The location on the river delta of Klarälven, adjacent to lake Vänern, makes Karlstad one of the Swedish cities where a significant flood risk is present. The city has several major floods in its memory which has caused great material damage and economic losses, the latest of which occurred in the winter of year 2000/2001. The purpose of the study is to examine how the approach to flood risk has changed in the municipality of Karlstad since the 1950s, and how this change has affected the current situation regarding the city's vulnerability to flooding. To investigate this, a document analysis was conducted, where key documents in the media and from the municipality of Karlstad was studied. Furthermore, an interview study was conducted with respondents who currently are employed or previously have been employed in the municipality of Karlstad, who in various ways work with issues of flood risk. The result of the study shows that several changes have taken place since the 1950s in terms of the municipality's approach to flood risk, which for instance has led to preventative measures being taken to a greater extent than previously in the physical planning.

In May 2005 the Swedish cinema chain Astoria Cinemas is founded and in July two years later the company goes bankrupt. In this thesis Astoria Cinemas is used as an example to illustrate the conditions for a culture-producing company in a commercial market. The purpose of the thesis is to discuss the strategies for cultural production that has been used by the actors involved in the Swedish cinema market, and also to discuss the structural environment on that market. It is a qualitative study based on interviews and documentation. A few conclusions are possible to draw from the empirical material, one is that Astoria Cinemas? management did not agree on the company?s business strategy and therefore might have acted strategically inconsistent.

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.

Vellinge is one of few municipalities in Sweden that refuses to accept refugees. The subject of this thesis is to find out how the local politicians in Vellinge make their considerations when they decide not to welcome refugees. The analysis uses the representation theory as a starting point. The two ideals of the representative role, either as a bound mandate or as a free independent role, is the base of the analysis. Vellinge is in the analysis compared to Lomma, a very similar municipality in southern Sweden that for a long time alsohas refused to accept refugees, however suddenly in 2007 decided to change their mind.

Responsible production is a subject of increasing importance for companies toadopt and communicate to their environment and many companies choose to implementenvironmental ? and ethic considerations into their brand strategy. There is, however, adividing line between companies according to what extent they choose to implementresponsible production into their brand strategy and to which extent they choose tocommunicate it to their stakeholders and surroundings. It is the hypothesis about a dividingline that is the foundation for this essay and something we believed could be interesting forfurther analysis.The purpose of our essay is to find out how the brand strategy of a company is affected by theresponsible production and in what extent they communicate it to their environment. Byanswering those questions we hope to find out why some companies communicateresponsible production more actively than others.We have conducted in-depth interviews with the Swedish clothing companies; MariaWesterlind, Zion and Dem Collective and we have through our analysis reached interestingconclusions.

Every year, Swedish municipalities transfer considerable amounts of profit from public housing companies to the owner municipality. Municipalities are allowed to do this, provided that the money is used to pay for certain purposes. But there are no legal repercussions if they do not comply. Not all municipalities choose to transfer profits. Based on partisan theory, this difference could be explained by the political governance of the municipality.

Due to the increase of the emission of greenhouse gas and climate changes more and more customers demand environmentally sustainable products. The increased demand of sustainable products from cradle to grave is something that has affected the food sector. Many retailers within the food sector feel that they are less or more forced to be environmentally friendly. Nowadays many retailers have chosen to show customers and stakeholders that they want to ?do good? by publishing annual sustainability reports. The Swedish food market has been one of many markets investing in being environmentally friendly.

The essay deals with gender aspects on climate change adaption. The aspects consist of the fact that women in Sweden drive cars less than men, and that women in the developing world are more affected by natural disasters arising from global warming. This study was carried out in the municipality of Huddinge, a suburb to Stockholm, by interviewing one Agenda 21 coordinator, one planner and one student in genderstudies. I also attended a meeting in the Committee for built environment in the Huddinge Municipality, to ask the politicians questions and observe gender structures during the meeting. The results also consist of a search for gender-related words in the documents used in the essay.The results are analysed using ecofeminsim, a theory that connects woman subordination and environmental destruction.

Celebrity endorsement has been a popular advertising strategy all over the world for the past few years. The purpose of this thesis was to find out why companies choose celebrity endorsement as advertising strategy and how the celebrity endorsement process appeared in companies. We choose to interview two companies in the retail business and the interviews were conducted with the marketing managers for each company. This study provided that companies utilize celebrity endorsement to increase their sales, and it is important that the whole company is in the celebrity endorsement process discussion before the company choose which celebrity they will work with. .

My study is about a preparation class in a selected municipality. It is based on the child¹s perspective, and it tries to highlight the school situation of new arrivals in a school where the majority of the pupils are of Swedish origin. The purpose of my study is to visualize how the education for newly arrived children is organized in the municipality, and to get an understanding of a range of student?s view of the schooling in the preparation class as an introduction to a regular class.To reach my goal, I have used qualitative methods, based on qualitative interviews. The interviews were made with six newly arrived pupils, and one interview was made with the deputy head of the school, which is in charge of immigrant education in the municipality.

AbstractEssay in political science, C-level, by Samanta Pudic´, spring semester 2008. Tutor: Susan Marton. ?The relationship between national government and local municipality when a refugee centre shall be located.?The purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between government and municipality with the help from the interdependens theory when a refugee centre is located. To be able to say something about the relationship between those two actors I have been using two municipalities as examples.

ABSTRACTCitizendialogue in the District of RasboA Case Study in the Municipality of UppsalaAuthor: Camilla ÖstlundSupervisor: Stig MontinThe essay is written inside the scope of Örebro Universitys evaluation of the new organisation in the municipality of Uppsala.The purpose of this essay is to study the citizendialogue in the district of Rasbo. This will be done partly by an examination of how the participants themselvesperceive citizendialogue. Their descriptions are put in relation to deliberative democracy and its critics amongst other. Partly by study how those involved have choosen to put it into practice. The opponents of the reorganization chose to start a non-profit association, Rasbo in co-operation, to carry on local mobilization and it will be compared with other similar groups.

In conjunction with an overview of the organizational structure of the municipality of Arvika the Balanced Scorecard was introduced as a management model. After the Balanced Scorecard has been in use over a period of years the conception of it varies throughout the organization.The purpose of this study is identifying which factors are facilitating and which factors are obstructing when implementing the Balanced Scorecard in the municipality of Arvika. This is a case study of the staff organization of the municipality of Arvika. The study is explanatory as our objective is to describe why the current situation appears as it does today. A qualitative method has been applied during this study.

This paper presents a study of the computer game ?Minesweeper?. The aim of the game is to search through a rectangular area of mined squares without hitting any mines. By using a strategy based on making every operation as safe as possible, series of the game have been simulated. The size of the playground is four times four squares.

Students at Jönköping School of Engineering were given an assignment from Jönköping municipality, to evaluate their decision support system, QlikView. The students have also developed proposals for improvement with focus on usability.The Jönköpings municipality has currently got 11000 employees and consists of nine different administrations. The target group for QlikView is approximately 600 first-line managers.The intention of QlikView is that the users can get an overall picture of their business by having all information in just one system.The purpose of the thesis is to obtain a picture of what the users think about the system today and present relevant suggestions for improvement, which the Jönköping municipality can use when the introduction of the new version of QlikView takes place. The research questions that the study aims to answer are:? Has QlikView got a user friendly interface?? How can the interface be improved to become more user friendly?Theories that this work is based on is Jacob Nielsens ten usability principles and Ben Schneidermans eight golden rules.