Gender equality is a political issue that has gained a lot of support in the last decades. Researchers have however pointed out that gender equality has a wide variety of understandings.SKL (Sveriges kommuner och landsting) is an organization that looks after the interests of local authorities and county councils in Sweden. SKL has by the government been granted 145 million Swedish crowns to support gender mainstreaming at a local level. During a period of three years, 2008-2010, funding has been given to 89 projects for this purpose.The aim of this study is to examine what meanings are given to the term ?gender equality? in these projects.

In organizations today Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is becoming a common means to try to gain legitimacy and credibility for their business. A successful CSR strategy has the potential to generate positive outcomes for a company and reaching out to stakeholders about the corporation?s contribution in the field is an important part of the work. In this study I examine how the employees at Max Hamburgare receive the corporation?s efforts within sustainability, how it is perceived and what this means to the employees.

This paper investigates the internal product costing system in one of the Swedish banks with the purpose to evaluate the quality of its product costs and possible implications on decision making. The study shows that the current system distorts product costs by, among other things, using relative allocation of costs and time and by allocating all costs to individual units of products. We therefore propose an alternative product costing system, which mainly draws on ABC theory but is also adapted to the specific needs of service companies and of the Bank. This proposal is intended as a solution in this particular case and not to be generalized in other contexts. We hope however to add to the understanding of why more complex costing systems, such as the ones based on ABC theory are, according to previous studies, not widely used in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to study how Swedish CFOs perceive that the requirement for companies to issue quarterly reports affect business operations in the company. The fact that it is regulations on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, and not the law, that requires companies to issue quarterly reports makes Sweden unique in Europe. The paper is based on interviews with CFOs from 32 companies quoted on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The major finding in the study is that a majority of the CFOs perceive that the pressure for short term results, created by quarterly reports, affect their work and the investment decisions made in the company. Also CFOs feel that the market over interprets the information given in quarterly reports.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between space and consumer interaction at WEEKDAY, a contemporary fashion retail store in Malmö, Sweden. The thesis is based on a qualitative case-study and has a social constructionist approach. In order to understand the interaction taking place between consumer and environment we conducted observations guided by Kenneth Burke?s Pentad.The retail servicescape at WEEKDAY is conceived as a metaphorical stage where drama unfolds, analysing and defining the retail space using Kenneth Burke?s pentad of dramatism. We concentrate on the use of two terms of Burke?s pentad, the scene and the act, almost exclusively as we investigate how the scene stimulates the act.

ADHD has for a long time been perceived as something that affects children and grows away with time. American psychiatric association state that ADHD may appear differently with adolescences and adults than with children. That could lead to misunderstandings and exclusion by adults and adolescences with ADHD at work life amongst other situations. This report investigates that exclusion and tries to find what information that needs to reach certain target groups to prevent it from happen.The works focus is text design, a part of information design, and looks firstly at the factors that make good information material. Then I investigate if there is a need for more information about ADHD within working life and if so what it would contain.

The aim of this paper is to study whether the way directioners (One Direction fans) on Twitter express self-understandings denote fandom as a sacred experience. For this purpose, the data was analyzed in relation to Nicholas Jay Demerath III typology of the varieties of the sacred experience. The method used was discursive psychology. The data was analyzed by how the fans draw the line between ?us? and ?them?, when expressing their self-understandings and their position in relation to others. Five themes were identified: (1) positioning and demarcation for membership, (2) group identity, (3) conflict, (4) the norms for behavior, opinions and language and (5) the group?s role and function.

In this essay i present a study on political learning of a minority ethnicity whose political history in the institutional form began in 1993. The ethnicity in question is the Sami?s and in 1993 the Sami Parliament was established. The establishment of the Sami parliament radically changed the preconditions for political work. Sami politics came to be pursued in an organized manner in the form of a public authority and democratically elected units.

This paper discusses honour related crimes and the judicial process within the legal system in a Swedish context. The empirical base of the study is four cases, with an honour background, and we have used discourse analysis as our method. We have developed four tools for analysing the sentences with which we observed aspects such as; language, the roles of victim and perpetrator that the involved can undertake, the different identities that the sentence might create and finally how the stories change when they enter the legal context. We connect our results to our theoretic backgrounds such as Kolfjord who discusses the legalization of conflicts, the holistic and individual perspective, the legal system as a theoretic background and finally the UN:s definition of honour crimes. These four theoretic perspectives have helped analyse the empiric base.

The goals of this essay are to identify rituals and ritual behavior at the department of archaeology and ancient history at Lund University. To do this a series of empirical examinations was conducted. Observations, interviews and polls revealed that some ritual behavior is in fact present. Two types of rituals were identified; the interaction ritual, as presented by Erving Goffman in the book Interaction Ritual, Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, in 1967. The second type of ritual is a ?problem solving? ritual, such as meetings.

This master´s thesis is a comparative study of the importance of eight factors suggested in the literature to be related to the perceived utility of the service Book a librarian (Swe. Boka en bibliotekarie). Disciplinary differences were also analysed. 73 encounters between students and librarians in 11 Swedish academic libraries were studied using a survey. Six factors were significantly related (at the .05 level) to the utility of the service.

Based on phenomenological hermeneutics and narrative theory the study explored how parents experience and create meaning when the child receives the diagnosis of autistic disorder. Interviews were conducted with eight parents and the analysis concerned both contents and form in their stories. The resulting aspects of the contents is presented in seven areas: stories about the time before the diagnosis, seeking help, receiving the diagnosis, the meaning of the diagnosis, coping, living with autism and stories about the future. The six resulting aspects of form included: chronology of the stories, creating order out of chaos, cultural norms, rewriting the story about the child, aspects of metaphors and changing perspective. The conclusion of the study is that the diagnosis serves as a way for the parents to transform experiences into a meaningful whole.

The purpose of this thesis has been to explore in what ways Franz Kafka?s ?The Metamorphosis? can be read as a story of gender. By bringing together Judith Butler?s theory of materialization and Lennard J. Davis?s crip theory I have spoken of Dismodernity as the domain of abject bodies that have been repudiated by (post)modern societies as untintelligible and dysfunctional.

Using a feministic perspective and a critical approach, my purpose is to discuss bibliographic classification, a central aspect of Library and Information Science. More specifically, my aim is to demonstrate the norms and the dominating thoughts regarding the organization and representation of knowledge, subjects, and social categories in classification systems. I review previous research involving critical approaches to classification. These show that classification systems are a reflection of the context in which they are created, with the result that universal assumptions can be questioned. Some studies also present problems inherent in hierarchical structures.

Postnatal depression (PND) is a condition which affects about 8-15% of recent parents. The cause of PND is unknown but several underlying factors have been purposed through different studies. This descriptive literature review aims to illuminate the parent?s situation when the mother is affected with PND. In search of literature, the databases Medline (via PubMed), Academic Search Elite, Cinahl, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES and SweMed+ were used.