The purpose of this master?s thesis is to study an electronic reference service from a user perspective. By qualitative interviews with eight students the thesis examines their information behaviour, why and when they use the service, the user?s experiences of the service and the communication with the librarian. The users have all used the Swedish electronic reference service Fråga biblioteket ? Forskningsbibliotek.

This study is a comparative analysis of how Hollywood portrays people from the Middle East before and after 9/11. The films used to conduct this study are True Lies (1994), The Siege (1998), The Kingdom (2007) and Body of Lies (2008). With a qualitative methodology, discourse analysis and postcolonial theory this study analysed not only how people from the Middle East is portrayed, but also how the Americans in the films are presented and how the characters in the films changed in the movies produced after 9/11.     The results show that people from the Middle East are portrayed in a negative way and that Hollywood uses stereotypes. However, people from the Middle East are more gradated in the films post-9/11. There is a bigger focus on Islam in the movies produced after 9/11 and the study also shows that family values play a less central part in the story in the films made after 9/11 and that work is of more importance.

Lifestyle magazines portray women in different manners and have an influence on how media consumers create self-images. The importance of knowing how different visual representation of the female acts out in magazines with large target audiences is therefore of weight for the magazines? readers to understand. This thesis analyze how the two lifestyle magazines ELLE and LOVE portrays women in images and how they in turn create ideal images of women.The thesis has been conducted through a qualitative analysis of 5 images from each magazine that represents the magazines artistic styles. The theories used in this study are semiotic image analysis and visual text analysis viewed from a gender- and discourse perspective.The conclusion of this thesis is that ELLE portrays women as strong, happy and feminine, with at tendency towards androgyny, while LOVE describes women as inferior and sexual objects constructed for the male gaze.

This thesis is a critical discourse analysis of the vision of Malmös contemporary urban development. By analysing official documents produced by Malmö municipality our aim is to make discursive and sociolcultural practices in the constitution and construction of the city visible and problematicize them. To do so we use critical discourse analysis and theories on Urban Studies. Malmö is a city historically labeld as a ?labour- city?, with heavy industry as its main labourmarket.

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 thesis is a comparative analysis of language policy in the Post-Soviet states Ukraine and Kazakhstan, wherein the states are seen as rational actors using language as an instrument in the nation-building process. With a take-off point in an underframe of theories on the nation, national identity, instrumentalism, power and the particular role of language in the nation-building process, this thesis shows that language is a key instrument used by the two states.The Ukrainian and Kazakhian language policies create and put across a certain image of the nation, by emphasising the titular languages as symbols of the new states. The line of argument in the language policy is a balance act between large-scale promotion of titular languages and a careful and inclusive attitude towards the Russian language. The biggest differences are that Ukraine, compared to Kazakhstan, has a more comprehensive and consequent language policy with a deeply rooted historic rhetoric. The most obvious instruments of the states in language policy is censuses, corpus-planning and the state choosing one official language..

Web 2.0 represents the next generation of creating interactive applications on the Web. The purpose of this thesis was to develop a service tailored to Web 2.0 technology, where users can post ads for free. The platform is an advertising system specially designed for animals. Surveys and interviews have been done; the result is that today?s advertising services on the Internet are not interactive and user-friendly.The users have the possibility to adapt different part of the system to their needs, such as choice of themes.

The prevention of age discrimination in Sweden did not have any solvent grounds until directive 2000/78/EG was implemented into Swedish law. Today age discrimination has been banned for just over two years. This ground of discrimination has, compared to other existing grounds of discrimination in Swedish law, a lot more opportunities to make exceptions from. Given the fact that the exemption rules are vague, it is difficult to determine whether the protection against age discrimination is in fact a protection at all. The purpose of this essay is to describe what the law regarding age discrimination means.

Studien är baserad på lärares, specialpedagogers samt projektledares uppfatt-ningar av arbetssätt och arbetsformers betydelse i ett matematikprojekt som bedrivs i åk 3. Syftet med detta arbete är att studera vilka arbetssätt och ar-betsformer som används i ett matematikprojekt för att utveckla elevers ma-tematiska förmåga med fokus på aritmetik, ur ett specialpedagogiskt perspek-tiv. En kvalitativ metod valdes där intervju i grupp, enskild intervju samt in-tervju via e-post med respondenter från tre målgrupper genomfördes. Ana-lysmodellen har konstruerats med begrepp frånAdding it up (Kilpatrick, Swafford & Findell, 2001), KOM-projektet (Niss & Højgaard-Jensen, 2002) samt Visible learning (Hattie, 2009). Vårt resultat visar att lärares, specialpe-dagogers och projektledares uppfattning är att flera faktorer påverkar pro-jektets arbetssätt och arbetsformer där bristen av tid är en betydande faktor.

