AbstractC-level essay in political science, by Frida Orlinder, spring semester 2008Supervisor: Susan Marton?Good contracting? ? A study of contracting in public procurement regarding the transportation of school children?Over the last decades models influenced by the market have been gaining influence in public administration all over the world. New Public Management has been presented as a theoretical ?shopping basket? from which concepts can be applied to the administration of municipal services. The purpose of this essay is to investigate in an explorative way how New Public Management (NPM) views contracting and the role of the internal customer in contracting.

The purpose of this thesis is to see how the Swedish public libraries present e-books on their website. This study has tried to answer the following questions:1. How do the public libraries construct their definitions of the word e-book, and what patterns are there in the definitions?2. How is the e-book definition presented in the context of the public library websites?This study has formulated its own theoretical framework in regards to how you can categorize definitions in four different categories to help see the way a definition is constructed.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine librarian's opinion of computer filters, to bring order in the debate on these filters and also to encourage future debate on this subject. The main problem is whether librarians themselves think they have the right to limit the public access to information on the Internet by using computer filters. We will also see how many public libraries are using filters, why they have chosen to use or not to use them, what is the librarians' opinion of filters, what rules exist regarding the use of the Internet, and finally if it is legal to use filter programs in public libraries. We have also included a short report on what filters are and how they work. This paper deals only with Swedish conditions on a number of public libraries.

This is a two years master?s thesis that studies five libraries. The purpose with the paper was to look at a specific material and study how it expresses itself around the architecture of the buildings, an if the descriptions were different depending on the library, public library or university library. The conclusion is that the ways of describing the library buildings have varied; depending on one part time and one part evolution. The way library buildings look and have been used has changed over time also, and as well how people perceive and talk, or in this case write about them..

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate and analyse how the concept of lifelong learning is expressed in political documents concerning public libraries and education and how it can be related to earlier concepts of education within the discourse of public libraries. Focus is the official approach to the concept of lifelong learning and public library. The documents examined contain the political aims for education and culture policy on a national and local level. The theories used in the study concern the background and meaning of the concept of lifelong learning, they describe public libraries and their earlier perspectives of education and they also give a picture of practices of governing within the framework of public libraries. The purpose is to see how the speech in the documents is reflected in discourses of society and public library.

The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of how self employed entrepreneurs (hereafter referred to as ?entrepreneurs?) develop their competence based on their perceived learning space. The main question is: How do these entrepreneurs develop their competence based on their perceived learning space? Other questions relevant for the study are: How important is the social environment for these entrepreneurs and how do they interact with their social environment in order to develop their competence. The study has a qualitative approach.

The overriding purpose of this graduate thesis is to evaluate if municipalities and county councils can deviate from the legislation of public procurement during procurement of customer choice agreements within the health and social care area. The intention of this Quasi-market is to provide the users with competition in terms of quality rather then the general principal rule of economic value.My conclusion results in a legal situation without rules of general procedure. So far the authorities make their own regulation in the field of customer choice agreements. The problem lies within the authorization of new contractors and their right to make an appeal against resolutions made by the authorities social care divisions.One solution is to legislate within the present law of public procurement. Another way to solve the problem is to create a lex specialis apart from the present public procurement regulation..

Denna uppsats handlar om hur Shared service (SS) inom den offentliga sektorn kan ses som en del av New Public Management (NPM). SS har beskrivits som ett verktyg för att uppnå de egenskaper som karaktäriserats som NPM, och denna uppsats syftar till att se ifall användandet av Shared Service inom den offentliga sektorn kan ses som en del av New Public Management. Genom en fallstudie på Kammarkollegiets Enhet för Administrativ Service har detta genomförts. Sekundärdata i form av rapporter har studerats samt intervjuer med direktören för Enheten för Administrativ Service Håkan Viberg har genomförts. Analysen visar på att detta fall i hög grad uppfyller kriterierna för NPM och motiven för SS, även om vissa skillnader har kunnat identifieras.

The purpose of this paper is to test a procedure that would be useful for a certain, more final purpose. Assume that you want to know if the differences in the result of a certain effort in health care have any connection with differences between the life situations of the patients. This would be easier to investigate if the life situations of the patients had connection to the easily available variable Health Care Cost (in Swedish VK). In that case the searching for connections between VK of patient groups and the result of health care efforts would be sufficient to gain knowledge of possible connection between health care efforts and life situations. Thus that is the final purpose.

