The aim of this essay is to examine the experiences of an introduction process of newcomers through an integrative perspective, by two guiding questions: How does the examined organization socialize newcomers? How is the organizational socialization experienced by the employees? Most Swedish corporations engage in some form of workplace introduction and this introduction should give the newcomer an understanding of his work and its relation to the organizations other business practices. Earlier studies have mostly focused on the effects of socialization tactics but few on the experience. This study, based on qualitative interviews with a regional manager, newcomers and established employees shows that the studied organization socializes its newcomers through many socialization tactics where the newcomers’ personality and previous knowledge allows to direct the socialization process. The introduction is perceived by the interviewed parties to happen most intensively at specific events; the first impression, the welcoming, while performing work and during the breaks. The newcomers and the established employees both perceived the social aspect as central to the introduction and the work execution secondary. It’s very important according to both parties that it creates a dialog about both work and private life for a successful introduction. / Studiens syfte är att undersöka upplevelserna av en introduktionsprocess för nyanställda genom ett integrerat perspektiv, med hjälp av två frågeställningar: Hur socialiserar den undersökta organisationen in nya medarbetare? Hur upplevs organisationssocialiseringen av medarbetarna? De flesta svenska företag bedriver någon form av introduktionsverksamhet och introduktionen ska ge arbetstagaren en uppfattning om sina arbetsuppgifter och hur de står i relation till organisationens övriga verksamhet. Tidigare studier har främst riktat in sig på effekterna av socialiseringstaktiker men få på upplevelsen. Metoden som använts är kvalitativa intervjuer med regionchef, nyanställda samt etablerade medarbetare. Resultatet visar att den undersökta organisationen socialiserar sina nyanställda genom ett flertal socialiseringstaktiker där den nyanställdes personlighet och kunskaper tillåts styra socialiseringsprocessen. Introduktionen upplevs av de intervjuade att ske som mest intensivt vid vissa tillfällen, det första intrycket, välkomnandet, arbetsutförandet samt fikarasten. Medarbetarna upplevde även den sociala delen som central för introduktionen och arbetsutförandet sekundärt. Det är mycket viktigt både enligt de etablerade och nyanställda att det skapas en dialog som handlar om både arbete och privatliv för en lyckad introduktion.

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This research is a result of a nine week field study during spring 2012, with the purpose of highlighting the stories of Dalit women in Madhya Pradesh, India. Together with a fellow student at Södertörn University, I investigated the Garima Campaign, an ActionAid project working with Dalit women forced to endure the illegal practice of manual scavenging, the manual removal of human excreta from dry toilets. This research was funded by a Minor Field Study scholarship provided by Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). In this paper I investigate how these oppressed women may change their life situation and self-image through participation in a group of peers striving towards the same goal, asking the questions: how do they narrate their former life as manual scavengers, what is it that persuaded them to join the campaign, and what kind of attitudes did they encounter from other members of society? Following this, focus is on communication and how it can contribute to improving the life conditions of people of low social status. The theories used for this purpose are intersectionality and empowerment, as well as Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and symbolic violence. The data was drawn from interviews with female former manual scavengers, supported by observations of their life situation and on other background material. The results of this study corroborate the findings of much of the previous work in this field, especially in relation to the treatment of manual scavengers by the rest of society. However, there seemed to have been three major arguments that finally convinced the women to quit working as manual scavengers. The first one related to their feeling of dignity. The second one dealt with them being aware of their human rights, which supports the argument that awareness may lead to change. The third argument was an important pathos argument, and consisted of the fact that their children were mistreated in school and that the women did not want their children to feel bad about their social situation. In the Garima campaign the women are allowed to do things taboo for Indian women, especially for Dalit ones, like disturbing the existing system and standing up for their rights by kicking up a fuss. The campaign opened up a new arena in which they did not only work to abolish manual scavenging practices, but also worked to attack the caste system on the grass-roots level. In informing others, convincing them to stop the practice, the self-confidence of the women was strengthened further, as individuals and as a group.

