The distance between home and work has increased in recent decades. By the development of infrastructure and public transport, jobs farther from home have become more accessible and this development has in turn increased commuting. Commuting travellers often pass over administrative boundaries which often serve as borders for public transport pricing. Also the market control prices. Research shows that travel times and costs significantly affect commuting choice.

?Facebook has become as natural as having a phone? The use of social media in three libraries in the Umeå region ? an evaluationSocial media has come to be an integral part of people?s everyday life, as well as the business world in terms of communication and marketing. More and more libraries also embark in the use of social media, and the purpose of this study is to evaluate the use of social media in three libraries in the Umeå region. The libraries all use Facebook as their current, primary social media. Thus this study focuses partly on the analysis of the content on each library?s Facebook page, and partly on the experiences of the responsible librarians. The evaluation is based on a mix of existing tools in evaluating social media that are relevant in a library context.

This survey is a text analysis of 4 teaching books during a ten years period in Social studies from a multicultural and intercultural perspective. Taking as a starting point that society and the school in today?s Sweden are multicultural and in need of more intercultural teaching I explore teaching books in social science to se how they relate to Sweden as a multicultural society and their way of relating to intercultural teachings and compare them. The questions asked are: How do the different books describe the multicultural society in Sweden? What kind of intercultural tools are found in the books? And are there any similarities or differences among these books? The theories used as a starting point are reformulated by the author after theories of Von Wright and Lahdenperä to fit in to the context of a text analysis of teaching books and the method used is a content analysis with its purpose of describing how the books are constructed.

The aim of this thesis was to study how social workers in social services in several municipalities perceive that they interpret the concept of domestic violence and how they believe they would act when it comes to different types of domestic violence. The thesis has focused on three types of violence; physical, psychological and economical. Seven social workers were interviewed with a thematised interview guide and six vignettes. The theoretical perspectives applied in the analysis were the process of normalization and the continuum of violence. The results showed that the social workers did not interpret domestic violence unanimous, and they had different ideas of how they would act in the vignettes.

To achieve a working collaboration in a big, complex organization where there are vast requirements on both quality and profitability is not always an easy task. An example of this is the organization that was created in the Swedish railway industry following a series of deregulations during the past 25 years. A partial market in this organization is the railway maintenance. In order to achieve a working collaboration between actors in this organization the so-called Purchaser-provider model (PPM) is presently used for the procurement of rail maintenance projects. Previous research has shown that this market-based instrument has clear positive effects regarding the cost-efficiency but hinders the collaboration.

Today many sociologists speak about the modern world and the god and bad that it brings. In association to this discussion there is a tendency to speak about an increased individualization, a process that often also means more choices and possibilities. But in addition to this follows a big responsibility for how we choose to live our lives, since our choices not seldom also influences other people, both locally and globally. The aim of this essay is to investigate the importance of non-profit organizations with social direction in our Swedish welfare society and thereby also in a modern world where people's individual choices are becoming all more important. In order to answer my main issue I have implemented thirteen qualitative interviews, of which ten of the informers are from different non-profit organizations and three from different stately authorities.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine how The Trilogy of Pippi Longstocking, written by the author Astrid Lindgren, has been received by the critics in the Swedish daily press. A second aim is to examine how the critics could be of importance for the consecration of Pippi as a literary character. The study is mainly based on reviews from the daily press with nationwide coverage. The theoretical framework consists of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu?s theories of the literary field, and the method of the reviews is a qualitative text analysis.

The purpose of this study was to explore the approach of the personal in residential care homes, legal guardians and Refugee secretaries consider as effective in their efforts to care for and guide unaccompanied boys in the Swedish society. With the help of qualitative method and semi-structured interviews, we have taken note of eleven informants? perspective on what approach they believe to be essential in the work of integration process with unaccompanied boys. We used Empowerment and the Swedish Integration Board´s proposal on indicators of integration as a theoretical base. The results show among other things, that our informants believe the keys to integration in Sweden for the unaccompanied youth are the Swedish language, education and a stable social network.

