The intention of this thesis is to examine "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and its position and functions in the public sphere. Particularly interesting aspects are like the linking of private and public issues, the show's potential as a forum for debate and dissemination of knowledge, and what types of criticism the show has been subjected to. The methods used dealt with the textual aspects of the show. Semiotic analysis and conversation analysis were applied to five episodes and a search of literature was made. The thesis rests on theories concerning television studies and talk shows, in addition to theories on modernity and identity.

The recent decades have been characterised by a trend where the public sector's been inspired by several methods and strategies from the private sector. The public library is in this case no exception. In this context there are different perspectives on whether or not this will lead to a dramatic change of the role and values of the traditional public library. The aim of this master's thesis is to make a contribution to a deeper understanding of the ideological conflicts within the Swedish public library and its relation to the market. In the literature of library and information science I have identified two separate discourses representing two contradictory systems of meaning concerning this relation.

The study is a case study about the green urban district, East Kvillebäcken, located in Gothenburg, Hisingen. East Kvillebäcken is the first urban district in Sweden with ambition to build sustainable according to the certification system Miljöbyggnad, which make it a pioneer project. The purpose is to investigate the upcoming and the meaning of the green urban district in East Kvillebäcken and show how public employees think the urban district can affect social, ecologic and economic aspects in the area. Dialogue interviews were done with four public employees, one estate agent and two residents. Local plans and other authority documents were used to get a deeper understanding for the case study.

The purpose of this paper is to study the ongoing discussion concerning e-books at Swedish public libraries. The e-booksituation has as of late gained a lot attention in the media. The main distributor of e-book in Sweden - Elib - is in the centreof this discussion and our goal has been to study the opinions and arguments that have been expressed within articles and blog postsconcerning the situation.We have analysed our articles and blog posts through a qualitative text analysis in order to find the main problems of the e-bookdiscussion and which arguments are used. We have also studied the effect Elib might have on the libraries' collection developmentaccording to the articles and blog posts.We found that the major issues within the e-book situation include Elib's price model - which is costly for the libraries - thewatermarking and the selection of books available to the libraries. It is also considered, according to the author's of our articles and blog posts, that the collections at the libraries are affected byElib's system since the choice of which books to include is given to the publishers, not the libraries or its users.The articles and blog posts agree that a change needs to occur for the e-books future survival at the public libraries..

On-call work has increased substantially in the past 20 years in Sweden, not least in the public sector and most notably in health and social care. This thesis argues that the increase has considerable influence on the prospects of on-call workers in the public services to act as guardians of democracy. Based on theories of Lennart Lundquist, the results of this study show that on-call workers suffers from inferior opportunities to act as democratic guardians in particularly two matters. First; they have fewer prospects than standard employees of professionalism due to lack of education and capacitation. Second; on-call workers have inferior opportunities to protest against wrongs, due to no real formalized possibilities to inform and due to transactional psychological contracts.

Over an extended period of time there have been plans to establish a shared facility in Lennheden to extract groundwater from the Badelunda esker to provide drinking water for the cities of Borlänge and Falun. The city of Falun is dissatisfied with the quality of its drinking water and the city of Borlänge is concerned about the risk of contamination of its existing groundwater supply at its current location. To provide a basis for a decision on this issue, the company Midvatten AB has been commissioned to perform hydrogeological investigations in the area of Lennheden.The purpose of this thesis is to design a functional groundwater model of the area between Lennheden, place of planned extraction, and Övre Tjärna, place of existing extraction, to get a better understanding of the groundwater situation in the area. A groundwater model enables simulations of different scenarios in risk assessment and contaminant transport. The aim of the thesis is that the model can be used as an aid in Midvatten?s investigations in Lennheden and that it also can be used in future projects in the area.The model has been made in Processing Modflow 5.3 and encompasses an area of 19,5 × 11 km along the Badelunda esker and the river Dalälven between Djurmo and Frostbrunnsdalen.

The public administration and its officials have a number of values which they have to relate to in their work. The values are a set of democratic and economic values.This study?s purpose is to examine how the officials at the National Insurance Office in Sweden give priority to these values. The study is performed by interviews with officials at two insurance offices.The study shows that the officials in a high degree value the democratic values legal security and public ethics. In turn they experience that productivity, which is an economic value, is being promoted in a high degree from the management.

