students healthcare-team, and that they were not left alone in the process..

The increased specialisation and complexity in products and services has created the need for Swedish companies to focus more on their core businesses. This has resulted in them opting to buy services and products that lie outside of their core business from consultancy businesses or other types of suppliers. When companies describe their offers in internal and external marketing it is done often in terms of company or service attributes that are not based on customer value or offered value for the customer. The reason for this is that companies have not adapted their services to the different needs of their customers. As a result of this, they run the risk of offering the same services as their competitors and communicate values that the customers either do not understand or experience as value adding.

This master?s thesis is about freedom of information ideas in the European Union data retention directive, 2006/24/EC. The directive means that data about electronic communications services will be retentioned. The aim of the thesis is to examine what ideas related to freedom of information that appear in the directive and how these ideas belong to the ideology of freedom of information that is common within the library community and to the juridical restrictions. In the light of surveillance tendencies that have occurred over the last years, the most well-known is probably the USA Patriot Act, it is interesting to study how freedom of information ideas appears when surveillance is legislated.

 Prostitution has been intensely debated in Sweden for nearly four decades. Two major investigations have so far been initiated by the government and numerous propositions have been put forward in the Swedish parliament resulting in the sexköpslag from 1999 that criminalizes purchase of sexual services. The law aims at punishing the buyer and protecting the women in prostitution, thus making it possible for women to be helped by various social interventions rather than punished. Swedish society has undergone major changes in these decades. Globalization, the internet and the membership in the EU have changed the Swedish society and influenced the discourse on prostitution.This paper has a twofold aim, on the one hand investigating if and how these changes have had an impact on the prostitution discourse in texts produced by the government and analyze how female and male sexuality in connection to prostitution is constructed.