Rating agencies provide service by offering information about different kinds of securities and/or investment opportunities. This paper addresses questions often asked during the 2008 U.S. financial crisis: Why did no one see this coming? Why were all the explanations given afterward, not given before as precautions? Or if they were given before, why did nobody listen? Using Giddens’ idea of disembedded systems [Giddens A (1991a) The Consequences of Modernity (Polity Press, Cambridge, UK)], the paper describes and frames the phenomenon of U.S. financial crisis and the role of rating agencies in particular as a disembedded service system. Hereby it offers an explanation of the crises in contrast to the common incentive-oriented or moralizing perspectives. The paper shows that the U.S. financial crisis emerged from a disembedded service system, a simulacrum of ratings, which after a while was no more connected to the reality of securities. Information-providing service systems are in danger to become simulacra, and with it they can disembed. The paper offers a new insightful perspective on how to analyze and understand information-providing service systems and hence offers a perspective to avoid crises based on disembedded systems. This is the first paper to our knowledge to analyze information-providing service systems based on Giddens’ theory of abstract disembedded systems. It provides a new understanding of information-providing service systems that can help to avoid crises based on disembedded systems.

For companies legal privilege represents an essential bulwark against the state. In the case of internal investigations legal privilege is of prime importance to the companies. At crucial points of intersection the legal situation in the US differs from that of Germany. In the US, confidentiality is regarded with the aura of a Holy Grail, applying to in-house counsel and external lawyers alike. However, in Germany those privileges do not apply to in-house counsels and neither are they intended to apply to the corporate lawyer (so-called Syndikus). This is explained by Criminal Law policy arguments, which according to the author\'s opinion are not tenable. This essay represents solutions de lege lata and de lege ferenda, in order to at least include in-house lawyers (so-called Syndikus) within the scope of legal privilege. For this purpose, the author argues in favor of a partial adoption of the American way.

The United States Whistleblower Program’s inadequate protections have placed the privacy and confidentiality rights of United States taxpayers in a vulnerable state. By using the United States Whistleblower Program as an example, this paper seeks to illustrate the risk of eroding the confidentiality and privacy rights of the taxpayer, which is a risk that other national and international governments should likewise attempt to mitigate in their own whistleblower protection programs.

My dissertation is focusing on the cocoa trade in colonial Spanish America. Cocoa is undoubtedly one of the New World products which has dominated Europe. The work is divided into four chapters. The first chapter focuses on pre-Columbus period. It describes the origin of cocoa bean, its spread and its significance to the first cultivators. Considerably big part of this chapter is dedicated to the importancy of cocoa bean for the Aztecs culture.The next chapter focuses on the arrival of Spanish colonists, their first experiences with cocoa bean, the beginning of the cocoa trade and its introduction and spread to Europe. The main points of the third chapter are the main areas of cocoa production and trading in the colonial period. Each part of this chapter focuses not only on the trade in Venezuela, Ecuador and New Spain but also on other related topics. The fourth chapter briefly describes Bourbon reforms and shows their influence on different areas of production in 18th and the beginning of 19th century. All findings are summarized at the final part. Keywords: Cocoa, trade, colonial Spanish America, Colonial administration, Spain, Viceroyalty of New Spain,Viceroyalty of Peru

This thesis analyzes not only the book itself but also the development and transformation of main characters of the novel The House of the Spirits written by Chilean author Isabel Allende. The work deals with an introduction period of the Spanish-American fiction of the twentieth century, with emphasis on magic realism and related spirituality and historical events of the 20th century Chile. The text also focuses on the general theory of characters and plot outlines and structure of the novel. Furthermore, these findings are applied to the fictional character of this work. The conclusion summarizes the results of the investigation carried out and refuted the thesis of literature Isabell Allende. It is concluded that House of the Spirits clearly belongs to the literature of Latin American post - boom and it means much more than just a simple entertaining reading.

