The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

The concept of leadership development plays an important role within the modern organization. As a result of the increasing interest in developing leadership competencies, investments in leadership development programs are becoming a common part of business strategies. However, the return on those investments is seldom evaluated. The reason for this is considered to be the complexity created by the many factors that influence leadership but have no relation to the program. This is a case study based on interviews with participants from a one-year leadership development program that was carried out at AB Previa.

The aim of this study was to gain insight into how two enterprises work with competence development and thereby study how the relationship between competence development and workers, employees, look like. The focus was on the workers motives and motivation towards a participation in a competence development course, their attitude to education, and how the transfer of skills gained from the course, into the workplace looks like. Further on, the work situations influence on the workers competence development has been taken into account.In the study, six people were interviewed in the role of either manager, coach or course participant who are employed in two different enterprises in the south of Sweden.The results showed that the participants were motivated by a strive for personal development or that the participants viewed education implementation as a part of the professionalcareer, which has resulted in a positive attitude towards the competence development course. The managers? motive for decisions about education was to change the prevailing attitude among the staff for the better and thereby strengthen the company?s brand. The work situation has encouraged the desire to participate in developmental education as the feeling of control has encouraged the workers to further development.

It is important for firms to continually develop their offerings as the business landscape develops in order to sustain their competitiveness (e.g. Schumpeter, 1934; Ansoff, 1979; Porter, 1985; Trott, 2012). In a context of globalization, rapid technology development and changing customer needs, the paper packaging industry is urged to enhance its product development activities (Hansen & Niskanen, 2007; Björkdahl & Börjesson, 2011). However, there is little research about paper packaging firms? product development processes (ibid).

If one looks at physical planning in Sweden today one can see that while talking about densification of existing development, reduced emissions and careful use of important land, urban sprawl is a fact with development of sheer residential districts in the urban edges and shopping malls in each and every municipality. As sustainable development is an essential goal for physical planning to strive towards, it is worth questioning if the direction of today?s planning will lead to the goal. A sustainable development can be seen as an obvious to goal aim at. In reality the aim means a hard and complex work.

This thesis at the Institute for Language and Folklore has as its purpose to lay a foundation for a continuinginventory work. The tasks I have performed during my time there was to create an archival description, anintroduction to the material and a process map showing the process of incoming delivery of documents. The aimwas never to finish the list of work, but to structure the material to get an insight into the material and to theproblems that existed within. The documents are of a very unique nature and require that the archivist is familiarwith and have knowledge of sign language. One of the problems I encountered was how fragmented the materialwas.

This thesis focuses on Chinese?Swedish code-switching of bilingual children in Sweden. The purpose is to, through a case study, study what Chinese?Swedish code-switching looks like in daily conversations between bilingual children and their parents. Three main questions are formulated from the purpose of the thesis, foucusing on the types and frequencies of code-switching, the grammar of code-switching, and the motivation of code-switching.The linguistic material comes from voice recordings of naturally occurring conversations between three children and their parents, which are transcribed afterwards.

Thesis purpose: The purpose of the master thesis is to analyse the battle of meaning creation regarding the notion of smoking and to reveal the production of unequal power relations. The battle is fought by different stakeholders through means of language and the study focuses on the tobacco industry in Germany. Methodology: A critical discourse analysis is applied with a qualitative research strategy. Our data collection was inspired by grounded theory and is limited in scope through a relevant case within the context of smoking in Germany. Empirical data is collected by means of an internet based document study of publicly available texts.

