Taiwan's recent democratization seem to have rallied a wider support of the notion of a national identity amongst its citizens which in the year 2000 led to the election of the pro-independence party DPP and President Chen Shui-bian. Meanwhile, China insists on the "one country, two systems" formula, regarding Taiwan as merely a Chinese province, and continues to fight any Taiwanese initiative towards sovereignty. Through a narrative perspective, this essay analyzes the self-conscious national identity-building quest embarked upon by DPP and President Chen Shui-bian. The analysis consists of three parts. Firstly, a text-analysis of President Chen Shui-bian's speeches is conducted to examine in what way he enforces and legitimizes the identity-building-process through narratives.

This study reflects on the swedish model and the models future. The swedish modelmeans that legisilation acts with the collective agreements . The wage issue is notregulated by law instead it is managed by the social partners in the form of collectiveagreements. In 2008, a report was presented by the Commission on a joint regulation ofthe minimum wage for all EU countries. The issue has become increasinglycontroversial and was especially disccused for the election of candidates to theEuropean Parlament last spring.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how swedishness is constructed and narrated in two Swedish documentary series that picture the Swedish participation in the international ISAF mission in Afghanistan. The main focus lies on how the Swedish soldier as such is portrayed, on which values, characteristics and qualities that they are said to embody and how these are linked to notions of swedishness, particularly the strong historical narrative, formed during the second half of the twentieth century, that defines Sweden as a peaceful, neutral and humanitarian state, with peaceful, enlightened and democratically minded citizens. Theoretically it draws on the concept of metanarrative to explain how ideas of shared national origin translates in to a broad organizing discourse, that defines, interprets and communicates notions of what it means to be a Swede and what is needed to make claims on swedishness. Another concept, that of national bodyscape, is also used to further define and explain how ideas of nationality are embodied and take the form of specific characteristics and  personal qualities. The meaning-making in these two series makes use of the above mentioned definition of swedishness as defined by humanitarian concerns, democratic ideals and moral superiority to construct an image of the Swedish soldiers as on the one hand soft, humanitarians, who are needed in Afghanistan because of their especially strong sense of justice and moral, and, on the other, as tough soldiers, who are able to participate in every aspect of the war as fighters.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how swedishness is constructed and narrated in two Swedish documentary series that picture the Swedish participation in the international ISAF mission in Afghanistan. The main focus lies on how the Swedish soldier as such is portrayed, on which values, characteristics and qualities that they are said to embody and how these are linked to notions of swedishness, particularly the strong historical narrative, formed during the second half of the twentieth century, that defines Sweden as a peaceful, neutral and humanitarian state, with peaceful, enlightened and democratically minded citizens. Theoretically it draws on the concept of metanarrative to explain how ideas of shared national origin translates in to a broad organizing discourse, that defines, interprets and communicates notions of what it means to be a Swede and what is needed to make claims on swedishness. Another concept, that of national bodyscape, is also used to further define and explain how ideas of nationality are embodied and take the form of specific characteristics and  personal qualities. The meaning-making in these two series makes use of the above mentioned definition of swedishness as defined by humanitarian concerns, democratic ideals and moral superiority to construct an image of the Swedish soldiers as on the one hand soft, humanitarians, who are needed in Afghanistan because of their especially strong sense of justice and moral, and, on the other, as tough soldiers, who are able to participate in every aspect of the war as fighters.

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 European Union has been working to promote equality between women and men for a long time. Despite this, Sweden still have a gender segregated labor market where men generally has the leading positions. According to European law the member states shall promote gender equality and to take all appropriate measures. Statutory gender quotas for company boards is one such measure that some of the European member states have implemented in national law. The Swedish law has no provisions governing gender quotas and therefore the purpose of this study is to explain how gender quotas for company boards relate to current law, both of European law and national legislation.

This thesis discusses the theory of securitization in relation to the issue of irregularmigration, from EU level to national level. By using discourse analysis, the purpose isto explore whether the discourse leads to practice when it comes to nationalimplementation of EU debates on return policy. The material used in this workconsists of policy documents regarding the Return Directive from the EuropeanCommission as well as the Reva Project in Swedish migration policy. The mainobjective of the Reva Project is to make the process of returning irregular immigrantsmore effective and it has been strongly criticized, both by media and public opinion.The conclusion of this case study is that even if the security rhetoric may appearstronger on the EU level, the main elements of the security discourse are stillportrayed in the implementation on the national level. Based on this analysis we canmake the presumption that discourse develops into practice in the case of returnpolicy in the EU-member state relation..

Democracy is a term that has been researched, and still is researched, a lot. In my education to become a teacher it has been the subject that interests me the most and I would like to be able to contribute to this research. The starting point of this essay is that in my experience there is a difference in how the national curriculum describes democracy and how the students I have met describes it. Therefore I wanted to investigate whether this also applies to a wider context than the students that I meet in my everyday life. The purpose of this essay is; to examine whether students in the ninth grade has the same view on democracy as the national means of control. The result I have attained through my work is that they somewhat share the same vision.