Today in Sweden the concept of the greyzone students that stands between the nine-year compulsory school and special school for mentally retarded children is recognised in different studies and reports. It is not obvious for this group of students to decide which category best can comply with their needs. Should they go in nine-year compulsory school or special school for mentally retarded children? In the last years there have been alarming rapports about how the share of students in special school increases. A study shows that the greyzone students are a group that distinctly is on the increase in the special school.

The Swedish metropolitan politics have had the bottom-up perspective as a major principle to evolve the democratic participation in segregated areas. My objective was to investigate if a bottom-up perspective has been used as a method of evaluation in a sample of 10 evaluation reports made about democratic participation in Malmö.The key questions were; In the evaluations:- How was the bottom-up perspective and related concepts defined?- What criterias and theories were used?- What values surfaced?- What methods were used?- Has a critical approach been used?The method used is analysis using the theories of Critical Social Method by Alvesson & Deetz, Values in evaluation by House & Howe and Choices of perspective by Eliasson.None of the analysed evaluations have used participatorial methods. As participation is defined mainly statistically, the criterias are usually quantitative measurements, though the evaluators agree that democracy is a matter of quality. There is a common lack of theoretical basis of analysis and methodology description.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how investments are justified in the Swedish data center industry, with a focus on cooling equipment. This is achieved through semi-structured interviews with 20 different interviewees. These interviewees represent different facets of the industry and facilitate an understanding of which factors, such as: investment costs, operating costs, reliability, environmental impact and the influence of external and internal actors, come into play and to which degree they impact the investment decision-making process. The results show that primarily low operating cost in the form of low energy consumption is the driving factor when it comes to the procurement of new equipment. A lower environmental impact is a positive side-effect of lower energy consumption.

So- called ?Network Based Defense? (NBD) was introduced in Sweden in connection with the transformation of the Swedish Armed Forces in 1999. NBD is based on the U.S. variant Network Centric Warfare (NCW), which in turn is derived from research on the concept of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). In Sweden the concept was introduced and included not only the Armed Forces but was intended to also support the Swedish civilian agencies in order to create networks and hence share the available information and thus more effective crisis management and to provide more "bang for the buck." In developing the concept of NBD the Swedish Armed Forces used both economic and human resources, in the form of research, new technologies, new organization and new methods.Between year 2004 and 2006 the Armed Forces once again entered the process of reorganization.

The aim of this study was to examine how Tanzanian HIV-positive women experience their socioeconomic situation. Semistructured interviews were carried out and the number of interviewees was 15. Collected data was analysed according to a qualitative content analysis and resulted in an overarching theme; Struggle for survival and tolerable life. Important in the lives of the informants was the access to economic and social resources. The informants described access to economic resources as important because of the possibilty to support oneself and the possibility of a lower level of physical strain.

The object of this explorative theoretical study is to compare similarities in three perspectives for evaluation of credibility. The perspectives are the historical method source-criticism, cognitive authority and domain analysis. These perspectives, regarded as intellectual tools for critical thinking in a process of information seeking, by asking questions about credibility related to the social and theoretical context of the intellectual background, can give support in articulating which documents that gives a specific and essential answer to a question. In this sense credibility is seen as a qualitative aspect of relevance. Patrick Wilson argues that we can attain some critical independence towards cognitive authorities and the literature by investigating the social and theoretical topography of a field.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the theoretical developments on social entrepreneurship. Our purpose is to create a better understanding of the phenomenon leading to new insights. We have categorized the knowledge of the concept into social economy, social ownership, social innovation and social missions. Drawing from our theoretical review we have chosen four empirical illustrations, Grameen Bank, Wikipedia, Basta Arbetskooperativ, Jörn Hälsogemenskap, and we have shown how these fit into the general description of the social entrepreneur. With help of our illustrations we show that it is complicated to pin point the core of social entrepreneurship as they each have separate structures, innovations, social missions and operate close to different sectors.