The means to political participation at the local level in Sweden are changing and this change is analyzed through a case study. The first aim is to explore the forms of public political participation in Swedish municipal Älvkarleby, namely public question time in local government, citizen motions and open meetings. A part of this is also to analyze he every day contact between citizens and representatives. The second aim concerns the reasons why politicians decide to support these means to participationThe empirical material consists mainly of semi structured interviews with local politicians, civil servants, participating citizens and local press. Official documents such as public minutes are also used in the process of creating an image of local participation.Local political participation is found to be limited but yet having the potential to strengthen democracy, provided that public decision-makers are open to a dialogue with the participants.Using Kjell Arne Røvik's theories of organisational change, the changes in local democracy can be explained as being partly rational, partly symbolic and partly identity shaping political decisions..

Investeringsbedömning är inte bara kalkyleringar och beräkningar. Människor påverkar och styr de data som ligger till grund för beslutsfattande och dessa individer kan därmed styra processen mot sina egna mål. Studien fokuserar på ett kommunalt investeringsprojekt, uppförandet av Arena Vänersborg. Investeringsprocessen, från planering och budgetering till slutförande av projektet studerades. Kostnadsavvikelser och styrningen i processen undersöktes och analyserades.

One step towards a more sustainable energy system is to create a more flexible electrical grid, where increased demand response among electricity consumers can play an important role. A distribution grid owner can encourage their customers to use electricity more evenly distributed during the day by introducing different types of grid fees such as time-differentiated power tariffs. In this master thesis, the theoretical economic impact of a flattened load profile for a distribution grid owner is investigated. Different factors that impact the distribution grid owner?s economy are identified and two are chosen to be quantified; losses in the grid and the fee to the feeding grid.

The automotive industry is today in a world of globalisation and external factors can influence the car companies and it is important that they progress with the people. When an external factor, as the oil price, increases dramatically, it will affect the economies in different matters. Other external factors are impacted by the oil price, for example inflation, unemployment and target rates. In addition, people are changing their preferences due to the attention of the environment. With this as the foundation the problem of the essay were divided into three aspects.

Under senare år har vi fått allt större problem med antibiotikaresistens bland bakterier. Dessa problem är delvis en oundviklig följd av användandet av antibiotika. De förvärras dock kraftigt av det faktum att vi använder antibiotika i en långt större omfattning än vad som kan anses nödvändigt. Detta överanvändande beror till stor del på det faktum att behandling med antibiotika i många fall är en förmånlig lösning för den enskilde patienten, som erbjuder ett snabbt tillfrisknande till en låg kostnad. Vi har följaktligen ett klassiskt fall av externa effekter, där det som är rationellt för den enskilde skiljer sig från det som är rationellt för samhället som helhet.

The main purpose of this study is to examine celebrity candidates in the European Parliament election in Sweden and Finland. The theoretical background assumes that candidate voting is beneficial in the election to the European Parliament. Previous research also shows that there are some opponents towards candidate voting, claiming it personalizes politics and it might lead to celebrities getting elected simply because they are well known to the voters.This study is a comparative analysis and analyzes the differences between Sweden and Finland when it comes to celebrity candidates. Furthermore, Max Weber?s theory on leadership will be used to categorize the celebrity candidates further.

The paper contains comment, clarification and criticism, even constructive criticism, of some theses that have been put forward by Laurence Bonjour in his In Defense of Pure Reason.It presents a concept of experience that deals with the relation between cognizer and object of experience that has a great similarity to that of Bonjour. Through analysis it is shown that the concept of a priori entails that Bonjour has two concepts of a priori, a narrow and a broad one. The narrow one is, in my own words: According to moderate rationalism a proposition p is a priori justified if and only if you apprehend that p must be true in every possible world. This doesn?t mean that Bonjour doesn?t believe in an epistemological, metaphysical and semantic realm.

This study examines the background and nature of the credit default index swaption (CDIS) and presentsrelevant methods for modelling credit risk. A CDIS is a credit derivative contract that gives the buyerright to enter into a credit default index swap (CDS index) contract at a given point in time. ACDS index, in turn, is a multi-name credit default swap (CDS). Within the eld of research, thisthesis identi es the CDIS pricing models presented by Jackson (2005), Rutkowski & Armstrong (2009)and Morini & Brigo (2011) as the most recognized and developed. These models are evaluated byreconstruction in a numerical software environment.

