This quantitative study aims to investigate whether there is a difference in the effect of the policy rate on the price per square meter for condominiums between small and large cities in Sweden. The study encompasses a total of seven Swedish municipalities, of which three located in large cities and four in small cities. Data regarding housing sales and additional variables have been collected for all municipalities, and the price per square meter is the dependent variable in the regressions performed on the dataset, which constitutes the empirical basis of the study. The aim is further to contribute to an increased understanding of how the effect of the policy rate might differ between Swedish cities and why. The results of the study show significant differences in how the policy rate affects the price per square meter in a small city compared to a large city, with the effect being greater in the latter.

The aim of this Master thesis is to study the public libraries' function as a place for people to meet. Four major questions are taken up: + Do the public libraries have the function of a meeting place? + How important do the librarians and the visitors find the libraries possible function as a meeting place? Do they think that this function is important? + What differs the public libraries from other places in society when it comes to the function of a meeting place? + What differences are there between a larger and a smaller library when it comes to the function of a meeting place ? The basis of this study are interviews with employees at a province library in Jönköping and at a smaller library in Sjöbo in Borås municipality. Our study deals with the history of public libraries, its functions as a meeting place, its architecture, culture, and statistics concerning numbers of visitors and loans of books. The conclusions that are drawn are that the public libraries have qualifications to function as a meeting place even if that isn't always the case.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to investigate a possible connection between the development of mobile library services in Sweden and the development of cultural policy during 1945-2006. Our main question is: is there a connection between the development of the mobile library services in Sweden, as described in Biblioteksbladet, and the development of cultural policy as portrayed by Anders Frenander and Dorte Skot-Hansen? In order to answer this question, we formulated two secondary questions: - How are the mobile library services described in Biblioteksbladet between 1945 and 2006? - Are there any similarities or dissimilarities between the development of the mobile library services and the development cultural policy as described in our theoretical models? If so, in what way? Our study covers the entire time period since the start of the mobile library services in Sweden in the late 1940s. The final year for our investigation is 2006.

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate the ideas about functions that public libraries have in the local society. We have used the method idea analysis on four municipal library plans, to find out which ideas about library functions that frequented each plan, and what similarities and differences there were between the ideas about functions in each plan. As a theoretic base, we have used a theory about three dynamic spheres in modern society: the state market and civil society, and examined how these three spheres influence and control the library functions. We have extracted six different ideas about library functions: educational, social, economical, entertaining, serving and democratic functions. The most dominating ideas in this study are ideas that the public library should be an educating and formative institution.

Social media has recently expanded dramatically, as more people are using different media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to express their opinions. This increases the possibilities to spread information and an unclear legal regulation in this area can create adverse consequences. Freedom of expression is a constitutional right, which forms an important cornerstone of a democratic society. Public employees? freedom of communication means that they can submit information to the media, without fear of reprisals from the authorities.

The public relations business has grown from almost nothing to a large international industry the last decades. Throughout the history the industry has struggled with a lot of critique and public relations has become a negative symbol for manipulation of information. Because of this negative view of the industry and the medial change taking place, the purpose of this study is to investigate how two different generations think about public relations. More accurate, the study will through a qualitative interview study explore how young people from a highschool in Luleå and elder people from Luleå township thinks about pubic relations, and most imortant why they have this particular view. By creating four focus groups, two with men and two with women, this also enables a comparative study between the gender. The focus groups were later analyzed and compared to two selected groups of theories on public relations, the theories were positive and critical theories compound in two categories.

This report was made for the company HordaGruppen AB to investigate how information security was handled. This report fits in the Master program of Internet Technology at School of Engineering in Jönköping University in Sweden.The question at issue was how you protect your information against different threats. One question was how to make an information security policy and which guidelines you can follow in the Swedish Standard, SS-ISO/IEC 17799:2000.Another question was to investigate the information sources at the company and which threats there are against it.The work begins with a presentation about information security for the chief of information and the chief of quality in the company. The next thing was to do a survey of as thing are at present with a tool from Länsteknikcentrum called ?Infosäkpulsen?.

