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Background There is a lack of knowledge about how mature Swedish authorities are in their agile work. At one of the Swedish Transport Administration's ICT units, proposals have been submitted to implement the scalable agile framework SAFe. The unit has four development teams that have a regular collaboration with the business side, where users and business-related managers are located. Today, it varies between different development teams how agile you work and the business side generally does not work agile at all. Aim The purpose of the study is to contribute with knowledge about how problems with working methods can be met by SAFe and provide an indication of the agile maturity of the relevant authority through the use of the Gartner model for agile maturity. The model has 6 levels on a scale of 0-5. The study also compiles challenges and recommendations for large-scale agile implementations and places them on a strategic, tactical and operational level. Method Interviews were conducted with three people on ICT and one person on the busi-ness side. A survey was conducted in which 16 of the 27 people at the Unit responded. The literature review found 9 studies with a total of 68 challenges and 67 recommendations from previous large-scale agile implementations. Criteria from the Gartner model were identified at each level and the findings from the data collection were compared against all criteria. Results At the ICT unit, the following areas were identified as challenges: training, auto-mation, collaboration with the business, commissioning, collaboration between teams, and workload. The literature study's findings of the most common challenges and recommendations at each level are: Strategic level - Challenge: inappropriate agile implementation method. Recommendation: develop an integrated, agile concept; Tactical level - Challenge: agile introduction from above creates resistance. Recommendation: ensure support from management; Operational level - Challenge: general resistance to change and Lack of education. Recommendation: offer training in agile methods. Conclusions SAFe could meet most of the unit's challenges, with the exception of "training" which is not met by any of SAFE's components. Based on the Gartner model foragile maturity, the unit was placed at level 2. In an agile introduction, the unit can take advantage of the literature study's challenges and recommendations. The result is interesting for organizations that are considering introducing a large-scale agile framework.

One of the chief international security issues of today is humanitarian militaryintervention. In light of this, some questions have been raised about when and howoutsiders should get involved or if they are morally right at all to engage in humanitariancrises. In this paper Syria is the chosen case study because of its brutal crackdown and amassive human rights violation. The main purpose of this thesis is to understand themoral and legal criteria for launching a military intervention for humanitarian aid in Syriafollowed by a detailed analysis of its ethical, normative and legal issues. The maintheoretical framework of this study is just war theory. This study utilizes the criteria ofJus ad bellum principles, namely ‘legitimate authority’, ‘just cause’ and ‘right intention’in order to asses the extent to which Syria fits into the framework of just war theory. Thispaper also applies legal criteria such as the Charter of United Nations and internationallaw for the purpose of legal examination. The most complex issue in this thesis is the factthat although legitimate authority has the moral responsibilities to protect civilians, but itoften fails to uphold its responsibility mainly because of self-interest and the lack of rightintention.

<p>This thesis attempts to address the notion of unreliable narration and its treatment tn the postmodern novel. More specifically, it seeks to identify a number of characteristics shared by novels which offer fictional treatments of historical biographies and autobiographies. These characteristics include the use of dual ontological narrative structures, self-reflexivity, the deconstruction of authority and the genre in question, and finally, the existence of psychological truth in the narrators.</p> <p>Chapter One briefly addresses the historical development of unreliable narration, examining works from Henry Fielding through to postmoderntsm. Chapter Two begins the Inquiry into specific works by examining Michael Ondaatje's autobiographical novel, Running in the Family, and the way that the narrator fabricates a relationship with the father he has barely known in order to cope with the experience of loss. Chapter Three concerns Timothy Findley's The Wars, and the deconstruction of authority in the portrayal of history through a narrator who, because of emotional involvement with his/her subject, actively fictionalizes what ts ostensibly intended to be a faithful historical account. Finally, Chapter Four examines Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries, and its narrator's active invention of emotional experience in order to impose meaning on what she perceives as a meaningless existence.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This work intervenes in the complex relationship between the large-scale management and exploitation of water in the United States and its impact on the bioregional literary imagination in the Tennessee Valley between 1933-1963. It shows through site-based environmental criticism and literary analysis that the “dam” becomes a material and symbolic place of convergence where one can examine the relationship between humans and their biospheres. As interdisciplinary rhetorical, literary, historical, archival and cultural analysis, this work engages writers such as David E. Lilienthal, William Bradford Huie, Robert Penn Warren, and Madison Jones in order to reveal the inherently conflicted realities of environmental conservation, individual identity, and displaced regional imaginations in American literature. / English

This study was designed to build on the existing research on teaching and learning in community college contexts and the literature of college writing in two-year schools. The work of Pierre Bourdieu formed the primary theoretical framework and composition theory was used to position this study in the literature of the college writing discipline. Employing qualitative research methods and a critical working-class perspective, this study reflects a combined data set of participant observation, in-depth personal interview, and document analysis, giving shape to the experiences of fourteen students in one section of a first-year college writing course. This ethnographic study provided fruitful data regarding the nature of student/teacher relationships and students’ negotiation of authority in the classroom and in their writing. The results showcase the value of in-depth, qualitative research in college writing classrooms, a perspective with great potential to reveal underlying factors for student behaviors and outcomes in two-year literacy education. / Urban Education

This dissertation contends that to appropriately address important cross-border problems and pursue public interest(s) in an increasingly globalized world, we must deal directly with the more complex, networked, interdependent and hybrid governance forms which have grown increasingly common alongside globalization. Consequently this, dissertation examines the largely unexplored possibility of commercial contracts to act as a governance tool capable of improving the ethical quality and effectiveness of global agri-food governance to address critical challenges in that sector. These include those associated with food safety, ecological sustainability and biodiversity, gender equality, access to food, poor working conditions, inequality as well as issues of representation and inclusion in decision-making. To do so, the dissertation advances a novel conceptual framework of commercial contracting that opens up space to explore and identify features of contracting which enable it to go beyond private interests to also address public ones. To demonstrate this, the dissertation utilizes empirics from my case study, which is grounded in the transnational pineapple value chain between Ghana and Western Europe. This dissertation makes four key contributions to knowledge. First, it has developed a novel and generalizable conceptual framework of contractual governance through which activists and policymakers can address critical global agri-food governance challenges. It has also advanced practical options to do so. Second, this dissertation has important implications for global and private agri-food governance literatures, which have ignored the commercial contract and the influential role that it plays in the governance of food. Third, this thesis contributes to a body of existing literature indicating that “private” governance arrangements may be more capable than many often given them credit for in governing in democratically legitimate ways over issue areas of broad public interest. Finally, this thesis contributes empirical data in a field and area of study which is notoriously opaque and inaccessible. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines the potential of private contracts to increase the sustainable and ethical production and consumption of food. It argues that contracts are more capable of regulating over important issues that are of common concern than they are given credit for. It also argues that commercial contracts have particular features that make them well-suited to regulating long-distance relationships that span the borders of countries and include a variety of different stakeholders. This is noteworthy, because the regulation of long-distance relationships is becoming both more common and important in the world today. To demonstrate my arguments, the dissertation uses data taken from interviews with pineapple farmers and exporting companies in Ghana who produce pineapple for supermarkets in Europe. It also draws on interviews from public regulators in the European Commission, and international organizations, as well as lawyers, academics and private standard-setting bodies in agriculture such as GlobalGAP.