We live in an exciting society, characterized by continuous changes and challenges. The effects of the globalization are widespread. The continuous flow of people, capital and goods follows in the wake of advances in communications, transport and information technology, resulting in a changed situation for different stakeholders in the society. This situation leads to increased cooperation and exchange, but also increased competition. The primary means of collecting empirical data for this study was interviews and a document study.

This thesis focuses on the mass media cover of ?Smart textiles?. The Swedish?smart? textiles are developed in Borås and are a mix of ordinary textile and new technology.  I analyse the article with a text analysis method, looking at themes and the language?s propositions in focus. Context and the actors in the articles are also important in the analysis.Many women occur as developers of the new smart technical product, a field often knowed as a typical male subject.

The essay on ?The revival of the countryside ? a multitalent in landproduction.? focuses on local and regional development within agriculture, foodprocessing and tourism.Due to great changes in society, the inhabitants in rural areas are forced to find alternative occupations. Using history as a tool to build up the future is a main factor in rural development. Apart from this it involves cooperation, resources, cultural heritage and values, entrepreneurship and innovation, economic vitality, and an understanding of markets and marketing. They all contribute to a region`s ability to benefit from rural development..

For the past decades, culture has been given a role as a factor for local and regional development. But what is meant by development and in what ways culture can be of importance in this aspect can be unclear. This thesis examines the perception of the role for local and regional development of one specific cultural place and network ? the cultural cooperative Not Quite in Fengersfors, Sweden. I study the way the role as developer is expressed and interpreted in the discourse of the cultural workers who are members of the network and in the discourse of public cultural policy in the region Västra Götaland and in Åmål municipality.

We live in an exciting society, characterized by continuous changes and challenges. The effects of the globalization are widespread. The continuous flow of people, capital and goods follows in the wake of advances in communications, transport and information technology, resulting in a changed situation for different stakeholders in the society. This situation leads to increased cooperation and exchange, but also increased competition. The primary means of collecting empirical data for this study was interviews and a document study.

AbstractThe aim of this thesis is to examine Interreg as an instrument for regional policy in the European Union. Interreg is an initiative designed to strengthen economic and social cohesion throughout the European Union by fostering balanced development through cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation. But how does it work in practise? Three main questions are asked to answer this:How well does the implementation in the programmes work?How does the programme management look and how well does it work?What degree of efficiency does Interreg show in financial and physical effectiveness?With evaluation and implementation as theories the questions are answered together with a qualitative method. The conclusions that can be drawn is that Interreg strengthen European unions economic and social cohesion in form of integration and regional development that in many ways make it easier to travel and trade over the borders.

In 1998 a new regional development policy was introduced by the Swedish government. A central feature in the policy was the formation of partnerships at the regional level. The partnerships were meant to consist of local and regional stakeholders, representing a great variety of interests, who would collaborate in order to improve regional development. The new policy was promoted, besides being more efficient, as a way to broaden political participation and to break male-dominated structures.This thesis discusses whether the regional partnership actually favours ?women's interests?, in terms of how the relationship of power between women and men is constituted by the model.

The purpose of this essay is to present, from a theoretical framwork about regional democracy, possible methods to handle the regional democratic problems in Östergötland in Sweden and to investigate the opinion of the political parties regarding this issue. Both the national and the local/regional level are investigated. The contents of the essay is based on literature studies and interviews of politicians in Östergötland. Regional democratic problems that is discussed are the political responsibility and the power distribution between the political actors on the regional level. A solution of the problem could be to organize the regional society structure in accordance with one of the following organization models"Statligt regionalt ansvar","Kommuner i samverkan"or"Regionalt folkstyre".

