In June 2006 the Council of the European Union agreed on the review of the EU sustainable development strategy. This renewed strategy voices a commitment to sustainable development that includes a diverse list of safeguarded interests. Sustainability is to be attained in the spheres of democracy, solidarity, the rule of law, gender equality and at the same time it should promote a dynamic economy. Given this multifunctional application of sustainable development, curiosity may soon give rise to questions such as; What is the legal significance of the concept? Is it to be considered a general principle of Community law? And can it be used as an instrument in adjudication and legal reasoning? Anyone who looks deeper into the concept of sustainable development is soon to find a labyrinthine complex of ideas, expressions and opinions.

The purpose of this report was to investigate how the Umeå School of Business and Economics at Umeå university can work to increase the share of courses and programmes that discuss sustainable development. Furthermore the purpose was to develop an action plan that can be used to increase that share. Methods used were a questionnaire directed towards the educators at the Umeå School of Business and Economics and an assessment of the content of courses and programmes connected to the Umeå School of Business and Economics. There was no clear structured way of working with education for sustainable development, but at the same time there was a will to integrate sustainable development in the education. Curricula were according to the educators an important tool to achieve this integration, their experience were that there are not enough time, people and money to work with sustainable development in the education and they would like to see more clear directions from the management.

The Thesis purpose is in the context of system development validate the Scrum Methodology. Projects concerning information technology are difficult to manage and tend to fail in quality, time or costs. Scrum presents a new view of the system development. Better cooperation between customers and developers, continuous follow-up on daily basis and extensive communication in the development team are all characteristics of Scrum. Scrum is described as a new paradigm by its founders but has been criticized by experts of system development too.

Syftet med den här magisteruppsatsen är att få en bild av hur skolledare och lärare ser på kommunikationsformen medarbetarsamtalet, kopplat till skolutveckling, i den svenska gymnasieskolan. Uppsatsen följer en fenomenologisk forskningsansats, i vilken en etnografisk modell med åtta kvalitativa intervjuer av tre skolledare och fem lärare på två gymnasieskolor setts som en fallstudie. Materialet har analyserats med hjälp av en narrativ metod och kritisk diskursanalys (CDA) och resultatet visar att skolledare och lärare talar om skolutveckling på disparata sätt i medarbetarsamtalet men också att förberedelser och feedback på medarbetarsamtalet skiljer sig åt och upplevelsen av medarbetarsamtalet är därför att det inte påverkar skolutvecklingen på de två gymnasieskolorna..

If one looks at physical planning in Sweden today one can see that while talking about densification of existing development, reduced emissions and careful use of important land, urban sprawl is a fact with development of sheer residential districts in the urban edges and shopping malls in each and every municipality. As sustainable development is an essential goal for physical planning to strive towards, it is worth questioning if the direction of today?s planning will lead to the goal. A sustainable development can be seen as an obvious to goal aim at. In reality the aim means a hard and complex work.

In today?s tough business environment the need for good and efficient leaders are becoming more and more important. The businesses are in constant change, the world is more unpredictable and the competences of the employees are much greater today, which also calls for a new type of leader, a leader who not only is authoritarian, but also possesses soft skills. In this environment where there is this greater focus on leaders, leadership developments have emerged and increased in number over the last ten to twenty years. They try to develop leaders in all domains of their life, both professional and personal and the model we work with in this paper is Total Leadership, this model implies that you try to accomplish being a better leader throughout your whole life as a leader, to be whole, genuine and innovative, no matter career or position in life.

In recent years more and more people have been sick-listed due to stress and it has happened to more women than men. The purpose of this paper is to see if recoveringfrom stress related states of ill-health can be promoted through participation in a stress management course. Five women who were or had been sick-listed and had participated in the life management course were interviewed. The results show that the course was an important forum for expressing emotions. The participants were more positive about the future after than before they entered the course.

The aim of this thesis is to study discursive change in the Swedish environmental political discourse between 1987-2005. The text of three Swedish budget propositions are analysed for this purpose.The results from the analysis are related to a few relevant theoretical perspectives that hold partly different views on what constitutes ?sustainable development? and ?ecological modernization?. Through these theories the thesis continues the discussion around the two central but somewhat blurry terms sustainable development and ecological modernization. The aim of this discussion is to conclude whether the discursive change in Swedish environmental politics can be said to go more in the direction of sustainable development or ecological modernization, or if elements of both perspectives can be found.The analysis shows that the Swedish environmental discourse has come to include more and more political fields such as general welfare politics, during the period.

