A co-operation is established when a group of people, sharing the same preferences and values, come together in order to satisfy a common need. The co-operative association should be democratic, governed and supervised by its members and open to everyone. The purpose of this article is to, from our ideal type, study similarities and differences regarding the corporate governance of the consumers? and the producers? co-operative movement. The motive behind our choice of alignment is that the mechanisms of corporate governance often are described from the perspective of the joint-stock company, making it valuable and interesting to study these mechanisms from the co-operative point of view.

AbstractReading books to children is often an integral part in preschool activities. The purpose of thisstudy is to investigate how educators think about the educational function of literature inpreschool activities. I have in my study used qualitative interviews with active educators andobservations to answer my questions about why the educator reads to the children, how theeducator thinks about the choice of literature and if the literature can contribute to thechildrens development and if so, how. The knowledge- and research background presentsliterature and previous research done on the subject. The results of my study shows that theeducators have many thoughts about the importance of literature in preschool.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the properties of the municipalities in Sweden that influence the choice of being a certified Fairtrade city. The independent variables which are used in the statistical analysis are municipal governance, local tax rate, whether there is an university and/or university college in the municipality, average income and higher education in the municipality. The variables are examined by logistic regression. Since there are no statistical data on ethical procurement, this exogenous variable isn?t included in the regression.

The purpose of this study is to highlight some aspects of the increased usage of tablets in preschool environments by answering the questions: what does the tablet become in the preschool environment, how much freedom does the children have over its usage.To answer these questions a series of observations were made at two different preschools. The observations were then complemented by interviews with teachers at the same preschools.This qualitative study focuses on some of the didactic questions regarding the tablets, based on a theoretical framework that is within the design-oriented perspective; which addresses the children's? autonomy, the institutional framework and affordance.Our conclusion is that the tablet?s introduction in the preschool has helped the teachers in numerous parts of their documentation, but we can also see that the children's opportunities to make choices regarding the tablet are more limited than with any other resource on the preschool. In our results we also see that when the children get access to the tablet they receive a learning experience, which among other things, strengthens their language skills and their social interaction with each other..

In a suburb of Stockholm, local polititians descide to close down an elemantary school. Because of its shortage of pupils, the polititians claim they can not guarantee the quality of the school and the public requreiments of equal education. The school-employed teachers and parents of the pupils are all unhapy with the descision, but first and foremost dissatisfaied with how the descision was communicated.Using qualitative methods; interviews and content analisys, this thesis aimes to determine how the involved parties, in regards to the termination of the school, view the concepts of freedom of choice, equal education and quality. Interviews have been made with decision-makers, employees of the school, the school leader, one civil servant and parents; all with the goal of understanding how the involved parties view the events leading to the termination of the school and what causes they see. Furthermore, the thesis analyses if and why the involved parties experience the decision as legitimate..

Aquaponics is a food production system consisting of a consecutive cultivation of plants and aquatic animals, fish or shellfish, in recirculating water. The plants feed on the nutritious effluents from the fish tank and bacteria converts ammonia from the fish tank into nitrate that is absorbed by the plants. The plants receive nutrition and the fish gain purified water. The environmental impact of the production of fish meal and fish oil used in conventional fish feed includes a large consumption of fossil fuels with subsequent carbon dioxide emission. The aquaponic system can be made environmentally sustainable and self-supporting if supplemented with a vermicompost/vermiculture for the production of worm protein as a fish feed. Vegetable waste from the hydroponic part of the system can be reused as worm feed in the compost and the protein rich worms can be harvested, dried and grinded and brought back to the aquaculture as fish feed. As a first step in this direction, I have investigated the effect of recycling of vegetable waste in vermicomposts on the growth and number of earthworms (this was evaluated after harvesting). The hypotheses were that earthworms can be cultivated in the vegetable waste and that by adding manure to the vermicompost it is possible to obtain a nutrient content adequate to support a continuous worm harvest, in other words create a vermiculture. Eisenia fetida and Dendrobaena veneta were grown in 20 L bins containing peat mixed with either poultry or cattle manure. The proportions were 70% peat and 30 % manure. Discarded plant parts from lettuce cultivation was added to the vermicomposts (35 g per week) and water was supplied with 0.8 L per week.

This master thesis covers the design of a special garden room, The Hardscape Room, in The Rehabilitation Gardens at Alnarp, in southern Sweden, as well as describes the design process. The Rehabilitation Gardens are intended to serve several purposes. It will offer horticultural therapeutic treatment programs for people diagnosed as having had burnout disease for an extended period. Research is also aimed at studying the possible impact of different garden design hypotheses as well as different forms of horticultural therapy. In The Rehabilitation Gardens at Alnarp the most extreme and demanding garden room focused on cultivation and horticultural therapy is The Hardscape Room.

