The focus of this essay is set on a number of processes that affect the challenges of the tourist trade, to be more precise ? an analysis of the attitudes towards tourism and sustainability within this line of business ? from an ethical and moral as well as social view. These issues are examined with reference to the concept of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). Thus, acquaintance with theories of social constructivism, post colonialism, globalisation and global civil society is essential in order to understand the analysed material. The essay is mainly based on the outcome of qualitative interviews with various kinds of persons working with CSR related questions.

Agencies towards Sustainable Development ? A Study of Environmental Management Systems in Governmental Agencies 2005A vision of the Swedish government is to build an ecologically sustainable society. A tool in this effort is to implement environmental management systems (EMS). The aim of the thesis is to present in which phase of the implementation of EMS Swedish governmental agencies are. This will be done by compilation and evaluation of agencies? yearly environmental reports.The thesis is written in co-operation with the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Swedish EPA).

The social dimension in the EU, explored through the document texts of the Treaty of Rome, the Lisbon Strategy, the Social Policy Agenda and the Swedish Strategy ReportThis paper explores the social dimension of EU social policy, except the aspects of the economic and labour market. The EU documents reveal an underlying line of thought stemming from the alignment of the six founding countries, spearheaded by France, with the conservative corporatist welfare model. As one of four European welfare models, the conservative corporatist model emphasises labour market issues, corporate social responsibility and the subsidiarity principle in EU social policy. It also influences how the texts define the terms social, social policy and social exclusion. The definitions determine how policymakers combat problems such as social exclusion and identify the policy issues to be included in EU social policy.The Swedish Strategy shows how the country is responding to the objectives that it has been assigned by the EU and how it plans to attain them.

It is widely recognized that the town of Södertälje, a small Swedish town of 85 000 inhabitants, has alone received more war refugees from Iraq than the US and Canada have put together. Whilst writing this thesis had nearly 6000 Iraqi refugees sought their way to Södertälje since the US invasion in Iraq 2003.Nevertheless, life is not what the media and the government retail. Six of these Iraqi refugees who resided in Södertälje share their life stories in the following thesis. They discuss their escape from Iraq and the difficulties of living in the segregated parts of Södertälje where they solely speak Arabic and Assyrian, whilst learning Swedish at sfi (Svenska för invandrare, Swedish for immigrants). Another distress is related to the unsecure future in Sweden waiting ahead.      The aim of this thesis is to engage in, and highlight the studies of six sfi-students in their endeavor to learn Swedish, whilst struggling through Swedish bureaucracy and experiencing despair due to their situation and uncertain future.       .

K3-regelverket har ännu inte införts. Det finns därför många frågor kring regelverket, framförallt inom fastighetsbranschen. Två av de största förändringarna i och med K3-regelverket är kraven på komponentavskrivning och upplysning om verkligt värde för förvaltningsfastigheter. Syftet med denna uppsats är att erhålla insikt i och förståelse om hur fastighetsbolag som skall tillämpa K3-regelverket, ser på detta regelverk och hur de tror att de kommer att påverkas av det i samband med införandet av detta.I studien används en induktiv ansats. Det är ett relativt komplext problem som undersöks, och därför används en kvalitativ undersökningsmetodik genom personliga intervjuer.

This thesis was conducted at Mälardalen University in Västerås and Härjeåns Nät AB, mainly in Sveg. Härjeåns Nät AB is a network company that delivers electricity in Härjedalen municipality, Ånge Municipality, Ragunda and Bräcke municipality. The maintenance and dismantling of electricity and broadband networks generates a lot of waste. The purpose of this work is to present proposals on the management of the waste. The goal is that all of Härjeåns offices should have equal management for the waste and an overview of how to manage the various wastes.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate what kind of motives where behind the long term decisions for the Swedish military defense in 2000 and 2004. This leads to the questions that the essay is meant to answer; 1. Were the motives behind the two decisions for the Swedish military defense of economic character or an adjustment of security and defense policy? 2. Was the parliament united in the two decisions and if they were not, why? 3.