This thesis is an ethnography of drug dealers. Working from a Chicago School Symbolic Interactionist approach (Mead, 1934; Blumer, 1969), nineteen interviews were conducted with current and former drug dealers. I inquired into their careers (initial involvements, continuities, disinvolvements, reinvolvements) of participation in selling drugs. The data analysis is primarily located in three chapters – Chapters Five, Six, and Seven. Chapter Five considers people’s involvements in selling drugs as well as dealers’ interpersonal exchanges with their customers. In particular three processes are considered in Chapter Five: initial involvements in drug sales,expanding the customer base, and making sales. Chapter Six discusses dealers’ relationships with suppliers as well as dealers who become involved in supplying activities. This chapter discusses the matters of: making contacts with suppliers, working with suppliers, and becoming suppliers. Chapter Seven examines some of the identity allures and problematics of being a drug dealer as well as instances of disinvolvement and reinvolvement in drug dealing. This includes considerations of: striving for respectability, encountering regulatory agencies, and the problematics of disentanglement.

In recent years, there has been a push by automotive manufacturers to improve the efficiency of the vehicle development process. This can be accomplished by creating a computationally efficient vehicle model that has the capability of predicting the vehicle behavior in many different situations at a fast pace. This thesis presents a procedure to automatically generate the simulation code of vehicle systems rolling over three-dimensional (3-D) roads given a description of the model as input. The governing equations describing the vehicle can be formulated using either a numerical or symbolical formulation approach. A numerical approach will re-construct numerical matrices that describe the system at each time step. Whereas a symbolic approach will generate the governing equations that describe the system for all time. The latter method offers many advantages to obtaining the equations. They only have to be formulated once and can be simplified using symbolic simplification techniques, thus making the simulations more computationally efficient. The road model is automatically generated in the formulation stage based on the single elevation function (3-D mathematical function) that is used to represent the road. Symbolic algorithms are adopted to construct and optimize the non-linear equations that are required to determine the contact point. A Newton-Raphson iterative scheme is constructed around the optimized non-linear equations, so that they can be solved at each time step. The road is represented in tabular form when it can not be defined by a single elevation function. A simulation code structure was developed to incorporate the tire on a 3-D road in a symbolic computer implementation of vehicle systems. It was created so that the tire forces and moments that appear in the generalized force matrix can be evaluated during simulation and not during formulation. They are evaluated systematically by performing a number of procedure calls. A road model is first used to determine the contact point between the tire and the ground. Its location is used to calculate the tire intermediate variables, such as the camber angle, that are required by a tire model to evaluate the tire forces and moments. The structured simulation code was implemented in the DynaFlexPro software package by creating a linear graph representation of the tire and the road. DynaFlexPro was used to analyze a vehicle system on six different road profiles performing different braking and cornering maneuvers. The analyzes were repeated in MSC.ADAMS for validation purposes and good agreement was achieved between the two software packages. The results confirmed that the symbolic computing approach presented in this thesis is more computationally efficient than the purely numerical approach. Thus, the simulation code structure increases the versatility of vehicle models by permitting them to be analyzed on 3-D trajectories while remaining computationally efficient.

Computations with polynomials are at the heart of any computer algebra system and also have many applications in engineering, coding theory, and cryptography. Generally speaking, the low-level polynomial computations of interest can be classified as arithmetic operations, algebraic computations, and inverse symbolic problems. New algorithms are presented in all these areas which improve on the state of the art in both theoretical and practical performance. Traditionally, polynomials may be represented in a computer in one of two ways: as a "dense" array of all possible coefficients up to the polynomial's degree, or as a "sparse" list of coefficient-exponent tuples. In the latter case, zero terms are not explicitly written, giving a potentially more compact representation. In the area of arithmetic operations, new algorithms are presented for the multiplication of dense polynomials. These have the same asymptotic time cost of the fastest existing approaches, but reduce the intermediate storage required from linear in the size of the input to a constant amount. Two different algorithms for so-called "adaptive" multiplication are also presented which effectively provide a gradient between existing sparse and dense algorithms, giving a large improvement in many cases while never performing significantly worse than the best existing approaches. Algebraic computations on sparse polynomials are considered as well. The first known polynomial-time algorithm to detect when a sparse polynomial is a perfect power is presented, along with two different approaches to computing the perfect power factorization. Inverse symbolic problems are those for which the challenge is to compute a symbolic mathematical representation of a program or "black box". First, new algorithms are presented which improve the complexity of interpolation for sparse polynomials with coefficients in finite fields or approximate complex numbers. Second, the first polynomial-time algorithm for the more general problem of sparsest-shift interpolation is presented. The practical performance of all these algorithms is demonstrated with implementations in a high-performance library and compared to existing software and previous techniques.