To be competitive in the corporate climate of today it is important to have effective logistic activities. A common resource within the internal logistics is forklift trucks, which are used to lift and transport material. It becomes more and more important to decide whether to buy, lease or rent the forklifts to obtain an optimal economic situation. Many companies have issues with internal pricing. It is difficult to price products and services correctly. It is common to price the overall instead of what it really costs.The purpose of the thesis is to present a model for the acquisition of forklifts for internal logistic operations, regarding financing and internal pricing, to obtain economic effectiveness and an optimal forklift fleet size. The study focused on a specific research question, and for this purpose interviews with experts were held, observations were made and a literature study was done.

Active work to increase the efficiency of energy use is taking place in Sweden and throughout all of Europe. Electricity is an important part in our society?s energy system which means that the electrical grid operators and associated therewith has a central role in this work. Monitoring and controlling the electrical grids are managed from the distribution system operator?s DC, dispatch center.The aim of this report is to examine how the operations in a typical DC on the Swedish electricity distribution network will look like in five to ten years.

This bachelor thesis aims at investigate how a specified house can optimize its energy consumption.Today the house often stands for the major part of the energy consumption in a consumers? life,whereas an energy optimization creates economic as well as environmental advantages. It is importantto make old houses more energy efficient, but putting high energy demands on new houses could beargued to be more important. The installations functions as both the heart and brain in a house, thusmaking it important to energy optimize these. Since the background describes the importance ofenergy efficiency and optimization in a house, the focus area of this report will be an investigation ofdifferent types of heating systems in order to be able to choose the one most suited for the house.Aspects considered when choosing the heating system was how economic the system is both inservice- and investment costs and how environmental and operational friendly the system is.Through literature reviews there were sufficient information gathered that served as a foundation whencomparing and choosing between the four systems - district heating, pellet-fired boiler, geothermalheating and solar heating.

AbstractInterest in the subject appeared from real events. We seemed to discern a trend in society. Wehave noted that the amount of social enterprises to a greater extent is formed in Sweden.Companies like GodEl, Postkodslotteriet and DEM Collective are typical illustrations ofcompanies included in the category of social enterprise. It seemed as socially profiledcompanies is the new generation companies. The purpose of this essay is to make aninventory of possible competitive advantages that arise from social branding.

The aiming with this project is to find out if a small scale chicken production can be profitable, from day-old chicks to a processed smoked product out to stores and consumers. The products will not be available in the stores all the time because we will give the customers quality rather than quantity, so when the product can?t be found in the stores the customers will ask for it. The conclusion I found out is that it might be hard to raise chickens in these scale from an economic point of view the costs for transport, logistics, slaughter and marketing are to high..

The capacity to extract information from vehicles has the potential to be very beneficial. Performing analysis on information about fuel usage, emission values and other driving properties of a vehicle can lead to great economic and environmental benefits.This report contains descriptions of two prominent systems for retrieving information of this nature from a vehicle, On-Board Diagnostics and FMS-Standard, and of an implementation of FMS-Standard.The conclusion drawn after this investigation is that these systems do indeed offer access to the benefits mentioned earlier, although to varying degrees and with differing prioritisation..

Genom att utgå från Graham Allisons modell Organisational Behavior undersöker denna uppsats huruvida FN:s agerande vid grova brott mot mänskliga rättigheter, så som folkmord, förändrats på en tioårsperiod. Då FN inte är den ende aktör vid sådana kriser har vi valt att studera hur regionala organisationer (Organisationen för Afrikansk enhet/Afrikanska Unionen) samt enskilda stater ( USA) agerat i samma fall. Dessa undersöks utifrån Allisons modell Rational Actor. Genom att studera folkmordet i Rwanda och den humanitära krisen i Darfur ser vi hur omvärldens bemötande utvecklats. Trots att förutsättningar har förbättrats och erfarenheterna ökat kvarstår dock problematiken med att agera.