The aim of this study was to search for a link between the subject pictorial studies in means of expression and the ability to communicate in written and spoken language. To do so findings in relevant literature and a few complementing theories was addressed to cast light on interviews made with teachers dedicated to the subject pictorial studies in a subject-integrated curriculum.Interviews were conducted with nine teachers and all but one were teachers in the subject pictorial studies, spread across all of the nine grades in compulsory school. Informants were located in areas of socioeconomically high as well as low status, in central and densely populated areas as well as areas less densely populated. The diverse theoretical background consisted of semiotics, constructivist theory, social constructivist theory and genre theory. Theories and literature partly both contradicted and supported each other, depending on situation and circumstance.No evident conclusion could be made that discriminated one affecting cause from another on speech or writing skills.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur en grupp typiskt utvecklade, svenska barn, i åldrarna fyra till tio år presterar på tre deltest i VMPAC, för att därmed skapa ett underlag för en referens för svenska barn i bedömningen av avvikande utveckling. Studiens frågeställningar är: 1. Hur presterar en grupp typiskt utvecklade, svenska barn, i åldrarna fyra till tio år, på tre deltest i VMPAC (Focal Oromotor Control, Sequencing Maintenance Control och Connected Speech and Language Control)? och 2. Förekommer det några skillnader mellan en grupp typiskt utvecklade, svenska barn, jämfört med den amerikanska normeringen i VMPAC och barn med verbal dyspraxi (CAS) undersökta inom ramen för en magisteruppsats (Björelius-Hort, 2009)? Oral- och talmotorisk förmåga hos 23 svenska barn i åldrarna fyra till tio år, som åldersmatchats mot barn med verbal dyspraxi (Björelius-Hort, 2009), testades med deltest två, tre och fyra ur VMPAC.

This thesis aims to analyse the problems concerning the reorganization of the Swedish consulary system, which took place right after the Swedish entry in the European Union in 1995. This thesis shows the underlying debate in the Parliament before the changes. It also discusses which factors caused the reorganisation. My work focuses on the Swedish consulary representation in Spain which exist of an embassy in Madrid and 20 underlying honorary consulates. The consulates are not foreign authorities but are still handeling a lot of cases as an govenmental authority.

ABSTRACT:The aim of this essay is to analyze whether the development of the Principles of War in small states´ doctrine has been influenced by the doctrinal development of alliances after the start of an international cooperation.The author suggests that the development of the Principles of War can be understood through theories of doctrinal development. The theory used for this analysis states that small states depend on alliances, such as NATO, and therefore adapt their doctrine to better match the doctrine of the alliance. Since the Principles of War are the foundation of doctrine, such an adaption should lead to an adaption of the Principles of War as well.The analysis will be made using Swedish Army field manuals as a basis. These will be compared to NATO´s, in order to see whether or not Sweden has adapted its Principles of War following its membership of the Partnership for Peace.The results show that today the Swedish Principles of War are more similar to NATO´s than they were in 1982, which suggests that they have been adapted to better match those used by NATO. Although this essay does not analyze the reasons why, the results imply that theories of doctrinal development also include the development of principles of war.

Kalmar Municipality has in 2008-2010 made an effort to educate managers on gender, with the goal of mainstreaming gender into public activities so that all citizens should feel safe in that treatment and services are designed and resources are distributed equally to both sexes living conditions and needs. The overall aim of this study was to examine whether the training effort has paid off, and how gender mainstreaming has been implemented in the different activities. We have used a qualitative approach, which we examined through interviews managers' approach to gender equality.Gender was generally described as an important issue of all respondents, and all were working to mainstream gender into their activities and workplaces. The results show that the operational and management needed clearer directives and strategies in their efforts to promote gender equality. Education was necessary because personal definition of gender may differ from the control contents of the documents.

Abstract   In this thesis, my aim was to investigate how preschool teachers view their involvement in children's free play. In order to answer this, I chose to do semi-structured interviews with four preschool teachers in three different preschools. My interviews has revealed similarities and support for as how history of research looks at the involvement of educationists. Both research and my results stresses the importance of being active in children's free play and to be a supportive teacher, particulary in conflict situations. For those children who have difficulty entering into the free game its the educationists task to co-play and help the children find the game.

Stress-related diseases in Sweden have doubled since 1997. Even longterm sickness related tostress has increased over the last decade. In future there is a need of alternative methods todecrease the amount of people being affected to gain a better population health. Natureassisted therapy (NAT) was shown to be a successful method as part of the therapy of stressand burnout likewise was nature an important factor to prevent people from mentaldisorders. The aim of this study was to analyse the latest research concearning nature and itshealth effects with focus on stress and burnout patients in order to plan health promotingactivities outdoors for these patients.