The purpose of this master thesis is to examine how librarians/cultural workers act in projects in order to stimulate and promote reading among children and youth in sparsely populated regions in the county of Jämtland during a period of three years, and if/how these projects differ. The examination is based upon the progress of these projects in four of eight communities. Four librarians and two cultural workers have been interviewed in order to get their view of the proceedings of the projects. The results indicate that the four communities all made up plans for three years but in different ways. They mainly collaborated with the school but also with the board of children's health and the preparatory school.

A severe profitability decline in sugar beet production in all of Europe is one of the consequences of the latest reform of the EU sugar regime. In south of Sweden, sugar beets is the crop that has been the most profitable by far for the last decade. The high profitability has contributed to the high rate of increase in the price of land and has restrained the structural change towards a more effective agriculture. Because of the reform, all sugar beet producers are facing diminishing income and must find ways to compensate this. The aim of this master thesis is to study how Swedish farmers adapt to the sugar beet reform. A questionnaire was sent to 354 randomly selected sugar beet producers.

The problem with passive farmers has arised as an effect of the European Union´s common agricultural policy (CAP) and the decouplement from production-based payments. Payments to passive farmers contradict the purpose of the single payment scheme and constitute a great cost for the EU. The new contractual period after 2013 has given rise to discussions on the direction of the CAP with a purpose of increasing the efficiency of the single payment scheme, and reducing passive farming. The aim of the study is to increase the knowledge about a few factors? influence on passive farmers? attitudes towards land use and the CAP.

The trend towards increasingly large farming units raises questions regarding how to better monitor production. Larger units make the impact from possible errors more severe, which increases the pressure on management supervision. To cope with management issues, prevent errors and handle increased demands on traceability and documentation, the Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) concept is making its way into various parts of agriculture. In sectors outside agriculture, RTLS are already being used successfully to track and locate items through nodes at different levels of accuracy, such as room level or the relative or absolute position. Empirical data can be received in real time from the nodes.

That many creative workers have uncertain and uneven incomes is well-established, but how or why they make a living is not. This paper examines the elusive value exchanges between creatives, buyers, consumers, and other economic supporters, and offers a model of how creatives make a living. By mapping income statistics of Swedish creatives together with in-depth interviews some patterns emerge. This, combined with Bourdieu's theories of social, cultural and symbolic capital, and Knorr's objects of sociality, forms a basis for a structured model of value exchange. The paper shows how creative workers create economic and non-economic capital (capitalization), how they advertise this capital (signaling), and how they convert between different types of capital (conversion) in order to make a living.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the concept of competence within the social services. More specifically it aims to find out how the social workers themselves look upon their own competence in social investigations concerning children. As the study was based on focus groups the main questions were vague at the beginning and were cleared later on during the group sessions.In three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden 11 social workers were asked to discuss this issue. The interviews were then thoroughly transcribed. In the data I identified 9 themes seeming to play a special roll in the discussions about competence: practice; experience; approach; intuition; responsibility; theories, methods and laws; reflection; resources and ethics; specialisation versus integration.The analysis made on these themes was based on two different kinds of perspective; one focusing knowing-in-action and the other focusing the organization framing the competence considered.As a conclusion the 7 first themes can be seen as a definition of the competence used in social investigations concerning children.

Approximately ten people die every year at building sites in Sweden. Every year TheWork Environment Authority (Arbetsmiljöverket) receives 3200 accident reportsfrom the construction sector. The Swedish building contractor Skanska has the vision:?Zero accidents?. Only at Skanska Sweden, where this diploma work is preformed,350-520 accidents and mishaps are reported every year for the last 5 years.

The purpose of this study was to examine social worker?s own experiences of dealing with gender perspectives in child welfare cases. With a constructionist perspective, this study is based on a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews. Six social workers were asked to reflect on their work and their methodology, and how it relates to gender perspectives when assessing children and adolescents in child welfare services.The result shows that there is a lack of control and review that children are given a gender neutral treatment. It also shows that there was no explicit protocol for how to take a gender perspective into account when assessing children and adolescents needs of welfare services.

Organic agriculture is financially promoted in Sweden by special environmental support and as consumers we are all encouraged to buy organic food. At the same time scholars at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences claim that organic farming does not provide any environmental benefits. The main criticism is that organic farming has lower yields than conventional, which means that more land is needed to produce the same amount of food as in conventional farming, leading to deforestation and loss of biodiversity. As for climate change, the critics claim that the significantly higher productivity in conventional crop production compared to organic, releases surplus land, which could be used for bio-fuel production and thereby replace the fossil fuels. The critics also claim that organic farming causes higher nutrient leaching than conventional.

Aquatic organisms are usually not exposed to single substances but rather to mixtures of toxicants in streams located in agricultural areas. The transport of pesticides used in the agricultural area in Sweden is monitored with continuous environmental supervision every year. During 2002-2008 an average of 10 pesticides were found in each sample and 40% of the samples contained substances with concentrations higher than the Water Quality Standards. Chemical risk management is normally based on single-test evaluations. A problem when assessing mixture toxicities is that the constituents and concentrations of pollutants in the environment vary greatly.

Approximately ten people die every year at building sites in Sweden. Every year TheWork Environment Authority (Arbetsmiljöverket) receives 3200 accident reportsfrom the construction sector. The Swedish building contractor Skanska has the vision:?Zero accidents?. Only at Skanska Sweden, where this diploma work is preformed,350-520 accidents and mishaps are reported every year for the last 5 years.

Bees are of importance for the global food security. In Europe 84% and in the World 35% of all the agricultural crops are dependent of animal pollination (Winfree et al., 2011:1). In agricultural production there is a huge lack of pollinators (Azien & Harden, 2009). A problem that is widely spread. In Sweden the problem becomes clear when looking at the statistics of the number of bee colonies during the last 20 years, where it has been a decline with 63 % (Statistiska Centralbyrån & Jordbruksverket, 2011).

As a school welfare officer you are often alone of having your perspective and must struggle to preserve that perspective. At the same time, there are very little defined what role a social worker should have in a school. This makes it nessesary to form and develop your role of profession independently. According to the Swedish school law, the schools are not required to employ a welfare officer. This makes the school welfare officer inferior to the other branches of occupation in school.

In Stockholm there are currently five women, out of a total of 102 employees, working in public sports arenas. In sports arenas men are numerically superior amongst the workers as well as the visitors. These arenas are in many ways male dominated, masculinized environments. In this essay I investigate the reasons behind the uneven distribution, in terms of gender, among sports arena workers. I do this by interviewing seven female sports arena workers (the five current and two former), and by observing their workplaces.

Malmö, like many other bigger cities in Europe, faces a double undertaking when facing the challenges the future. Not only must the municipal be able to provide its citizens with welfare and a high standard of living, it must also establish a level of economic growth that allows the city to act as catalyst for the surrounding area. In order to provide the population with welfare and the economy with a qualified working force, these two challenges have been combined into one plan for the future called Welfare for Everybody. As part of this plan, new organisations have been created with the purpose collaborating with the social services office and support people in their transaction from welfare recipients to self-providing workers. The purpose of our thesis is to build on Michael Lipsky's classic work "Street-level Bureaucracy" and by conducting interviews with a number of front line workers study how they view their role, the client group and how they motivate the working line.