Ever since Lipsky wrote about street-level bureaucrats in 1980 the main belief has been that certain characteristics of their jobs make it exceptionally difficult to severely reduce their discretion. However, discretion comes at a price and if public servants abuse their power the legitimacy of government is at risk and ultimately even the democracy.This thesis address this question by analysing the Swedish employment service which in the beginning of 2001 started a project called ?Af Sverige? trying to improve internal rule of law. By comparing two local and fairly equal jobcentres and how the street-level bureaucrats within use their discretion, I seek to find support for my hypotheses that organizing local jobcentres according to the principles of machine bureaucracy plays a significant part in reducing discretion.My findings show that a jobcentre characterised by strict rules, few units, good communications and a forthright manager who delegates formal power to the employees results in a stricter and more uniform application of regulations among the street-level bureaucrats. My conclusion is therefore unambiguous.

Theft without break-ins has increased significantly in the last year of swimming, sports and leisure facilities in Karlskrona, more precisely 60%. Vandalism in the shape of graffiti is another common crime. The solutions are divided into social and situational crime prevention. Social crime prevention engage in actions that are based on social causes of crime rather than the opposite situational crime prevention, which instead assumes that discourage with the help of technical solutions and has as primary objective to hinder accessibility for example theft friendly goods. The main purpose of this work is to come up with solutions to prevent these crimes, while also being cost-effective and realistic to implement. The work is important in that it creates safety awareness and promotes a healthy safety culture. Moreover, the future goal is to lower these statistics. The goal of the work is in addition to developing our knowledge of crime subject, was also to provide help and solutions for our clients.

approaching Boden deals with the approaching of a city, both in a physical sense ? along the road ? and in a spiritual sense ? in mind. The physical encounter with a city is represented by the experience of the road and its surroundings, while the spiritual encounter is represented by the idea of the city that we already have, or will get, in our minds. We have in this degree project approached Boden through a thoroughly analysis of both the entrance roads and the city itself. In this degree project we are looking for ways of how to create characteristic and interesting entrance roads to a city, with Boden as an example. This demands knowledge about the problems involving entrance roads as well as the distinctive features of the city.

Change is inevitable when software is built and deployed. It?s not particularly problematic to manage change if there is just one system. But in a large global IT organization, with several systems and people who develop, problems may arise. If organizations don?t control change, change will control the organization.

The aim of our study is to ascertain whether a hanging suspension fluorescentlamp for a private home environment is going to be attractive for a largeaudience. We want to open up for new uses of fluorescent lamps as lightsources.The main approach in this work is how to design a fixture with fluorescentlamps as a light source that will meet the requirements and requests of thehome environment could look like. At the same time we want to make a newimpression of how a fluorescent light source.Primarily we used a quantitative method, but this was rejected after a pilotstudy. Instead we used a qualitatively based method in the sense that weconducted a group interview as well as individual interviews.Based on data from the interviews and our preliminary work a prototype wasbuilt. This prototype is a fluorescent fixture equipped with 2x14W T5fluorescent lamps, dimmed separately.

The aim of this two years master´s thesis is to examine discourses about electronic books in relation to libraries that occur in the Swedish library journal Biblioteksbladet by using critical discourse analysis (CDA). The thesis also aims to discuss changes in the discourse practice, and discuss the relationship between discourse practice and social practice in the field of library and information science (LIS). A main point of CDA is that language is a form of social practice that helps shape social reality. Furthermore the concept of ideology, as understood with-in CDA, brings understanding to the way discursive events help reproduce and transform social relations of pow-er. The text samples span from 2005 up to and including 2011 and were examined by using Norman Fairclough´s three-dimensional conception of discourse, which allows for interpretation of text on a linguistic, discursive and social level.The result of the analysis showed that there are several different discourses about electronic books and li-braries, none of which can be said to be particularly representative.

A fauna passage is a way for animals to cross roads separated from the traffic. In Sweden, there are an unknown number of passages with different functions and appearances. These passages would, with the question ?Which fauna passages can be found in Sweden, and how well do they work?? as a base, be compiled in a comparable way. This would be done with a number of questions asked to the different regions of Vägverket.

