The following thesis in library- and information science is a qualitative, comparative analysis of the relationship between the minority populations in Sweden and Finland and the library. The objective with the thesis is to investigate how the state is working to promote minority groups at the library and what lead to today’s situation. The investigation starts, as regards time, with the European charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which was published 1992 and ends with the establishment of the Swedish library law 2014. The method that is used will be a comparative analysis that aims to compare Sweden and Finland. The study is based on Edmund Dahlströms theories regarding ideologies and politics that have been ruling society’s social and legal framework for minorities. The analysis consists of one chapter where both comparison and conclusions are included. It’s discovered that Sweden and Finland have a similar legislation regarding minority languages, with the exception that Finland doesn’t have a universal legislation for the national minorities and therefore, to a degree, excludes the territorially boundless minorities. This is also the case in their library law. Sweden has in their new library law a paragraph where the national minorities are included. This despite the fact that Finland had a system for national minorities before Sweden, who started working towards that first until after the European charted had been decreed.

Women in the Swedish labor market have lower wage than men on average. There are multiple reasons for this gender wage differential. Among other things, processes at the organizational level have been stressed. Some researchers argue that the gender of the manager has an effect on wages and that this effect might differ for men and women. Prior studies have analyzed the potential effect of manager gender on wages, but few empirical studies have scrutinized the question. The studies that exist use the proportion of female versus male managers in the organization as a measure of the effect of manager gender on wages. This paper however offers a direct test of the association of the gender of the immediate manager with men’s and women’s wages. Specifically, two hypotheses were tested: that (i) a female manager is negatively associated with women’s wages (ii) a female manager is negatively associated with men’s wages. To address the hypotheses, the analysis provides OLS regressions (for men and women separately) using survey data from European Social Survey (ESS) 2004 and 2010. The analysis includes theoretically and empirically relevant variables clustered in block of human capital, organizational and individual level variables. The results show that men’s wages are negatively influenced by having a female manager once human capital was adjusted for. There is no evidence that women’s wages are affected by having a female manager, since the share of women in the occupation and in the firm fully explains the negative association between female manager and wages for women. For female respondents, organizational factors seem to be of greater importance for wage determination than the gender of the immediate manager.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if the application of the ecosystem services concept can provide decision makers and stakeholders with additional relevant information for decisions regarding establishing of aquaculture on a local level, using the Lake Storsjön as a case study. In order to provide this knowledge, three different tasks are carried out within this thesis: the identification of the main ecosystem services provided by Lake Storsjön, the understanding of ecosystem services that will be affected by the expansion of aquaculture and the identification of the services that will be used for a possible expansion of the aquaculture sector. The CICES methodology (Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services) is used to identify the ecosystem services provided by Lake Storsjön. The understanding of the affected ecosystem services is carried out with the use of a Delphi-inspired approach. The identification of the services required for the establishment of aquaculture is driven by a cross-reference matrix. Lake Storsjön provides thirty-nine out of the fifty-nine ecosystem services included in the CICES. About half of these will be effected by environmental impacts connected to operations of ecosystem management required by aquaculture expansion, mostly with a low or medium degree of impact. An increase in the implementation of aquaculture might cause detrimental trade-offs with these ecosystem services: “Wild animals”, “Genetic materials from all biota“, “Disease control”, “Maintaining nursery populations and habitats” and “Filtration/dilution/sequestration/storage/accumulation by ecosystem”. An expansion of the aquaculture sector requires seven of the ecosystem services provided by Lake Storsjön. The vital services for this process are: “Surface water for non-drinking purposes”, “Filtration/dilution/sequestration/storage/accumulation by ecosystem” and “Chemical condition of freshwater”. These services have to be safeguarded and maintained in order to guarantee adequate conditions for an expansion of this sector. At the same time the expansion of aquaculture supports the service “Animals from in situ aquaculture”. The benefits connected to the implementation of aquaculture shall be economically assessed and compared to the actual economic value delivered by the other ecosystem services in order to further understand the positives and negatives outcomes of aquaculture expansion in an ecosystem services perspective. This is considered to be a relevant step for strategic and decision making processes concerning aquaculture expansion in Lake Storsjön. In addition to the economic perspective, it seems that the most relevant factor when discussing planning and development processes towards ecosystem services is the importance of not overshooting the resilience ability of the ecosystem in order to ensure the accessibility of the services to future generations. This belief is recommended to be applied to Lake Storsjön in order to guarantee a conscious expansion of the aquaculture sector on a social, economic and environmental level.

Some authors sustain that even though literature that regards branding of consumer goods is constantly expanding, there is not enough focus to what concerns the attitudes of consumers toward fashion luxury apparel.   The purpose of this thesis is to discover the differences in the attitudes toward luxury fashion apparel of people in Sweden and Italy.   The method chosen to achieve this goal is a deductive one. This method aims to compare a part of the existent literature about fashion with the fashion reality, in regards to luxury apparel, present in Sweden and Italy. A quantitative research has been conducted through an online survey.   This research found out that in general, the sociological models analyzed fit much better the Swedish society than the Italian one. This means that Swedes resulted much more caring in others’ judgments than Italians. This can be also proved by the fact that they resulted influenced more strongly and by more factors (friends, media, etc.) than Italians. Finally, Swedes, compared to Italians, consider fewer features as important when evaluating a fashion luxury brand and, these features, are also rated slightly different.