The purpose of the study was to investigate how inventories of suspected polluted areas as a part of the planned control of existing companies cab be designed in order to achieve as great effect as possible. The study was conducted in cooperation with Piteå municipality. An analysis of regional inventory projects, local municipal strategies and a pilot study in Piteå was conducted. The experience from both the regional projects and the pilot study was that in order to achieve an effective control a number of factors were inportant: an efficient selection of companies, a good dialogue between the controlling agency and the companies, sufficient resources, education of municipal inspectors and guidance for decisionmaking. Another inportant result was that the municipal planning can prevent an efficient inventory if the control of city development projects is allowed to take time from the planned control.

This thesis investigates the 200 year old phenomena of savings banks and if they increase the economic growth (GDP) in the local region they act in. That is being done by testing three hypotheses; the savings banks increase the attractiveness of the region they act in; the savings banks increase the entrepreneurship in the region they act in; and the savings banks increase the economic growth in region they act in. This quantitative cross-sectional study with data from the year 2010, finds that the savings banks increase the attractiveness of the local region, most likely through the efforts and financials they put into different local projects. A positive result is also found for increased entrepreneurship in the regions that have a local savings bank. The result is explained by the savings banks relationship lending, which increase the likeliness for a company to get the credit they need to start and develop.

Regionalism is a concept of extensive proportions and as such is complex to define. This phenomenon becomes much clearer by studying it from different perspectives. This paper focuses on regional political parties and description of their political ideas. The goal of this paper is to examine and compare regional political parties in two Swedish regions: Norrbotten and Skåne. By studying two biggest regional parties in these regions, namely Norrbottensparti and Skånepartiet, I will try to get an insight into the regional politics, as well as illustrate regionalism and its meaning.

This is an empiric, qualitative, case study of cooperation between two public organizations in Ystad, Sweden (Försäkringskassan and Ystad kommun). The aim of the study is to illuminate why they cooperate and what happen with the idea to cooperate and the organizations when they do. The theoretical tools used are influenced by institutional theory. A translationmodel is used to illustrate what the local actors do with the idea when a decision is made to adopt it and how it affects the actors. The study suggests that the cooperation in Ystad called One Stop Shop is partly done because it's a popular way of organizing public organizations in Sweden and partly because försäkringskassan, aim to upgrade their organization identity.

Social networks have increased significantly during the latest decades, but what does the cooperation include and how does the network processes look like? Networks are not specific for communities in the 2000?s or for that matter human organisations, but the ability to build networks and introduce more actors to the organisation have become easier with today?s communication technology. The study is about the Norrköping Municipality membership in the transnational network Sweden Emilia Romagna Network (SERN). It gives an insight into how networking and cooperation can be seen by politicians and officials, based on mission statements and the reason why a municipality choose to participate in transnational networks. The study aims to examine how Norrköping Municipality uses the SERN network and what the network have resulted in since the beginning of the municipality membership in 2005. It is a qualitative study which involves interviews with officials and politicians from the Municipality of Norrköping and textual material from SERN?s strategy documents and policies.

The aim of this study has been to describe the ongoing region enlargement process in the region Mälardalen, located in the east part of Sweden, and to investigate how this process can affect the local level. The study is especially orientated on public communications and accessibility. The intention has also been to examine how the local accessibility can affect the re-gional development in Mälardalen. The local investigation object that has been chosen for this research is the city Strängnäs, situated in the province of Södermanland. The city of Strängnäs and the cities in it?s near geographic surroundings has been the benchmark for this casestudy, in which the local accessibility with public transportation has been investigated.

AbstractOur study deals with intrapreneurship in local activity. The main purpose of this study is to understand, explain and develop the concept of intrapreneurship in local activity with the help of existing information, our discussion, and reasoning and with the help of theoretical concepts. One reason for the choice of this topic was our pure curiosity towards this quite unique and unexplored phenomenon. We know that the term intrapreneurship in local activity has not existed longer than about ten years and the amount of existing thesis of intrapreneurship in local activity is very few. The information about intrapreneurship in local activity is mainly collected by studying Örebro´s intrapreneurship policies but also by studying other local authorities in Eksjö, Umeå and Västra-Götaland.