This study aims to investigate whether or how the tour operator Fritidsresors customers gets affected by their sustainable environmental work and what kinds of effects the work has generated. A secondary data analysis of Fritidsresors website has been made, and an in-depth interview with Fritidsresors sustainability manager. Also a quantitative survey was conducted by fifty respondents, all customers of Fritidsresor. The answers have since been interpreted and processed in accordance with a comparative and phenomenological approach and with an exploratory purpose. Scientific articles have been studied and analyzed in order to generate an explanation for the phenomenon as a research field, and how previous research has looked.

The aim of this study is to describe how nature is portrayed in swedish poet and critic Aase Berg?s two earliest poetry collections, Hos rådjur (1997) and Mörk materia (1999), and how it relates to notions of humanity, culture and civilisation. The concept of ?nature? is problematized in a short survey of how it has been used by and critizised in ecocritical literary theory, which is used as the main theoretical framework for this survey, with an emphasis on selected theoretical concepts by Donna Haraway. As a methodological starting point, ?nature? is tentatively defined as ?that which does not let itself be subsumed under the human, culture or civilisation?, and this definition is contrasted with how the concepts are handled in the texts.The investigation shows that the relationship of nature to the human is a fundamental theme that provides a structure for both poetry collections.

Computers and business systems are used more frequently in a world where IT gradually is taking over. This is also true when it comes to the real estate valuation process where actors on the Swedish real estate market are using automatic valuation systems for real estate appraisal. But the real estate agents have not yet seen the charm in using these automatic valuation systems for real estate appraisal. Can the real estate agents also use the automatic valuation systems? We developed our three main subjects: the valuation process, an automatic valuation system and the real estate market with assistance from scientific articles.

AbstractAuthors: Carolina Magnusson and Johanna MagnussonTitle:  The balance between research and practice. A study of family therapist?s knowledge retrieval and the application of evidence-based practice.Supervisor: Jan Petersson Assessor: Peter HultgrenDuring our research we discovered that a very small amount of research had been conducted about the effect of the social services. It inspired us to fulfill this study. The aim of the study is to describe and analyze what knowledge family therapists in two Swedish municipalities use in family therapy work.

The purpose with this study was to systematically examine scientific studies of audiologic group rehabilitation. The definition of audiological rehabilitation was explored, different variables that influence the result and how the outcome measures should be done and its relationship with the goals of audiologic rehabilitation. The method used was a literature study. Pubmed and Cinahl were used for the search of literature. Some articles were searched from scientific studies reference lists and also advice from the supervisor.The result from the different studies shows that the effect of rehabilitation varies as there are many aspects that have an affect on the outcome measure.

No accidents or injuries should occur because of our public health care. It should be a place with high security and good quality in order to avoid this type of accidents. This is a tough situation when the public health care organization should have as good quality as possible despite savings. It is difficult for middle managers to improve patient safety in the absence of money.The purpose of this study is to explain the work with patient safety that middle manager perform during saving times. The perspective we will look into is how they work with patient safety as an ongoing change.

Background: Inter-organisational ways of working have become more and more common during the last decades. In order to attain efficiency and productivity, such inter-organisational relationships need to be governed and controlled. However, studies have shown that inadequate control is one of the main reasons for why inter-organisational relationships fail. One of the means that can be used for governing and controlling a business is management control. The use of management control in inter-organisational contexts is a quite unexplored area of research at the present time, which might seem somewhat surprising considering the fact that inadequate control is a common explanation for why inter-organisational relationships fail.

Background: The construction industry is Sweden?s single most important industry branch with a significant influence on Sweden?s wealth. The political restrictions that once controlled the industry are today almost gone. This combined with an unbalanced supply and demand situation on the Swedish constructions market, caused by urbanisation, has led to increased pressure on the Swedish construction companies who now are forced to find new methods in their struggle to contain or increase their competitive advantage. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to survey: which strategic variables are of great importance in today?s Swedish construction industry with focus on the four main actors, JM, NCC, PEAB and Skanska.