There is a known link between relative deprivation and street crime among market liberal countries. Although some research has been done with cross-national data, there is none to suggest that the observed link is as valid in a country well known for its extended welfare and generous social expenditure like Sweden. The following study uses longitudinal data to see if this recognized link between relative deprivation and street crime also stands in a country with almost a century long tradition of striving for social-, economic- and cultural equality. Even though Sweden, over the last decade, has been subjected to a series of deregulations due to policy changes at national level, and with a following rise in inequality, it is still considered to be one of the most equal countries in the west. It is therefore not unlikely that the high degree of social security will reduce the negative impact of relative deprivation on social relations among its citizens, perhaps enough so that the correlation will be significantly weakened. The results indicate that the negative impact of relative deprivation on social relations still remains evident, even with a high degree of social security, suggesting that an extensive welfare does not significantly reduce the negative effect of relative deprivation on social relations.

No description available.

The study focuses on the current status of the Sami indigenous community of Sweden and on the implementation of the concept of self-determination for indigenous peoples, as presented by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007. Nowadays, even if the Sami community of Sweden can enjoy several political, economic, social and cultural rights, a lot remains to be done concerning the development of their self-determination because several international principles related to indigenous rights have not been implemented so far.   Therefore, the aim of the study is to explore how the Sami people of Sweden define and understand the principle of self-determination for indigenous peoples and how they would like to implement it in the future, while also focusing on what can be learned from their particular situation from a conceptual perspective. To achieve that, the research has been mainly based on a field study carried out at the end of April 2014 and at the beginning of May 2014. Several representatives belonging to different Sami political parties and Sami stakeholder’s organisations have been interviewed on the field. Moreover, two academic researchers and one public relations officer have also been contacted and interviewed afterwards to offer a different perspective on the topic.   The findings of the study indicate that the interviewees have highlighted three main issues while defining the concept of self-determination for indigenous peoples: the importance of recognition and self-identification, the respect of indigenous traditions and the protection of traditional lands. Besides, many ideas mostly based on the development of the Swedish Sami Parliament have also been mentioned while thinking about the future. The study has also shown that the indigenous position in Sweden is quite paradoxical because even if the Sami people have some rights, they do not have self-determination as the current situation is still dominated by the state. Finally, another major aspect of the findings has also indicated that self-determination is mainly about changing attitudes between the states and indigenous peoples.

Records of stable oxygen isotope variations from a variety of proxies have been used in palaeoclimatic research since the 1950’s. Several studies have applied stable isotope analysis of lake sediments to reconstruct past climate changes in central and northern Sweden, including a study of Lake Blektjärnen in Jämtland, central Sweden, by Andersson (2010). In this study, sediments from that same lake were sampled for stable isotope analysis of bulk carbonates with the aim to improve the resolution of the isotopic record for the last two millennia. The results indicate a shift from relatively drier to wetter conditions between ~2,300–1,300 cal. years BP, generally wet conditions close to the Medieval Warm Period (~1,000–750 cal. years BP) and generally dry conditions during the Little Ice Age (~550–150 cal. years BP). These results are in agreement with previous palaeoclimatic reconstructions in the region. The isotopic record of Lake Blektjärnen was completed for the last ~2,350 years at a resolution of ~15 years per sample, three times higher than that of the previous study, displaying the advantages of bulk carbonate sampling for stable isotope analysis and providing a high-resolution dataset on humidity changes in central Sweden during the late Holocene.

How mobile people are affects the accessibility which can lead to several benefits like better match in the labour market and economical gain in the labour market. How mobile people are and their accessibility are effected by several factors. The purpose with this study is to see what individual characteristics that influences the choice of mode of transport when commuting and the travelled distance. This was done with a quantitative method that analyzed the Travel Survey of Southern Sweden. The result was carried out from descriptive result and regressions that was analysed. Findings from the result shows that gender, income and origin of birth are the individual characteristic that affects the choice of mode and travelled distance the most. The result can indicate that the commuting is also effected by structures as well as the economical incitement. The most used mode for transport and the probability to go by car increases with the economical gain does as well.

This study is based on a comparative qualitative analysis of religion textbooks in elementary schools. The aim is to investigate how Muslim women have been represented in religion textbooks used as educational material in Swedish schools, between the 1970s and the 2000s. This study rests on the social constructivist theory which implies that reality is what we make it. In order to do a comparative qualitative analysis, three deductive stereotypes have been applied: the oppressed, the submissive and the uneducated. However, an additional, inductive stereotype was identified during the analysis of the material: the independent. The text analysis showed that Muslim women were mostly represented as oppressed and submissive, having no right to their own opinions, lives or bodies and simply needing to be covered to get accepted by the Muslim society. However, it was also possible to conclude that similar representations of Muslim women could be found in textbooks from the 1970s and 2000s.