Short-term-fostercare has a huge burden of work, hence they get harder and harder cases since placements in institutions decreases and short-term-forstercare increases. We wanted to study short-term-fosterparents experiences of their work, since they makes an important effort. The aim of the study was to describe the teamwork with them and the groups: the social care, the children/youth and the biological patents, from a short-term-fosterparent perspective. We´ve also been interviewing two fostercare-secretaries, hence we wanted to get an insight in the organization of short-term-fostercare. The study is a qualitative attempt and we´ve done six interviews with short-term-parents.

AbstractThe thesis investigates how the European Union promotes stability and security in the Mediterranean region. The aim is to analyse the European Union?s security ambitions with Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the Barcelona Process. An analytical framework with five sectors (military, political, economic, environmental and societal), based on the Copenhagen School?s theories about security sectors and securitization, is used for the analysis.

The main purpose of this essay is to investigate the legal position for employers concerning protection against what employees can express about one?s employer in social media.It may regard dissatisfaction concerning employment, tort or so-called whistleblowing. The spread through social media may be comprehensive and thus cause more damage to the employer.Employees within the public sector as well as in the private are protected by the liberty of speech, which is constitutional, even the protection of sources or the right to criticize can offer some protection. This gives the employees the possibility to widely express themselves in private social media as long as it can?t be classified as a violation, which per se is very rare.However, certain differences between the both sectors will be pointed out.There are still no constitutional rights regarding social media, but a grey area has emerged concerning the legal position.

In the early 1990?s more and more companies of the Swedish public sector were exposed to competition, and this started the debate on how such actions might affect the business and even society.The first chapter examines how the public sector and especially health care, is financed and managed. We also explore what it means to be exposed to competition and find that there are many different ways of exposing the public sector to competition. The study examines dental care as an example of a market with both publicly and privately owned companies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how publicly and privately owned health care companies view their relationship with their consumers.

This study focuses upon the new societal objects that are termed public privatepartnerships where the public sector forms strategic alliances with the private sectorand the civil society to manage the wicked issues of today. An exampel of suchcooperation is Vänerhamn AB where the municipalities around the lake of Vänernand the private shipping companies got togheter to handle an economic crisis of theshipping buisiness. The partnership Vänerhamn has developed from a problematicactivity to a healthy company and the aim of this thesis is to illuminate thisdevelopment through an historical institutional approach, focusing critical junctureto discover if the governance theory can be used to understand the partnershipspositive process. This will be done through research questions about the organisation of thepartnership, about the members interests with the partnership and about eventuallycoordination problems in the partnership. The questions derive from dimensions ingovernance theory, central for the activity of partnerships. Interviews with centralinformants where held and it was complemented through a document analyses inorder to search for indications of the dimensions and that is the methodologicalapproach of the study. The conclusion of this thesis is that the governance theory can be used tounderstand Vänerhamns postive development since the members interest with thepartnership to a begining was not at all conformed and that led to obviouscoordination problems.

Handling, loading, transport time and unloading in connection to transport of farm animals affect animal welfare. Induced effects include both psychological and physiological stress responses in animals. The physiological parameters may be measured through blood analysis while behavioural changes often manifest themselves through increased vocalisation, escape attempts and apathy. Physiological parameters are additional parameters of importance when measuring animal stress responses. The handlers behavior during transport has been shown to have major impact on animal welfare and the quality of meat. Animal friendly handling and driving of animals create a more manageable work environment for the handlers. To further increase animal welfare in connection to transport, stables should be built with well adapted drift passage and ramps on the transport vehicle.

The abrupt and early weaning of intensively kept lambs may have serious animal welfare implications, but relatively little is known about this. Weaning includes the breaking of the mother-young bond and abrupt replacement of milk by solid food, often coinciding with changes in the (social) environment. Altogether, these changes are likely to affect lamb welfare significantly. This study aimed to establish how strong and persistent lamb welfare is impaired following abrupt weaning by means of measuring behaviour parameters indicative of affective state. Also, we investigated the existence of a diurnal rhythm in play behaviour, which is considered an important indicator of positive affect and good welfare.