It has in a broader extent become important for companies and other organizations with large organizations to have a properly functioning web platform where content management is an essential part. Polopoly is a web content management system developed in Sweden, used by several European corporations but foremost Scandinavian such working in different media related business areas.Our aim has been to analyze this tool and render a report which hopefully will assist the initiator of our thesis; a consulting enterprise called Qurius, in their negotiations with future customers, when to suggest Polopoly as a suitable content management solution.By using case studies at companies currently using Polopoly, our goal is to define which characteristic makes the product a competitive publishing tool. To put our analysis in perspective, we will compare the most important aspects of Polopoly with a similar product.According to the results of our investigation we consider Polopoly being a beneficial choice with regard to a number of important parameters. Finally we have summarized these properties in a list of examples explaining in which cases Polopoly is a preferable alternative as a web based content management platform..

The purpose of this essay has been to examine the public`s view of the Swedish eldercare during 2006. This study uses discourse analysis as a research method, the reference material has been articles from the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. The aim of the research has been to find central themes, conflicts and consensus in the discourse of eldercare. The analysis resulted in four main subjects which were based on four main questions; the questions of responsibility and execution, the question of contents, and the question of where the eldercare should take place. The analysis of conflicts and relations of consensus in the discourse of eldercare resulted in two different main views; the traditional and a more modern.

Studies have found that the applicability of commercial marketing strategies within politics have increased in recent years as a result of a rising number of swing voters. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of the commercial theory of incongruent information in political marketing in Sweden. Subsequently, an experiment with 742 participants was conducted, testing the effects of congruent and incongruent ad messages for two established Swedish parties. The effect of ad message choice on several well-established measures of ad effectiveness such as awareness, credibility, attitude, conviction and voting intentions was analyzed. The results showed that incongruent information effectively increases attitude, conviction and voting intention for voters who decide on the election day what party to vote for.

Swedish agriculture stands in front of big changes the whole time. As a milking producer you have to adapt and develop the company to these changes and find the best solution. This potential is easy to find if you compare your company with other similar companies. Labour cost is the biggest cost in milking production after the cost for food. Today it is rather easy to measure how many hours per cow different system of cow houses needs, but we do not know so much about how many hours it takes to breed a calf. To learn more about the labour time with the calves during the first time after the calf was born, I made time studies on five different farms with calf hutches, automatic milk system, large calf boxes, and smaller calf boxes with teat buckets.

This thesis has been adjusted because some parts are classified, some sentences might have been changed. Electric bikes are a convenient mode of transport, a good choice when long distances or tough slopes can be an obstacle.The goal of the project was to create a prototype on a locking mechanism with an inductive charger for electric bikes.The idea behind the project was to develop a user-friendly locking mechanism, where the bikes would be charged inductively when they were locked. To implement the project facts about induction, battery charging and locking devices was needed to be acquired. Circuits for induction charging were created and a lock device was constructed. A microprocessor was used to control the entire system.A prototype was designed with a locking device and an inductive charger fixed in a bike rack.The entire project became very wide which resulted in that not all of the parts of the project could be completed.

This thesis work has been performed at the Division of Assembly Technology at Linköping University for a period of ten weeks. The work is part of the project ProFlexA, which is a research project in collaboration between Linköping University, Lund University, and industrial partners such as Combi Wear Parts and Smålands Stålgjuteri AB.The casting process creates random incurred burrs and defects, which must be removed during a cleaning process to make sure that the cast can be sold. Automation has long been sought for the cleaning of castings due to, among other things, poor working conditions for staff, but this has proved difficult to implement with today's technology. Automation has for some time been available for more capital strong companies with large annual volumes, but for smaller companies with small-and medium-sized volumes, automation has not been an option.The goal of ProFlexA is to develop an automated cleaning cell aimed at small-and medium-sized volumes.The goal of the thesis is to do a pre study at ProFlexA?s partners on cleaning of castings, and develop concepts for automated cleaning of castings.By recording the process and cycle times, the cleaning of castings has been documented as it works today, and on this basis, information and statistics has been compiled.

This master thesis work was done at Saab Underwater Systems AB, a company at the cutting edge of underwater technology. Here torpedoes and other underwater vehicles are developed and manufactured. The major customers are navies of different countries, mostly the Swedish navy. The aim of this master thesis is to develop, construct and evaluate an automatic Trim System for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles. The task of the system is to change the position of the centre of mass and the vehicle?s total mass or volume.

The aim of this study examines how two groups of social workers at two workplaces reflect to their own clothes in various work situations. We want to gain an understanding of the variables that affects social workers choice of clothes at work. In a qualitative approach the study is based on two focus group-interviews and four semi structured interviews. Empirically analyzes relate to Pierre Bourdieu?s "la distinction, Ervin Goffman?s "frontstage-backstage", and of Michele Foucault?s power concepts.