This thesis aims to study the impact of the transition from communism to democracy on the public libraries in Poland. The central areas of study are changes in: the organisation of the public library system, the role of the public library in society, the librarian's daily work and job situation and collection development. The thesis is based on qualitative interviews with public librarians, public library managers and researchers in Warsaw, Torun and Gdansk. The theoretical background consists of chapters outlining thoughts on democratic and communist library ideas and public libraries' responses to a changing society. The results show that the public library system has been affected by two major decentralisation reforms in Poland, leaving the libraries in the care of local governments.

The purpose of this report was to investigate how the Umeå School of Business and Economics at Umeå university can work to increase the share of courses and programmes that discuss sustainable development. Furthermore the purpose was to develop an action plan that can be used to increase that share. Methods used were a questionnaire directed towards the educators at the Umeå School of Business and Economics and an assessment of the content of courses and programmes connected to the Umeå School of Business and Economics. There was no clear structured way of working with education for sustainable development, but at the same time there was a will to integrate sustainable development in the education. Curricula were according to the educators an important tool to achieve this integration, their experience were that there are not enough time, people and money to work with sustainable development in the education and they would like to see more clear directions from the management.

The Thesis purpose is in the context of system development validate the Scrum Methodology. Projects concerning information technology are difficult to manage and tend to fail in quality, time or costs. Scrum presents a new view of the system development. Better cooperation between customers and developers, continuous follow-up on daily basis and extensive communication in the development team are all characteristics of Scrum. Scrum is described as a new paradigm by its founders but has been criticized by experts of system development too.

Uppsatsen behandlar lagstiftningen som skyddar offentligt anställdas yttrande- och meddelarfrihet. Med grunden i Lennart Lundquists ?offentliga etos? är den utformad som en fallstudie där tre fall granskas för att kartlägga hur dagens lagstiftning fungerar i praktiken.Uppsatsen jämför även med en normativ ansats två olika förslag till förändrade förutsättningar som är ämnade att bättre trygga en fullgod yttrande- och meddelarfrihet för verksamma inom det offentliga..

Title: Images of Sweden in ItalyNumber of pages: 5252 (589 including enclosures)Author: Oskar GustafssonTutor: Martin NilssonCourse: Political Science C level ? Bachelor?s ThesisPeriod: Spring term 2010University: School of Social SciencesLinnaeus UniversityPurpose/Aim: The purpose of my research study is to, through the use of political science theories on soft power and marketing theories about nation branding and in comparison to previous studies on the image of Sweden in Italy, gains a better understanding of the image of Sweden in Italy, with special focus on national political institutions and young Italians.Method: The method of analysis is a combination of qualitative methods: interviews where information about the image of Sweden amongst national political institutions were gathered and a survey where information was gathered about the image of Sweden amongst young Italians.Main results: On the basis of the results I have gained it can be concluded that a positive and well informed image of Sweden emerges when it comes to cultural and social factors but a more restricted and somewhat negative image come to light when asking national political institutions and young citizens in Italy about their views and knowledge on Swedish domestic and international politics and economics.Keywords: Soft power, Public Diplomacy, Nation Branding, Images of Sweden, Italy..

Syftet med den här magisteruppsatsen är att få en bild av hur skolledare och lärare ser på kommunikationsformen medarbetarsamtalet, kopplat till skolutveckling, i den svenska gymnasieskolan. Uppsatsen följer en fenomenologisk forskningsansats, i vilken en etnografisk modell med åtta kvalitativa intervjuer av tre skolledare och fem lärare på två gymnasieskolor setts som en fallstudie. Materialet har analyserats med hjälp av en narrativ metod och kritisk diskursanalys (CDA) och resultatet visar att skolledare och lärare talar om skolutveckling på disparata sätt i medarbetarsamtalet men också att förberedelser och feedback på medarbetarsamtalet skiljer sig åt och upplevelsen av medarbetarsamtalet är därför att det inte påverkar skolutvecklingen på de två gymnasieskolorna..

The North-American sociologist Michael Lipsky has characterized social workers as street-level bureaucrats with a substantial discretion in the relationship between the welfare state and its citizens. Within Lipsky´s theoretical framework social workers appear as a powerful group that socializes the citizens to uphold certain expectations towards the welfare state and its (re)distributional programs. From this point of view, it is important to learn more about social workers and the attitudes they express towards the welfare state. The aim of this study is to analyze how the welfare-political attitudes of future social workers are affected by their social background (e.g. class background and ancestral homeland).

