Over the past twenty years, the cooperation within the European Union (EU) has strengthened and expanded with both more number of Member States and stronger influence on international politics. The unique character of the Union and its ability to enforce peace and humanitarian intervention has attracted attention in political science. This prominent position of the Union is perceived by many scholars who often hold this derived from the Union's influence in international relations. Various terms have been used to define the powers of the Union. The British researcher Ian Manners states that the unique identity of the Union in the international arena is formed by its normative power.  An important policy area within the Union is the environmental cooperation.

Resignations are common in all business sectors and can also be found among forest machine operators in the forest business. As the industry today faces a lack of forest machine operators it is justified to determine why machine operators choose to quit their jobs. The aim of this study was to a) find out the number of machine operators that have resigned b) identify and analyse the cause for these resignations c) identify the reasons why the machine operators started to work in the forest and d) give suggestions on different measures that will limit resignations amongst forest machine operators. A questionnaire was sent to machine operators who have quit working as employees, contractors or as employees for contractors with Holmen Skog during 2003-2007. 32 machine operators responded to the questionnaire. Interviews were made with 10 machine operators who had answered the questionnaire to gather more qualitative data. The results of the study indicate that fewer forest machine operators change profession than employees in other occupations in Sweden.

Aim: The nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, raised global criticism against nuclear power. In Sweden, the criticism has not been very visible and the government now allows a renewal of the nuclear power plants. The purpose with the study is to have a closer look on how Swedes in position of power motivate their positive attitude to nuclear power and how they conduct themselves to each other and to their opponents. The rhetorical perspective will be in focus for the analysing.Method: Four different artifacts represented by Swedes in position of power having a positiveattitude to nuclear power were chosen. Three rhetorical theories (the rhetorical arena, stasis andethos, pathos and logos) were used with the research question in focus.Result & Conclusions: The analyses resulted in conclusions about the strategies used by the participants such as: the importance of contexts, meaning for example that the greenhouse effect legitimizes nuclear power as a source of energy with important benefits.

The democratic conditions in national states have change radically at the same time as the society has changed. Because of social and economic globalization processes, the states and government has lost power for the benefit of transnational and global institutions. That affects the democracy since the nation state earlier defined the domain of citizenship. At the same time, citizens? confidence towards political parties and politicians has gone down.

Playboy is a magazine that, for more than a half century, has been mostly known to the wider audience for its stylized pictures of naked women. What a lot of people do not know is that the magazine, with its editor in chief Hugh Hefner in the lead, has been frontrunners in human rights. Playboy has been fighting protecting the right of freedom of speech, fighting for equal rights for all people during the civil rights movement and supported the feminist movement by funding precedent cases on abortion rights. According to a series of text analyses by Beggan & Allison (2000, 2002b) Playboy?s editorial direction contradicted conventional definitions of masculinity. Also, the magazine portrayed its Playmates with complex identities that, in many cases, contained a number of traditionally masculine abilities.In this thesis we have done a critical discourse analysis of the Playboy interview and how the gender of its subject is portrayed by the magazine.

This essay deals with the subject of the use of news medium amongst the students inKarlstads University. The presentation of the problem is about illustrating the or thosemedium that is the most used amongst the students, and also which one, ore which onesof the news medium the students puts largest trust in. This subject was chosen with thepurpose to illuminate patterns and attitudes of and to news medium, to make it easierfor eventual research in the future to connect these patterns and attitudes with theparticipation in political elections. The subject in question is interesting because of thefact that the news medium is one of the largest sources of information for the citizensknowledge?s about the society, and the citizen?s attitude to the news medium mightpossibly have the ability to affect people?s commitment in politics.

The purpose of this study is to examine the medial depiction of Muslims in the case of Pastor Terry Jones' intention to burn the Quran. Our study is based on theoretical framework regarding an alleged clash of civilizations, how that leads to global conflicts and controls the world politics. It?s also based on the western way of characterize Muslims as violent, irrational human beings, and how mass media have a tendency to depict Muslims as ?the others?. The questions we aim to seek answers to are: How were Muslims portrayed in CNN's and Al-Jazeera's reporting regarding Terry Jones plan to burn the Quran? Which discourses exist about Muslims in each news channel and what are the main differences between them? The qualitative method used is a critical discourse analysis on empirical data consistently of twelve articles.

