This essay focuses on the implementation of the strategy gender mainstreaming in the European Union and the member states. It starts to identify problems connected to the implementation process and recognizes significant prerequisites for an efficient implementation of the strategy. The main problems and prerequisites are: political will, governance and structure and knowledge about gender equality. The empirical material consists of reports from the EU that touches upon gender mainstreaming and gender equality. The problems and prerequisites will be analysed in relation to the governance perspectives top-down and bottom-up and expert bureaucratic and participative democratic and gender and feminism.

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.

Numerous studies have showed that Swedish municipalities are responsible for several of the activities that concern children and their rights, e.g. school and health care. Furthermore, the Convention of the Rights of the Child is an international agreement that Sweden has signed and ratified which also implies the obligations that Swedish municipalities have. The purpose of this study is to investigate and compare, from a social justice perspective, how children?s rights are being emphasized and how children?s opinions are being taken into consideration at the municipality level in Sweden.

The primary purpose of this thesis is to study how political agents construct and give meaning to the concepts of democracy, representative democracy and referendums. The starting point of the thesis is the pressing issue whether or not Sweden should hold a referendum on the new EU constitution. To analyze this question my choice of method is critical discourse analysis and the topical theories revolve around democracy and responsibility.My study shows that there are three different discourses in this debate: ?the democratic process?, ?the representative democracy? and ?the concept of democracy?. However, the meaning of the concepts in these discourses varies depending on which side the political agents are on.

This thesis is a product of research about how implementation issues occur due to the relationbetween bureaucrats and politicians. Our study treats the democratic dilemma that occurs whenschools are to implement environmental certifications. Through a comparative study we comparetwo schools in Norra Hisingen, a district in Gothenburg municipal where one of the schools iscertificated and one is not. By using theories from top down and bottom up approaches toimplementation we develop key factors that will lead us to answer our research questions.Through text analysis of policy documents and through interviews with bureaucrats we analyzewhat may be the causes for only one of the two schools to be certificated though Gothenburgmunicipal wish all schools to be. Through our analytical tool we can establish that the policydocuments are well formed according to our top down-theory and that these documents does nothave a major impact on the fact that one school is certificated and one is not.

In this study, we have examined how Swedish tour operators are using social media as part of their marketing plan. Our purpose was to find out which strategies they use in the area of social marketing. The companies that were examined were Ving, Fritidsresor and Jambo tours, and the social network site that the research focused on was Facebook. The examination was conducted with a content analysis of the companies' Facebook pages and qualitative, structured interviews with the companies. The aim was to compare the various tour operators Facebook pages in order to get a broader overview of the companies marketing strategies.

In a Swedish classroom today there will be students with different ethnicities, world views and religious beliefs.  The students will be taught religion through a non-denominational education, where as a teacher you are meant to be objective, open-minded and fair in the representation of different traditions. This representation is colored by the outsider-perspective and the students then learn about religion from a party which is not involved in the religion being taught. This essay discusses how to balance the outsider-perspective in religious education in the Swedish school with insider-voices. More specific, the use of Muslim websites when teaching about Islam.The material this essay studies are three Muslim websites: al-islam.se, islaminfo.se and islamguiden.se. In order to make a didactic analysis of the websites, they are compared to a standard Swedish textbook.

This paper is a Master thesis for the Master?s program in International and European Relations in the Department of Management and Economics at Linköping University. As the title indicates, the aim of this thesis is to make a comparative analysis of the conflict resolution initiatives that were employed in the Sierra Leonean and Liberian conflicts. The research questions are: ? What were the root causes and trajectories of the Sierra Leonean and Liberian conflicts? ? What were the conflict resolution initiatives employed in resolving both conflicts? ? Why did the Lome Peace Accord succeed in the case of Sierra Leone whilst the Abuja Peace Accord failed in bringing peace to Liberia? In order to answer the afore-mentioned questions and fulfil the aim of this paper, a qualitative research method has been chosen.

The Swedish welfare organisation is built on the fact that the legislation gives the municipalities and social workers guidance and direction how to assess cases. Through out this the clients have right to be assessed both equally and individually. How is this done? The purpose of this paper was to examine the effect of the organisation referred to the social workers ability to discretion and the evaluation of the assessment in first time applications of social assistant cases. The purpose was also to look for variations in decisions and if these could be explained out of organisational and assessment effects.

This essay will treat questions regarding why we should read literature, more specifically fiction, in schools. My issues regards how the curriculums of the swedish school subject legitimizes reading of literature, and my main focus is on the curriculums themselves. As a complement, I have completed three interviews with professional teachers to see how they legitimize reading for the pupils and for themselves. I have also discussed the potential democratic values of teaching and reading literature in schools, and I discuss my results in relation to the "values" of the swedish schools. My study is based on a study of the old curriculums, completed by Magnus Persson in 2007.

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.

The thesis ?Vi fixar och trixar oss fram till att hjälpa människor? focuses on social work in the field of prostitution and human trafficking in Sweden. Through semi-structured interviews with social workers in the municipalities of Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö working with persons selling and buying sex, and through discourse analysis, the author analyses the perceptions among these social workers of the relation between human rights, prostitution and human trafficking, and the social work which they conduct.The thesis concludes that although the social workers perceive prostitution and human trafficking and social work in this field as human rights related, they are not explicitly using a human rights based approach in their work.The thesis concludes that the social workers identify several aspects that infringe on the rights of their clients in relation to the human rights principles of Universality, Non-discrimination, Accountability and Rule of law and the principle of Participation and Inclusion. They portray the human rights situation of street based sellers, especially those not being Swedish citizens and those affected by human trafficking, as severe.The thesis concludes that the social workers find several obstacles (legal as well as structural) that diminish their ability to strengthen their clients? human rights situation.

This paper examines the interpersonal and intercorporate networks of interlocking boardmembers among Sweden's 50 largest publicly traded companies in 1985 and 2005. We find that both the interpersonal and intercorporate networks of 1985 are considerably more coherent and densely connected than those of 2005. The observed changes in social network structure are compared to changes in company ownership in Swedish publicly traded companies during the same period, and it is found that the observed changes in network density and cohesion can be related to a notable increase in the number of foreign board members. These results imply that the social organization of the Swedish system of corporate governance has changed notably during the period. Social network theory suggests that these changes can explain the greater demand for external regulation, decreased homogeneity of board members and increase in board member compensation observed under the period.

The aim of this study is to through six interviews, with six experienced, social workers?, in three cities, understand how the child?s position in the Swedish child protective services? enquiries has change, and the factors behind it. The aim is also to compare if the social workers? view of the child?s position in the enquire has change accordingly to Socialstyrelsens intentions of BBIC. The theoretical approaches that was used is the new institutionalism, the Shier?s pathways to participation and the term discretion.

In this essay we have been trying to get an understanding of what Swedish charter tourists cares for when they are going on vacation. The Tourism industry is a major field with a lot of winners, but it also comes with consequences. The purpose with this essay is to get an understanding of how aware the Swedish charter tourists is of these consequences. We would also like to get a perception of how the tourists themselves believe that their presence effects the locals at the destinations they are visiting (if they assume that they are). There are several different types of consequences that can appear in the context of tourism, but we have decided to focus on one kind.