In this study, I intend to examine some aspects of the activities of cultural companies in the town of Arvika. The study is qualitative in nature and based on in-depth interviews with self-employed cultural workers, as well as representatives from Arvika municipality. Cultural policy documents have been studied to clarify the self-employed status in the cultural sector and thus their importance to the cultural life in Arvika overall.My hope is to get a glimpse of what it means to work as a self-employed within the cultural sector in Arvika and the conditions that exist, in order to successfully run and develop their businesses.There is a shift in cultural policy, which has led to permanent forms of employment becoming fewer and self-employment to grow ( Karlsson & Lekvall, 6 ). One can say that the cultural sector has moved in the direction from a public matter, to the more privatized ( Köping , Lantz & Stenström, 3 ). The problem with this is that the policy of self-employment has not progressed at the same rate as the amount of business.

Since 1928 the Swedish accounting and taxation has been closely linked by law which today as the European Union works with its harmonisation of the European accounting systems brings up difficulties. The Union strives to integrate the countries different ways of accounting in order to make it easier to use and understand foreign information. The Swedish connection between accounting and taxation means that a harmonisation would change the whole system as its known today. The purpose with this study is to examine what the link between the two means and how a decoupling would affect Swedish accounting and auditing. We also want to examine how the Swedish taxation office, who currently uses the accounting as a ground for taxation, could guarantee the quality of the declaration without a proper underpinning. The study shows that a decoupling could lead to an increase in quality on swedish accounting and that the administration would become more difficult to handle. The risk of dividend of untaxed profits is not seen as a problem in this context.

The term CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is frequently discussed today. Many large companies work actively with CSR related questions. However, few empirical studies exist on what this work entails and why it is undertaken. Instead, most of the academic research focuses on what the term itself should mean. To bridge this gap this study centers on the employees? perceptions of CSR.

The purpose of this thesis was to study a selection of Swedish government agencies and their usage of new media to convey information. We thought that the relationship between government agencies and the media should be addressed. This because of the current transitional period between traditional and new media. We have studied five different Swedish government agencies; Swedish Armed Forces, Swedish Tax Agency, Swedish National Institute of Public Health, Trafikverket and Sida.We used a qualitive content analysis and analyzed their homepages on the basis of six different criteria. In addition to this we studied their presence on external social communities and how the government agencies comply with the requirements of their communicative efforts.The study shows that the government agencies? media usage varies.

With this paper we intend to investigate what kind of benefits there are by adding commodity futures to a well-diversified portfolio. Since the last fifteen years the commodity speculation has grown tremendously, which partially can be explained by that commodities exposes the investor to certain factors other than an investment in equities. According to our calculations the commodity futures have outperformed stocks during our research period, which partially could be explained by the increasing demand of physical commodities in developing countries e.g. India & China (Akey, 2005). By constructing different portfolios consisting of equities and corporate bonds we could investigate whether our portfolios will benefit from commodity futures and how this will vary over different levels of risk.

The purpose of this thesis is to clarify the concept of ?managing diversity? and to describe how it appears in the Swedish school, in the classroom as well as in the organisation. To support the study, interviews have been carried out with principals and teachers in three different Swedish schools.The thesis is divided into two sections; a literature study and an interview section where we describe the thoughts and knowledge of principals and teachers. From a diversity point of view, we discuss the relationship between documents, organisation and teaching.The study described in this thesis shows that managing diversity has not yet had its break-through in a Swedish school context. The official curriculum of the Swedish school system values diversity, although the directives are unclear as to how the managing of diversity is to be carried out in reality.

Millions of animals are annually affected by human activities; in the food industry, zoos and animal shows, clothes and shoes production, furniture and pharmaceutical industry, research, as well as pet and sports animal industry. Companies working with Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR, have become more common and within this area there are great possibilities for companies to work with animal welfare. In this study five companies were interviewed and 27 companies participated in a survey regarding CSR and animal welfare. The aim of this study was to investigate opinion and approach among companies towards implementing animal welfare as a part of their work with CSR. Furthermore the aim of the study was to investigate how companies may implement animal welfare. The result showed that the vast majority of the companies participating in the study works with CSR and the main part of the companies also answered that they have implemented animal welfare. The way of working with animal welfare varied among the participants; e.g.

The main purpose of this study has been to survey the pupils? general comprehension of the content and aim of Swedish as a subject in upper secondary school and their attitude towards the subject. Furthermore the study aims at discerning whether there is a distinguishable difference between programmes with vocational and academic character.The study is based on the results of 101 answers from students in an opinion poll handed out at a Western Swedish upper secondary school. Throughout the analysis the results of the two programme groups have been weighed against each other. The result of the survey shows that:? The understanding of the aim and content of Swedish at upper secondary school is acceptable as a whole.