The purpose of the thesis is to map the meaning of ?international competence? in Swedish company boards of directors. The study is divided in a qualitative part and a quantitative part. The qualitative study consists of a discourse analysis where variation in interpretative repertoires are identified to enhance the understanding of the nature of reasoning related to the meaning and importance of the issue at stake. The discourse analysis is conducted on an empirical material from 27 interviews with decision makers in recruitment processes to Swedish company boards of directors.

Benchmarking is an established method of working which is often used in order to develop the quality of the organization. However, almost 70% of the organizations with benchmarking fail due to the lack of planning and structuring of the benchmarking exercise. Maintenance sections in the paper and pulp industry are one of those who have decided to conduct benchmarking. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to gain knowledge of how the maintenance sections in the paper and pulp industry deliberately structure and plan to use benchmarking as a driving force for quality development in the maintenance sections.The study is a hermeneutic case study. Telephone interviews and document analysis have been used as data acquisition methods.The results show that there is a lack of both planning and structuring in the benchmarking process, and lack of management commitment for quality improvements within industrial maintenance.

In this examination paper I?m using the qualitative method: phenomenographic analysis to present twenty educated and working pre-school teachers opinions about being outdoors in Swedish pre-school. The purpose is to describe the variation between different pre-school teachers? opinions, not to focus on wrong or right.    The paper starts with a review over the opinions presented by the literature on the subject.

Areal is one of the major players in the Swedish market for real estate brokerage of agricultural properties and related additional services. The purpose of this report is to give a better picture of the needs for additional services of property purchasers of Areal. Add-on services are the type of counseling you may need to achieve good economy on an agricultural property. Through a survey of property buyers of Areal information has been collected and compiled. A very good response rate was obtained and the material seemed reliable as it reflected the population in general.

The purpose of this essay was to examine municipal guidelines regarding the administration of the social assistance, collected from 18 municipalities in the Stockholm-area to achieve a greater understanding on how they were constructed in respect to the legislation and how the language mediated their contents. The legal aspects of the social assistance was studied through a jurisprudential method in which the legislative history, texts of laws and case laws were examined. The empirical aspect of this essay was studied through a hermeneutical method and analyzed through theories of social constructionism and legal pluralism. The results from the jurisprudential study were also used to understand how the municipal guidelines were constructed in relation to the law. The results of this essay corresponded well with previous studies in this field where considerable divergences in the approval of social assistance have been established.

Medarbetarskap har fått mer betydelse i det svenska arbetslivet under de senaste decennierna. Många organisationer strävar efter att förbättra samarbetet inom och över avdelningsgränserna samt chefens och medarbetarens relation. Arbetstagaren har till stor del övergått till att ta en mer aktiv roll i arbetet. Enkätundersökningen (N = 139) genomfördes i en statlig myndighet där medarbetarskap undersöktes utifrån F. Hällstén och S.

The aim of this study is to increase the knowledge and understanding of the early process of socialization and its influence on the choices in life, with the example taken from the agricultural family. The question is considering how the process of socialization within an agricultural family has influenced on the choices in life of four women. A qualitative method with a hermeneutic, phenomenologic perspective is applied and four interviews have been done with women who all grew up in an agricultural family. The results have been analysed through social constructive-, psychodynamic-, attachment- and cognitive theory. The results indicate that socialization is a complex process.

This study examines how Sweden?s four biggest newspapers deal with the attacks in Oslo and on Utøya the 22nd of July 2011. This date, where the ethnic Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, bombed the goverment headquarter and killed 69 people at a political camp, will be remembered for a long period of time.  With its critical perspective, this study examines a total of thirteen news articles published within eight days after the attacks in Oslo and on Utøya, to see in what way the Swedish news papers constructs Breivik as a person. Furthermore the study examines in what way the Swedish newspapers makes connections to Sweden and to what extent speculation is used in the news articles. The theoretical premises for the study are the critical discourse analysis, and key elements within it that is used are ideology, discourse and micro- and macro analysis. The conclusion shows that Swedish newspapers are disposed to construct Breivik as a unique individual who falls outside the normative scopes in their explanations of a murderer or a terrorist.

