The purpose of this paper has been to examine the heavy metal band Sabatons use of history and to relate it to societal trends in today?s Sweden. I have examined Sabatons music, album covers and music videos in order to define a certain use of history. To do this I have used a use of history theory and a heavy metal theory. My results showed that some of Sabatons use of history could be defined as commercial and that the societal trends in today`s Sweden have in some cases affected the selection and presentation of events and characters that`s been portrayed by Sabaton.

The purpose of this thesis is to study to what extent the UN millennium development goals have influenced Sweden?s development policy. The research method that I have used is a qualitative text analysis and I have studied the ideas in governmental texts and millennium development goals reports from 1995-2008.My hypothesis is that the basic ideas that has symbolized Sweden?s development policy has not changed much since the adoption of the millennium development goals in year 2000. This hypothesis is based on different ideas that the basic perspectives in international development policy are rather constant.My conclusion is that many of the areas that are affected by the millennium development goals already are prioritized areas within Swedish development policy, for example poverty reduction and gender equality.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine the portrayals of class in four Swedish contemporary novels that have been mentioned as working class literature in the literary public sphere. During the 20th century, society has undergone vast changes due to globalization and technology development. The rise in standards of living for most people in the Western societies has led to changed consumption patterns. In consequence, there has been increased emphasis given to cultural rather than materialist explanations of social stratification.

Of all observable societal trends, the proliferation of standardizing processes is striking. Auditing standards are an illustrative example of this. Not only privately owned companies must today make available numbers and key figures to satisfy needs of information and knowledge. Government agencies are increasingly conforming to this trend, adopting standards for quality assurance and monitoring, producing numbers and annual reports ? despite their somewhat ambiguous task and role.

I uppsatsen görs en läroboksanalys av samhällskunskapsläroböcker från 1970-tal och 2000-tal. Samtliga läroböcker som ingår i analysen vänder sig till elever i gymnasieskolan. Fokus för analysen är hur arbetsmarknadens parter framställs under 1970-talet, respektive under 2000-talet. Framställningen av dessa aktörer kopplas bl.a. till samhällsutvecklingen och till för tiden gällande styrdokument.  .

This essay ventilates the relatively new phenomenon employer branding. Due to societal changes, such as demographical and financial changes, the labour market in Sweden has changed. It is evident that an increasing number of organisations need to put more of an effort in their methods of attracting talent and retaining competence within the organisation. By a case study based on five interviews, the purpose of the study was to compare literature and practice to see how well they compare as well as how employer branding bring about different aspects of the effect. There was also an ambition to highlight aspects of employer branding considered important to have in mind when undertaking an employer branding exercise.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the underlying causes for the opening of Karlstad Public Library. In doing so a theory based on the actor/structure model within social theory is used. The structures and actors are intertwined and therefore need to be analysed together. To do so the theory poses a series of questions that needs to be answered. The method used is document analysis.

My essay is fundamentally about an idea. It could even be placed in the study of the history of ideas by the fact that it could be seen as if I am trying to reflect upon how one single idea can get a strong societal and historical impact. How thoughts, visions and then inventions are constructing societies and everything that derives from them. In my text I try to illuminate and connect social theory to our social reality and by using discourse (theory) analysis I try to study central terms in the discourse of surveillance. The question which is of social psychological interest would be that of how the individual in dialectical relation to thesurrounding society is free and how he then would get inflected by this surveillance.

AbstractDue to the success of the Populist Party Sverigedemokraterna in the Swedish election of 2006, the daily paper Sydsvenska Dagbladet published a number of columns written by well-known academics, writers and debaters. Their aim was to address the question of why this happened in the election and what it is in the Swedish society today that brought forward these trends. The first and the last word was given to the writer Fredrik Ekelund, and therefore the debate was named Ekelunddebatten.The debaters are fighting to present their view of the world as the only option when categorizing different societal groups and appointing themselves as group representatives. My aim is to unravel these different conceptions of the world and to do this I use the Dicourse Analysis as a method. I discuss the results with Critical Discourse Theory as a theoretical base and also from the view of the current societal discourses: the working class discourse, the multicultural discourse and the discourse of political correctness.I mainly observe four different conceptions of the world with different posing of problems.

AbstractThe thesis investigates how the European Union promotes stability and security in the Mediterranean region. The aim is to analyse the European Union?s security ambitions with Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the Barcelona Process. An analytical framework with five sectors (military, political, economic, environmental and societal), based on the Copenhagen School?s theories about security sectors and securitization, is used for the analysis.

The aim of this study is to examine the existence of norms in three Spanish textbooks intended for upper secondary school in Sweden. One category of norms, gender norms, is selected for analysis. The focus of the analysis is on how gender norms are represented in the textbooks. The concept of gender also includes - in addition to the relation between man och woman - ethnicity, sexuality and disability. The three analysed textbooks are Caminando 3, Vistas 3 and El Sur paso 3.

Sustainable beef and milk consumption. The consumption of beef and dairy products in Sweden is high. A lot of greenhouse gases are emitted from the production of these products. The production of beef in Sweden has decreased but the import has increased. The number of dairy cows has decreased while beef-production with suckler-cows has increased in Sweden.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine and compare William Easterly?s and PGU?s (Shared Responsibility: Sweden's Policy for Global Development) different views on development and international development cooperation. The methodological approach chosen in this study is an analysis of ideas based on the following questions:1. Which principles should be applied to development and international development cooperation?2.

The main purpose of this study was to examine how preschool teachers are working to promote each child's language development and whether they can ensure that they do that. Therefore I wanted to find out what a good language development implies for each teacher, how they work to promote each child's language development in daily practice, how they measure the actual language development and also what conditions the teachers have, to engage in a language development way to work. For the study, I chose a qualitative method, with structured interviews and all together I interviewed six preschool teachers, within the same organization in a suburb close to Stockholm.  The results showed that there is an ambiguity, among the preschool teachers, in what a good language development means, but it can be stated that they do have a language development way to work even if it needs to be developed. Further on, it has emerged that the teachers have the tools to measure children's language development, although they do not have the conditions yet to use the method to the fullest. About the preschool teachers own conditions in order to operate in a language development way to work, I concluded that they have a strong foundation to build on, but they still have much work ahead of them.

The market for management training programs is growing and the supply of the service is increasing and getting further diversified. A consequence is a market with a wide variety of definitions of the very concept of development, and subsequently a wide variety of practices and methods to achieve development. The individuals that are subject to these programs seldom know what they are purchasing, or what to expect. When assuming a transfer of the developers view on development to the subject, a need for a greater understanding of the concept arises. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what views on development do exist among management trainers and map underlying dimensions of the views to increase the understanding of the concept of development.