If one looks at physical planning in Sweden today one can see that while talking about densification of existing development, reduced emissions and careful use of important land, urban sprawl is a fact with development of sheer residential districts in the urban edges and shopping malls in each and every municipality. As sustainable development is an essential goal for physical planning to strive towards, it is worth questioning if the direction of today?s planning will lead to the goal. A sustainable development can be seen as an obvious to goal aim at. In reality the aim means a hard and complex work.

In today?s tough business environment the need for good and efficient leaders are becoming more and more important. The businesses are in constant change, the world is more unpredictable and the competences of the employees are much greater today, which also calls for a new type of leader, a leader who not only is authoritarian, but also possesses soft skills. In this environment where there is this greater focus on leaders, leadership developments have emerged and increased in number over the last ten to twenty years. They try to develop leaders in all domains of their life, both professional and personal and the model we work with in this paper is Total Leadership, this model implies that you try to accomplish being a better leader throughout your whole life as a leader, to be whole, genuine and innovative, no matter career or position in life.

?CSR and political consumption ? a study of Nike?s and Puma?s CSR-reports?The purpose of this dissertation is to examine if political consumption has influenced multinational corporations to improve their Corporate Social Responsibility reports and policies more, than a company who has not been a target for political consumption.This dissertation is a content analysis of Nike?s and Puma?s first (Nike 2001, Puma 2001) and latest (Nike 2007/09, Puma 2007/08) CSR- reports. Archie Carroll?s model of Corporate Social Responsibility is used as theoretical framework in this study. The model is used to focus on four areas within CSR; economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic.

Mass media is becoming more and more personalized and despite common ideas it could actually be a good thing. Instead of affecting the actual content of news coverage it might only have an effect on the way in which news are presented. Famous politicians more regularly become symbols and synonyms for their parties or for the government and are being used to create interest in the beginning of articles.Those are the results from a content analysis of the newspaper coverage of the Swedish parliamentary election in 1976 and 2006 in which the scientist categorized each article in one of four ideal types, counted quotes and analyzed whether personal names were interchangeable with party names without affecting the content. All three methods showing that it is the presentation, not the content, which has been personalized.At the same time, psychology-science tells us about the human brains associative learning processes, where memorizing becomes far more efficient when the information can be connected to an already known person. Increased personalization of news might therefore increase the political knowledge of the receivers..

In the world after the Cold War, internal and ethnic conflicts have been predominant. Ethnic conflicts have their own theories on why they erupt and what can be done to solve them. This essay seeks to analyze how the Ethnic Security Dilemma can explain the causes, and possible solutions, of today´s armed ethnic conflicts.By making an ideal types typology over different types of ethnic conflicts, and then analyzing the Ethnic Security Dilemma´s impact on each conflict type.

After the 9/11 attack the United States declared war against terrorism, which launched a conflict between indefinable transnational networks and states. In this war it became clear that the strategies used in traditional wars between states were not sufficient. New strategies have been discussed, but without any concrete results.In this thesis assassinations of terrorist leaders ordered by states is being presented as a possible strategy in the war against terrorism. Assassinations have been used in all times to shift political power but is today not morally accepted. This thesis aims to show that when used under the premisses of the just war theory, the strategy can be equally morally justified as any traditional war.

The findings in this case study are mainly based on material collected during a field trip with a fellow student to Laos in February-March 2005, which was sponsored by Sida through a Minor Field Study scholarship. The original interest was to study a political aid project (Governance and Administrative Reform Project Luang Prabang, GPAR LP) in a country like Laos with very complex preconditions such as one-party polity. In Laos my interest in evaluation of political aid grew mainly because I found out that the two donors in the project, Sida and the UNDP, had reached different conclusions in their respective evaluations of the project.The main interest in this thesis has been to study how donors have evaluated a political aid project. The study shows that Sida and UNDP used, what in the literature usually is referred to as, Conventional evaluation as methodology when they conducted their evaluations of GPAR LP. The study also shows that the main reason for the different points of view that are expressed in the evaluations depend on a lack of dialogue and consensus, regarding for the project crucial concepts, rather than choice of evaluation methodology.

Modern democracies rest on a foundation of values essential to their prosperity. Two of those values are freedom of speech and political equality. To many, these values appear to coexist effortlessly. However, what this thesis aims to expose are some of the problems that quickly arise when attempts to interpret the values fail.The thesis investigates a specific US Supreme Court ruling called Citizens United. The ruling enabled corporations and unions to use their own treasuries for unlimited independent political expenditures.