This report deals with the attitudes within municipalities of open source software and open standards and if open source software may be an option to gain open standards. The aim has been to find out if open source software and open standards would be able to solve the lock-in problems that municipalities have against proprietary software. The study is conducted as an exploratory, inductive and qualitative study with depth interviews of subjectively selected informants as data collection method. A literature review has also been implemented by the relevant books and articles. Some economic determinants of municipalities to make use of open source software have not been considered in this study.

I have conducted a review on four countries in Scandinavia and the goal was to create a better understanding about what has caused homelessness in this countries. The result shows that the causes of homelessness can be explained by a variety of reasons. The most common causes of homelessness were related to mental illness and drug abuse. There where also other causes of homelessness, which was considered normal in Scandinavia. Examples of other causes were eviction, unemployment, housing policy, housing shortage, payment of debts, separations and family problems..

Since the 2006 election, the debate surrounding the Swedish labour market policy has intensified. There has been a discussion about a need for change towards a more flexible labour market. An example of this is on the other side of the strait, in neighbouring Denmark. Their flexicurity model, ?the golden triangle?, is characterized by a flexible labour market, generous unemployment benefits and active labour market policies.

Sweden?s environmental work is to set out from 16 national environmental quality objectives. It aims to work for a sustainable society and to solve our current environmental problems today and not pass them on to future generations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate Uppföljning av handlingsprogram för miljömål (a follow up-study of a programme for environmental quality objectives) and to propose new methods to work with the revision of Handlingsprogram ? så genomför vi de regionala miljömålen i Hallands län (a programme to implement the regional environmental quality objectives in the County of Halland), a revision which will start in autumn 2010.

The aim of this study was to examine and compare two municipalities? approaches to deal with men?s violence as a social problem. Further the aim was to analyze social workers? opinions about interventions for men who practice violence in heterosexual relationships. The study has got a qualitative approach and we did a subjective selection where we chose to apply semi-structured interviews with social workers who work with domestic violence.

In this thesis we present a qualitative study of Employer Branding through a perspective of gender. We examine the awareness of Employer Branding as a tool to break gender patterns in female and male dominated administrations in three Swedish municipalities. Six recruiters people were interviewed, including three pre-school managers and three managers of technical administrations, to see if there are any differences or similarities between the organizations? Employer Branding to break gender patterns. In addition to the interviews, the Web pages of these three municipalities were investigated through a contextual perspective.We found that our interviewees do use Employer Branding, but that they were not necessarily aware of its? meaning.

Who runs the development? A comparative study of the construction of residential buildings in Nacka and Södertälje.The aim of this study is to identify actors involved in the initiation and implementation of residential house construction in two Swedish municipalities. This means who is taking initiative for new residential buildings, who affects the planning process, who finances these new buildings and who builds them. By exploring empiric material from the municipalities of Nacka and Södertälje, the above questions will be answered and by referring to pluralism, growth machine theory and regime theory a link to general theories of political science is made. The results found show that the analysed municipalities have quite different possibilities for acting and that these backgrounds are also important for which actors will take initiative for new residential buildings and which actors will be allowed to state their opinion during the planning process.

This study is mostly based on previous research, which includes Sub-national actor?s attitudes and regional action towards the European Union. The purpose of the study is to investigate if four Swedish municipalities in Värmland operate internationally towards the European Union and deepen an understanding of their actions. The main research question is: - How can we increase our understanding of municipal action against the European Union? The research questions of this study are answered through qualitative method and semi-structured interviews were conducted.

This paper is about if municipal council's ideology affect steering in the municipalities of Vellinge and Fagertsa. Vellinge has for a long time been governed by Sweden's conservative party Moderaterna. Fagersta has for a long time been governed by Sweden's left party Vänsterpartiet. The main question of the paper to be answered is as follows:Is there a relation between the steering in municipalities and the ideology of the governing parties?The hypothesis is that there is a connection between what ideology the party that governs has and how the municipalities are being governed.

The purpose of the study is to investigate and elucidate how and why municipalities cooperate across municipal boundaries with destination development. To answer the purpose the authors chose two research questions:What are the incentives of cooperation between the municipalities in Roslagen? What are the possibilities and difficulties of cooperation? In order to answer the research questions interviews with local business managers, administrative director, the acting Head of destination and tourist office staff were made. Municipalities have signed a cooperation agreement in October/November 2008, where they will work more formal together to strengthen the destination Roslagen. The result of the study shows that the main motive for municipal cooperation is the sharing of financial resources to promote and develop the destination Roslagen together.

The overall purpose of this essay is to study in which degree the democratic model that is called participant democracy works in the Swedish municipalities. To achieve what I set out to do I will focus on a central political area in which the Swedish municipalities has sovereignty versus the state, in other words in an area where they rule themselves. That political area will then represent how well the participant democracy works in the Swedish municipalities. The research questions then becomes:Does the participant democracy at Swedish Municipality level work in a satisfying way?Does the participant democracy in a large Swedish Municipality in a central political area work?Does the participant democracy in a small Swedish Municipality in a central political area work?Are there similarities and differences between the municipalities?If so, how can that be explained?To answer these questions I will study documents regarding the planning and building area.

The aim of this essay is to examine the handling of plastic waste on a local level in the three municipalities of Gothenburg, Malm? and Stockholm. This is achieved with the help of guidance within the theory of Multi-level Governance. By applying the EU directive 2019/904, about disposable plastic, and examining the global plastic problem, the efforts to promote sustainable use, and recycling of plastic, is analyzed. The method involves a qualitative content analysis, where the 2022 waste plans of the three municipalities, ?Sveriges handlingsplan f?r plast? by the Government Office, and the 2019/904 EU directive constitutes the base of the study.

The purpose of this study was to examine what participants in the third phase (fas 3) of the Swedish unemployment program, Jobb- och utvecklingsgarantin, think about their situation, what they think about the program and if they feel stigmatized due to their unemployment. The data for the study was collected at one of the organizers of the program, which provides an introduction program for the participants. A qualitative method was used and the data was collected through six semi-structured interviews. The results were analyzed using Antonovskys theory of Sense of Coherence (SOC). The conclusions of the study were that the participants felt support from the staff at the organizer.

During the past decades the competition for skilful employees has increased and companies and organizations compete to attract the right people. The Swedish municipalities and country councils need to recruit 420 000 new employees before 2020, but have a limited budget to promote themselves as attractive employers. To find a solution, many of the municipalities have started to work with fundamental values to become more attractive employers and to inspire employees to use word-of-mouth to recommend them. There are no empirical studies of how successful this strategy is, and the purpose of this thesis is to show if there are significant correlations between the fundamental values, the employer's attractiveness and word-of-mouth. The results of the study are based on a survey with 1996 answers from employees in three different municipalities in Stockholm, Sweden.

In part this paper is a contribution to the ongoing Swedish discussion about our public structures. The discussion has picked up speed in the last years thanks to a government backed committee trying to come up with a suggestion to make our public sector more efficient. A big part of the debate is about the independence and work of our municipalities, what they should do, what they shouldn?t do and when the state should step in and take over. I make a theoretical investigation into one of these issues, the one about job creation.