The purpose of the present thesis is to investigate the interaction between the branches in the different villages and its users and the importance of the branches for democracy. To illustrate these points, I have focused on Högsby municipality, a local council in Kalmar county. Högsby municipality is of particular interest in this connection, since all seven of the branches have been closed recently; only the main library remains. Moreover, three of the closed branches were, in 2005, taken over by citizen organizations local to the part of Högsby municipality where the libraries were located. The specific issues that were addressed were:- What needs were satisfied by the local libraries in Högsby council and is it possible to satisfy these needs in other ways and then, how?- Does the absence of a local library affect democracy?Interviews were performed.

The aim of this study has been to explore local cultural policy documents in some municipalities in the geographical region of Västra Götaland. Do the municipalities have these kinds of documents for their local cultural activities, and how are they designed? These are questions which the study has focused on. The study has been concentrated on the library activity in the local cultural policy documents. The research has been a comparative one.

Relationship marketing is an important part of the new view of communication strategies. The theories around this subject has a general and global perspective on how to manage relations and communication problems. But somehow the local perspective is forgotten. In this thesis we have focused on the local market and which demands it has on the work with relationship management. The purpose of this thesis is to find out how relationship marketing can contribute to create a high valued brand on a local market.

The business world has been through an extreme transformation over the past decades, which have forced companies to look at themselves from a new point of view. Consumers have a complete new set of ways to gather information and are more motivated than ever to make sustainable consumption choices. This change of attitudes among consumers has made companies focus on other things than price versus quality. A whole new concept has been brought up to questioning: environmentalism. Consumers demand more organically produced products.

Floorball is currently the second largest sport in Sweden, yet there is a low ethnic diversity. This study aims to describe, explain and understand how the leaders in Swedish floorball perceive the work with ethnic diversity from the Swedish Floorball Federation and within the associations they seem. The questions of the study are: How do leaders perceive that the Swedish Floorball Federation works to promote ethical diversity in the within the federation? How do the leaders describe their own efforts to promote ethnic diversity within their team / association? How do the leaders perceive their role in increasing ethnic diversity? How do the leaders perceive the sport as an integration arena? The study was based on a qualitative method with semi-structured interviews. The respondents were eight leaders from four different associations, two leaders from each association.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate in which aspects the public library is affected by its local community. This is re-searched by means of an exemplified case study of a Swedish public library in which we analyze governing documents and the library website with respect to environmental scanning and mar-keting of library services.The research questions are: How are the local community?s demands on the public li-brary being described in the governing document? How is the public library?s response to the demands of the local community being described in the operational plan? How are the demands of the local community, as shown in the governing document and the operational plan, re-flected in the marketing of library services on the library website?Our conclusions are that:The demands of the local community are described in a general fashion in the governing document, but there is a lack of concrete political guidelines.The public library's response to the demands of the local commu-nity is described to some length in the operational plan, but not with respect to economical factors.The demands of the local community are reflected to some length in the marketing of library services on the library website. Many of the overall themes that we identify in the governing document and the operational plan can be found in the marketing directed towards important target groups..

The aim of this master?s study is to examine the function of the public library in the local community at present. I have searched for the answers to the following questions: Which position has the public library in the local cultural policy? What characterizes each library and which are the priorities? What is the local profile of the public library? What cooperation partners does the public library have and what do they mean to the library? Does the public library intensify the local community in any way? To answer this, I have made three qualitative case studies. Interviews and collection of documents were carried out in three different communities.

Local history collections are fairly common among the Swedish public libraries and these collections often contain older or rare material. There are no national policies concerning the preservation of rare books at the public libraries, and the librarians of public libraries may lack that knowledge. The aim of this study is to examine librarians? attitudes toward their libraries? local history collections. We interviewed five librarians in the county of Västra Götaland and also made a small observation study of their local history collections.

The purpose of this study was to look into the work of care organizers for elderly care, in three municipalities in southern Sweden, and how they use the law and local guidelines to evaluate the need for home care. The intention was to determine if presence of relatives makes a difference in the needs assessment and if the care organizers practice harmonize with the guidelines. To do this, we did a qualitative study alongside with analyzing each of the local guidelines. By interviewing five care organizers, we were able to see their side of elderly care and how they combine the law and local guidelines in their daily work with elderly care. Our main themes are, in short, the law and local guidelines, the view of care organizing and needs and also closeness to relatives.

This research examines the effects of creative store window displays of fashion brands in enhancing recall, attitudes, intentions and brand associations. A comparison has been made between high-end and low-end brands, creative versus non creative store window displays to identify differences in effects. The theory applied in this study has been used from creative advertising effects due to the lack of relevant research in store window display effects. Therefore this study is a contribution to the research of store window effects. The method used in this study compare fashion high-end brand with fashion low-end brand by placing the products in the store window display where the creativity has been manipulated.

When discussing local development attention is often given to the problems involved. Factors like decreasing population and inadequate infrastructure are two examples. Local politics has, however, lately been argued to have possibilities to affect its own development and its chances to achieve growth. Some of the most important factors from this debate are to make a community attractive for people and companies, committed leadership, the local business world with entrepreneurialism and a good business climate. These factors serve as a starting point for this discussion where focus is on the possibilities to achieve growth on the local level and the politics that is used for this purpose.To illustrate the chances to affect local growth I apply the theoretical perspective of regime theory and thereby examine the governing coalitions "power to" govern and not "power over" as the earlier theoretical perspectives in the area.

Consumers are facing a wide selection of brands trying to get their attention. An increasing amount of corporations are incorporating non-traditional media in their marketing strategies as an attempt to build relationships with their customers. However, along with the new opportunities to enhance consumer emotions about the brand, social media has brought along new risks for corporations to face. This paper investigates the consequences of different ways of handling such electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) crisis on Twitter. Furthermore, we investigate potential differences depending on the credibility of the source that sent the message.

The thesis has two purposes. First, to give a practical insight into the challenges that Swedish companies might face, and how these challenges are tackled, when implementing strategy in a local area. Second, to develop a general applicable model as a conceptual contribution to the field of international strategy implementation in local areas. This empirical-driven thesis is written in a qualitative and explorative approach, where abduction is adopted in order to find mysteries and contribute to the forming of new theories. The empirical foundation is twenty-two interviews and observations of three large Swedish companies.

This study represents the different factors that may have an influence on the budgetproposal in the local government for the revision. The revision in the local government is an important part of councillors and public insight into the different activities. The budget for revision decides how much of the activities runned by the local government can be observed by the elected representative accountant. The aim of the study is to see how the following variable affect the dimension of the budget appointed for revision. We have used Institutional theory, theory that contains the role-play between guardians and advocates and Agent theory with help of accountability.The dissertation is written in Swedish..

During the last decades the Swedish local party systems have gone through some considerable changes. The number of parties present in local party systems have increased and in some cases even doubled. This makes coalition building between parties complex and parties will be forced to rethink their coalition strategies and adjust to the new circumstances. Theoretically, coalition building has often been considered and applied to national data and there have been just a few attempts to develop and theoretically explain coalitions on a local level. Thus the aim of this paper is to use different theoretical approaches to local data to test the significance of traditional coalition theories.