The idea that I put forward in this thesis concerns the democratic system and the threat from discoursive impact on its core values. I focus my normative analysis on three of these democratic values: transparency, accountability and influence ? and what democratic problems the discoursive impact causes in conflict with them. I have used a critical discourse theory to define discourse and discoursive impact, by focusing on the process of discourse, rather than its nature. I deal with the political structure where I claim that the essential relation between citizen and politician is disrupted, due to lack of information and the imminent problems of the existing network society.

This thesis uses statistical methods to investigate if political appointees working for the Swedish government are good representatives for the members of the ruling party. This is a relevant question since the number of political appointees and the political fields in which they are employed have increased. Some say that this is a sign of presidentialism, which in this context means that the prime minister and his cabinet are becoming more independent from parliament and supporting party. The research is done by comparing the political appointees with an select elite of party members regards to socioeconomic background, which interest that are promoted in society and ideology. The consequences of differences on these characteristics between political appointees and the party elite could be that some interest in society are wrongly overrepresented while others are wrongly underrepresented by the unelected political appointees.

In this paper, I am using a critical discourse analysis a la Fairclough to examin how various actors talk about the group of unemployed youths in the 52 articles from Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. What?s written in media often portrays different ideas that individuals use in social practice. My theoretical points are social constructivism, risk-, expert-, and media society. Four themes crystallized in the analysis; young and unemployed, education, jobbgaratin and youth and labor market.

My project is about attitudes towards disabled people, about our fear for those who are different, about acceptance, ideals and normality.My inspiration has been prosthesis, and mostly people that are born without limbs. Through my research I have come across a lot of questions. Such as, why is a prosthesis so important and for whom? Why is it so important to be normal? What is normal and for who? People that are born different se upon themselves as normal, until they realize that others don?t. Many of them want to learn how to deal with life without prosthesis. And therefore they reject these. Sometimes the prosthesis is aids that are highly necessary.

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to discover the driving forces in top athletes, concerning training, body image and social positioning. Furthermore the object is to study how important being fit is for social reasons in today?s society. The athletes have been interviewed face-to-face and described their personal drive regarding training, their goals and the significance of the sport. They have also described how they see the image of the ideal body that currently exists within the field of sport and society and how training affects their own body image.

In today?s society a large focus is put on energy systems and how our energy systems are built up. In order to make sure that we in the future still can enjoy the living standards that we are used to today, Sweden and EU have made a number of decisions on making our energy system more energy efficient and consequently reduce the usage of energy resources. By 2020 the European Union should have reduced its energy consumption by 20 % compared to 1990?s level, and by 2050, 50%.

This is a BA thesis in landscape planning at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate why Japanese gardens, created in Sweden, often lack the feeling connected with Japanese gardens. The thesis includes a short study of Japanese history, spanning from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, to create a mild understanding of how the Japanese society changed, due to political, religious and cultural influences. The traditional Japanese garden styles, developed during this period, have been concisely compiled separately to create a homogeneous image of each style. In order to display opposite views of garden design in the European garden styles, some of the european styles have been concisely compiled as well. To produce a higher level of understanding of the Japanese garden, a consice compilation of the fundamental design principles has been included, as well as variuos types of decoration typical to the Japanese gardens, since the miss-use of these is a certain way of losing the feeling of a Japanese garden. The thesis is concluded by a consice compilation of possible reasons as to why the feeling connected with Japanese gardens is absent, as well as some attempt to include the feeling in the Swedish versions of Japanese gardens..

AbstractThe aim of the thesis was to examine some older people's experiences of everyday life and how it is to grow old in Namibia today. Because everyday life is a broad concept, we chose to focus on some specific parts of everyday life. These are chores, family, work/education, elderly past and present and the government/society. Furthermore we chose to look at the similarities and differences between the experiences on the basis of gender, race/ethnic groups and class.We chose to use a qualitative research method and to be inspired by life stories. We used a semi-structured interview guide and interviewed six people between 70 and 89 years.

This study aims to examine how performance management is compatible with the operations at Sida, Sweden?s International Development Cooperation Agency, by performing interviews with representatives from Sida. The public sector is facing increased demands on accounting, which has emerged as an institutionalized social norm in society. The nature of Sida?s operations, however, proves to be highly complex, rendering results based management difficult to implement.

Eastern Europeans in Gotland is an essay with the purpose to find out how persons born in Eastern Europeans countries have adapted and integrated on Gotland. European community and notions about other groups of immigrants on Gotland have been relevant questions besides. The results of the essay show that the conditions for adaptation and integration are very different between the periods of time and for the individuals, depending on how they arrived to Sweden. The migrant workers quickly adapted to the labour market and had good premises to be in a position of financial independence. The demands of skills were low in the 60?s, but as a result of this, many of them didn?t learn the Swedish language very well and during the crisis in the 90?s they were no longer that attractive on the labour market.

This thesis work is performed on VSM Group Ltd in Huskvarna that produces sewing machines under the trademarks Pfaff and Husqvarna Viking. On these sewing machines is an application that helps the user to thread the needle. The aim with the work has been to study today's applications on VSM and their competitors' sewing machines in order to since developing a new Needle-threader that divides itself from all the ones used today. The objective with the work has been an entire new concept with an operational prototype.As a base the competitor analysis was used where today's applications was studied in order to identify positive and negative aspects of these. This led to a number off ?concept families? where different variants off the same ideas were collected and evaluated.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how love relationship affects the identity and attitude towards school of study motivated girls in 17-18 years of age with the subsidiary purpose to get anidea of how the gender order is maintained in the relationship.The study is based on theories of gender theory and identity theory, which concerns gender as aresult of actions and how the gender order is maintained. The identity theory is based as a choice toconvey different roles.The study is founded on qualitative research interviews with six different girls, where the focus wasto learn about their own experiences of how the love relationship affects them.The results were interpreted through a hermeneutic analysis.The results show that the love relationship affect informants' identity on self-perception, what roles they convey and the attitude towards school. It turned out that the informants' attitude towards school was dependent on their boyfriend´s attitude towards school.The results also show that girls are highly involved in the process of maintaining the gender order in which they choose to manage their time according to their boyfriend's time, and has the role of the engaging and emotional in the relationship..

The purpose of this essay is to examine how Elin Wägner depicts the middle-aged woman who lives in the country in Sweden, in the 1920?s. The question at issue is: What problems and what subjects for rejoicing does she raise? My aim is to try to understand the women?s situation, as well as how Elin Wägner describes the situation in her four novels from the 1920?s: Den namnlösa (1922), Silverforsen (1924), Natten till söndag (1926) och Svalorna flyga högt (1929). At the same time I intend to compare the woman of the 1920?s to the situation of women today.I am writing from a feministic literary theory called ?omläsning? according to the description of Gunilla Domellöf.

The Swedish mental hospitals existed for about one hundred years, the period around 1880-1980. The research is intended to be from a local setting perspective to study the local approach used to meet requirements from Furunäsets mental hospital principals 1960 - 1972, the effect this had on the care and treatment of mentally ill patients and how Swedish society's changing approach to mental health influenced the process. The results of the research showed that Furunäset searched for ways to meet the principals' requirements which often went against the patients? personal best. Furunäsets mental hospital strove to fulfill its institutional goals in them selves rather than giving patients the care and treatment they needed.

This qualitative study aims to study how sexuality is constructed in web articles on the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. The study is based on a social constructivist perspective where language is seen as constitutive of reality. The study is based on a Foucauldian discourse analysis which is used in order to see what is excluded and included in the articles? construction of normal sexuality. The result shows that there are similarities in how the web articles produce normal sexuality.