Today, we live in a consumption society. We buy products to soothe our needs and desires. Thru material things we can express our own personal identity and shopping is seen more as a pleasure than a need to survive. With the background media- and communication studies, the reason of this study was to explore how blogs as a social medium can influence the consumption ideal in society. With dialogical analysis and semiotic analysis we wanted to see if we could find a specific consumption culture in the content of six blogs we did our studies on. We found that the blogs showed us that there is normal to have everyday luxury and spoil oneself with expensive things.

AbstractAre we always aware of our actions and the affect they have on our environment? With this study we are exploring a phenomenon, called Jantelagen, which have affected the Swedish society for a long time. It is a phenomenon that where brought to life officially in the 1930?s by an author called Aksel Sandemose. We want to know if Jantelagen still exist in the society or if it has faded to the degree that it is no longer in use.

This work is an essay on language, multilingualism, and identity. My purpose in this work was to try and explore how today's young people views in their native language, identity and language development in a multicultural society. I was also interested in how young people find a balance between two very different cultures. Since my work will be based on interviews, I have chosen a qualitative approach. My choice of the qualitative method is primarily related to my purpose.

The society of consumption exposes us to a lot of information, where advertisement constitutes an extensive part. Due to its expanding, advertisement receives a natural and obvious space in our everyday life. This study aims to investigate how social and cultural values can be mediated in advertisement. The focus has been put to ideas related to health and fitness in the advertisement of power drinks. The thesis takes social constructionism as a starting point, and combines image- and critical discourse analysis in purpose to analyze the pictures.Sociology of consumption, construction of identity, lifestyle and everyday life all constitute an essential part of my analysis.

In 1989 the Cold War ended and in 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist, over night the ruling paradigm of International Relations was obsolete. What would happen now? Samuel Huntingtons answer was that in the future, cultural identity would be the most important factor behind international conflict. And that the threat of world war would come from clashes between civilizations instead of clashes between ideologies like during the cold war. Was he correct? This thesis is an attempt to find out if Huntingtons theory was right in its predictions of the world to come.

The prospect of Turkish accession to the EU has sparked controversy in many of the member countries. It has highlighted the different ways in which European as well as Turkish identity is being defined in the debate, with some politicians seemingly trying to draw on old prejudices in order to make the case against membership. By utilising discourse analysis as advocated by Thomas Diez, this thesis seeks to explore the debates regarding the Turkish accession bid in the British House of Commons. Its purpose is to analyse how ?EU? and ?Turkey?, understood as contested concepts, gets described in different ways.

The purpose of this examination was to find how supervisors interpreted the termsvocational identity and vocational culture, found in the diploma goals in workplace-based learning at the Child- and Recreation Programme. To reach the purpose, I formulated questions that I answered through a qualitative study. I made six interviews with pre-school teachers who had been supervisors for students at the Child- and Recreation Programme. The informants answered the same questions and the answers were recorded. The result of the study showed that the supervisors made a fairly consistent interpretation of the terms.

My interest in examining what happens when you as a teenager are exposed to five or six times the amount of time as ordinary classes to music education derrives from my own experience as a music teacher at a school which has those kind of special music classes. During my career as a music teacher in grades 4 ? 9 in Swedish compulsory school I have taught music classes as well as ordinary classes for 18 years. During this time I have often wondered what this exposure means in retrospect. Is it the conquering and mastering of music skills that students remember when they?ve grown up to young adults, or is it something else?The aim of this study is to find out what it means for teenagers to have music as a school subject every day of their years in Swedish high school.

The purpose of this paper was to analyse ?Identity- about trademarks, signs and symbols?. The project was a co-operation between the National museum of Art and Stockholm School of Economics in the spring of 2002, which consisted of an exhibition, a book and a series of seminars. The goal was to illustrate how the trademark had developed through history, which role it has in the modern society and how the trademark serves as a creator of identities. The project, mostly the exhibition, was exposed to criticism, which was directed towards the sponsorship deals between The National Museum of Art and five companies..

The physical environment is constructed of materials. The materiality of different places contributes to how places can be distinguished and the material can contribute to the construction of place identity. For architects with different orientations the material is one of the principal means by which they can express their idea. The material remains when the design process is finished and instead the material becomes a precondition for how people will perceive and deal with the place. The literature study of the essay examines how the concept of place and materiality is dealt with in different disciplines and how these descriptions are linked to the concept of place identity.

This study represents seven adolescents? perspective on online poker gambling. The purpose of this study is to analyze and describe adolescents? thoughts and experiences of online poker gambling, thus gaining a deeper knowledge and understanding of how gambling affects youths in their living conditions and in their identity development. This was done by studying the symbolism and meaning that gambling has in these youths every day live and in their identity development.

This essay is an in-depth, qualitative study concerned with questions about female ?class-travellers?. A class-traveller is a person who is born and raised in a particular social class but changes his/her social belonging through studies, marriage etc. In this study I have interviewed three female class-travellers, all of which have made their ?journey? through studies at the University of Lund.The study is an attempt to enrich the research-field of class-travelling by applying a feminist perspective, and by making women's voices about class-travelling heard.

We consider the meaning of leisure time for the human linguistic and cultural development of great meaning, in particular association with bilingual. We are both bilingual and have had the privilege to use and develop our knowledge likewise our experience during our education.The purpose with our school essay is to investigate what the youth tell us about their bilingual development outside School time. Our target group is Albanian-/Swedish speakers from upper secondary youth. Based on our own experience we know that upper secondary School contributes to an increasing awareness about themself and their own language and identity.In our empirical study, have we used qualitative strategy and build our interview guide on the basis of the semi structural method. Furthermore we have carried out two different group interviews which consisted each between 6-7 interviewees.

The purpose of this thesis is to show what advantages and opportunities social media offer for B2B-companies (business-to-business), and how they can be used for marketing communications.We have studied how companies can use social media, for example evolving the organization, developing products/services, staying up-to-date, building relations, creating customer loyalty and engagement, building the company?s identity and image, and affecting the buying decisions. We have also studied how B2B-companies can choose media channels, set goals, and measure the results.We have carried out interviews, through phone and visits, with four chosen companies that fit our criterias: Swedish B2B-company that is successful in social media.The result of the interviews show that B2B-companies use social media for various purposes, for example networking (to create and build long term relations with other companies) and to improve the company?s image among the end customers. Most of our interviewees reach their end customers (consumers) in first place and customers (companies) in second place, since many B2B-companies do not yet use social media.Half of our respondents mention that social media should not be used for advertising and campaigns (one way communication).

Suicidology deals a lot with taking into consideration significant symptoms, risk factors and establishing causal relationships which inevitably are very important for suicide prevention. But do we understand the suicide attempters better thereby? The aim with the study is to elucidate the meaning of the lived suicidal experience that is expressed by participants on an Internet forum. Ten participants' texts which concerned own suicidality were chosen out from this Internet forum and were analyzed and interpreted on the basis of a phenomenological hermeneutical method inspired by Ricoeur (1976). The result established twelve themes that with the aid of Heidegger (1993) and Derrida (1978, 1991) led to that the following conclusions could be drawn about the meaning of the suicidal lifeworld: suicidal concern and care in itself reduces the sense of identity, practical suicidal doing in itself reduces the world, sense of identity is more affected by the future than the present and the past, the death is escaped from through a calculating determination to have the death at one's disposal, inability to turn away from the death increases oscillating between states of emotions, the surrounding world's requirement to avoiding death becomes to a compulsion to isolate one self; and finally: to both feel anxiety in front of one self's own death and dread when escaping from it..