The aim of the study is to explore the meaning of living with urinary incontinence caused by Spina Bifida, self-esteem, psychological well-beeing and expectations on treatment of urinary incontinence in 10 children and adolescents, 9-20 years old, as well as their parents perspective. The study was conducted through semi-structured interviewes as well as self-reports about self-esteem ("I think I am"; Ouvinen-Birgerstam, 1999) and psychological well-beeing (Beck Ungdomsskalor; Beck, Beck & Jolly, 2004). To examine the parents insight in their childrens situation and well-beeing parents proxy-reports was compared to their childrens self-reports. The results showed that psychological well-beeing and self-esteem of the children and adolescents in this study was comparable to normgroups, but that there was big individual differences. The parents proxy-reports are comparable to their childrens self-reports, but vary depending on the domain beeing estimated.

This thesis examines the organization Empower and their members, who consist of sex working women in Thailand. The purpose is to explore the more liberal point of view of prostitution and how the female members perceive Empower. Furthermore the study investigates if the organization can improve the sex workers empowerment. The study also delineates how these women reflect on their professional role as a sex working woman and whether the women relate to feminine discourses. The study is implemented in Chiang Mai, Thailand during the fall of the year 2010 and is based on qualitative methods like interview, focus group, observations and text analysis.

Environmental objective 17: Sustainable consumption - An attempt to integrate the global impact of the Swedish consumption with the environmental objectives system The aim of this report was to integrate the global impact of the Swedish consumption withthe environmental objectives system through presenting a suggestion for a seventeenth environmental objective ? Sustainable consumption. How the Swedish consumption pressures the global environment and methods to measure the affects was investigated. The pressure was divided into five main fields: climate, air, water, land and chemicals. The impacton humans and the biodiversity was also discussed, as well as differences between how men and women affect the environment and get affected when the environment changes.

This Bachelor thesis deals with the act of the British Labour Party when they recalled a referendum promised by former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Tony Blair promised a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty, but his successor Gordon Brown later recalled it when the Lisbon Treaty succeeded the Constitutional Treaty as the legal foundation of the European Union.The main purpose of this thesis was to with help from various theorethical frameworks explain why the Labour Party decided to do this, even if this decision gave the main opposition party, the Conservative and Unionist Party (the Tories), the chance to heavily critisize the Labour Party, and picture them as traitors.The research questions were:? What are the reasons that the Labour Party went from being a Eurosceptical party, to become more pro-European?? Why did the Labour Party cancel the promised referendum on the new treaty of the European Union?Various answers were found for the first research question. Among the most important was that it was a part of the over all transition which led to the launch of New Labour.The second research question was answered with three explanatory models based on actions of the Labour Party on three arenas; the electoral arena (based on power, this model claims that the Labour Party act as they do because the know the Tories would not act differently if they were in office), the parliamentary arena (based on ideology, this model claims that Labour want the Lisbon Treaty because it has a stronger social dimension than earlier treaties) and the internal arena (based on the problem of identification, this model claims that the Labour Party identifies itself with the British government, and not just the voters, and are afraid of damaging Britain?s influence in the EU and international politics if Britain says ?no? to the Lisbon Treaty)..

This paper is a case study of a local labour market project. The aim of the study is to investigate the staff?s way of working with unemployed people, receiving social assistance, in order to reduce the payment of social assistance in four adjacent city districts of Stockholm. Other objectives of the study are to investigate which criteria the staff uses when selecting participants for the project, in which way the participants? background affects the measures taken by the staff and how the staff experiences working as part of a project.

Introduction: The number of hearing impairments in Sweden is increasing. The largest increase is seen in ages 25-44. There are reasons to believe that these impairments are noise induced. Leisure time noise is not controlled in the same manner that industrial noise is. An ongoing conflict between city council officials and rock club owners, musicians and music event organizers about sound levels at smaller live music clubs exceeding the national sound level restrictions created the need for an acoustic intervention project.

Organizational democracy has been a popular research area in recent decades but the implementation in real organizations is slow (Kokkinidis, 2012; Verdorfer, Weber, Unter Rainer & Seyr, 2013). Several researchers (Schön Jansson, 2012; Falkheimer, Heide & Johansson, 2013) argue that communication practitioners have a key role in democratic processes and that because their job role is under constant change there are only a few modern studies regarding the subject. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how communication practitioners in private and public organizations experience their role in the process of internal communication and to what extent they are aware of, and work with internal organizational democracy.The practitioners we interviewed had a strong feeling that they were a support function for the business and the organizational management. As a result of the study it is clear that communication practitioners are very loyal to their employers and to the organization they work for. They are, therefore, not neutral in their professional role and argue that their task is to represent the management's interests.

This thesis project has been written and accomplished in cooperation with HABO AB. The objective of the project was to develop a standard stated packaging system. The background to this is that HABO is not pleased with the system currently in use. The system which HABO is currently using consists of to many sizes. The largest benefit of a standard stated system is that it becomes much easier to organize the packaging with the aid of a computer program.