During the last two decades, the elementary, - secondary-, and upper secondary schools of especially Europe and USA have gone through a change. From being formed in the post war time and, in Europe, very influenced by the ideas of social democracy, the school today has more and more come under the influences of neo liberalism, entrepreneurship and the political and economical situations during the late 1980´s.This undergraduate work brings up the changed discourses of education and knowledge in relation to the traditional free school system for adults in Sweden, the popular education, and especially in relation to folk high schools (folkhögskolor). By using, first and foremost, the idea of Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analysis (CDA) the rules and documents concerning the folk high schools are analyzed. The purpose of the paper is to identify and recognize the movement in the discourse to reach an understanding about the political situation for folk high schools in Sweden. In the end you can see that it is possible to define a similar development in discourse surrounding the popular education, as has been in the case with the elementary, - secondary-, and upper secondary schools..

Music not only fun but also necessary. This paper investigates how young people describe their relationship to music. The young people - students - in this study are coming from two different districts of Malmö: One with a population with mainly ethnical Swedish background and the other with a multicultural population. The research question is how we can describe young people's relationship to music on the one hand from the social theories which are presented and on the other hand from own experience as a music teacher. Group interviews are used to get the young people's own descriptions.

There are experiential products that through a digital transformation wholly or partially have taken new place in our everyday lives. Just a few years ago, we had music on CDs, movies on tape and books in bookshelves. In Sweden, we are now facing a transformation when the e-book begins to take place alongside the printed book.This paper focuses on what values play a role in the attitude towards ebooks among a selected group of Swedish book bloggers. A qualitative content analysis was performed on blog posts concerning the ebook from twelve different Swedish book blogs. The posts were then coded into categories and values.

Under 2009 lanserade Lantmännen handel med emissionsinsatser och emitterade förlagsandelar. Handeln med emissionsinsatser syftar till att behålla emissionsinsatserna i Lantmännen, då många av medlemmarna är äldre och kommer att begära utträde ur föreningen kommande år. Handel med emissionsinsatser ger möjlighet för medlemmar att köpa och sälja emissionsinsatserna på en andrahandsmarknad. En välfungerande marknad innebär en minskad risk för att emissionsinsatserna försvagar Lantmännens soliditet. Emissionen av förlagsandelar gjordes för att öka det individuella kapitalet och ge medlemmarna en möjlighet till ökad värdetillväxt i Lantmännen.

The thesis describes the following main question: Will the administrative labour during football tournaments be made easier with the help from a mobile web service or will it convey to unnecessary extra work? To be able to give a good and qualified answer to this question, the thesis will in the beginning describe how the technique for such a system might look like and also describe the existing administrative moments during a football tournament, this is too give the reader a deeper understanding for further reading. The thesis then goes on to describe a concrete system which is tested on three football tournaments. On the basis of the tests, interviews and through analysis of these the thesis will be able to answer our questions. The result which we present in the thesis have unfolded through testing of the system on three chosen football tournaments. The differences in way of labour pre and post the system have been analyzed and through interviews the value of these changes have been assessed. The results achieved in the thesis are as follows, the presented mobile web service does not only decrease the total work effort made by the tournament officials it also speeds up their work.

Människor tillskriver varandra egenskaper. Detta sker omedvetet och systematiskt och syftar till att underlätta förståelsen av omvärlden. Syftet med detta arbete har varit att undersöka i vilken utsträckning det är möjligt att utifrån vald språkstil i ett e-postmeddelande bedöma en persons egenskaper, vilket i denna rapport benämnts en persons sociala styrka. En engelskspråkig undersökning har legat till grund för arbetet och tanken har - förutom ovanstående - varit att utröna hur väl ett experimentellt engelskspråkigt undersökningsresultat står sig under förhållandevis naturalistiska svenska förhållanden. Resultatet visar inte entydigt att språkstilen styr de egenskaper som författaren tillskrivs.