The overarching goal of this paper is to explain the intensive occurrence of partnerships ? regarded as a specific organizational structure ? in the formulation and implementation of Regional Growth Programs.By using theoretical concepts from new institutionalism, the paper tries to examine the explanatory capacity of this theory in the specific case of partnerships. The basis is a skeptical stance towards the conventional interpretation that views partnerships as rational organizational tools. Hence, the purpose of the paper is also to compare our own institutional explanation with the conventional.The paper finds that the occurrence of partnerships can be understood as the effect of an intensive institutional pressure. The government has, in what we regard as the institution for regional development, prescribed the partnership as a rational solution ? a rationalized myth - to the regional growth problem.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) promotes the Ecosystem Approach (EA). In this thesis it is analyzed how the EA approach could be applied to regional management of coastal areas in Sweden. The aim of this report is to compare management for preserving biodiversity on a landscape level in two regional coastal areas in Uppsala and Västra Götaland respectively. In Uppsala, one of the plans consists of a previous nature reserve and in Västra Götaland, a Regional landscape strategy has been established. The ecosystem approach is used as a theoretical framework in this thesis.

The aim of this Bachelor's thesis is to examine library directors'views on weeding in Swedish public libraries. The researchquestions posed are: What formal goals and criteria govern theweeding process?; How are these goals and criteria accountedfor?; How do the library directors view the weeding in relationto the roles of the collections?The theoretical framework consists of a division of weedingcriteria inspired by Stanley J. Slote, and a slight adaptation ofMichael K. Buckland's roles of collections.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how key performance indicators are being used as performance management tools within the production industry. Specifically the purpose is to investigate how the KPI:s within the telecommunications industry drives reusability regarding production test systems. This thesis will also highlight today?s cost models and suggest improvements of the KPI and what new ones could be introduced. A case study at Ericsson AB has been performed.

In today?s world there are plenty of technological tools and methods available with the purpose to increase peoples motivation for a healthier lifestyle. One such tool is a so-called activity tracker which uses sensors to log the user's everyday life and present it as automatic feedback. Gamification is a new and successful method to motivate and engage people in fulfilling tasks by using game elements and mechanics. In this study, five participants were instructed to use the activity tracker and pedometer Fitbit Flex daily for three weeks. Halfway through the study the participants were ranked and listed against each other in a ranking list in order to evoke competition.

The aim of this study was to investigate how four families in the Stockholm area reason, what kind of preconception they have and what their horizon of expectations is when they make the choice between sending their children to the profile class of municipal/free schools and sending them to the general classes in those schools. The main research questions asked were:What kind of preconception do the parents have about profile classes?What reasons do the interviewed parents have to send their children to a profile class?What are the interviewed parent?s expectations of the profile class choice?The study is built on qualitative interviews with the parents of the families. The empirical data has been analyzed using a framework of theories drawing on the theory of reproduction, the forms of social capital, the ideas created from the word profile and elite and the horizon of expectations. The results show that the parents of the families have a similar degree of preconception about profile classes.

AbstractIn the paper, democracy's development and change are studied in Swedish textbooks related to social science. The study?s starting point is that the picture of democracy provided to students has changed over time. The study aims to see how the view on democracy has altered in Swedish textbooks in social science. In order to examine this, I have studied seven textbooks, from 1945 to 2006, in social science.

Swedish school children's results have deteriorated in recent years and formative assessment is, in accordance with previous research, a way to develop students' learning and performance. A part of formative assessment is based on feedback that students should receive before, during and after a new assignment. In this study, we want to find out how students and teachers apprehend students' development in relation to feedback and what general attitudes towards feedback can be seen in both parties. The literature and theory discussed is linked to formative assessment, both at international and national level where many important aspects of formative assessment are essential in relation to pupils' further development. The theories are based heavily on human interaction and socio-cultural perspective as a concept.

A prerequisite of an international exchange of information is multilingual tools for information retrieval, such as the multilingual thesaurus. There is an ongoing discussion about the construction of, and the guidelines for, multilingual thesauri. In recent years the praxis as defined in ISO 5964 Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri 1985 has been the topic of a scientific discussion. It has been about how equivalence across languages is to be established when it comes to concepts, terms and relational structures. This masters thesis treats the praxis and practice of multilingual thesaurus construction.

