This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using different benchmarking models to measure and compare the efficiency of Swedish gas distributors. It also discusses to which extent the results of a benchmarking study should influence the revenue-cap which will be implemented in the gas distribution sector in Sweden from year 2011. The discussion is based on arguments from both theory and practical applications of benchmarking. The results suggest that benchmarking Swedish gas distributors against distributors in another country using a parametric model is most favorable, but the reliability will be increased if non-parametric models are used also. Partial and total productivity measures could be used to confirm results of other benchmarking analyses.

Active environmental activity?? a comparative study of the municipalities environmental activityThesis in Political Science D-Level at Karlstad University byJenny Ljung Spring 2008Tutor: Michelle MichelletiThe threat against our climate is one of our biggest challenges today. The awareness of the problem has grown rapidly for the last years in governments on international, national and regional level. The Swedish government is recognized as one of the leading countries in the climate and environmental work internationally. The Swedish municipalities play a big role in this successful work.

Watching television (TV) has been given a new meaning, you don?t have to book a specific time, a specific date if you don?t want to miss the program you were planning to see. In Sweden now days we can watch TV in lot of different ways, whenever we choose to do so. In this thesis I attempt to explain and document the process of shaping a tvformat, the development and adaptation to a time when the TV medium is in a change. Plus a look at how the television audiences relate to their use of it.

AbstractMaterial collected or created through observations, discussions and interviews with a group of students studying theatre in the fist year of upper secondary school formed the base for this paper. The students that took part in the observations showed a variety of motivations for the studies in theatre, but the major aim was to obtain qualifications for further studies at university. Special focus was put on a student with dyslexia attending the course in theatre from the perspective to strengthen general learning abilities. The training and teaching in acting skills as performed in the theatre studio provided the arena for the observations. The aim was to investigate if an interactive process as defined by Lev Vygotskij and the acting method created by Constantin Stanislavski would create social and artistic development among the students in the study.

The political and civil unrest during the last years of the First World War had a profound impact on the political life in many European countries. Academic research on the Swedish Social Democratic Party and the development of the parliamentary system during these years, often focus on the civil unrest and the mobilization of the labour movement during the spring of 1917, and the impact on Swedish politics of the Russian and German revolutions.This study is an examination of the relation between the Swedish labour movement and the Finnish Civil War of 1918. The general aim of the study is to examine how different levels and organisations of the labour movement acted in regards to the situation in Finland, and how these different levels and organisations interacted with one another. A second aim of this examination is to better understand during what kind of processes of the Swedish labour movement?s history that the Finnish Civil War occurred, and how it affected them.The conclusion of the study is that the there was a disparity between the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SAP), which at the time was part of the Swedish government together with the liberal party, and the grassroots of the labour movement, organized in trade unions, and in the local organizations of the SAP and the Social Democratic Left Party (SSV).

AbstractWhen I, at the age of 20, started working in home care service, I had an idea of what it means to age, a view witch I quickly realized was not true at all. The essay begins with a search for the images of aging you come in contact with, when you do not have a deeper interest in the matter.I take a closer look at how aging is described and how the concepts of aging and dignity are often interconnected, and debate about which images of aging that is outdated and where from they originated.I also show that that image is in for a change, much is happening right now, and there are many like me, who want to change and broaden the view of what aging can mean.Finally I describe my sculptures ?Beatrice? and ?Rosmari?, and reflect on how they relate to the image of what old age looks like.As a sculptor, I want to create an alternative to a widespread image of old people as a problem or idealization of the olf lady as a kind, cute and cookiebaking creature, as well as an alternative to the traditional sculpture tradition, that often show men in positions of power, and sweet passive women/girls.I tell of the strong, stubborn, eccentric and absolutely ordinary lady.

Society and the workplace are two factors that are important for the individual's health status. It is important that the individuals has the right skills to take care of their health. For organizations, it is important to strive for the welfare of their employees. This has proven to have a positive impact on work performance, reduced absenteeism and reduced costs for rehabilitation. In 2007, the local authorities in Umeå implemented a wellness offering for all employees working in the municipality administration.

