Cultural organizations set on capitalizing on artistic ideas are subject to an industry specific economic condition that requires a balance of art and commerce; two opposites reflecting credibility and non-credibility. Hence, commercialization of the cultural industries implies non-credibility in an industry insisting on symbolizing the opposite.This study aims to demonstrate how cultural industries can attract a wide audience, while maintaining credibility. This is done through the perspective of folksiness since its context indicates the existence of credible commercialism.The study demonstrate that credible commercialism is part of folksiness and is possible thanks to the folksiness context that 1) utilizes attributes that balance and disarm "negative attributes" creating an atmosphere of acceptance and 2) meets the consumer's need fulfilment of identity through individualism and belonging, and 3) contains attributes that increases loyalty..

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine boys?/young men?s forming of masculinity and gender identity and how discussions around gender stereotypes and conceptions represents themselves in contemporary youth novels. Gender theory based upon R.W. Connell?s theoretical framework which discusses masculinities in plural is used.

This essay focuses on Finnish immigrants living in Sweden and their experiences of educationof literature in Swedish upper secondary school. It concerns the fact of how education ofliterature can be used to strengthen students? formation of cultural identity. The essay tries toidentify obstacles as well as possibilities in the teaching of literature with a view to deepenand enrich this process. The method consists of a phenomenological approach includinginterviews with a group of Finnish immigrants living in Sweden.

In recent years, the Internet has exploded with different kinds of social media, where a significant function is to share your life in text and images. This changes how we form our identity, our religious identity included. The aim of this paper was to study how Instagram forms a space for the creation and development of religious and spiritual beliefs. For this purpose, Instagram updates from five women with yoga oriented Instagram accounts have been analyzed in relation to two theories: Paul Heelas? och Linda Woodhead?s theory of a spiritual revolution and Heidi Campbell?s theory of networked religion.The aim of the study was to explore how these women presented themselves in their Instagram flow and what part religion and spirituality had in their presentations.

Sverige är ett mångkulturellt land och forskningsområdet kring hur det är att leva med två kulturer är viktig att belysa. Denna studies fokus riktas mot hur unga vuxna upplever kopplingen mellan den personliga och etniska identiteten. En kvalitativ undersökning genomfördes med 16 intervjuer. Respondenterna levde i den svenska samt en utomeuropeisk kultur. Resultatet visade att deltagarna upplever sig som en blandning av de två erfarna kulturerna och att den etniska identiteten upplevs som stark.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how today?s consumer society can be understood from ananalysis of the phenomenon Every Day Carry (EDC). The aim is thus to problematize the daily useof the artifacts that surrounds us and investigate how these can be understood as networks of humanand non-human actors, aswell as identity- and meaning-making practices in today?s consumersociety.The theoretical and methodical framework is built upon an eclectic variety of consumptiontheories,Michel Callon?s, John Law?s and Bruno Latour?s work on Actor-Network-Theory,Discourse analysis inspired by Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and anethnographic methodology specifically adapted for online research. The empirical material consistsof photographs and commentaries from two EDC blogs aswell as commentaries regarding EDCfrom a commentary field on Youtube.com.

The purpose of this essay was to examine the packaging design´s communications related to the colloquially brand's symbolic capital and how they became meaningful through experience and perceptions that led to the identification processes in the consumer society. There were eight interviews of snuff users who became my main collections materials. My theoretical framework was discourse psychology´s emphasis on language and Bourdieu´s concept provided important tools in the analysis of the material.I could highlight that packaging design and the brand had influenced the informants and given them symbolic beliefs and what it meant to sniff a certain brand. Color, brand awareness and price were crucial in choosing where the informants attributed themselves the cans symbolic values to their identity. It could be inferred high and low status perceptions based on stereotypes in the design itself..

Immersion is a construct that measures how deeply engrossed a user is with any mediated situation. In the field of game design, immersion is a significant aspect of what makes a game enticing, and as such it is of pivotal importance to create and maintain it to keep the player's mind off the real world while inside the confines of a game framework. According to the GameFlow theory, it is one of seven key tenets of evaluating and implementing a successful game design. Yet, certain multiplayer online games are designed in a fashion that in some cases seem to break immersion, where the player is frequently put out of action, sometimes for minutes on end. In this study, using online questionnaires, we discover that players, despite claims otherwise, seem to be in several ways affected negatively by this breaking of immersion.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate if gender stereotypes are mediated to children between 0-3 years through books suitable for their age. This thesis concerns books that are available in public libraries. The content will be analysed by using a combination of methods, both content analysis of all the books in our study and a qualitative analysis of a smaller number of these books. With inspiration from both Robert Connell and Yvonne Hirdman and their theories of gender and gender stereotypes, this material was read and we wanted to examine if books for very young children might establish stereotypes. Our analysis showed that many known stereotypes are common in these books.

AbstractBackground: Countries can be seen as brands (nation brands) with brand values that transmitto the country?s products. Country-of-origin (COO), the brands nationality, links the productto an associative network of cultural shared national stereotypes. Through associating thebrand with a country or a region, the credibility of the brand can increase and strengthen thebrand. Therefore COO is used in marketing to position a brand.Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine how luxury fashion brands communicatetheir national identity through analyzing their advertising.

The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent  young adults use media to create the image of themselves. The questions we wanted to answer was as follows: what does the media use of young adults look like compared to their attitudes towards media content; what awareness do they have of other young adults attitudes concerning media content; and finally, how do these attitudes affect their own media use?Media consumption is a great part of  the daily lives of young adults living in Sweden: the national  average media consumption is seven hours a day, for 15-24 year olds. This provides a new way for young adults to express their identity - by showing their use of different media content, they can change other's perception of themselves.The method we used in our study was a combination between a quantitative and a qualitative method. We first made a survey in three classes with senior year high school-students, in a Swedish school.

Media and social media have been proved to occupy an increased amount of time in people's everyday lives and affect how individuals interpret reality. This phenomenon is referred to as the medialization and its implications on organizations and their members become important to understand. The purpose of this study was therefore to examine how members of an organization under intense scrutiny from the media are affected by this exposure in their everyday work. To gain knowledge about the area a qualitative case study was performed on the Swedish train operator SJ AB - one of the most media exposed organizations in the country. A theoretical framework is developed for the study and discusses organizational identity, stigmatization and motivation.

The purpose of this study has been to examine how collaborations between clothingcompanies and fashion designers can influence their brands. Our ambition has been todescribe this phenomenon by describing how collaborations can affect and influencethe clothing companies? brand identity, image and positioning. Furthermore, we wantto describe how these collaborations have changed the fashion industry and what thefuture holds for it. We find this topic relevant since collaborations are becoming anadvantage for companies in a competitive industry that is constantly in change.

This study is about the significance of dual citizenship and the feeling of belonging people experience. Descriptions about the problems with being a citizen in a state, but not being accepted as one, is also discussed in the thesis. The juristic aspects, what it means to be possessed of dual citizenship and the consequences when the negative aspects of dual citizenship arise, is also discribed. The reasons for having dual citizenship is very analogous but at the same time different. The common denominator is however pragmatics.

This study aims to investigate, describe and discuss the views of group new arrived pupils from the preparatory training to the compulsory school level. They all came to Sweden and started in the preparatory training there they also started studying Swedish as a second language. This study aims to investigate the creation of identities and how the pupils socialize in the Swedish school. The study has been conducted with respect to the pupil´s own perspectives and what they consider important.The methods used are interviews together with an interpreter. Their voices are used and described in this paper.