What kind of international actor is the European Union and how shall we define it? These are questions that many have tried to answer often by addressing the apparent uniqueness of the EU itself. One of these theories is Normative power Europe. A theory whose main argument is that the EU is best perceived as a changer of norms. My aim with this thesis is to test this claim and to see if the Union should be regarded as a normative power.

In 1989 the United States choose, after years of conflict, to carry out a military intervention in Panama, to remove Manuel Noriega, convicted for drug dealing and for threatening the lives of the Americans living in Panama. The aim of this study is to examine whether George H. W Bush?s arguments for the military intervention comply with the principles of the just war.The method chosen for this study is a qualitative literature study, based primarily on secondary data. It is a case study with two complementing theories, the theory of the just war and the world system theory.The result showed that the American intervention both can be justified and unjustified following the principles of the Just War Theory.

The aim of this study is to map the consumption patterns of the poor. We also examine if loyalty can be created in this segment, and try to discover different types of poverty. This study is of great importance since the poor segment has been slightly overlooked in marketing research. Therefore we have also turned to other academic disciplines such as sociology, ethnography and consumer culture in order to analyze our empirical input. The study is abductive and we have in a qualitative and ethnographical manner conducted interviews in order to obtain information and reveal categories.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the daily press, morning and evening papers respectively, describe homeless people and their situation from a number of chosen articles. Was there a possibility to make clear if the public opinion of homelessness has changed from a media perspective during the last five years? In order to meet the purpose of the study, the authors have used discourse analysis of the chosen articles as well as the theory of social constructions and the theory of stigmatizing. The articles have been chosen from the two largest daily morning papers and the two largest evening papers. From each article many rich and close quotations are used, which subsequently have been analysed and interpreted.

Abstract Title: The Future of ABC at Sandvik Tooling ? Incorporating ABC with information systems in order to drive business development from a cost point of view. Authors: Jenny Andersson and Camilla Salomonsson. Supervisor: Charlotta Johnsson ? Department of Automatic Control, Lund University.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how power structures concerning gender and sexuality emerge through the use of language in the Swedish reality show Paradise Hotel. Of particular interest is the representation of heterosexual relations in the show. Because of its interest in the relationship between power, gender and sexuality, the thesis is based on theories from gender and discourse studies. The specific theories referred to are Michel Foucault?s understanding of power, stereotypes according to Stuart Hall, Yvonne Hirdman?s gender system and contract theory, Judith Butler?s heterosexual matrix and R.W.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether there is a difference between the respondent groups preparers and non-preparers position in IASBs question if a reversal of previously impaired goodwill should be prohibited. The background is an exposure draft sent out by the IASB and we examine the answers, in form of comment letters, sent in by the respondents to reach our purpose. Our method is positivistic in the sense that we study already existing theories when we create our hypothesis which gives our assumption about how the result of the respondent?s answers will be. Our data, which we have collected from the comment letters, is qualitative secondary data.

In this project we have used the theory of analytical mechanics to derive equations of motion for complex mechanical systems in order to study their behaviour over time. Even if the theory provides powerful tools to tackle tough problems which would be very hard to solve by methods of Newtonian mechanics, you are still relatively limited without running any computer simulations. One realises that in a faster rate it will be an incredibly difficult task to find an analytical solution when the degrees of freedom increases. Even if one would succeed to derive the equations, one still has to solve them to get the information of the systems behavior. Of experience one knows that the equations in general are nonlinear and hence must be integrated numericaly.

This master thesis aims to examine how public libraries in Sweden are practically and ideologically equipped to deal with e-books, outside of the dominant distributor Elib. The study also aims to find out what?s required of the book market and the public libraries to make further progress in the question of e-books. In Sweden e-books are still representing only a small amount of all the library loans and an even smaller amount of the commercial book market.The methodological and theoretical ground for the thesis is Grounded Theory, and the survey is based on interviews with publishers, librarians and distributors.The conclusions of this thesis are that the public libraries lack resources to invest in e-books, and that they also lack in knowledge about the media and its readers. It also exposes that both internal and external collaboration efforts need to be further developed.

The purpose of this study is to better understand, from a foster parent perspective, how the integration process of the foster child is carried out in the foster family. The purpose is to identify the challenges and success factors in the process. The study is based on a qualitative method. The data consist of interviews with six foster families. The study?s theoretical framework is mostly based on system theory and also on the theory of ambivalence.The results show that most of our families considered five factors to be important in order to facilitate the integration process.

Society is characterized by patterns of behavior and interaction that is created and recreated inthe interplay between individuality/collectivity and freedom/constraint, thus represents avariety of social issues and social phenomena. One of these phenomena is social supportexchanges and social capital. In order to obtain views on how this might appear in a specificsociety and contribute to the knowledge about social support exchanges and social capital, thisstudy was done with seven families in a village in Nepal. The village and the families gave aview and an example of how it might look in a place where social support exchanges plays acrucial role in this way of living. Through observations and interviews I have tried to make thesocial support exchange areas and meanings visibile.

The Swedish early childhood system is considered among the best in the world, however, in spite of this, we feel that there exists a conflict between educators? and parents? expectations of ?a good preschool?. During our teacher education training we have observed many different preschools and almost in all of them we have listened to anecdotes about one or more conflicts arising between educators and parents and which we have been able to pinpoint toward differing expectations. After talking with a preschool director, who also perceives that expectations of the preschool aims sometimes differ, our idea brought us to conduct this investigation.In this study, we have investigated parents? expectations of preschool and compared them with educators? expectations.

Aims: Patient associations have been around for some time and research has shown that such associations can influence society, politics and how diagnoses are thought of. This study is a comparative analysis of two patient associations in Sweden. The first association called Attention represents people diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders such as ADHD. The other association called RSMH represents people diagnosed with mental illness such as depression. The aim of this study is to explore the social and political agenda of these associations and to explain their relation to biological, psychological and social models of explanation.Method and theory: The method used was a qualitative document analysis using documents produced by the associations themselves as well as documents from media and politics.

This study presents a holistic view of which factors small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have to consider, in moving their customer order decoupling point (CODP) further from the customer, thereby becoming more customized. The study also investigate whether SMEs and larger enterprises differ in the strategic questions relating to what influences an enterprise to become more customized, which prerequisites are required and which problems enterprises should anticipate and prepare for. These questions are important, given that strategic change is challenging, and can take considerable time to accomplish; it therefore needs to be based on the right decisions. This study is motivated by the fact that the markets SMEs are selling to tend to become more and more complex and harder to anticipate. Increased globalisation and use of IT and ICT have lead to greater uncertainty in customer demand.

The number of public schools in Sweden has increased strongly over the past twenty years. This essay gives a possible explanation to how the Social Democratic Party in Sweden took part in this evaluation from 1987 to 1997. I've analysed how the party's ideology in this issue was shaped and adapted to the opposite politics, when the Liberals and Conservatives Parties were in government.The empirical analyse is primarily based on official documents from the Parlament such as debates, government bills and motions. I have also studied the Social Democratic Party's congresses which took place during this period of time. I have practised two different theories in analysing the motives behind the acting.