In this thesis I have criticized traditional nationalism theories formulated by Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith. The critique has been based on my belief that nationalism theories do not explain nations whose foundation is built on forward-looking, dynamic aspects such as economy, human and civil rights, and democracy. Traditional nationalism theories have been focused on historicizing perspectives whereas I want to draw attention to non-historicizing perspectives within the field of research. So far nationalism theories has had a shared past or a shared ethnicity as its focal point.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how power is distributed in the mathematics classroom and how students achieve agency when ICT (Information and communication technology) is used as a teaching tool. Three learning situations, structured by mathematics, are analysed: in the first situation mathematics is taught in a traditional way, in the second mathematics is taught in interdisciplinary projects, and in the third mathematics is taught using ICT as a pedagogical tool. The theoretical concepts of power and agency are used as analytical tools within a socio-political framework. The concept of power is used to assess the students? ability to influence their learning and degree of inclusion in the three learning situations.

Earlier quantitative entrepreneurial studies with a focus on poverty rate has centred their arguments and analyses entirely on income differences which has resulted in a high poverty rate among self-employed. Their results shows that variables such as age, gender, hours of labour and structure of the household significantly affect the poverty rate among self-employed. In this study we aim the focus on material living standards instead of income differences, thus using a more representative approach while studying entrepreneurial poverty. The purpose of the study was to examine how personality traits (big five) affect the material living standards among the self-employed in Sweden, using a group of employed as a control group. Variables earlier known to affect the poverty risk among self-employed where used as control variables together with education and household income.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the politics and activities of the Social Democratic students´ association Spartakus. Their relationships and political and ideological differences towards the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the remaining parts of the Social Democratic youth organisation (SSU) in Linköping during 1969-1971 are examined. To fulfil this aim I have studied relevant literature and interviewed people who were active in Spartakus, as well as people from SSU and SAP in the municipal during the period. I have also studied written material produced by the students´ association itself during the period. The theoretical frame of reference consists of Dahl´s theory on a democratic political order, and party theories like the mass party theory of Duverger, theories from Sjöblom, Panebianco, Lipset and Tingsten and also Gidlund&Möller´s theory about different kinds of party members.

Friend lists allow Facebook users to group their friends and may be used to share certain information only with those in a specific list. This function has been around for several years, but has never gained any particular popularity among users, most of whom probably did not know it even existed a couple of years ago. In the fall of 2011, however, the function was updated and made more visible on the site.There are several possible uses of friend lists, such as privacy control, filtering of the news feed, self-presentation and targeted information sharing. This paper aims to investigate the extent to which friend lists are used by students today, as well as why students actually use their lists, i.e. for what purposes.Judging from the results of this study in comparison with earlier research, there seems to have been a somewhat recent increase in the awareness of the fact that friend lists actually do exist, but still most users tend not to utilize them.

The Swedish bank Handelsbanken has, according to their own way of measuring, been more successful than a weighted average of their competitors during the last 38 years. They have also handled the recent financial crisis, as well as the one in the 1990´s, better than most other banks. This paper studies their management control system at branch level in order to identify the controls which have been enforced to ensure that a low risk level is retained in the lending. The controls that have been identified are; (1) A decentralized organization with the offices as profit centers where the manager has restrictions regarding risk level and the results are measured as K/I (cost/revenue). (2) The absence of bonuses and individual follow-up regarding performance measurement.

This master thesis has been done at Enea Epact AB. The purpose of this thesis is to develop and implement a Link Quality Control algorithm for GPRS/EPGRS in the current testing tool. A Link Quality Control (LQC) shall take quality values from mobile stations and base stations and decide a codingsscheme that opimizes the throughput of data. The Advantage with LQC is that it adapts the used coding scheme to the channel quality. If the channel quality is too bad for the used coding scheme, a slower coding scheme with more redundancy should be selected.