The aim of this two year master thesis is to analyze how digital preservation is presented as a problem in the Swedish national strategy for the digitization and digital preservation of the Swedish cultural heritage. In order to study which assumptions about digital preservation exists within the strategy I apply the discourse oriented methodological tools presented by Carol Lee Bacchi, which focuses on discerning what problem or, rather, representation of a problem exists within a specific policy. This study is a post-structuralist discourse analysis. The main focus of the study is on what assumptions and prerequisites the dominating representation of the problem is based upon and how the representation has evolved. The main material of the study consists of public investigations conducted by the Swedish state, governmental propositions and replies as well as other public documents upon which Bacci's methodological tools are applied.Results show that digital preservation is primarily interpreted as a financial problem as the national strategy and its surrounding documents stress the need of cost-efficient solutions.

This study is an attempt to shed light on problems and possibilities of the school library of the Swedish comprehensive school concerning library law and goals of the school and the school library. Many investigations about the role of the school library of the comprehensive school have been carried through. They have all more or less come to the same conclusions. In spite of Swedish library law and goal documents of the school library, the school libraries are often neglected, if not will and commitment are to be found among teachers. Using a model of the school organisation by Gunnar Berg, three cases of school libraries are presented and analysed in a larger organisational and political perspective.

The national spatial planning guidelines and the subsequent legal regulation in the Natural Resources Act and the Environmental Code has been a part of the Swedish planning system for almost 40 years. In the recent years, critics have claimed that the regulations are outdated and does not work the way it was intended. This paper examines closer why it is perceived that the regulations does not work, with a focus on how the national interests are managed in the municipal planning. Why is the national interests not applied in the municipal planning as intended? Is the error in the system or in the implementation of it? The aim of this essay is to study the gap between theory and practice by studying how the land management provisions in the Environmental Code is applied in five selected municipalities. The aim is also to find interesting issues for futher studies of the topic.

Umeå Energi are working towards a goal, that in the year of 2018, they will be completely climate neutral. As a part of this, one target is to reduce their grid losses by 4 % of the 2012 level, which corresponds to an overall reduction of the grid losses of just over 1.7 GWh. In many residential areas, the distribution grid is designed and rated for electric heating as the heating in the houses. As many of the houses later has been converted to other types of heating, their electricity use has decreased and the total power output from many of the secondary substations has decreased significantly. Because of this, many of these stations today are well oversized, which in turn means that the energy losses in these stations are unnecessarily high.In this degree project, 25 secondary substations have been studied, all located in residential areas in and around central Umeå.

The construction market has, as a result of the crisis in Europe been uncertain in recent years. During the year 2013, the construction will be stabilized, in particular Finland. The geographical proximity between Sweden and Finland and similarities in cultures and climates makes Finland a coveted market for many Swedish companies.Differences in national regulations and guidelines, which are produced by the authorities in different countries, are examples of barriers that may hamper the process, including for Swedish villa suppliers, to establish themselves on the Finnish market. It may be useful when facing a new export drive, to look up what similarities and differences there are between the countries building codes, to prevent mistakes and unnecessary costs to the project work..

Abstract (magisteruppsats, 61-80p)This paper is concerned with the national sentiments in the Federal State of Germany,regarding the east- and west-German cleavages, since the unification of the country in 1990.The point of departure is the nationalistic theory crafted together by the scholar AnthonyDavid Smith, which implies an ethno-symbolistic perspective on the dynamics of nations.The main question in the paper is to which extent you can consider the East- and WestGermans to be a unity, considering the past and the forty-year-division. For this reason theauthor basically uses two different sources: scientific books and the German journal DerSpiegel.Founded on Smith's theory, the study contains a broad explanation for national identities incontemporary states, which ranges from pre-modern times, when the ethnic communities werecreated, to the national world of today.The discontinuity of the German case, represented by the separation 1949-90 of the Germannation into two entirely different societies, makes it possible to draw conclusions about whichfactor that has the pivotal impact on national identities.The result turns out to be that the national historical core-values and symbols of the currentGerman state and nation are more profound than the splitting national sentiments. Thus theGerman nation is likely to recover from its Cold War break-up.Keywords: German unification, A. D. Smith, Nation and nationalism, National identity, DerSpiegel.

The Swedish forest policies have earlier mainly been focused on two goals: production and environment. The production goal aims to benefit the economical gains from forestry while the environmental goal primarily aims to shield the ecological values of the forest. With the introduction of the Swedish environmental code and the environmental objectives it was made clear that the overall objective for Swedish community development, including the forestry sector, is sustainable development. Sustainable development includes supporting economic, ecologic as well as social values of which the latter seems to have been forgotten in the forestry sector. This was recently brought to attention to the sector and the debate how to handle the social values is now ongoing.The legislator has not been unaware of the social values since they have since long been at least somewhat included in the preliminary works.