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1.
  • Christiansson, Marie-Therese, 1966-, et al. (author)
  • Mötet mellan process och komponent : mot ett ramverk för en verksamhetsnära kravspecifikation vid anskaffning av komponentbaserade informationssystem
  • 2006
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Denna avhandling är en kvalitativ studie av hur organisationer kan förenkla och förbättra arbetet med kravspecificering vid anskaffning av komponentbaserade informationssystem. Avhandlingens utgångspunkt är att mer verksamhetsnära och användbara informationssystem kan anskaffas genom att använda en integrerad verksamhetsmodell där verksamhetsanalys och kravspecificering slås samman. Fyra kunskapsområden har studerats och analyserats för att generera ett ramverk som riktar uppmärksamhet mot relevant innehåll och utformning av en integrerad verksamhetsmodell, 1) verksamhetsprocesser 2) verksamhetsmodellering 3) mjukvarukomponenter och 4) specificering. Avhandlingens empiri representeras av en rekonstruktion av den komponent- och processorienterade anskaffning av ett komplett vårdinformationssystem som genomförts i Landstinget i Värmland. Analyser och respektive kunskapsområde har skett utifrån ansatsen Multi-Grounded Theory vilket innebär en reorigenerering utifrån en växelverkan mellan existerande teorier och empirisk grundning. Några exempel på kunskapsbidrag är ett vidareutvecklat processbegrepp samt en ny livscykelmodell för komponentbaserade informationssystem. Utifrån kunskapsbidragen inom respektive kunskapsområde har integrationssynpunkter identifierats som legat till grund för utveckling av ramverket för en verksamhetsnära kravspecifikation. I avhandlingen dras slutsatsen att genom att integrera arbetet med verksamhetsanalys och kravspecificering skapas bättre förutsättningar för att kravspecifikationer speglar de behov systemen är avsedda att uppfylla och att gapet mellan krav och lösning minskar genom ett bättre underlag för kommunikation mellan kund och systemleverantör. Ramverket pekar på att en verksamhetsnära kravspecifikation utformas i en integrerad processmodell som beskriver verksamhetsprocesser utifrån identifierade generiska processbegrepp samt ett scenario för användning och klassificering av funktionalitet. Kravspecifikationen bör, enligt ramverket, även innehålla en systemöversikt, kommersiella och leverantörsrelaterade krav, design- och arkitektoniska krav samt utförandekrav. Ramverket har prövats och vidareutvecklats utifrån en extern validering i form av en utvärderingsworkshop där ramverkets relevans och användbarhet diskuterats utifrån de erfarenheter och den dokumentation som genererats i Landstinget i Värmland.
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2.
  • Aarsand, Pål André, 1970- (author)
  • Around the Screen : Computer activities in children’s everyday lives
  • 2007
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The present ethnography documents computer activities in everyday life. The data consist of video recordings, interviews and field notes, documenting (i) 16 students in a seventh grade class in a computer room and other school settings and (ii) 22 children, interacting with siblings, friends and parents in home settings. The thesis is inspired by discourse analytical as well as ethnographic approaches, including notions from Goffman (1974, 1981), e.g. those of activity frame and participation framework, which are applied and discussed.The thesis consists of four empirical studies. The first study focuses on students’ illegitimate use, from the school’s point of view, of online chatting in a classroom situation. It is shown that the distinction offline/online is not a static one, rather it is made relevant as part of switches between activity frames, indicating the problems of applying Goffman’s (1981) notions of sideplay, byplay and crossplay to analyses of interactions in which several activity frames are present, rather than one main activity. Moreover, it is shown that online identities, in terms of what is here called tags, that is, visual-textual nicknames, are related to offline phenomena, including local identities as well as contemporary aesthetics. The second study focuses on placement of game consoles as part of family life politics. It is shown that game consoles were mainly located in communal places in the homes. The distinction private/communal was also actualized in the participants’ negotiations about access to game consoles as well as negotiations about what to play, when, and for how long. It is shown that two strategies were used, inclusion and exclusion, for appropriating communal places for computer game activities. The third study focuses on a digital divide in terms of a generational divide with respect to ascribed computer competence, documenting how the children and adults positioned each other as people ‘in the know’ (the children) versus people in apprentice-like positions (the adults). It is shown that this generation gap was deployed as a resource in social interaction by both the children and the adults. The forth study focuses on gaming in family life, showing that gaming was recurrently marked by response cries (Goffman, 1981) and other forms of blurted talk. These forms of communication worked as parts of the architecture of intersubjectivity in gaming (cf. Heritage, 1984), indexing the distinction virtual/‘real’. It is shown how response cries, sound making, singing along and animated talk extended the virtual in that elements of the game became parts of the children’s social interaction around the screen, forming something of an action aesthetic, a type of performative action for securing and displaying joint involvement and collaboration. As a whole, the present studies show how the distinctions master/apprentice, public/private, virtual/real and subject/object are indexicalized and negotiated in computer activities.