Tack till min handledare Lars Holmberg för de riktlinjer och stöd som du gav. Jag vill också tacka de snälla människorna på Uppsala Brukshundklubb för intervjuerna. Men framför allt min katt Sally, som under denna tid gick och födde tre underbara kattungar som jag kunde njuta av under pauserna.

Förändringar är vanligt förekommande i dagens organisationer. En strategi som kan nyttjas för att öka lönsamheten och nå målen är förändring av organisationskulturen. Dessa är svåra att genomföra eftersom omedvetna antaganden måste synliggöras och ifrågasättas samt förändringen i sig är tidskrävande. I socialt samspel formas och omformas kulturen av individerna och enligt symbolisk interaktionism sker då överföring och tolkning av symboler. Genom att utföra en kvalitativ intervjustudie på en specifik stödenhet inom en organisation kan de faktorer som behöver tas i beaktande i en kulturförändring belysas däribland symbolbegreppet. Syftet med studien är att utifrån ett ledarperspektiv få djupare förståelse för förändring av organisationskultur och hur ledarna anser sig vara viktiga i förändringsprocessen. I studien tas hänsyn till organisationens internmaterial kring förändringsarbetet och för att besvara forskningsfrågorna genomfördes åtta samtalsintervjuer med ledare inom stödenheten. Behov av samsyn, mätning, stöd från organisationen samt högsta ledningen och ledaren som symboler är enligt ledarna de bidragande faktorerna i kulturförändringsprocessen. Ledaren anses i synnerhet vara viktig då denne fyller en central funktion i överförandet av organisationskulturen. Ifall ledaren anses vara en symbol kan denne påverka kulturförändringen genom att synliggöra den önskade kulturen i sitt agerande. / Changes are common in today's organizations and change of organizational culture is one strategy that can be used to improve profitability and achieve objectives. Changes in organizational culture are difficult to implement because of the unconscious assumptions that must be made visible and challenged. The change itself is time consuming. In social interactions individuals shape and reshape culture. According to symbolic interactionism transmission and interpretation of symbols occur through the social interaction. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of what contributes to a change in organizational culture and how the leader may be important in this change. The qualitative interview study takes into account the organization's internal material about the change process. There were eight interviews with leaders in the support unit in order to answer the research questions. Contributing to the change according to the leaders is: consensus, measuring, support from the organization, top management and leaders as symbols. The leader is considered to be particularly important because the leader has a central role in the transfer of organizational culture. If the leader is considered to be a symbol, the leader can affect cultural change by acting according to the desired culture.

This C-essay is a qualitative study designed to create a basis for understanding how managers involved in school affairs perceive the impact of merit points on students’ chances to continue on to higher education and how this will affect individuals' life chances. The study is based on three interviews with managers involved in school affairs. In this paper grades, merit points and socioeconomic class differences are discussed. The aim of this paper is to answer the following questions:  What impact does merit points in language studies and the way different languages are valued, in the system, have for the individual and for society?  Who are the winners in the new grading system and who are the losers; how are different socioeconomic groups affected? The material was interpreted with the help of a report written by Ingrid Nordqvist and Monica Langerth Zetterman called "Secondary School competition field-a regional perspective", a paper written by Helen Raven who did a study on grades, national tests and social reproduction and the Frenchman Pierre Bourdieu's theories. The results show that class differences will increase and that it will be difficult to rise in the social hierarchy in the future.

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the structured and evidence-based assessment tool/method The Brief Child and Family Phone Interview (BCFPI) trough a social psychology perspective of conversation. The aim was especially to seek an understanding of the method considering aspects of children’s participation. The research question was: how do the method users apprehend the advantages and the limitations of the BCFPI method considering aspects of children’s participation. The study was carried out trough a qualitative analyze and sex respondents in two child psychiatry clinics in Sweden were interviewed. A symbolic interactionistic perspective were used to analyze the results. The results showed that it was mostly advantages that were discussed and only a few limitations were presented. No reflections about children’s participation were expressed. Together the results and analyze contributed to an understanding of the BCFPI method as a restricted method considering social psychology perspectives and perspectives of children’s participations. One interpretation of the results showed that much focus was on the effectiveness of the method. In the future it could therefor be significant to reflect upon social psychology aspects as well as aspects of children’s participation regarding the BCFPI method.