Multi-brand portfolios are characterized by comprising many brands in the same product category. Companies that have chosen to organize their products according to this strategy are facing both possibilities, such as expanding the accessible market size, and challenges such as how to organize the brands, their individual roles and their relation and position to the other brands in the category to maximize revenues. To address these aspects of multi-brand portfolios, I have investigated four product categories where multiple brands are represented at Mölnlycke Health Care, Unilever, Fagerhult and L?Oréal; how the multi-brand portfolios are organized, how the segmentation, positioning and product differentiation are done and what advantages and disadvantages that are associated with this strategy. My conclusions are that multi-brand portfolios can be organized in many different ways and to become successful, they have to be set in relation to the company?s whole brand architecture.

Incident response plans are faced with new challenges as organisations expands to the cloud, this thesis aims to highlight these challenges and their potential solutions. Our work has focused on managing the incident response in contrast to earlier work that has been focusing on preventing them.As with any development, security is seldom prioritized. Instead the focus are often aimed towards usability and functionality, which means incident response plans are written, implemented, forgotten and finally becomes obsolete. This could result in an organization losing their ability to produce acceptable forensic images, avoid severe downtime, or prevent similar incidents in the future, which are all important parts of incident response.Traditional incident response plans does not address incidents in the cloud. Thus, an absence of guidelines for managing incidents in the cloud becomes apparent.

The Motor Group of the European Council was commissioned in the autumn of 1997 to prepare a proposal for a new European Bus and Coach Directive. In the beginning, most of the Member States did not have the accessibility requirements as their main concern; still a smaller network with actors from the National delegations from Britain, Germany and Sweden would influence the other National delegations in the Council group to finally agree to retain the requirement of accessibility of the Directive. Within the EU decision process, the European Disability movement acted as a strong player during the whole negotiation process using the proposal to a new Bus and Coach Directive as a tool to influence key actors to go towards a Directive with a strong approach for accessibility.Policy Transfer and Policy Transfer Network are used as analytical tools to understand and structure the transfer of the question of accessibility during the negotiation process. Actors understanding how the bureaucratic process works within the EU decision system have a chance to contributing for the changes in the directions they wishes for within a range of policy areas. The principal aim of the Directive was to guarantee the safety of passengers and to provide technical prescription in particular to wheelchair users.

The purpose of this study was to look for tendencies that social media can contribute to exposing users to a stronger perception of opinion polarization, and further to see if the daily presence of social networking sites can put normative pressure on the users. The study was made using a survey with participants from Umea? University during the time frame of november-december 2014. The theoretical framework behind the study was mainly drawn from The Spiral Of Silence by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and was further supplemented with more current research, studying the effects from The Spiral Of Silence in the modern and more fragmented media landscape that exists now then when her theory was written. Further theoretical tools for analysis of the results came from Michel Foucault and his discussions in Discipline and punish, specifically his views on how surveillance can be discontinous in practice, but still permanent in it?s effects.The results of this study indicates that social media users tend to isolate themselves from uncomfortable opinions, and do not follow or read opinions they do not already agree with.

AbstractEvidence based research has shown that organized parent support programmes have a goodeffect in strengthening the role of the parent and preventing problems during growth. Thisin turn has a great significance for Public Health.Komet is one of the evidence based programmes used in Sweden, based on Americanprogrammes and adapted to Swedish conditions.This qualitative study consists of interviews with six children between six and nine yearswith behaviour problems, whose parents have taken part in the Komet programme.With Grounded Theory as research approach the children?s experiences of the programmeand relations within the family have been looked into and analysed.The result of this study suggests that a space for growth of their own is a common need ofthe children, and that this can be achieved by giving them the opportunity to function in afamily environment where they are seen and understood.The Komet programme contributed to this by giving the family tools to strengthen relationswithin the family, create calm and make the children more visible.The self image of the children in this study had improved which gave them more room togrow in a strengthened family situation. This in turn improved conditions for good feelings,and sense of well being, of importance for child development and health..

This paper discusses honour related crimes and the judicial process within the legal system in a Swedish context. The empirical base of the study is four cases, with an honour background, and we have used discourse analysis as our method. We have developed four tools for analysing the sentences with which we observed aspects such as; language, the roles of victim and perpetrator that the involved can undertake, the different identities that the sentence might create and finally how the stories change when they enter the legal context. We connect our results to our theoretic backgrounds such as Kolfjord who discusses the legalization of conflicts, the holistic and individual perspective, the legal system as a theoretic background and finally the UN:s definition of honour crimes. These four theoretic perspectives have helped analyse the empiric base.