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3.
  • Achen, Thomas, 1964- (author)
  • Den bioetiske udfordring : Et retspolitisk studie om forholdet mellem etik, politik og ret i det lovforberedende arbejde vedrørende bio- og genteknologi i Danmark, Norge og Sverige
  • 1997
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Biotechnology and genetic engineering raise a number of new ethical problems. Consequently, over the past 15 years, several European countries, including the Nordic countries, have passed new laws in an attempt to deal with the ethical problems posed by biotechnology. These developments raise the question of how to formulate legislation to regulate both the technical and ethical aspects of biotechnology and genetic engineering. Is it indeed possible to formulate a valid ethical framework in a thoroughly secularised society? How has this been coped with politically? And what is the nature of the relationship between ethics, politics and the law, that emerges from this process? The regulation of biotechnology is very often carried out by legal means in modern society. The thesis shows that the distinction between ethics, politics and the law - inherent in the Scandinavian tradition of legal realism - is not sustained in the law preparatory Process in the fields of biotechnology and genetic engineering in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The analysis reveals that the tendency for ethics, politics and the law to merge is expressed in the new normative reflexivity which characterizes legislation in this area. The thesis defines this process in terms of four elements: a proceduralisation of ethics, a democratisation of ethics; negotiated development of norms, and a moralisation of politics and the law. These new tendencies suggest a need for a new analytical framework. The thesis argues that reflexive law theory and discourse ethics theory can provide a more adequate understanding of the new normative reflexivity inherent in the legislation examined. In a society characterised by moral, social, cultural and political pluralism it is of profound importance to contemplate how legal and political norms are developed. Furthermore, it is highly pertinent to consider how we can conceive these processes in theoretical terms.
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4.
  • Adelswärd, Viveka, 1942- (author)
  • Styles of success : On impression management as collaborative action in job interviews
  • 1988
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The research reported in this study takes both a general descriptive approach - investigating the characteristics of 48 job interviews - and a comparative one - analyzing ways in which those who got a job offer differed from those who did not. Data used in this study are tape recordings of job interviews with applicants for trainee-positions with a large Swedish business corporation. Additional data are tape-recordings of post-interviews made by the researcher with the applicants as well as questionnaires from the interviewers.The theoretical nations of self presentation and impression management (Goffman) have been the main points of departure for this study. All communication invalves impression,management. but job interviews focus explicidy on this aspect of interaction. Job interviews can be seen as argumentations where the applicants are actively trying to support their claim that they are perfect for the job. Their argumentations are enacted in a dialogue, however, and the applicants' ways of arguing are thus dependent on the interviewers' contributions to the dialogue. Communication is a constant handling of conflicting demands. The particular solution to these conversational dilemmas manifests itself as a personal style.Three main empirical analyses of the data were performed. The first concemed itself with the structure of the job interview. What does it look like and how is it managed? The analyses show that the responsibility for maintaining the global structure lies almost completely with the interviewer, hut that the applicant has the responsibility for managingthe local structure, for feeding interesting detalls in to the interview.The second set of analyses was concerned with the ways in which the applicants actively argued for themselves. The results show that the successful applicants qualify their claims more forcefully, by modifications, explicit analysis or humour, for instance. The successfulapplicants also receive more interactive assistance from the interviewers.The third set of analyses aimed at investigating some aspects of the interactive elimate in relation to the interviewers' different interviewing styles. The ways in which the interviewers paused and used simultaneous talk had a decisive influence on the length of the applicants' answers. The interactive element of interviewing was once more demonstrated in the analysis of laughter; in the interviews with the successful applicants there was more mutual laughter than in the interviews with the nonsuccessful applicants. The different interviewers' styles were recognized and described accurately by the applicants hut were valued differently.The main significance of the study is the demonstration of the interactive element in dialogue. The interviewers are in a certain sense actively creating the grounds on which they are to base their decision to hire the applicants or not.
