This thesis aims at analysing conflicts between different ideals of democracy, using the example of a newly implemented citizen´s initiative reform. This reform gives citizens the right to make policy proposals to Swedish municipal councils. The proposals are to be handled in the same way as proposals from the municipal council members. An ideology analysis of various government documents as well as of an official state study (SOU) is carried out to identify and discuss the ideals of democracy that underpin the reform. The analysis is based on participatory democracy and electoral democracy theory and Arnstein's Eight Rungs on the Ladder of Citizen Participation is used to discuss different types of participation by the citizens.

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which incontinence aids, used in local authority/municipal nursing homes, were adapted to the resident?s urine-leakage volume and to find out how nurses perceived the current situation concerning individual testing of incontinence aids in municipal nursing homes. The study method was a quantitative empirical study and was carried out in two phases. The first phase was a weighing test, carried out in three nursing homes, whereby the incontinence aids used by 25 residents during a 48 hour period were weighed. The second phase was the completion of a questionnaire by the municipal nurses working in the same local authority.

Aftercare is an important condition for the Care of Alcoholics and Drug Abuse Act (LVM) to be successful. According to the law, the municipals are responsible for the aftercare. We compared how three municipal in Skåne, Sweden, define and work with the aftercare after treatment under LVM. The study was based on nine qualitative interviews with social workers, division managers and politicians from each municipal. As a theoretical reference the theory of total institutions and empowerment theory were used.

The thesis discusses new social movements and how they act on the conditions of the late capitalistic society. The purpose is to examine a new social movement trough its own members. What is their view of the movement?s aims and visions? How do they look upon the strategies to achieve these goals? The study is based on eight qualitative interviews with members of Attac Sweden. The results show that the members are highly aware of the movements avowed aims and strategies.

Local cultural environment planning in Sweden often comes to rely on municipal heritage plans. These plans are meant to facilitate management of local cultural values, work as a tool for local planning and increase awareness of cultural environments for the public. In the last decades public participation in planning has become more and more of the ideal strategy, challenging the idea of cultural environment planning as an expert-led field. The idea of the field as one that implicates public participation as a strategy has been fortified in Sweden through national goals, government bills and conventions. Nevertheless the implementation of public participation in municipal heritage plans remains quite uncharted. The aim of this study is to explore public participation in regards to how municipal heritage plans are developed and the perception of public participation in cultural environment planning amongst professionals, comparing bigger and smaller municipalities.

This dissertation aims to explore how an investment appraisal differs depending on if it is conducted by a municipal or a private real estate company. Municipal and private real estate companies are not performing on totally equal terms in the property market. A municipal company in Sweden has a public service mission. The consequence due to that mission is that they have limited yield potential but on the other hand the right to certain subsidies. They are also limited by the law of public purchasing (in Swedish: Lag om offentlig upphandling) in the investment process.

AbstractMatchmaking on an organisational level? about co-operation between municipal introduction-units and voluntary organisationsEssay in Political Science D, by Rebecka Johansson, spring 2006The aim of this study is to examine co-operation between municipal introduction-units, which work to integrate newly arrived immigrants and refuges, and voluntary organisations in Sweden. The essay is a comparative case study which examines three local authorities and the main questions are;- Do voluntary organisations constitute a functioning co-operation partner to the municipal introduction-units? Are there conditions for future co-operation?The answer to the questions is that there are no, or rarely any, co-operation between voluntary organisations and municipal introduction-units. It is difficult to judge whether there are conditions for future co-operation.

Entrepreneurial firms face unique challenges in attracting and acquiring human resources due to difficulties associated with resource constraint and organization legitimacy, often described as liabilities of "smallness" and "newness". The aim of this paper is to examine the "smallness" and "newness" challenges met by small entrepreneurial firms, which strategies they apply to counter these challenges, and if these strategies can be explained by the firm's HR philosophy. Since few studies on Human Resource Management (HRM) in small entrepreneurial firms exist, a framework combining theory from the research fields of HRM, entrepreneurship and small firms has been developed. Employing a qualitative case study design of five small Swedish entrepreneurial firms, our findings demonstrate four "smallness" and "newness" challenges and seven strategies that either counteract or prevent them. Furthermore, results showed that the strategies applied seemed to have no significance with regards to the firm's HR philosophy.

