This study deals with religious independent schools and its impact on society. The purpose of this essay has been to examine what various teachers from both religious independent schools and public schools have for perception of religious independent schools. The questions highlighted in the study is the teachers´ general view to religious independent schools, teachers´ perception of the Education Act " a denominational education, but a non- denominational teaching", and what teachers believe to be segregated or inclusive.The study has consisted of five qualitative interviews with different teachers, where three of them work at religious independent schools, while the other two teachers work in public schools.The study shows that there are prominent differences of approach to religious independent schools. Teachers who work at religious independent schools avert criticism of religious independent schools and argue that teaching in religious independent schools do not differ appreciably from the public schools. Instead can religious independent schools serve as a good alternative to the public school.

In the late 20th century there has been some changes in the public sector. These changes are described as New Public Management. When ideas from the private market is transferred to the public sector, for example to regard citizens as cus-tomer. Central in this paper is the use of term customer in the Swedish public sec-tor. There are two questions in the paper; which possibilities has a disappointed customer to effect the public sector, and what may happen with democracy, the common good, when the citizen becomes a customer?To answer the questions I study two different cases, Svedala kommun and the tax department, Skatteverket.

Libraries all over the world struggle against the threat of decreased funding and a lack of governmental interest. In countries with an under-developed library sector the interest from the government is often minimal or non-existent. Since the 80´s Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency has contributed to the library development in Central America through the Royal Library of Sweden. Nicaragua was the first country to be counterpart in the project. For a period of eight weeks I have completed a field study in Nicaragua and visited the National Library Rubén Darío and public libraries in the country.

This thesis explores how public art is received by the general public in Borås, Sweden. As a point of departure it was assumed that a study of the local papers would offer an accurate insight in to the debate of public art. Hence, press clippings were chosen as primary source material together with the works of art. The questions addressed in the study are: what is written in the local daily press about public art? Who writes in or makes statements to the local dailies about public art? Textual analysis is the predominant method employed while hermeneutics is the underlying theory.

The purpose with this thesis is to understand the relationship between a square?s design and its function as a public meeting place, were Sundstorget in the city of Helsingborg is used as a study object. The architect Jan Gehl developed a theory of people?s outdoor activities in his book Livet mellem husene (1996). He divides the activities in three categories; 1) necessary activities, 2) optional activities and 3) social activities, which are differently affected by the place?s design.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine librarians opinions about media. Four questions are asked: What kind of different attitudes to new media has librarians had? How is new media discussed in relationship to each other in the debate? What mechanisms and underlying causes control the discourse for new media in public libraries? Does the discourse change over time, in that case, how? The theoretical background is theory about moral- and media panic and popular adult education. The media panic theory includes the idea that the same reaction occurs every time a new media is introduced. The theory about popular adult education is that the public need to be cultivated.

The aim of this master?s study is to examine the function of the public library in the local community at present. I have searched for the answers to the following questions: Which position has the public library in the local cultural policy? What characterizes each library and which are the priorities? What is the local profile of the public library? What cooperation partners does the public library have and what do they mean to the library? Does the public library intensify the local community in any way? To answer this, I have made three qualitative case studies. Interviews and collection of documents were carried out in three different communities.

The public spaces of the city from a social sustainability perspective, Jubileumsparken, a public space for the young, aims to see how public spaces can be open and accessible to all young people in the community. New public spaces can be created and formed by urban planning. A public space that is undergoing considerable development is Jubileumsparken, which is situated in Gothenburg. This area constitutes the case study for this thesis. Due to the commercialization in the neo-liberal society of today, there is a risk that economically weak people, such as the young, the unemployed or students, can?t take part of all public spaces.

The aim of this thesis is to use Gabriel Tardes theories concerning imitation, repetition and the public opinion as a way of understanding how transmedial communication develops over time. This involves a study of social media, traditional press and public organizations in relation to each other. The campaign, What are you doing? (Vad håller du på med?, 2013), launched by the Swedish military as a way of drafting more soldiers, is used as an example of how the theories can be applied to help us understand connections, patterns and social behavior in the rapid mutation and viral spreading of information. By discussing the campaign and its effects, the ambition is to give an understanding of how a campaign of this scale could be planned for and structured.