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5.
  • Adeniji, Anna (author)
  • Inte den typ som gifter sig? : Feministiska samtal om äktenskapsmotstånd
  • 2008
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Den här avhandlingen undersöker frågan om äktenskapsmotstånd i dagens svenska samhälle, media och kultur. Boken belyser olika sätt att uttrycka äktenskapsmotstånd och vad det betyder att formulera feministisk kritik av normerande familjevärderingar.Undersökningen baseras på etnografi och kritisk kulturanalys och granskar synen på äktenskap, relationer och familj som ett kulturellt imaginärt fält. Det empiriska materialet består av intervjuer med kvinnor som inte har velat gifta sig, liksom ett brett material från tv, webbsidor, dagstidningar, skvallerpress och bloggar.I avhandlingen genomförs och presenteras en feministisk metodologisk process, grundat i akademiskt kreativt och självreflexivt skrivande. Detta innebär att skrivprocessen, textformatet, liksom minnesarbete, olika intervjutekniker och andra kreativa analytiska praktiker är en del av det metodologiska ramverket.De teoretiska perspektiven som ligger till grund för denna studie består av flera feministiska strömningar: radikalfeminism, queerfeminism, liberealfeminism, anarkafeminism och ett socialt rättviseperspektiv. De belyser, på olika sätt, intersektioner mellan äktenskap, genus, sexualitet, nationalitet, klass och makt. En gemensam utgångspunkt är att identitetskategorier, möjligheter att agera liksom vår plats i världen är konstruerade av maktrelationer och normativa föreställningar om genus. Dessa perspektiv tillhandahåller analytiska verktyg för att diskutera och dekonstruera kulturella föreställningar om äktenskap och äktenskapsmotstånd.
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6.
  • Adrian, Stine, 1974- (author)
  • Nye skabelsesberetninger om æg, sæd og embryoner : Et etnografisk studie af skabelser på sædbanker og fertilitetsklinikker
  • 2006
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Avhandlingen handlar om användandet av assisterad befruktning i Danmark och Sverige. Teknologierna är intressanta eftersom de skapar möjligheter för barn att födas som annars inte skulle ha blivit till. De utmanar också normerande föreställningar om sexualitet, etnicitet, normalitet, ålder, kön och släktskap. Genom att undersöka vad som sker i mötet mellan normer, patienter, personal, teknologi och könsceller på fertilitetskliniker och spermabanker, skapar avhandlingen insikt i de skapelse- och förändringsprocesser som äger rum. Analysen visar hur beslutsfattare, personal och patienter förhåller sig till teknologierna. Den genomgående princip som används för att sätta etiska gränser utgörs av försök att imitera naturen. Denna princip omförhandlas och förändras dock ständigt. Omförhandlingar kan äga rum i möten med teknologin eller genom kroppars sätt att reagera på. De äger också rum då naturaliseringsprincipen skapar absurda situationer, t.ex. sådana i vilka patienter och deras kommande barn stigmatiseras och marginaliseras. Med utgångspunkt i den empiriska analysen bidrar avhandlingen dessutom till en teoretisk förståelse av hur materialiseringsprocesser (skapelseprocesser) äger rum i mötet mellan diskurser och materiell agens. Avhandlingen är skriven med utgångspunkt i feministiska och teknovetenskapliga studier och kan läsas som ett bidrag till feministisk ny materialtetsteori och metod.
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7.
