This study aim to investigate the conditions framing the professional development situation for physical education teachers (PE) in a small municipality in the south of Sweden. The Swedish National Agency for Education declare that "focus must be directed towards strengthening the teachers' profession", and that "schools need well-trained teachers and good teaching to help students achieve good results". The study focuses both the schools? contribution and the way in which the teachers take own initiative and are motivated to develop their professional skills. The investigation is all based on teachers' perspectives.

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.

The idea that I put forward in this thesis concerns the democratic system and the threat from discoursive impact on its core values. I focus my normative analysis on three of these democratic values: transparency, accountability and influence ? and what democratic problems the discoursive impact causes in conflict with them. I have used a critical discourse theory to define discourse and discoursive impact, by focusing on the process of discourse, rather than its nature. I deal with the political structure where I claim that the essential relation between citizen and politician is disrupted, due to lack of information and the imminent problems of the existing network society.

The objective of this graduate work is to gain a better understanding in how pre-school educators are able to work with music in their pre-school activity to promote child development. We also want to enlighten possible factors for the development of children based on music and to form our own ideas of whether teachers choose to apply music in their didactic practice or not.The point of this essay has been to attempt answering on what importance music makes for children's development and learning in pre-school, and how teachers could work with music in pre-school in order to promote children?s development. Our data consists of six interviews and two observations realized at a pre-school in Södertälje.We took heed from the theories laid out by Lev Vygotsky's which describe four different levels of development that includes educational development in social interaction between teacher and child. Our choice of this theory is inspired by our seeking deeper understanding of Vygotsky's theory´s application to the aesthetic approach in the interaction in meaning making and learning.The result of our study confirms previous theory and research in that music as a form of expression has a major impact on children's development.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate why the two Swedish municipalities of Frykerud and Östmark were the only municipalities in Värmland that were forcibly merged by the state during the ?Municipality block reform? of 1971, and whether local identities played a role in the resistance against this reform.     The study is designed as a comparative case study and builds on both history and political science to analyze the topic from a broader perspective. Based on the research situation three theoretical theses have been formulated, the durability of which will be tested in the analysis part of the essay.    The study notes that Frykeruds resistance against the ?Municipality block reform? started when the reform prevented a planned retirement home construction in the municipality. In the analytical part of the essay, the author discusses how the discontent can be interpreted as symptomatic of bourgeois centralization resistance, as well as being due to the fact that traditional, local self-government as a political subject was perceived as threatened.

Through a sociocultural perspectivethe purpose of this study is to investigate how preschool teachers look at quality development in preschool and how they perceive their participation in this development.I have used a qualitative method based on five interviews with preschool teachers from three different parts of Sweden. I used an interview guide with open questions. The interview answers were categorized in themes based on the responses which were most frequent. In the result I have been using an analysis based on these themes. The result showed that the preschool teachers consider that the leadership style affects their work.

The aim of this study is to investigate how employees in consulting companies develop their competence in order to perform their daily work. The focus is on informal competence development. The theoretical framework consists of theories concerning learning and competence development in working life, theories on organizational change and evaluation, a well as professional reflection. The methods applied are narrative research and interviews based on the assumption that knowledge about reality is only obtainable through language and communication.The main results show that competence is developed through experience, social interaction, communication and dialog with co-workers and customers. The post-modern conceptions of the rapid (technical) development and need to be up-to-date has a strong hold on the informants apprehension of working life, as does the notion of not having enough time for all the competence development they would like.

This master thesis is about one of the first female in the Swedish Parliament, Elisabeth Tamm (1880?1958), and her political articles in the magazine Tidevarvet. The aim of this study is to find similarities with Tamm?s political thoughts with the Ecofeministic theory. Due to women?s right to vote 1919 women citizenship was in a political debate.

During the last decade working with competence has emerged as a more strategically important area. Today the human resources in a company are considered a competitive advance and the HR-units play a significant role when it comes to HR-management. Different motives for investing in strategies that promote competence development and learning also exist. The purpose of this paper was to examine how the process of competence development was managed at a large global company. The empirical material consisted of four persons who were interviewed and the analysis of the material was inspired by grounded theory.From the analysis four major themes or core factors emerged as central to the interviewed persons' understanding of the competence development process; solid preparatory work in relation to competence development, communication, awareness of responsibilities and finally the taking action and evaluation of the action.

There is a clear difference between types of regions and forms of regionalization. This theoretical division can point out other division lines on different areas and levels, like the one of discourses. In this article is urged that regional political discourses may be divided in West and East European ones. To argue for West and East differences in regional discourse the article shows division lines both in the history of regionalization but also in ideologies. The regional policy of the EU is one example for today's regionalization as a West discourse and the Transylvanian in Rumania as an example for the East discourse.

Abstract Title: Enabling Smart Research and Development through Knowledge Conversation Seminar date: 2005-06-08 Course: Master thesis in business administration, 10 Swedish credits (15 ECTS) Authors: Andreas Johnsson, Johan Rosendahl Advisors: Lars Bengtsson Key words: Knowledge management, Knowledge conversation, Research and development, Ba, Trelleborg Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to create a model that shows how knowledge management aimed at research and development processes can be used and how the theoretical fields can be connected. Methodology: The thesis is based on abductive perspective where empirical and theoretical material has been mixed to create a foundation for the analysis. Theoretical perspectives: Theories concerning knowledge management and research and development have primarily been used. These have been complemented with material about team structures and incentive systems. Empirical foundation: The empirical material is based on semi structured, mostly qualitative interviews and strictly quantitative inquiries performed at Industrial Hose within the Trelleborg group.

AbstractEssay in political Science (c-level) by Karin Forsling, Spring 2007A school for the best interest of the child? - The Swedish School System according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.Supervisor: Stig MontinThe purpose of this essay is to investigate how the Swedish governments work with the im-plementation of this convention and what progress has been made. The inquiry of this study is to describe how the changing in the Swedish School System correspond to the national strat-egy for implementation of UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in Sweden and how the political protagonists.I have read some of the most relevant documents from the authorities and organisations work-ing with children?s rights in Sweden and papers and communications from the political pro-tagonists.Since UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified by Sweden in 1990 the work for implementation has been quite successful but there are still lots to do. There are still some problems in School such as bullying, insulting, insecurity and lack of peaceful and harmoni-ous school environment.

The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze why or why not Swedish municipalities implement the gender equality policy ? ?right to work fulltime?. In order to understand this institutional change, the analysis is based on a theoretical framework consisting of two fields: political representation and feminist institutionalism. The study is divided into two empirical inquiries. The first part is based on a quantitative survey that describes the casual relationship between two independent variables; women´s political representation and party ideology, and the dependent variable; political decision about ?right to work fulltime?.

AbstractTitle: 2008- the year of the mobile-TV-markets expansion? (2008- ett år för mobil-tv-marknadens utbredning? Drivkrafter hinder och aktörer).Number of pages: 50Author: Hilda EngstrandTutor: Lowe HedmanCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Fall Semester 2007University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The aim of this research paper is to identify the main operators on the mobile-tv-market and to map out the main forces behind its growth. What are the driving forces that creates a new disribution-market? Also to study how political media-regulation effect and urge the mobile-tv- market.Material/Method: Interviews with people from the mobile-tv-market. To read public-documents, press releases and reports from the government, media-companies and organisations has also been a method used to gain information.Main results: That the mobile-tv-markets growth is a result of several driving forces.