This thesis deals with the international law institute of diplomatic asylum. Introduction analyzes early history of asylum law, focusing primarily on the period of ancient Greece and Rome, and later on the asylum practice of the Church, which as an influential institution of the medieval world greatly influenced development of asylum law. To be able to put diplomatic asylum in broader context of asylum law, thesis also deals with territorial asylum - classic form of asylum. There is also a marginal consideration on refugee issues. General discussion is followed by the analysis of diplomatic asylum itself. Diplomatic asylum as a Latin American legal particularism is a special form of asylum provided in the premises of diplomatic missions or in other suitable places. Thesis deals mainly with the interpretation of the necessary attributes that shaped diplomatic asylum and analyzes significant codification achievements in Latin America. A milestone in development of diplomatic asylum was the ruling of the International Court of Justice in Asylum case, put forward by Colombia and Peru, after a peruvian revolutionary, Mr. Haya de la Torre, was granted asylum in Colombian embassy in Lima, Peru in 1948. Negative attitude of the Court instigated legislative action of South American republics. During the...

En beskrivning av ett borgarhus i trä från 1700-talet, tillika grafisk verkstad för konstnärer. Huset Krogen Amerika i Linköping är ett av de äldsta trähusen som är bevarat på sin ursprungsplats. Det sätts här in i en historisk och socialhistorisk kontext. Syftet är framförallt att beskriva hur konstnärsföreningeen " Krogen Amerika- Grafikcentrum i Östergötland" bildades och flyttade in sin verksamhet i det gamla huset. Här ges också en förklarande teori om hur föreningslivets höjdpunkt, grafikens uppsving som konstform och rivningsvågen i Sverige under 1960-1970-talet sammanstrålade och gav upphov till att flertalet konstnärdrivna föreningar bidrog till att rädda äldre byggnader från rivning. Vidare fastställs även varför just kulturaktörer är en exemplarisk grupp vad gäller bevarandet av äldre hus på sin ursprungsplats.

The aim of this essay has been to show how the object America is constructed in two of the most used history books in Swedish high school. The theoretical framework used in this paper is based on the post-structural discourse analysis as presented by Michel Foucault. More specifically can be said that Foucault´s theories about formation of objects have been used as a tool to show how the image of America is constructed in the books. Later this paper also discuses which subject positioning the studied books take, also this inspired by Foucault´s theories. The study is presented with long quotes from the studied material to reach a transparency that enables the reader to see which dictums the conclusions are based on. This also makes it easy for the reader to judge whether or not the conclusions are reasonable. Two central themes has been located and focused on: 1) The arrival of the Europeans and their conquest of America and 2) the emancipation from Europe. With its focus on America this essay has been able to reveal that America gets its meaning through the Europeans which due to the theoretical framework means that America doesn´t exist without being contrasted with the European civilization. The essay has also shown that the linguistic category “America” embodies different significance in different parts of the books. At first America is generally described as a continent without history that gets invaded by Europeans and the linguistic category refers to current Latin America. This changes however and later the linguistic category “America” refers to the current United States and gets associated with terms such as freedom.

Who is the most typical woman in ELLE Sweden (2013)? In this study we investigated the typical woman represented in the Swedish fashion magazine ELLE (2013) for women. Does a typical woman exist in the magazine at all and if so – in what words and roles is she described in? How is this woman perceived in relation to the male gender? Based on the theory of constructionism; that the gender (i.e. What is female versus male) is constructed in the society and that media has an affect on our physical and psychological well being as well as our behavior and thoughts, the investigation of the female gender representation in women magazines, was of great importance to us. As our instrument in this study we used a quantitative content analysis in the purpose of gathering information from 24 reportages (12 issues of ELLE Sweden 2013) where 27 female celebrities in total were interviewed. According to our final results there is a very clear and typical representation of the woman in ELLE Sweden. Among other things she is a successful, white, western, career woman in the entertainment- or fashion industry who is ”beautiful” with blonde hair, lives in the city and admirers the opposite sex.

This Bachelor thesis aims to uncover the main reasons the Swedish emigrants stated for migration during the mass migration to North America during 1840 to 1914. The research material used for this thesis is a mix of Swedish emigrant letters, letters to the Swedish government’s report on migration (Emigrationsutredningen) and letters to the editor of the Chicago based Swedish-American newspaper Svenska Amerikanaren. By using quantitative content analysis I got results that are presented in this paper through different categories of stated reasons. The distribution of the categories in the different kinds of material and how the distribution of stated reasons changed over time is presented through charts. Results show that the by far most stated main reason for migration during all the periods of the mass migration was to improve the economic situation of the Swedish emigrant. The results also show that the stated reasons for migration confirms a lot of the ideas and research presented by earlier studies on the subject of the Swedish migration to North America during 1840-1914.