The past years in Sweden has been infected by a discussion about immigration and immigrants, both spoken in politics and media. The aim of this essay is to study the attitude about immigrants in the third period of immigration in Sweden found in the local press. And also what image the press gave of immigrants. The study looks at Smålandsposten, which is a large local press in the Växjö area. During the period for this study was the attitude in the local press very negative. The studied articles in Smålandsposten shows a profound idea of a ?we? and ?them?.

This essay is about the problematization of uneployment and unemployed in national policy documents of the years 1979 and 2007. The purpose of this essay is to illustrate and analyze the problematization of unemployment as a construction. My overall aim is investigating how the unemployed and unemployment are represented and constructed in the Swedish political debate the years of 1979/80 and 2006/07 by analyzing national policy document. The analysis will consist of questions about the problemrepresentaion made by unemployment and the unemployed, the assumptions behind this problematization and what kind of impact it could generate for the unemployed.  In this way, the study aims to investigate the changes that may have occurred in how unemployment is problematized in the Swedish policy documents and highlight citizenship conditions on the basis of labor market policy.

Today's labor market is characterized by flexibility. This applies to organizations, forms of employment and working time. Unregulated working time is such an adaptation and the main subject of this essay. The purpose of this study was to investigate the conditions that underpin unregulated working time, in relation to the Swedish legislation and to EU legislation. The intention has been to investigate the work environment impacts of unregulated working time, and what differences there are from a gender perspective.The conclusion is that workers who enter into agreements for unregulated working time have significantly different terms from traditional workers.

The Swedish system of rent control has recieved a lot of critique for creating an ill-functioning housing market. Supporters however claim that a movement towards market rents would lead to increased segregation. We evaluate whether rent control has managed to counteract segregation in Stockholm. Our evaluation is based on a data set of 292 representative households in Stockholm. We find that residents in rent controlled apartments in attractive locations typically are born in Sweden by Swedish parents and that they are likely to have a higher income than residents in rent controlled apartments in less attractive locations.

This thesis focuses on the problems involving immigrants and their voting behaviour in Sweden. We presuppose that immigrants vote in a far less extent than Swedish citizen according to general statistics. We try to explain and give solutions to this problem. To our help we use both integration theory focusing on multiculturalism and electoral participation theories.Starting off in these two theories, we have further analyzed a number of policies issued to solve the participation dilemma. The policies were issued in order to elevate the socio-economic standards, inform citizens and close the distance between voters and politicians.Our results show that what work best is long term ventures aiming at integrating immigrants to the Swedish society.

After the formation of the European Union internal market in 1992, member state specific obstacles and barriers were largely removed. This was especially the case in harmonised industries where standardisation and technical regulation have led to legal certainty. Despite this, a large range of trade regulation continues to remain distortional to trade, in addition to the ongoing tariffs and subsidies. The key trade regulations relate to a number of areas involving technical regulations such as production labelling and the protection of intellectual property rights. Whilst policy makers claim justification based around the need to correct market failure in delivering desired outcomes, the question is whether these regulations are appropriate responses to market failures or if they have simply been imposed in an attempt to protect domestic markets.

The main purpose of this essay is to study the Swedish labor law concerning employees who are, aspire to be, or are expected to become parents, both men and women. Thereby accomplishing a gender perspective on the issue at hand. The study also take in to account the laws issued by the European Union, and their impact on the Swedish law system, so as to gain an international perspective. The laws regarding parental leave, both Swedish and European, involve protection for workers from being treated in a less favorable way than someone in a comparable situation, as employers are forbidden to disfavor any employee or job-seeker in basically all situations in the work place or in a recruiting context, if the disfavor is in any way related to the parental leave. The only situation where an employer is allowed to disfavor an employee regarding his or her parental leave, is if the disfavoring is a necessary consequent of the employee?s absence.

This Master?s thesis explores and describes the beliefs, values and norms in a selection of five Swedish municipal cultural policy documents approved 2005-2007. The comprehensive question is: Which ideological traits characterize cultural policy in the chosen municipalities as communicated in their respective cultural policy vision document? The method used is ideology analysis. Ideal types based on a model by Dorte Skot-Hansen are used as a conceptual framework, illustrating three different rationalities in relation to cultural policy: the humanistic, the sociological and the market oriented.

