The purpose of this study is to determine if and how municipal consultative entities through influence may affect the legitimacy of the Swedish democratic model. The study aims to do this through analysing the opportunities for influence present with the Youth Council and the Council of the Retired in Karlstads municipality, to determine how the councils may affect political participation and the role of elected representatives. To do so, the study asks the following primary research question:"What requisites for influence are present for participants of municipal consultative entities, as found for the representatives of the youth and the retired within the framework of their participation in the Youth Council and the Council of the Retired in Karlstads municipality?"The study answers this research question by dividing it into one question of policy and one question of democratic perspective, and investigating these matters through nine snowballing interviews with the decision makers, organisational actors and participants of the councils. The information from the interviews is then analysed per council through a framework of democracy theory, policy process theory and organisation theory.

The aim of this thesis is to assess the strategic importance of Central Asia as a whole and interests of great powers in the region in particular within the theoretical framework chosen. The work shows Central Asia as an area of the New Great Game, analogue of the original Great Game which was played out between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia in XIX century. The parallels between the original Great Game and the New Great Game are drawn in order to understand the scope and the true intentions of the players of the latter one. Also, the security issues in the contemporary Central Asia are explored and analyzed to provide with the background for future predictions. Furthermore, the indirect purpose of the thesis is to examine whether the international system has changed from that of two centuries ago by comparing the structure of the international systems at the time of two Games.

Swedish consulting companies within the architecture-and engineering business exist on a market that is distinguished by an increasing globalization and internationalization. The companies? commissions are based mostly on long-term, personal clientele. These relations are threatened by a huge number of coming retirements and high employee turnover.Consequently these companies need to improve and strengthen their relationships with existing customers, to create long-term employee and customer loyalty. The purpose of this essay was to analyze and evaluate consulting companies´ internal marketing.

AbstractThis degree project is about having meetings in The Swedish Social Insurance Agency, which is awide organisation. This work will concentrate on one of the projects going on within theorganisation which is travel-free meetings, where they are building a video meeting system thatallows the employees in the organisation to be able to meet with each other through the use ofvideoconferencing instead of physical meetings.In this work we will show how Kaikaku (radical system changes) along with Kaizen (continuouschange) can support an organisation to become more efficient and reduce wastage. We have donethis work in an organisation that is present in over one hundred locations in Sweden.The Social Insurance Agency has over 13 000 employees at over one hundred locations inSweden.The organisation has to be close to their customers and provide the best service aspossible. To be able to work in a uniform way, the employees get together and have meetings.Some meetings are just progress meetings and takes perhaps no more than two hours to complete.However, if seven employees from seven different locations need to have meetings, in the worstcase, they all have to meet in a common place.This is expensive for the organisation in travel costs, time and absence from work, but thetravelling also contributes to environmental pollution if the employees are travelling by a fuelpoweredvehicle.A whole day could go lost for having a meeting in about two hours if all sevenemployees went from their own cities to e.g. Stockholm for the meeting.Muda (wastage) of travel created several different types of Muda, namely:? Wastage with anticipation when the employees had to wait for e.g.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the archivist's professional role in public authorities and discuss if, and in what way, the profession is effected by the new swedish process oriented archival description system. The study focuses on swedish authorities and does not make any international comparisons with other institutions. Neither does it investigate archivists workingin the private sector, but centers on public institutions.The survey is performed in five swedish public authorities, using interviews and observations. Grounded theory is used as a method initially in the purpose of keeping an open mark towards the object of study. The initial results led on to questions about how well the archivists perceived that communication within the authorities served, and how this in turn prepossessed their work situation and the professional roles in which they found themselves.

Problem area and purposeNowadays, 2006, the downloading of music and movies is an increasingly more burning issue. But while the music industry has made great progress in using the Internet as a distribution channel the film industry has been at a standstill for several years. Recently however there has been progress in the form of a few film companies beginning to offer their customers legal ways to acquire films over the Internet. But with this progress one central question arises, which this report will try to answer; what are the important factors for selling films as the Internet moves from primarily being a information channel to also functioning as a distribution channel? The purpose is to examine what the consumers find important when purchasing film, and to establish to what degree there is a substitution effect between DVDs and downloadable films.MethodThe report is first and foremost based on an Internet survey with a total of 383 participants.