Animal welfare is impaired if the diet does not provide sufficient feeling of satiety or the ability to perform natural feeding behavior. Pigs are omnivores and spend most of the day searching for food by rooting, grazing and chewing. Both inability to perform foraging behavior and insufficient feeling of satiety often leads to direction of foraging behavior towards stereotyped and abnormal oral behavior. Dry sows are often fed restrictively which leads to unsatisfied feeling of hunger. Dietary fiber has been found to reduce stereotypic and abnormal behavior as well as aggression, which could indicate that pigs need to forage has been met giving a feeling of satiety.

Animal welfare is impaired if the diet does not provide sufficient feeling of satiety or the ability to perform natural feeding behavior. Pigs are omnivores and spend most of the day searching for food by rooting, grazing and chewing. Both inability to perform foraging behavior and insufficient feeling of satiety often leads to direction of foraging behavior towards stereotyped and abnormal oral behavior. Dry sows are often fed restrictively which leads to unsatisfied feeling of hunger. Dietary fiber has been found to reduce stereotypic and abnormal behavior as well as aggression, which could indicate that pigs need to forage has been met giving a feeling of satiety.

Transportation of pigs might be a welfare problem. Stress during and after transportation can negatively affect the meat quality or cause carcass damages, which leads to major economic losses every year. The transportation chain can be divided into several stages; loading, transport and unloading. This literature review focuses on unloading of pigs from a transport. When arriving at an abattoir pigs can be fatigued and need to be as smoothly unloaded as possible.

The environmental situation is becoming increasingly critical. The energy sector and other industries have a big impact on our climate and the public is raising their voice for companies to admit their responsibility towards the environment and society. Companies engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and happily disclose their responsible performance in annual reports. But what messages are they conveying in their CSR-reporting, and what attitudes towards CSR can be found underneath the explicit content? The aim of this study is to discover which discourses exist in CSR-reports from Swedish energy companies, and how these discourses operate.

Cattle production systems are changing to bigger intensified systems with larger numbers of animals per farm and more free range systems while at the same time employing fewer people. Aversive handling has been known to affect cattle production negatively for many years, but lately scientists have started to focus more on what positive effects gentle handling and positive human-cattle interactions may have on beef and dairy production. Fear can cause high stress in production animals and this can contribute to not only reduced production within beef and dairy cattle, but also increased risks for accidents and decreased animal welfare. Therefore, by reducing the fear cattle experience of humans, it could be possible to increase production, decrease accidents and increase the welfare of the animals. Reducing the animals fear and stress can be done by simple means, such as walking and talking calmly around the cattle, associating humans to positive feelings (such as feed) and stroking the cattle?s body regions associated with social grooming.

This study is made in cooperation with Setragroup AB. Setra is Sweden?s biggest sawmilling company with a turnover of almost 6 billion SEK. 45% of the produced volume goes to the Swedish market where the customers are the DIY-sector and industrial customers. Setra as well as the other Swedish sawmilling companies operate in a very competitive environment.

The aim of this paper was to investigate whether or not it is possible to keep bottlenose dolphins and killer whales in captivity while maintaining good animal welfare. Today, many zoos and aquariums claim that their primary function is to conserve species and educate people about conservation and threatened species. The keeping of wild animals is justified by conservation programs and by the information spread to the zoo visitors. This does however not seem to be the case for marine mammals such as bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) and killer whales (Oricnus orca) since these species are not threatened in the wild and neither of them are listed as threatened in IUCN's Red List. Bottlenose dolphins and killer whales are entirely aquatic carnivores and are distributed in all coastal and pelagic waters from the Arctic ice in the north to the Antarctic ice in the south.

The purpose of the essay is to analyze the welfare state from a gender perspective. Further, the paper analyzes and critically examines three different normative solutions provided by Irish Marion Young, Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas for the realization of a welfare state that includes women.Habermas argues that the welfare state has created a situation of dependency and state paternalism which reduces both individual and collective self-determination. Young follows Habermas? argument. She argues for a political climate where justice is reduced to the distribution of material goods rather than the elimination of underlying relations of domination and gender specific patterns.