Citizenship and immigration policy are controversial aspects of the European integration project. Fourteen years ago Roger Brubaker stated that the vital differences between German and French citizenship policy were unthinkable to harmonise. This paper therefore seeks to investigate whether the old image of the two countries are accurate. By evaluating citizenship and immigration policies in today's context with the increasing influence of European Union policy I here present a more correct picture of the situation in both countries. Partly to see how the harmonisation has come this far.

The local politicians in Sweden are responsible for a great deal of the welfare system why one would assume that there are a lot of demands put on them - demands for certain skills or a certain level of competence. I have in this study tried to find out how the demands on the local representatives concerning the demands for competence and the actual level of competence among the politicians are affecting the local politics. This was done through investigating how the local politicians are perceiving their level of competence and the demands put on them, but also how the employees are perceiving the demands and the level of competence put on the politicians. The study was made in the municipality of Gislaved in Southern Sweden. I was using both quantitative method (an opinion poll among the politicians and employees in the municipality) and qualitative method (interviews with three politicians and three employees and literature studies).In order to investigate the demands for competence I split the concept into ?soft? competence (socially and emotionally based skills), and ?hard? competence (skills based on knowledge, education and experience).

Through a case study, I wanted to find out what advantages and disadvantages local companies consider with scrum and what they think about its future. To find out what scrum is, I read the literature and scientific articles and then wrote surveys based on my thoughts. Further, I also wanted to find out if it?s possible to use scrum in a school environment and therefore I visited a high school class who used scrum in one of their projects. The result was good but could have been better as it requires more training of scrum to understand everything. The surveys were distributed to various local companies. After having received a lot of answers, I concluded that the clear priority was the most positive feature of scrum and the most negative was that it was difficult to get the rest of the organization to understand scrum, which creates problems. Both high school class and local companies believe in scrum?s future, even if they think scrum will be partially modified to adapt to the software-development in the future. According to the survey responses, the most important to get the projects to be successful both now and in the future is that everyone who work with scrum is right educated..

I wrote this essay with the aim to explore, understand and get some insights into what it is that effects the possibilities to plan for ecological sustainability and make it happen. There is no clear definition of sustainable development but world top meetings and reports have developed goals and strategies. I will present some of the theory at hand but most of this essay is based on six interviews with planners at local governments from around the country. Several of the local governments are using the goals issued by the state government by putting them into their large scale plans. During the interviews some obstacles were identified, like a lack of resourses, disadvantaging powerstruktures, conflicts with marketeconomy and simply different meenings about what ecological sustainability is in practice. My method of getting information through interviews and documenting them by taking notes had, as all methods, it?s weakneses.

Tidigare forskning har indikerat att det kan existera informationsasymmetrier i aktiemarknaden mellan olika marknadsaktörer. Personer med insyn har oftast tillgång till särskild information som inte är tillgänglig för marknaden. Detta innebär att möjligheter till abnormala avkastningar existerar för dessa personer vid handel av bolagets finansiella instrument. Denna studie undersöker i första hand huruvida insynshandel på Aktietorget och Nordic Growth Market genererar abnormal avkastning samt om det föreligger en skillnad i resultat mellan dessa marknadsplatser. Det som ligger till grund för studien är insiders samtliga köp- och säljtransaktioner under 2005 för bolag noterade på Aktietorget och Nordic Growth Market.

The Swedish road transport sector relies almost completely on fossil fuels. In 2007, as much as 96 percent of the total sales of fuels was made up of petrol and diesel, while at the same time the share of total emissions of greenhouse gases in Sweden that came from road transports amounted to close to 30 per cent. Sweden is by no means worse off than any other European country in these respects. In order to address the questions of high oil dependence and CO2 emissions the European Commission has proposed a reinforcement of the legislative framework, with a 10 percent minimum for the market share of biofuels in 2020. Furthermore, the proposed target is binding for the member states, unlike the current voluntary target of 5.75 percent by 2010. More than doubling the usage of biofuels in only a bit more than a decade will most likely not be possible without policy interventions.

As EU?s authority increased the number of lobbies in Brussels grew. Today there are approximately 15 000 lobbyists in Brussels. EU decisions and EU directives can have a huge impact on companies and organizations. They can however influence these decisions and directives through lobbying.