Early Swedish films from the 1910?s and 1920?s are not only an important part of Sweden?s cultural heritage, but also an important part of the international film heritage. This period is often refereed to as the golden age of Swedish film history. Despite this fact, the possibility to watch Swedish films from this period is very small and the main purpose of this thesis is to examine why the availability of these films has such low priority in the Swedish film policy and at the Swedish Film Institute. With the use of policy analysis, I study governmental policies and policies from the Swedish Film Institute for early Swedish films and seek to identify the policy problem and its different parts.

The marketing campaign ?Låna dig rik? [Get rich by lending] involved 25 public libraries in three regions; Kronoberg, Kalmar and Blekinge. This paper examines 28 news-articles concerning this campaign, found in eight publications in the responding regions. The purpose of this is to determine to what extent the description of the campaign found therein responded to the intents of its founders and to what extent the public had a say in these articles. The result found indicates that the overall image of the campaign presented in the news-articles was well in correspondence with the intents of the campaign itself but that the public views where arguably absent..

In this Masters thesis the image of the public library in the local press and in the eyes of the public is examined. The questions posed to examine this are: - What activities of the public library are described in the local press? - What activities does the public associate with the public library? - What functions and roles of the public library can be found in the articles and interviews and how are they expressed? - What opinions of the public library and hereto related activities can be found in the articles and interviews? This study is based on an analysis of 127 articles, published in Borås Tidning during a period of six months, and of interviews with 35 people from Sjuhäradsbygden. To analyse the articles and the interviews Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen´s model of roles for the library has been used. The model includes four roles for the library: the library as a cultural centre, a knowledge centre, an information centre and a social centre.

This bachelor?s thesis describes a qualitative case study of a public library as ?third place?, a place besides from home and workplace visited frequently for conversation. The subject is chosen because of the many roles of public libraries. The main query of the study is ?What view does the public library have of its role as third space and how does that relate to the way utilization of the public library as third place is seen??.

The aim of this two years master thesis in Library and Information Science is to examine how librarians and library managers in the three Stockholm suburbs of Alby, Fisksätra and Rinkeby think and reason about the role of public libraries in the integration process. The aim is also to examine whether their perception differ from that of local politicians at the municipal level. The theoretical framework is Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hanses model for analysis of the local library profile, and Jose Alberto Diaz theory on the integration process. The method used is qualitative interviews. The interviews were recorded and the content was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The results of this study show that the library services in the three suburbs, rather than being stipulated by the legal demand for special services towards immigrants, are based on the needs of the local population.

AbstractPaper in political science, C-level, by Lars A Roos, spring semester 2007. Tutor: Susan Marton. ?Policy networks and Nord Stream.?The purpose of this paper is to examine how the government and interest groups have been working together to commonly prevent the building of a gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. To do this, a comprehensive question how does the government and the involved interest groups work together in policy networks? has been broken down to three more specific questions: (1) Can the cooperation between the government and the interest groups be placed within the frame of a issue network or a policy community? (2) Has the cooperation between the government and the interest groups contributed to new tools for the government to prevent the gas pipeline? (3) If the answer is yes to the second question then, which are these new tools?My examination is a case study of the policy network that exists around the Swedish actors in the case of the Baltic Sea gas pipeline.

The transformed municipality ? Economic and social growth in Örnsköldsvik 1997-2007Author: Kristina HanssonThis thesis focuses on the economic and social growth in the municipality of Örnsköldsvik. It is a single case study and the municipality is studied through economic theories concerning regional growth in the period of 1997-2007. The aim is to analyse whether these theories, such as Åke E. Anderssons and Ulf Strömquists K-society, and other more or less microeconomic assumptions, also are applicable in smaller local contexts.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine public library and information technology IT discourses to see which relationships are established between them in four library journals. This is done in two steps, where first discourses are defined followed by an analysis of the relationships established between the public library and IT in each discourse. The questions from which the analysis emanates are as follows: What discourses exist around the public library and IT in the library journals? What conceptions of the tasks of the public library are constructed in the discourses? What conceptions of the tasks of IT are constructed in the discourses? What conceptions of the relationships between the public library and IT are constructed in the discourses? The theoretical and methodological starting-points are found in Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory. 37 articles from four library journals Biblioteksbladet, Bibliotek i Samhälle, DIK-forum and Ikoner - are analysed through a model in five phases.