This study aim to investigate the conditions framing the professional development situation for physical education teachers (PE) in a small municipality in the south of Sweden. The Swedish National Agency for Education declare that "focus must be directed towards strengthening the teachers' profession", and that "schools need well-trained teachers and good teaching to help students achieve good results". The study focuses both the schools? contribution and the way in which the teachers take own initiative and are motivated to develop their professional skills. The investigation is all based on teachers' perspectives.

AbstractEssay in Political Science, C ? level, by Ylva Björkegren, spring semester 2008. Tutor: Anna Spånning. ?Sida from a liberal feministic perspective.

The objective of this graduate work is to gain a better understanding in how pre-school educators are able to work with music in their pre-school activity to promote child development. We also want to enlighten possible factors for the development of children based on music and to form our own ideas of whether teachers choose to apply music in their didactic practice or not.The point of this essay has been to attempt answering on what importance music makes for children's development and learning in pre-school, and how teachers could work with music in pre-school in order to promote children?s development. Our data consists of six interviews and two observations realized at a pre-school in Södertälje.We took heed from the theories laid out by Lev Vygotsky's which describe four different levels of development that includes educational development in social interaction between teacher and child. Our choice of this theory is inspired by our seeking deeper understanding of Vygotsky's theory´s application to the aesthetic approach in the interaction in meaning making and learning.The result of our study confirms previous theory and research in that music as a form of expression has a major impact on children's development.

Through a sociocultural perspectivethe purpose of this study is to investigate how preschool teachers look at quality development in preschool and how they perceive their participation in this development.I have used a qualitative method based on five interviews with preschool teachers from three different parts of Sweden. I used an interview guide with open questions. The interview answers were categorized in themes based on the responses which were most frequent. In the result I have been using an analysis based on these themes. The result showed that the preschool teachers consider that the leadership style affects their work.

The aim of this study is to investigate how employees in consulting companies develop their competence in order to perform their daily work. The focus is on informal competence development. The theoretical framework consists of theories concerning learning and competence development in working life, theories on organizational change and evaluation, a well as professional reflection. The methods applied are narrative research and interviews based on the assumption that knowledge about reality is only obtainable through language and communication.The main results show that competence is developed through experience, social interaction, communication and dialog with co-workers and customers. The post-modern conceptions of the rapid (technical) development and need to be up-to-date has a strong hold on the informants apprehension of working life, as does the notion of not having enough time for all the competence development they would like.

Title: Multi channel publishing: a qualitative study on how Norrköpings Tidningen publishes news in multiple channelsAuthor: Roland AlbinssonThesis supervisor: Per-Anders ForstorpBackground: In this day and age, the media is omnipresent and a part of our daily life. The phenomenon of media convergence can be traced back to the birth of the internet, and today all of the major newspapers have a website of their own. As a result of multichannel publishing, consumers have a wide range of tv channels to choose from, but there is still uncertainty as to whether more channels automatically equates to more and better news. There is no doubt about the fact that multi channel publishing is a necessary survival skill for media conglomerates today, but effects such as news recycling and the concentration of ownership are in conflict with the consumers? availability demands.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to, by means of a case study, describe how NT?s multi channel publishing is an expression of media convergence, as well as to study how the news are affected by multi channel publishing.Research procedure: This study is based on three different research methods, observations, text analyses and qualitative interviews.

During the last decade working with competence has emerged as a more strategically important area. Today the human resources in a company are considered a competitive advance and the HR-units play a significant role when it comes to HR-management. Different motives for investing in strategies that promote competence development and learning also exist. The purpose of this paper was to examine how the process of competence development was managed at a large global company. The empirical material consisted of four persons who were interviewed and the analysis of the material was inspired by grounded theory.From the analysis four major themes or core factors emerged as central to the interviewed persons' understanding of the competence development process; solid preparatory work in relation to competence development, communication, awareness of responsibilities and finally the taking action and evaluation of the action.