This thesis concerns the Gotlandic hill-forts (sw. fornborg) situated on a cliff or in an elevated position and which traditionally have been referred to as cliff-forts (sw. klintborg/höjdborg). The study derives from the notion that these monuments, diverse in size and shape, by archaeologists have been viewed and treated as a homogeneous category of ancient remains. The author?s key aim is to challenge this perception by identifying various subcategories from the 28 cliff-forts on the island.Ever since the archaeological discipline initiated the study of cliff-forts in the late 1800s and more or less to present day, the interpretations have been almost solely dominated by explanations of the military and defendable nature of them.

Due to an increased population in cities the need of densification of cities increases. This means that the amount of ecological elements in the city is at risk of decreasing. Ecological services contribute to the city?s climate by softening the negative impacts that densification of cities means. Thus increases the will and ambition in city planning in to preserve greenery.This is an interdisciplinary thesis within the subject of geography that studies Biotope Area Factor (BAF), a planning tool that is used in city planning with the purpose of compensating for lost ecological services associated with new housing estate.

The purpose of this thesis work is to create a prototype for an augmented reality application that isaimed to support service technician when performing service and maintenance of machines andengines. The prototype will be used for investigating what technical limitations there is and toestablish basic usability for the user interface. The method that is used is user studies and analysis toevaluate use cases and user stories. An iterative work process is then applied for design and theprototype is continuously user tested.The resulting prototype uses a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 running on Android operating system. Theframework used for augmented reality is NyARToolkit which handles marker recognition andconnections to Android.

This work applies intersectionality to five Somali women self-narratives and focuses on their identities and positions in Swedish society, but also their relation to Somali society. Since people constructs in relation to the environment, this work studies the impact of environmental confirmations of their own self. Intersectionality is brought into the social work with an operational attempt, and shows how critics of power and interplay between theories and empirics can provide new knowledge. Intersectionality also demands some alterations of the social constructionists? idea of the ego.

New technology has created new opportunities for journalists working with web TV. Changes in the work processes have led to new professional roles. According to the theory of media logic such events become news that suits media organizations and working conditions. How does the media logic affect the editorial workflow and how does it affect professional roles? In light of my own experience in various roles in television journalism, I examine how the web TV format shapes the work of journalists.

In the 1969 Le Thor seminar, Heidegger stated that his philosophical journey could be characterized by three different themes: meaning, truth, place. The first two of these have been the subject of countless studies and discussions, but the question of place is still relatively unexplored in Heidegger?s thought, despite the increased interest for this topic in his writings. Even though scholars like Jeff Malpas, Edward Casey, Stuart Elden and Miguel de Beistegui have written books and essays on the importance of the conception of place in Heidegger?s thinking, there are still many important aspects of this theme to be discussed, given the importance Heidegger himself ascribed to this topic.In this essay, I therefore wish to pose the question of how one can understand the relation between place and the role of tragedy in Heidegger?s conception of truth.

The Swedish energy system will be influenced by many future changes, such as energy and climate policy objectives. The installation of more renewable electricity could increase by using solar energy. Over the recent years, grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems have increased dramatically in Sweden, partly due to various support systems and compensation models. These support systems have been designed to make it easy for individuals and businesses to invest in self-generated electricity and thus contribute to the transformation of the energy system.The introduction of a higher proportion of solar energy may in turn affect the Swedish electricity system. This could mean that the electricity companies will be facing a number of changes in the near future.

Over a long period of time, there has been a rich debate in the academic and financial world if active management can generate an excess return. Many experts say that the current active management strategies is nothing more than a money grab that produces large gains, for banks and investment firms, through high management fees while producing no excess value for the individuals buying their service. In short, an effective market makes it almost impossible for fund managers to produce value for their clients in the long run.No argument has only one side though, other experts say that active management has a role to play because not all investors are rational. This irrationality can lead to mispricing on financial assets in the marketplace and in turn lead to an ineffective market where active management can fill a much needed role. The purpose of this study is therefore to see if active management strategies can create a higher risk adjusted return, taking management fees into consideration, during times of high volatility when the uncertainty is at its peak.

With growing economies and better living standards in many parts of the world today, there is a need of expanding the capacity of generating electricity. The alternatives for renewable energy technologies are not fully developed and have still some problems to conquer.The company Minesto has developed a technology that is called Deep Green. It is designed to gain electricity from tidal currents. Deep Green works in a similar way as a kite that is attached to the seafloor with a moving wire. It contains of a wing that moves due to the water current.