The current field of research concerning the impact of railroads in Sweden beside from the State main-line network is relatively narrow. Including cultural impact to the area narrows the results even further. The purpose of this study is to open the field even more into the local societies and to what extent the impact of the introduction of railroad might have had on smaller county villages. Sweden holds a unique position concerning ?station towns? or ?railways towns? in terms of railway policy and the industrial development in towns that were affected by the railway, as the affected towns continued development were based on a hybrid between direct democracy and adaptations of city-law policies.This study takes place in Kisa, a small town in southern Östergötland that during the beginning of the 20th century turned into a municipal community due to the building of Östra centralbanan (roughly translated Eastern central-line).

The subject of this two year Master's thesis in Library and Information Science is the information practices of illiterate immigrants in everyday life. The purpose is to examine how immigrants seek, identify, understand and value information sources and information, and how the practices have changed with their arrival in Sweden. It furthermore focuses on the barriers that illiterate immigrants meet in accessing and understanding information. It moreover investigates the strategies they use to overcome them.For this purpose twelve qualitative research interviews were carried out, with illiterate immigrants as well as with service providers. The theoretical concepts of the essay is information practices, which means that the information process is within a context, and information poverty, that people in different context do not have adequate and equal access to information and information sources.Using McKenzie's model of information practices, the essay concludes that illiterate immigrants are active in their information process, especially when they interact with information.

Holmen Skog has only five out of 70 wood buyers who are women, This report is seen as a step in the process towards gender balance in the company. This is a problem that is equal over the entire forest industry in Sweden. They all think that sexual equal workplaces are very important to remain competitive, see things from different perspectives and development of the company. The survey was done by sending out questionnaires to all women who work and have worked as a wood buyer at Holmen, and as many men of both categories. These four categories became a total of twenty persons. To map the industry another questionnaire was sent out to the six largest forest companies in Sweden. The survey found that female wood buyers not finished their work earlier than men did, as they thought before.

The first July 2008 did the Swedish government introduce a new family policy, the child care allowance. This essay is a case study of how the child care allowance has influenced families and which possible effects that the child care allowance can lead to. In order to respond to the issue has family models been used in order to analyze the results from a questionnaire survey distributed to households which has become granted child care allowance in Växjö municipality. Therefore is this essay?s premier contribution to the social science a description of how families have reasoned and decided about their child-care.

Under de senaste åren har e-post blivit ett allt viktigare verktyg för kommunikation och företag använder i allt större utsträckning sig av denna kanal. Användningen av e-post har även fått negativa konsekvenser, till exempel att en stor del av de anställdas arbetstid går åt till att hantera e-post. Detta har inneburit att e-postens roll, vilken är att underlätta arbetet och leda till bättre effektivitet, går förlorad. Syftet med vår studie har varit att undersöka hur kommunikation via e-post styrs och att skapa förståelse för behovet av styrning av e-posthantering i organisationer. För att kunna besvara syftet har vi utfört en fallstudie av tre företag.

The purpose with this essay is to examine the Liberal Party and the Left Party´s views on homework, if the parties considers that homework affects the schools plan for equivalence and if the parties disagreement can be related to their different ideologies. To answer the purpose I have used following questions: How do the Liberal Party and the Left Party define the concept of homework?, What is the purpose of homework in primary schools according to the Liberal Party and the Left Party?, What are the arguments for and against homework and do homework affects the schools plan for equivalence according to the parties? and Can the parties' views on homework be related to their respective ideologies? The method used is a qualitative textual analysis with focus on the idea analysis. The material consist of relevant newspaper articles, news and debate clips and the parties various party programs, during the time frame of 2006-05-31 - 2013-10-14. To answer the purpose I also used different types of discourse theories, equivalence theory and the ideologies liberalism and reformist socialism as theories.The results shows that the Liberal Party and the Left Party have different views about what a homework should be considered as and that both parties thinks that homework can affect the schools plan for equivalence, but they have different perceptions about how.

Mothers of small children often work part-time in Sweden. Since old age pensions are based on lifetime income, part-time work leads to lower pensions, as long as there is no compensation from non-actuarial benefits such as minimum pensions. In this paper, I investigate whether different components of the Swedish pension system provide incentives for part-time work among women. The analysis is performed through a simulation of future pensions for 9 typical women in a certain cohort. For three levels of education, I compare pensions of women with different labor market participation rates in different growth scenarios.

