The purpose of this study is to find the virtue ethics John Bunyan presents in Pilgrim´s Progress part 1, compared with the virtues Max Weber presents, and then try Weber´s theory on the empirical data, Pilgrim´s Progress. When I compare the virtues in Weber´s theory with the virtues in Pilgrim´s Progress, I interpret Weber´s theory as limited. From Weber´s theory emerges the puritan virtues: fulfillment of duty, struggle, self-control and live simply. He also mentions gratitude to God and helpfulness to other people, but this is shown through work in the society. These virtues can also be found in Pilgrim´s Progress.

The study aims to investigate student participation as a tool for democratic development in secondary school from a student perspective. Furthermore, students' perceptions of the school's work with student participation in formal and informal contexts are also investigated, with basis in the teaching structure. The results are based on interviews conducted with students who all attend the same class in their last year of high school. Subsequently, an analysis is made based mainly on three different theories: democracy, curricula and sociocultural theory. The result shows that students feel that they are able to practice student participation but the amount of influence they get differs between individuals depending on devotion and commitment.

Blekinge Hospital suffers from a budget shortage of 100 million SEK, while the government now requires that hospitals will no longer be running a deficit. Blekinge Hospital will then use their limited resources to survive in the future and the activity must be enhanced in order to keep costs low without having to lay off personnel. The idea is that the organisation should be more efficient with a more efficient resource usage. Performance measurement systems are important tools for achieving the policies set out within an organization, measuring and evaluating performance is a way to see where improvements in efficiency may be necessary in the business. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is one of several measuring systems, where the focus is on measuring non-financial performances.

Lean is a production philosophy which is about increased resource use while meeting customer requirements. The foundation of lean comes from Toyota and their production philosophy The Toyota Way. Professor Jeffrey k. Liker has worked with Toyota's production philosophy and Lean for a long time and has created a 4 P model and 14 principles that characterize the Toyota production system (TPS), which many sources refer to.The aim of my work is to study the working procedure of asphalt projects from sales to the laid asphalt with a focus on planning and production management. The goal is to examine how the lean philosophy can be applied in planning and production to simplify the flow of asphalt projects based on Likers model and principles.

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.

This thesis examines the verification of the terms and conditions stated in contracts based on the Public Procurement Act. In March 2013 the Swedish state procurement commission released " Good Business - A Strategy for Sustainable Public Procurement " (SOU 2013:12), which found that the proportion of control and verification is relatively low. The thesis examine how verification is carried out and looks for an explanation to why verification is not more oftenly performed. To answer these questions two care studies, based on seven semi-structured interviews, is presented as the empirical material. Network theory has been used to analyse the empirical results, and aspects of commonly used theories such as contract management and "Markets and Hierarchies" by Williamson has also been taken into account.

Resource-based learning or problem-oriented learning are teaching methods that are becoming more and more common in schools today. In order to make these teaching methods work there is a demand to make students information literate. The aim of this thesis is to find out how six teachers at six senior high schools apprehend their professional role of seeking, preparing and developing the course in history of literature. I have used phenomenography which is both a set of theoretical assumptions and a methodology. This means that by doing a limited number of qualitative interviews one is able to describe the variations of the conceptions that have emerged.

This study deals with Swedish nuclear-energy politics from 1980 to 2006. The purpose is to trace and to explain change and stability in three political parties? rhetoric concerning the phase-out of Swedish nuclear-energy and the Swedish government?s nuclear politics. Two hypotheses based on path dependency theory are tested to analyze if rhetoric and politics are developing in separate directions. The first hypothesis is based on the idea that earlier promises from the political parties affect what promises they can make later on.

Homeless adolescents are in Sweden rather invisible, as a group. There is no established definition or description of the problem, nor any uniform terms regarding it. The purpose of this study is to investigate how four different organizations, based on their basic principles, describe the group homeless adolescents. We discuss why the organizations reason as they do, and what it leads to. In order to do so we have performed qualitative interviews with representatives from each organization.

Based on an analytical overview of post-Communist civil society development in Russia, the present thesis attempts a critical discussion of general civil society theory from the perspective of its relevance for the case study in question. The text consists of three closely interconnected, mutually reinforcing parts. In the first part, major issues of current civil society research are being thematically presented and discussed. The second part concerns itself with the case study as such. It is divided into two parts, one dealing with the relations between state and civil society in Russia, the other with civil society and the individual.

The regime theory is the dominant paradigm in the studies of urban politics in USA. It provides a set of concepts to analyse the change from government to governance in the American local politics. The regime theory postulates that governing power in local government tends to be highly fragmented. The private sector has with its control of economic resources a major influence in shaping governing decisions. In this essay I study the regime theory in a Swedish context to investigate if the theory is pertinent when studying of Swedish local governance.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka vilken affärsmodell som born globals använder vid internationalisering och vilka faktorer som påverkar valet av modell. Studien har använt sig av en kvalitativ forskningsmetod och har genomförts som en fallstudie. Vidare utgörs studien av semistrukturerade intervjuer. Studien kommer fram till att born globals vid internationalisering har en affärsmodell som a?r freemium och att det resursbaserade synsättet samt bransch är viktiga bakomliggande faktorer till valet av affärsmodell. Faktorerna globalisering och entrepenören har mindre direkt påverkan medan nätverk endast har en begränsad påverkan i valet av affärsmodell för born globals vid internationalisering. .

This thesis focuses on the perception of immigration and refugees in the commonEuropean refugee and immigration policy. It identifies different discourses andstudies their development and interrelated power structures.Using the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, documents from theEuropean Council, the Commission, the Justice and Home Affairs Council andParliament debates are analysed. The study is defined in the time span of 1999-2006, i.e. from the European Council's first agreement on developing a commonEuropean asylum system, following the period up till today.Four discourses are distinguished, focusing respectively on rights, security,European Union's needs, and cultural identity. I use Sandra Lavenex theory ofrealism and idealism to analyse one of the main points in the thesis: There is afundamental schism between the one rights-based discourse, focusing on universalhuman rights, and the three sharing a particularistic focus on immigration as asecurity concern.

The aim of this qualitative study was to explore which inner conceptions about the abused older women the professional social workers had and how they experienced the enconter of an abused old woman in an intimate partner relation. The theoretical background is social construction by Berger and Luckmann. This theory was uset to analyze the transcribed interviews. This study is based on nine interviews with five professionals in social services, three volunteers from the voluntary sector and one social worker who worked in a community based support group for abused older women. The result of this study shows that older women were often abused, by a relative they were dependent on, in their home.

The purpose of the Sharing Economy is to exploit unused resources between people, as an alternative to buying new and owning themselves (Gansky, 2010). Gansky (2010) argues that a major reason why the Sharing Economy has grown in recent times is, besides from the recession and people?s increased environmental awareness, the urbanization which has made people move closer to each other and in to the big cities. This in addition to an increased use of GPS technology in smartphones enables people to be constantly connected to an ever-changing network. People now share and exchange services and products from each other.