Since July 2005 the major companies listed on the Swedish stock exchanges are required to apply the Swedish Code of Corporate Governance. The code states that companies shall have a nomination committee responsible for nominating new board candidates and seek to obtain gender equality in the Board of Directors. This paper examines the trend of board as well as nomination committee composition among Sweden's 60 largest publicly traded companies between 2005 and 2008. Our overall finding is that neither the board nor the nomination committee composition has changed to a notable extent during the period and that the share of newly appointed female board members has actually decreased. However, the trends vary between different sectors.

The study aims to investigate student participation as a tool for democratic development in secondary school from a student perspective. Furthermore, students' perceptions of the school's work with student participation in formal and informal contexts are also investigated, with basis in the teaching structure. The results are based on interviews conducted with students who all attend the same class in their last year of high school. Subsequently, an analysis is made based mainly on three different theories: democracy, curricula and sociocultural theory. The result shows that students feel that they are able to practice student participation but the amount of influence they get differs between individuals depending on devotion and commitment.

This master thesis is an attempt to study the joint-use solutions between the public library and the public preschool in the local district Kristineberg in the community of Borås. The two main questions are; what kind of joint-use library is the activity at Kristineberg? What kind of advantages and disadvantages do the actors experience from the joint-use activity at Kristineberg? The analysis is based upon the interviews with eight informants with different connections to the joint-use library and public preschool. I also use documental analysis and literature studies. Relevant theories, such as Andersson´s and Skot-Hansen´s analysis of the role of the public library and Bundys, Imhoff´s and Dornseif´s theories about joint-use libraries are presented and later used in the analysis.

The purpose of this study is, on one hand, to obtain an understanding of how children in municipal music- and culture schools choose instruments and what forms of recruitment methods they are subjected to, and on the other hand, how you can make them continue to play once they have begun.To acquire this information, I have interviewed five music teachers and two principals at municipal music- and culture schools in Värmland. The questions treated, among other things, what affects children?s instrument preferences, recruitment methods and what you can do to keep interest for the chosen instrument alive.The result of the study shows some apparent tendencies. Even though some of the instruments have trouble recruiting students and other instruments have trouble keeping them, the old methods, which obviously do not work in a satisfactory manner, are still being used. Instead, increased commitment at the occasion of recruitment, more group teaching which strengthens the social bonds through role models and a will to have the courage to change the organization when it does not work, is required..

In Sweden today almost all people are connected to a bank in some way. It can range from loans, savings, shares, etc. They have a current account where salaries, student aid etc. is paid. Due to the large selection of banks, it has become more important for banks to be competitive in their services to their customers so they don?t change bank.

"What's feminine about the Women's library?" This library, Kvinnobiblioteket, is abranchoffice at Björkskatan in the city of Luleå, and the introducing question is thestartingpoint of this essay. To find some possible answers is its object.One way of describing what's feminine about Kvinnobiblioteket is through presenting itsobjective, ambitions and methods of working. That is done mostly in a chapter headlined"Kvinnobiblioteket", and shows how the women's perspective concerns for exarnplepurchase of books and magazines, displaying of books, the opening hours, design etc.Although the focus in the survey is not in the former kind of description, but in the interviewsbeing made during a two week long period of time with ten women at Kvinnobiblioteket(both library user and personnel) at spring 1995. The results of the interviewsthen have been compared with theories from psychological-, feminist-, literature- andlibrary and information sciences, as we11 as to former surveys and essays.The material together leads to some keywords that seem to be important when trying tofind out what's female about the women's library.

AbstractUniversity of Växjö, School of Social SciencesCourse: POC 536, Political Science 41-60Title: The U.S. military intervention in Iraq ? A study of how the intervention corresponds with the UN CharterAuthors: Andreas Malmgren & Johan SchneiderSupervisor: Lennart BergfeldtDate: 2006-09-26The aim of this essay is through a qualitative literature study examine the main arguments of the Bush administration to justify a military intervention in Iraq. The theories used to explain the actions of the U.S. are system level analysis, hegemonism and realism while the UN Charter will be applied as a normative theory.