Based on different integration policies, we aim to examine how five municipalities in Stockholm County are working to promote integration at a local level with focus on voter participation and to some extent, representativeness among foreign-born. Statistics provided by SCB shows that foreign-born tends to vote to a lesser extent than those born in Sweden. Further, we aim to examine the implementation of two policy documents established at a national level concerning integration in contrast to policy documents established at a local level in each different municipality. Further, we aim to examine summaries of actions taken in response to the local integration programs, as well as personal interviews. Each municipality will be considered separately, but we thus seek to make a comparative study.

This paper investigates the compensation for risk in the context of the Swedish stock market with a special focus on downside risk. Using daily market data collected from the A-list of the Stockholm Stock Exchange between the years 1983 and 2005 the purpose is to answer the question whether Swedish investors are compensated for holding stocks with high downside risk, measured as downside beta. Using panel data analysis it is shown, in accordance with most previous evidence in international research, firstly that stocks with high beta values on average experience higher returns than stocks with low beta values, and secondly that stocks with high downside beta values experience higher returns than stocks with high beta values in general. On the other hand, cross-sectional regression methodology using a bivariate regression approach shows that downside beta does not explain excess returns very well. Instead, regression analysis suggest that high upside beta does a much better job in explaining excess return over this time period compared to downside beta.

Abstract One of the essential conditions of the co-operating within the EU is that homogeneous conditions of competition prevail within the entire common market. The competition policy in the EU should guarantee that the competition is not distorted in a way that would prevent or create difficulties for the free mobility of goods and services between the member countries. The policy of competition should also guarantee that no new protectionistic obstacles will be formed, regardless of if it is being done by actions taken by member countries or as a result of actions taken by companies in order to set limits to the competition. Companies putting to an abuse their dominant position on the common market, or on a substantial part of it, is irreconcilable with the idea of the common market in case it could interfere with the trading between member countries, and is thus prohibited. The purpose of this dissertation is to describe the collective dominance from the view of the commission's interpretation of the practice of article 82 in the EG - treaty.

The essay circulates around the technological analysis of flint material from four localities around the Baltic Sea basin. The analysis was created to investigate the question of where the first Gotlandic settlers originated from and to give clues about the colonization process. The investigated material was collected during the fall of 2011 and a correspondence analysis is used to analyze the collected material. The purpose of using a correspondence analysis is to test the method as a tool for investigating Mesolithic flint technologies. The essay also discusses marine hunter-gatherers, their economy and how their archeological remains differ from terrestrial hunter-gatherers..

Following the wake of the AIDS-catastrophe in the beginning of the eighties, homosexual men or 'men who have sex with men' (MSM) have been barred from donating blood throughout the planet. In this thesis I look into the different discourses at play in the context of creating the legal framework for blood donation in Sweden. Genealogically tracing the emergence of the category of MSM and mapping how the category is brought to use in contemporary negotiations on blood safety, I scrutinize how scientific truth is established within blood transfusion practice. I argue that the rationality of risk group exclusion is contingent on economical grounds, and that the foucauldian concept of biopolitics could productively be used to understand this rationality. In particular, the concept of the 'biopolitics of blood' can be employed in order to understand the reluctance from the involved actors to acknowledge the heteronormative consequences of the legal framework of contemporary blood donation..

In this essay we discuss how the decentralisation of the Swedish school system affects the concept of ?equal opportunity school?. We investigate the development from both a historical and contemporary perspective, in order to identify changes over time. The central question of the essay is how the decentralisation of the school system affects the teacher?s perspective and experiences of the government?s framework about ?equal opportunity school?? The analysis is based on four qualitative, semi structured, direct interviews with respondents both active in municipal schools situated in the Malmö council and with more than thirty years of experience in their profession. Our analysis of the interviews show that both respondents experience the overall situation in the schools has deteriorated from an equal opportunity aspect since the decentralisation of the school system.

With the help of image analysis and scent theory, we have made an analysis that explains how the perfume smells in advertising. There are many different factors that play a role in our perception of smell by image. We have found that using the connotations we can get a sense of the scent. What helps us along the way, the colors, the women and the environment. From this one different conclusions are mad and we create a scent sensation..

In this thesis an explorative study was undertaken with the aim to study how a number of private care providers, as well as politicians and officials from councils in and around the Stockholm and Uppsala counties, think about the future of the Swedish elderly care from a property perspective, i.e. homes for the elderly. The analysis shows that there is a demand for capacity in 6 out of 16 municipalities, and that the property is an important part of this capacity, and the fulfillment of it. This was mainly due to the cost of capital, but also because of several other factors such as lack of land, a wish to guide the design, ideology, and in many cases a wish to use the property as an instrument of domination to control private health care providers.Also, the property was show to be connected to economic competition, to freedom of choice, and to quality. The problems related to the property in the market for elderly care still remains to be solved.