In this Masters thesis the image of the public library in the local press and in the eyes of the public is examined. The questions posed to examine this are: - What activities of the public library are described in the local press? - What activities does the public associate with the public library? - What functions and roles of the public library can be found in the articles and interviews and how are they expressed? - What opinions of the public library and hereto related activities can be found in the articles and interviews? This study is based on an analysis of 127 articles, published in Borås Tidning during a period of six months, and of interviews with 35 people from Sjuhäradsbygden. To analyse the articles and the interviews Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen´s model of roles for the library has been used. The model includes four roles for the library: the library as a cultural centre, a knowledge centre, an information centre and a social centre.

Due to poorly functioning local and regional markets, the smallholders in San Francisco, Petén, were dependent on intermediaries that took advantage of the smallholder?s distance to markets. In an attempt to secure income and strengthen their bargaining position, 189 smallholders joined forces through the creation of a social smallholder network, held together by a community based enterprise. This enterprise was initiated in 2011 with the help of government incentive programmes and NGOs that within a few years will leave the enterprise to auto regime. This study treats the sustainability of a community forest based enterprise, Chachaklum, in northern Guatemala. The study identifies factors that enable smallholders to organize themselves in order to obtain business practices that support an improved standard of living.

This paper conducts a qualitative examination based on interviews with four high school librarians. The purpose is to illustrate their professional role in proportion to that of the teachers from working with students? reading comprehension and from their role, if any, in the school?s educational activity. The work is based on the following questions:- How does the high school librarian describe his or her work to increase the students' reading comprehension and contribute to their reading development?- How does the high school librarian describe his or her involvement in the schools? educational activity?- How can one understand the high school librarians' relation to the teachers with reference to the librarians? jurisdiction and the formal and actual legitimacy of the school library profession?The theoretical framework constitutes of the concept of jurisdiction and of formal and actual legitimacy.

The aim of this essay is to study the development of democracy in the Halland province, with focus on participating measures. First and foremost to test earlier research about the causes of the development of democracy, which says that the work takes place with obvious variation between the municipalities and that it is caused by economic resources and experienced problems in the democracy. The purpose is also to conduct a general discussion about the conditions and effects of the development.Thus the method can be characterised as theory consuming because I as far as possible assume the method that has been used in earlier research. Still, my study is limited to the six municipalities of the Halland province and is therefore a study of few cases. One person in each municipality has been interviewed in order to collect a list of all the measures that have been carried out.

The scope of this master thesis is the scientific publishing at Uppsala University's Faculty of Arts. The aim of the thesis is to investigate publication patterns and publishing strategies. To investigate how the publication patterns of the faculty is structured and what priorities and considerations the researchers have regarding scientific publishing. Furthermore, the aim is to compare these publishing strategies and publication patterns to incentives and selection principles of the bibliometric indicators in the performance based research funding systems on the national and local scale.The thesis is based on the theories of disciplinary differences developed by Richard Whitley and Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler. These theories suggest a framework based on organizational and sociological perspectives, that offers ways to explain differences in publication patterns between different scientific fields.The study is based on two empirical studies of the faculty.

The municipality of Falkenberg is a result of a unification of several smaller municipalities in 1971, each one with a small library. This left Falkenberg with an unusual large amount of smaller branch libraries. The object of this thesis is to describe and try to understand the political conflicts that have erupted during the period 1971-1994. Through a case study containing press clippings from the local newspaper, different reports, political meeting protocols, a historical background of the library and a study of library specific norms and regulations I can create an image of the heated debate. The participants in this debate can be divided into politicians and civil servants and the conflict circles round the fact that from an economical perspective, there is not enough budget to keep all the small, local libraries.

Title: Collaboration in BoDa-units. A qualitative study about collaboration regarding people with disabilities. The purpose of this thesis was to internally examine the cooperation between different professions in municipal BoDa-units. By doing a qualitative study using focus-group-interviews in three municipalities, we were able to examine the personnel?s experience of cooperation issues and opportunities in BoDa-units.

This essay examines the Swedish party Miljöpartiet de Gröna and their election campaign 2006. Focus is set on the local organisations in the region of Skåne by examining how they have carried through their campaigns as well as if they have experienced any obstacles in their campaign work. The primary research aim is to give a theoretical contribution as well as an increased knowledge of the local organisations work in the election campaign.Mainly this is a qualitative examination that revolves around the experiences of the organisation members. The material has been collected by interviews and a question survey. For analyse a concept device that correspond with campaign work- and election theory through a partly rational point of view has been constructed.