Landstinget i Östergötland upphandlar sedan 2001 samtliga godstransporter från externa leverantörer. Detta examensarbete har som syfte att inför en kommande transportupphandling 2006 utreda behovet av godstransporter och hur kostnaderna för dessa transporter ska fördelas inom Landstinget i Östergötland. Målet var att förenkla existerande avtal och ta fram en lösning på hur förändringar av transportnätet ska kunna hanteras med minimal administrativ arbetsinsats. Lösningen skulle också innebära att landstingets kostnader kunde hållas låga.Studien har visat att det genom att standardisera transporttider går att förenkla transportavtalen avsevärt. Transportören erbjuds också större frihet att anpassa landstingets körningar till övriga uppdrag, vilket möjliggör lägre priser.

Bakgrund: Prestationsmätning är en viktig del av ekonomistyrning och mätningarna ser olika ut beroende på organisation. Inom offentlig verksamhet har intresset för prestationsmätning ökat i och med New Public Management-idéerna (NPM). NPM har bidragit till en ökad företagsekonomisk inriktning på offentlig styrning, där resurshushållning och effektivitet fått ett tydligare fokus.Prestationsmätning har tidigare främst förknippats med finansiella prestationer. Under 1980- och 90-talen ökade kritiken mot detta ensidigt finansiella intresse, företrädelsevis ur en företagskontext. Att även utföra icke-finansiell prestationsmätning, och att då ha en flerdimensionell styrning, framhölls allt oftare som ett sätt att få organisationer mer framgångsrika.

The aim of this Master thesis was to examine how libraries at Swedish colleges and universities make Open Access journals in physics available to users. We examined if, where, and how the 50 Open Access journals that are listed in the Directory of Open Access (DOAJ) under the heading Physics (General) were made available to the public at 19 Swedish colleges and universities. We also examined possible patterns regarding qualities in the Open Access journals and to what extent the libraries made them available. For this descriptive statistic was used. The selection of library portals that were included in the study were those Swedish colleges and universities that teach physics.

Ten years ago the public computers with Internet access were introduced in the public libraries. The purpose of the public computers was to give the possibility of searching information. Along with the Internet came also communication media like chat and e-mail. This type of communication was a new function for the libraries and the reactions among the librarians were mixed. It has been a source of big frustration and attempts to block it has not succeeded.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine attitudes and standpoints amongst librarians at the Swedish public library towards literary awards and awarded literature. The questions posed in the study are: What attitudes are expressed amongst these librarians towards the Nobel Prize in literature, the August Prize and literary awards and awarded literature in general? What significance do the Nobel Prize in literature, the August Prize and other literary awards have concerning purchase and display at these public libraries? How is awarded literature perceived and how do they talk about it concerning quality and are questions of quality significant? Qualitative interviews with seven librarians at four different public libraries have been done. Theories regarding J?rgen Habermas the bourgeois public sphere and Pierre Bourdieu?s terms habitus, field and capital have been used as to explain the library as a public sphere.

Can the Danish "Aftalesystemet", a system with the intention to simplify the use of services within health care, be used in Sweden? This project has investigated the possibility by installing and testing the system and explored its functions to detect any eventual problems. Analyses were made of the system's graphical part and the underlying code to see in greater detail how the communication between units occurred, since no actual documentation of it existed. Discussions with the developers took place regarding how the current system works and how further development should continue. In order to test the system, a completely virtual environment was used.

I detta examensarbete undersöks vad som lockar med bilen som vardagligt transportmedel hos invånare i Malmö. Som en del i detta, identifieras faktorer bakom valet av transportmedel. Malmöbors tankar kring sin egen miljöpåverkan samt vilka utmaningar vi står inför när det gäller att gå emot ett mindre bil-dominerat samhälle diskuteras. Metoden bestod i att genomföra samtalsintervjuer med sex personer som samtliga bor i Malmö och som har körkort och tillgång till bil. Resultaten tyder på att bilens attraktion består i de fördelar den tillhandahåller, såsom lastutrymme, sparad tid, frihetskänsla och oberoende.

Scandinavian Biogas is involved in the planning of a combined ethanol and biogas factory in Karlskoga, Sweden. Besides biogas and ethanol large amounts of digester residues will be produced, about 450 000 liquid tonnes residue (~7,3 % Dry Substance( DS)). The objective of this thesis was to investigate possible uses of the residue from the biogas production process ScandgasEthanol developed by Scandinavian Biogas, and to derive a methodological approach how to evaluate and compare handling systems. Three systems where proposed and compared in this thesis; spreading of the untreated residue as fertilizer (system 1), dewatering to a higher DS content to reduce transportation before spreading as fertilizer (system 2) and production of a solid fuel by dewatering and drying the residue (system 3). The general conditions for the proposed systems were investigated in terms of practical viability, economical aspects, environmental impact and energy inputs/outputs.