This report studies how the divergence between men and women is manifested in the physical space and how the representation of room recreates this divergence. Spaces are coded and women have traditionally been associated with private space and men with public space, leading to that the home is encoded as female space and public squares as male space. Thereby women lack a natural place in public space. The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (Boverket) wants to change this situation by enforcing safety-creating measures based on gender equality theories.I have studied what potential risks the project initiated by Boverket as well as discuss the potential problems with representation. Can representation be used without freezing the space? I also search for methods for working with a gender perspective without reproducing gender stereotypes and roles and avoiding encoding the private as female and public as male? Also I use a public seminar with urban planners, artists and architects to retrieve how we work with these issues today.I conclude that city planning needs to incorporate new strategies of thought that does not divide space, e.g.

To thoroughly think with safety and security in mind is an important issue in planning of public city spaces. Spaces intended to be available to all inhabitants of a city should have a welcoming appearance. Unfortu-nately, this is not the situation in many pedestrian walkways, parks and such spaces, possibly due to lack in safety and security. This master thesis intend to examine questions at this issue ? what makes you feel safe and what causes insecurity in public city spaces. The safety aspect treats the human psychological and sociological ways of perceiving her milieu and other humans in it, and how the physical shape of her surroundings can affect the sense of safety.

In the paper we bring up and analyse the attitudes librarianshave towards youth and youth programs in the public library.The purpose is to raise awareness among librarians and tomake the process of change and development. We have usedsemi structured interviews in order to answer our researchquestions and conducted the interviews with five librarians incharge of the youth programs in different public libraries. Inthese interviews we asked about their views on youth as auser group, youth programs and how this affects theiropinions on the roles of the public library. We have also triedto see how the librarian?s opinions differ from how thelibrary runs their youth programs today.We have used two different models as theoretic framework.One of them has defined three different roles of the publiclibrarian and is constructed by Maj Klasson and the other is adeveloped version of Andersson & Skot-Hansen?s classicmodel of the roles of the public library made by Jochumsen,Rasmussen & Skot-Hansen.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to identify and describe thedifferent roles that are expressed in a public library by researchingthem in the four policy documents concerning Västerås public libraryin 2010 and by interviews with three specially chosen key persons.Further studied are the discourses that can be perceived in thematerial and whether or not the roles could come in conflict witheach other. Laclau and Mouffes discursive theory constitutes themethodical frame for this thesis and by using terms from discursivetheory the analysis was made in four steps.Seven roles were identified from the policy documents concerningVästerås public library and the interviews with the key persons. Thefirst role of the public library was the intermediary of knowledge andinformation, the second was viewed as a democratic role, the third asa marketing role, the fourth as a role that handled the collaboration,the fifth role was to improve literacy, and the sixth and seventh roleswere as a culture centre and a meeting place. With the help fromkeywords five major discourses were found within the material.

This essay discusses the interaction between the authorities in Nacka municipality in Sweden and supervisors within the eldercare. In Nacka politicians have gradually started delegate responsibility for how care-giving for the elder should be done and focus instead on formulating economical objectives and overall rules. It is up to the approved supervisors of eldercare to deliver good care and quality. The method chosen to accomplish this is public choice. This method is a part of the big New Public Management (NPM) reform which have had a big impact on Swedish public sector since the 1980´s.

The aim of this master thesis is to study if the websites of the Swedish public libraries are accessible to all people. According to the library law all people must have access to the public libraries and their information services. Today, when the Internet is one of the largest sources of information, it is important that all people, including those with different kind of disabilities, children, elderly, immigrants and people with old technical equipment, have access to the public libraries websites.We have in this study considered the graphic user interface, the language, the structure and the navigation possibilities at ten public library websites. We have from a checklist of our own, based upon the opinion of different experts such as Jacob Nielsen and Tommy Sundström, investigated the websites.The main finding of our study is that the websites are generally accessible even thou we found a lack of accessible for immigrants. Most of the websites had some pages in English, but none hade all pages in this language.