Sandvik Wire needed a review of the administrative part of the order fulfillment process and especially the work around packing and the inventory of finished goods. Therefore we acquired the assignment to investigate the administrative part of the order fulfillment process in the company with the purpose to identify potential for improvement. This investigation was performed with focus on the terminal and packing functions. The purpose with the investigation was also to identify critical factors for an efficient order fulfillment process and investigate if information quality is such a factor.Data was collected through interviews and observations on Sandvik Wire. With the help of this data the information and material flows was mapped, the work within terminal and packing, and adjacent functions was investigated.

Competition in the market of interior design during the last several years has drastically increased. The consumers of today are very conscious about what the market can offer and therefore they have high demands on the products. It is not only the function of the product that matters but also the design that makes a difference. Companies are becoming more aware of this and as a result they have to find a way to set themselves apart in order to attract customers. This realization has led designers and economists to cooperate in a different way than before.

Syftet med denna intervjustudie var att undersöka hur ett antal nyckelaktörer inom turismnäringen såg på matens roll och hur de arbetade med matupplevelser i praktiken. Insamling av data genomfördes genom semi-strukturerade intervjuer som transkriberades och analyserades utifrån en mall för kvalitativ bearbetning av text. De aktörer som fungerade som informanter för undersökningen arbetade samtliga med matturism på nationell, regional eller lokal nivå.  De aktörer som deltog i studien var Landsbygdsdepartementet, Visit Sweden, Regional Matkultur Småland, Smaka på Skåne, Kristianstad Kommun och Idala Gård. Undersökningens resultat visade att samtliga aktörer ansåg att maten hade en given roll inom turismnäringen.  Informanterna betonade vikten av att producenter ser matens potential till att bli en matupplevelse och synliggör den för turister. Ett skäl till att detta inte alltid görs kunde bero på den bild svenskar har av svensk mat och svensk matkultur menade informanterna.  De förespråkade en stolthet över svensk mat och mattradition.

This two year masters thesis is written in the scientific field of library- and information science. The purpose of the study is to investigate the collaboration between teachers and librarians in different types of school library organisations. Two school libraries with only the school as a target group, two integrated public- and school libraries, one school library division and one public library that provides the school with school library services has been studied. The study takes place in Uppland.The theoretical framework used is based on Montiel-Overall and her four models of collaboration: coordina-tion, cooperation, integrated instruction and integrated curriculum. The first research question focuses on the col-laboration between teachers and librarians based on each of the TLC-models.

The aim of this two years master's thesis is to examine public librarians? views of their pedagogical role towards school children, and to illustrate the relationship between public libraries and schools as a background for the role of the public librarians. The theoretical framework is Carol Cullier Kuhlthau?s theory of the roles of librarians as mediators in reference work (Levels of Mediation) and in education (Levels of Education). The main question of the study is: How do public librarians view their pedagogical role towards elementary school pupils and high school students? Related questions regarding the use of the public library for school purposes, the communication and cooperation between the public library and the schools, the difference between public libraries and school libraries and the librarians? view of pedagogical work are also made.The method used is qualitative interviews.

The main purpose of this study has been to explore and determine how the journalistic work was used by internet users to start and keep a discussion on the internet going.We started in the aftermath of a local arson in a town of Sweden, where a discussion on the internet forum Flashback and the local newspapers commentary fields was raised.We have used these discussions to study what part the journalistic work play in these events. To do that we used a critical discourse analysis and a rhetoric analysis to investigate how these discussions use news articles to make their point. We divided the comments into four different categories, which are comments about understandings of the event, comments that talked about the matters of fact, criticism pointed at the newspaper and comments that identify the offenders.The result of the analysis shows that both forums use journalistic work as facts in their discussions. Both also use earlier articles that were written before the arson, to make their point in the discussion..

Deliberative politics offers a new and exiting way of overcoming the problems that the western democracy of today is facing. A lot of research in the most recent years have had the goal to replace the representative democracy with a decision-making frame built on decentralization and deliberation. The goal for this essay is to create a framework for local decision-making, based on deliberativ norms, that could work as a complement to the representative democracy instead of replacing it.During the recent years the so-called "brukarråd"; councils for the most common users of one special public service, has been a new way for the local government to get in direct contact with those who are most affected by changes and developments in the specific area of the public administration. In this essay I argue for that these councils should be designed so that they could house deliberative processes.After creating a model for the possible way of designing the "brukarråd" I compare the framework with the system that exists today. In this way there is a possibility to point out if there is a way to deepen the democracy within the already existing system..