Background: Palliative care is something that all people should have the right to be allowed to, to be able to enjoy the qualities of life, even when someone has been afflicted with illness that cannot be cured. How do the nurses in municipal home-care deal with and prepare themselves to perform a righteous task? Aim: The aim of this study is to illuminate nurses, comprehensions of palliative care within municipal home-care. Method: The method is a questionnaire to nurses. Results: The results did comply to law and regulations.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to examine how managers in public libraries are managing financial cuts. Questions posed are: What strategies are used by the library manager to handle the cuts and how are the strategies being worked out? What are the consequences of the cuts? How do the managers use their library plans in the work with the cuts and how do the plans change as a consequence of the cuts? Library managers in eleven communities are interviewed about their financial cuts in 2003 and/or 2004. The result shows that cuts are made in different ways. The study analysed the managers statements with a model about strategies created by Oulton.

In query expansion (QE) terms are added to an initial query in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. In this thesis we use QE in the sense that a reformulation of the query is done by deleting the terms in the initial query and instead replacing them with terms from the documents retrieved in the initial run. The aim of this thesis is to, in a experimental full text invironment, study and compare the retrieval result of two different query expansion strategies in relation to each other. The following questions are addressed by the study: How do the two strategies perform in relation to each other regarding recall? What may be causing the result? Are the two strategies retrieving the same relevant documents? Two strategies are designed to simulate a searcher using automatic query expansion (AQE) either with or without relevance feedback.

The main subject with this master thesis is to take a closer look on how some of the university libraries of Gothenburg have evaluated their electronic services (such as search-systems, Internet-based services, CD-ROM etc.). The information technology has made its way into the library field during the past century and needs to be evaluated and quality measured to ensure the best possible service to the users. Since evaluation of electronic services is a new area in the evaluation field, some problems has arisen in terms of choosing evaluation strategies and finding the appropriate performance indicators for the evaluation process. The main questions asked in the thesis are; - Which are the most common theoretical strategies for evaluation? - How do some of the university libraries of Gothenburg perform evaluation in practice? - How does the various strategies for evaluation apply to the context of this thesis? The results show that specific strategies for evaluation aren't used in the reports discussed in this thesis.

The purpose of this study is to examine senior high school students? strategies and reasoning when solving mathematical problems and make a review of the concept problem solving. The purpose is also to examine if the students? choice of strategies are influenced when their mathematical knowledge is improved.The study was conducted in two science classes at a senior high school. All the students were asked to individually solve two mathematical problems.

The private sewage systems in Sweden releases around 600 tons of phosphorus per year, compared to about 350 tons from municipal sewage treatment plants, and they account for approximately 21% of the total anthropogenic discharge of phosphorus into Swedish waters. About 40% of Sweden's nearly 1 million private sewage systems are inferior with respect to emissions to surface and groundwater. The technology of small sewage plants is under development and knowledge of treatment effects for different solutions is poorly consolidated. Municipal authorities lack resources to keep up with the technologic development and assess the reliability of the treatment performances that suppliers report for their products. The thesis aims to conduct a market review and evaluation of wholly or partially prefabricated small sewage plants, to make it easier for municipalities and property owners to assess different technical solutions. The goal is a compilation of the products on the market, evaluated on the basis of the reliability of specified degrees of reduction.Information on sampling procedures and test results were collected through a questionnaire to all active suppliers and the responses were then used to classify the products.

The usage of visions and strategies is something that helps an organisation to create an imaginary scenario and guide them of how to realize these goals. During the years of 2006-2008 Region Gotland presented a document that was supposed to show the region's visions. The theoretical framework of this thesis is based on the stakeholder theory, Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Management Control Systems Package (MCS). Personal interviews were conducted within the organisation Region Gotland, with individuals whom are directly linked to the visions and strategies of the organisation. The purpose of this study is to clarify the concepts of vision and strategy, and what their impact is on the organisation's work on the operation level.