The care for the elderly in the municipalities has recently seen the need for a formalized system for quality assurance. Under increasing demands for monetary efficiency while bound by law to retain acceptable standards in health care, there is need for efficient and at the same time quality-assured management. The municipalities often solve this puzzle by introducing systems and standards influenced by theory-clusters such as NPM (New Public Management), TQM (Total Quality Management) or other quality management theories.This essay focuses on how the public administration in the municipalities defines quality and designs and implements system for formalized quality assurance. Our basic view of organizations is institutionalist and our theoretical framework includes theories about quality, NPM and TQM..

The aim of this study is to examine how and in what way users of the public participate and affect the archival information that is to be preserved for the future through the examination of three archival projects involving public participation. The study seeks to examine if participation of the public could lead to increased democracy and diversity of information in the archives. The study will be performed through the examination of three participatory archives all tied to traditional archival institutions.The study is based on the theoretical framework of Benn and Gaus and their notions of public and private which they discuss using the key words access, agency and interest. The study also takes into consideration Laura Millar?s theories of social memory as a means for the public good.

Syfte: Uppsatsens syfte är att blottlägga de antaganden som ligger bakompublic service-begreppet och de konkreta villkoren för SVT. Syftet ärinte att utvärdera huruvida SVT sköter sitt public service-uppdragutan varför det överhuvudtaget finns ett public service-uppdrag ochvilka värden det grundas på.Problem: Vissa värden som finns i public service-begreppet och därmed ocksåhos SVT, som vilken roll medier ska ha i en demokrati och om de kanförmedla sanningsenlig journalistik, problematiseras som regel inte.Varför anses SVT vara en institution som är trovärdigare än andra?Går det överhuvudtaget att erbjuda en ?public service? via televisionsom regeringen menar sig kunna göra?Tillvägagångssätt: Denna uppsats tillämpar inte den traditionella uppdelningeninnehållandes teori, metod, analys och resultat utan diskussioner ochresonemang, teori och analys förenas kontinuerligt. Uppsatsen är iförsta hand teoretisk och utgår ifrån tillgänglig litteratur och SVT:sstyrdokument. Med detta som grund förs en kritisk diskussion kringpublic service-uppdraget och dess innebörd.Resultat: Public service existens eller icke-existens baseras i mångt och mycketpå vilken typ av samhälle vi vill ha.

The aim of this Master´s thesis in Art History and Visual Studies is to examine the existence and theexpressions of openness and interior space in the contemporary Swedish architecture of singlefamilyhouses. Research has focused on open-plan housing with open connections between kitchenand living areas, large windows, walls of glass, high ceiling heights and entresol or loft levels, usingtwo case studies and analyses of seven reference objects. Interpretation is based onphenomenological theoretical perspectives.Houses that are more or less transparent permit views from both the inside and the outside. Adiscussion of this potential dilemma is supported by sociological perspectives on identity, life-style,self-presentation, privacy and publicity..

Many media buyers annually spend money on advertising which will not be of benefit to their own brand; the fact that consumers confuse from which brand they have heard or seen commercials, comes as news to nobody. The phenomenon of media confusion has however earned much less attention. As a greater part of the total marketing budget is being spent on the media investments, on behalf of the actual advertising production, the more interesting it turns out to maximize the effects of the media expenses. The search for optimization is somewhat practised today by brand managers who are daringly adding a few more media channels to support their TV-campaigns. Buying ad space in TV is nevertheless much more expensive than the radio equivalent.

The subject this thesis will investigate concerns the matter of how political ideologies exist within public libraries with a focus on the democratic ideal. Public libraries are part of the political system and we want to show how political ideologies take their shape in public libraries and the possible consequences of this. With the help of three major political ideologies, liberalism, conservatism and socialism we investigate how the democratic ideals of these ideologies are expressed in documents that describes activities the libraries will and have performed. In order to identify these ideologies we use discourses in cultural policy as a bridge between the investigated documents and the political ideologies. As an analytical tool we have developed a model that describes the relation between text, discourse and ideology which we use in our analysis.