Bakgrund och problem: Dagens företag verkar i en osäker och dynamisk miljö där marknaden ställer allt högre krav på snabba förändringar och anpassningar till kundernas behov. För att möta denna dynamiska omgivning har en rad nya produktionsfilosofier introducerats. En av dessa som fått stor uppmärksamhet och vars användning ökat är lean.Under senare år har det kommit att riktas stark kritik mot tillämpningen av traditionell ekonomistyrning och att denna kan vara skadlig vid tillämpningen vid lean. Andra forskare tar det steget längre och ställer sig frågan om det finns någon plats för ekonomistyrningen vid operationella koncept.Som ett svar på ovanstående kritik introducerades lean accounting, ett ämne som fortfarande är hårt debatterat inom managementlitteraturen. Andra forskare skiljer här på lean accounting och lean control, där lean control fokuserar på output, behavioral samt social control.

The aim of this master thesis is to create an understanding of what it can be like to grow older as a homosexual man in Sweden today. The study has an intersectional and queer theoretical approach and is based on eight in depth interviews with men who are aged between 68 and 82 years old. In the analysis I deal with the problem of how sexuality can be inter- preted with the experience of aging. Central to the analysis is the criticism of norms connected to age, sexuality, social- and family life and gay culture.The results show that the norm-breaking sexual orientation of the men affects their life path in terms of how to organize social life, where friends often replace the traditional family. New ways of forming relationships and living their lives imply other obligations rather than the traditional for significant others, which was shown to influence the expectations and outcome of old age in terms of care and support.

With this research we aimed to seek how youth workers express their experience of counselling on the internet compared to traditional counselling face to face with a theoretical ground in semiotics and symbolic interactionism. Our questions were 1) How do youth workers describe their experiences from anonymous, faceless online counselling? 2) How do youth workers experience the differences between online counselling and the traditional face-to-face counselling? 3) Which possibilities and difficulties do they see in online communication with adolescents? We used semi-structed interviews with seven youth workers. Six of those are active in non-profit organisations, and one in social services. The results from our interviews showed that the interviewees saw that misunderstandings were more frequent on the internet, but that online counselling with adolescents still was easier than in the face-to-face meetings.

This masters thesis investigates the relation between China and the Information Society as it is manifested in the UN conference the World Summit on the Information Society WSIS. The first phase of this two-phase conference took place in Geneva 10-12 December 2003, with two documents, Declaration of principles DP and Plan of action PA, as main results. The information policy is central to an authoritarian rule in its efforts to keep control over the national identity. The thesis investigates the impact that the information revolution and Internet might have on the Chinese national identity through the acceptance of DP and PA in various aspects. With the use of the information science theories by Manuel Castells and Frank Webster, the vision of WSIS was compared with the Chinese information policy.

One of the main objectives of all food production is to produce foods that can safely beconsumed without fear of being sick. Despite this hundreds of people are affected in Sweden offood poisoning almost every day. Most cases are caused by a small group of so-called pathogenicmicroorganisms. The most frequently affected are the small children, the elderly, persons withreduced resistance and pregnant. The reasons behind the food poisoning are often ignorance andlack of food hygiene.

The purpose with this disertation is to find if there are selected factors which can force companies to grow. We have chosen five factors which we think can force the companies; market, strategy, profitability, demographic and institutional factors. We want to examine if there are differences between small and larger companies, and if there are differences between the lines of business.The intention to growth is also influenced by different factors. The organization and the board have an effect on the development. There are also factors that can obstruct the growth, for example control.

The Open Access (OA) movement came to be as a reaction against the enclosure of information resources, facilitated by new distribution technologies. The purpose of the OA movement is to make research results freely available. The aim of this master´s thesis is to increase the understanding of how libraries outside of the academic sphere and within research institutes relates to OA. As a theoretical framework I created two different ideologies, the OA ideology and the nonsharing ideology. I also conducted six interviews with librarians.

Background: Traditional oral health education is seldom enough in order for dental care personnel to motivate their patients to good, long-lasting oral health care habits and there is a need for evaluation of other more efficient methods. One of these methods is motivational interviewing. An overview of its origin, definition, theoretical background and practical methods is given by way of introduction. Aim: The aim of the investigation was to review studies that had used motivational interviewing in order to obtain oral health, focusing on prevention and treatment of gingivitis, periodontitis and dental caries. Method: Systematic review. A search question was run through the databases ASSIA, ERIC, PsycINFO, Social Services Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts and PubMed. The articles were reviewed based on defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results: Five publications (based on three studies) met the inclusion criteria.