Background: The business market today is characterized by tough competition amongst the competitors to capture consumers? interest and money. One marketing tool companies can use to achieve this is the company?s image. The customer buys not only a product, but also the image that the company or the product is associated with.

This essay is included as a sub-study of a survey about child poverty, which the Department of Sociology at Uppsala University, the Ombudsman for Children and Gillbergska Stiftelsen (the Gillberg?s foundation) has been commissioned by Uppsala Town to implement. The intent of this essay is to investigate how three pre-school managers in the municipal preschool in Uppsala describe child poverty, how they see the preschool?s social responsibility and how they manage child poverty in their practical operation. The essay is a qualitative study and informants' responses has been analyzed and related to symbolic interactionism, the thesis theoretical basis.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of capital structure in Swedish small and medium sized firms. The study includes 24.859 Swedish firms which are further analyzed with regards to their financial characteristics. These characteristics consist of short term debt, long term debt and total leverage. The study compares the relationship between these characteristics and six independent variables.The result shows that profitability is the greatest determinant for capital structure in Swedish small and medium sized firms with regards to total leverage. When profitability increases the total leverage of the firm decreases.

This essay aims to explore the philosophical meaning of the expression ?present and real? in Clara ? or, On Nature?s Connection to the Spirit World by F. W. J. Schelling.

This study aims at using discourse analysis to analyze SFI students attitudes to religion and religiosity in an SFI-context. The questions are: How is the discourse constructed and maintained by religion and religiosity of SFI students in an SFI context? How do SFI participants experience that their religion has affected their time at SFI?Using a case study approach, interviews were conducted with a group of SFI students. The results show that the religious discourse in SFI is influenced by the SFI-context and affected based on the current education discourse that exists there. Furthermore, the discourse is designed and maintained by the participants private religious beliefs and the religion of the majority of the group, One canhere speak of a strong social unit forming a plausibility structure The power structure that emerges is that the majority has the power to define the significance of religion and place within the SFI context. In the SFI-context the participants view is that religion is something private that should not be expressed in the school environment.

This Master's Thesis studies the attitude that library employees have regarding a sex and gender-neutral treatmentof their clients. The analysis is based upon replies to a questionnaire which was submitted though channels directedat library employees, like BIBLIST and BiblFeed. The respondent?s replies contained a number of welldevelopedcomments making the resultant analysis both quantitative and qualitative in nature.In performing the analysis a theoretical framework combining Hirdman?s gender system with symbolic interactionismhas been used together with literature about gender roles.The questionnaire showed that gender neutrality is a complex concept that can be interpreted in many differentways and is therefore easily misunderstood. It is obvious that sex is an important category when respondents aredealing with their clients, but also that sex and gender are problematic concepts which respondents find difficultto know exactly how to relate to.

Literary debates about canon occur regularly. In the summer of 2006 such a debate took place in Sweden. The aim of this Master thesis is to examine the debate to identify the different discourses and what they reveal about ideas concerning the role of literature in society. The empirical material used for the analysis consists of 46 debate articles from three important newspapers. The combined theory and method applied is the discourse analysis described in Ernesto Laclau?s & Chantal Mouffe?s discourse theory.

The ongoing change that characterizes the landscape as a result of the development of the society as a wholeis the basis for this thesis. Even though the Scanian landscape still is dominated by arable land, other valuessuch as biological diversity, cultural heritage and economical aspects, has all been ascribed the landscape asmore and more important factors and in some respects, compete with the farming industry about the right tothe landscape. Our demand of more and more space, will of course also affect the landscape. Huge amountof land are used to build external malls and single-family houses, which gives rise to an increasing need foran extended transport system that also is land consuming.It all comes down to: how the municipalities deal with non built areas - the green structure. Do themunicipalities have separate programs describing their vision and objectives concerning the green structure?Literature studies, an inventory made of the municipality programs in the west and south west of Scaniaand interviews with employees at the municipalities clarifies the use of the green structure concept, both intheory and in practice.The green structure concept seems to be derived from the environmental debate.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how the gender structure appears in detective novels and in the society during the 1960s and 2000s. We have a pre-understanding that the gender structure is more distinct in the earlier books and we will investigate this by looking at the two aspects occupation and family role. We find this to be an important question to notice because society today isnt equal between the sexes. Our study is based on a theory of Yvonne Hirdmans, she claims that the man is the dominant part and the woman is in an inferior position. We apply a stereotype model she has conceived and we try to categorize the characters in the books we have analysed into this model.

The aim of this study was to find out if hypertext structure has any relevance for the efficiency of information retrieval. An experiment, in which three variants of hypertext structure were compared, was carried out in the autumn of 1998. Three websites with different structures were constructed for this purpose: a sequential version, a hierarchical version and a webcluster version. 44 subjects, all students at the University of Lund, were randomly divided into three groups. Subjects were requiered to answer a number of questions using one of the three versions.

This paper is a morphological structure-analysis of icelandic tales to determine their common and distinguishable components in relation to one another and to the russian folktale with Vladimir Propp?s book Morphology of the Folktale (1968) as theoretical basis. The paper looks at the Poetic Edda and Njals saga and the functions of the actions for each other and for the story as a whole. Although the icelandic tales shows great similarities with the russian folktale in general, it also shows deviations. The functions have sometimes appeared on inverted positions, and in a full third of the stories the evil has won over the good in a crucial struggle, but has in 90 % of these stories still been punished before the end.

This essay aims to explore the philosophical meaning of the expression ?present and real? in Clara ? or, On Nature?s Connection to the Spirit World by F. W. J. Schelling.

This study aims to disclose how an asymmetric planogram structure of the brand with the highest actual variety may come to affect the brand itself and its category as a whole. The authors of the study feel that there is a gap still unfilled amongst previous extensive research examining how differences in either space or price vary between categories, products or brands. An in-store experiment was conducted by collecting quantitative data from daily sales, observations of customers and questionnaires. The results show that an asymmetric structure leads to customers being more attentive towards the brand, and perceives it to be more dominant over its surrounding competitors. Furthermore, results indicate that the customer perceived variety increases and we see tendencies to changes in sales..

As a starting point the society is more enlightened and has gained a greater awareness about the gender power structures and its different forms. Present research shows the continuous development into other shapes and comes into different expressions that might be unrecognised. In order to gain knowledge about the present structure of the gender power structure system, the aim of this study was to investigate framing of female and male politicians in media. The main question asked was: ?are there framing differences in the portraits of the male and female politicians?? In order to achieve results articles in the biggest Swedish daily newspaper were examined.

The Swedish market for unsecured loans has frequently been attacked by media and government officials. Some actors have been accused of exploiting customers and charging inappropriately high interest rates. Despite the public interest very little academic work has been published on the topic. Therefore it is our purpose to investigate why the prices can differ so much between the different actors. Further, we also aim to conduct a market overview as a secondary purpose which will help us in reaching our primary purpose.