Title: Female leaders within the bank sector. Level: D-level in Business Author: Emma Roos & Fanny Wiklander Supervisor: Maria Fregidou-Malama Date: 2011 ? January Aim: The aim of this study is to examine which factors are behind the low number of female leaders compared to male leaders within the bank sector. Method: We have adapted a qualitative method. This means that the researcher works close to the object of research and tries to understand it. We believe that this is a suitable method for our study since it?s based on seven personal interviews.

The aim of this paper is to study intra household allocation of capital income by using data on Swedish observations. The 1991 tax reform was to change the taxation on capital income from a progressive to a flat tax system. Before the tax reform there were incentives to allocate capital income to the spouses with the lowest income of labor in order to reduce the total tax burden. The data describes the year of 1989 and 1993, those we choose to examine. Using Swedish data from LINDA database we estimate a quotient by ordinary least squares (OLS) regression.

Our planet is faced with enormous challenges as the extreme weather events related to the human-caused climate change continue to gain strength. The scale of the problem has made changing human behaviour the central focus of sustainable development, and both public and private sector are expected to gain relevant expertise and introduce this work in their agenda. Over its 40-year history, social marketing has become an established field providing tools for social change, but compared to health promotion, sustainability has not been a major focus of social marketing research so far. At the same time, sustainable lifestyles are embedded in complex systems where both individual factors and those of physical and social environment play a defining role in their adoption. Communities are a good example of such environments, and they became the key focus of Community-Based Social Marketing, which combines different insights from psychology to suggest a step-by-step framework for crafting behaviour change campaigns. However, it has not been applied to larger and diverse communities, like cities, and has not focused on sustaining new behaviour over time, which is crucial for creating sustainable lifestyles.

Portable is a project with its starting point in plastic bags, how they negatively affect our planet and how people´s patterns of behavior and qualities of life are affected when people try to live more envi¬ronmentally friendly. Now we have reached the point when peoples way of living and consuming in the western world has to change. This is nothing new and we can now see that sustainability is start¬ing to get attention in every area.Today plastic bags are used on average for 12 minutes. Only one out of 200 is reused, and then only once . This is not sustainable at all.

This thesis treats how accountancy companies works to maintain customer relations. This is getting more important in the accounting business because there are several inner and outer factors available that may affect customer relations in this business area. The main question with the thesis is: How works accountancy companies with keeping customers?The purpose with the research was to investigate and identify which inner and outer factors that may be important from a company perspective to keep customers. Another purpose was to investigate if there existed any differences between the companies in how they are handling different factors like for example a law change and how it could affect customer relations.

The Swedish construction industry is dominated by men; however this is starting to change. The average age of Construction Engineers is high and approximately 40 per cent of the employees will retire by the year 2015. Currently, female engineers dominate the graduating classes of Swedish Universities but this is not reflected in the Swedish Construction industry.With so many female engineers available, why is this? Does it require a change in company culture and their condition of work to attract them? Is it the attitude towards women in the industry among the employees that has to be changed? Or is it a woman?s thoughts and prejudices of the industry that creates obstacles?The purpose of this final thesis is to describe how contracting firms in the construction industry can make themselves more attractive for female engineers. To reach the purpose, a study among salaried employees and craftsmen was conducted.

The essay treats how a process of implementation was executed and the teachers? relation to two curricula, Lpo94 and Lgr11, with two different grading systems, which have functioned as models for one and the same year. The purpose is to investigate the ways in which a change in curricula and syllabus affects teachers in their teaching and assessment practice in the subject of Swedish at secondary school. The investigation had a phenomenological approach and was executed by means of in-depth interviews, questionnaires and one observation. The results are based on a methodological triangulation with qualitative and quantitative data where visible similarities and differences are brought out.

The purpose of this study was to try to understand the Swedish population regarding the perceptions of the Swedish welfare system, based on the reactions that occurred after Sweden's Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's statement about raising the retirement age. Our results demonstrate that the reactions on changes in the pension system in fact rooted in a safety factor and not the change in the pension system itself, through which the Swedish welfare system acts as a safety net for the population. Further the results shows that these safety factors create a form of egoism. With an interaction between empiricism and theory, where the starting point of the material was of an inductive approach, the material abstracted into different levels from which the result emerged. The focus of this study lies in the understanding of how human beings act according to one's need for security in major changes, which may be of importance to a comprehensive understanding of changes in social structures..