  • Agic, Haris (author)
  • Hope Rites : An Ethnographic Study of Mechanical Help-Heart Implantation Treatment
  • 2012
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This thesis is about cultural aspects of advanced medical technology for treating end-stage heart failure. New medical technologies like mechanical help-hearts save lives, but they also bring new uncertainties, risks, and challenges. Based on nine months of ethnographic field work in a Swedish academic hospital, this study examines the ways of managing uncertainties of end-stage heart failure and of high-tech treatment, and also how these practices tie into the shared understandings of life-threatening chronic illness, the body, and medical technology’s role.This study draws on anthropological discussions of healing rituals as an analytical tool to make sense of social and cultural dimensions of mechanical help-heart implantation treatment. Viewed as a ritual, this treatment creates and maintains hope as a virtue through which possibilities of new medical technology are justified as culturally approved ways of handling the uncertainties of severe heart failure and mechanical help-heart treatment. Ultimately, even when treatment is regarded as successful, the patients may be saved but are never really ‘cured’ and remain, thus, permanently tied to the world of medicine. This new mode of existence is characterized by paradoxical permanent transit between uncertainty and hope.
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8.
  • Agnafors, Marcus, 1977- (author)
  • Justice among Us : A Philosophical Analysis of Michael Walzer’s Theory of Justice
  • 2010
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The American philosopher Michael Walzer has been regarded as one of the most influential theorists in the field of distributive justice since the publication of Spheres of Justice in 1983. However, despite the popularity, his theory is often misunderstood or said to suffer from serious shortcomings.The aim of the dissertation is to present and defend a clearer and stronger version of Walzer’s theory of distributive justice. After a brief sketch of Walzer’s early works, in which important concepts were introduced and developed, the mature theory is analysed. By subjecting the key areas of Walzer’s theory to a critical and reconstructive philosophical analysis, a stronger and more detailed account is gained. Important ideas and concepts such as community, consent, interpretation, social meanings, complex equality and minimal morality are discussed, criticised and revised in order to strengthen the theory. In addition, a comparison is made between John Rawls’s method of wide reflective equilibrium and Walzer’s interpretative method; it is argued that the methods of the two philosophers exhibit considerable similarities.
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9.
  • Ahlstedt, Sara, 1977- (author)
  • The Feeling of Migration : Narratives of Queer Intimacies and Partner Migration
  • 2016
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This dissertation analyzes narratives of queer partner migration, that is, a family-tie migration in which one of the partners of a relationship has migrated in order for the partners to be together, and where the partners queer the migration in the sense that they have a non-normative sexuality and/or gender identity. The purpose of the study is to examine how queer partner migrants and their Swedish partners experience the migration process – which continues also once the administrative process has been completed – by analyzing the emotions and feelings that emerge in the process. The study is a contribution to research on privileged migration as well as intimate migration.The focus is the queer partner migration relationship, and what emotions and feelings ‘do’ to this relationship, but also how emotions and feelings structure the migration process. The study analyzes the work three different emotions – love, loss, and belonging – do in these migration processes, and how this work is described in the participant narratives. Migrant participants have migrated from different parts of the world (Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America), making it possible to analyze what emotions and feelings do in this particular migration process from the point of view of nationality and, in particular, proximity to ‘Western-ness,’ race, and language as well as how privileges connected to these positions come to matter in the process.The dissertation is an ethnographic interview study in which both migrants and Swedish partners have been interviewed. The interview material consists of a combination of couple interviews and individual interviews.By using affect theories and the concept of queer phenomenology, the dissertation shows how the work that emotions and feelings do in migration processes is connected to gender identity, sexual identity, race and whiteness, nationality, perceived proximity to Western-ness, class, language, and the migration narrative the migrating partner is (or is not) written into by way of the country they have migrated from. This is analyzed in relation to the theoretical frameworks of entanglement, homonationalism, and intimate citizenship.The analysis shows that emotions and feelings structure the migration process for both more privileged and less privileged migrants, but in different ways. The understanding of who ‘is’ a migrant, and the preparedness for the feelings that arise in a migration process, are tied to the positions mentioned above and the privileges these positions give, or do not give, the migrant access to. By focusing on emotions and feelings and what these do, the study also illustrates how the migration process affects the non-migrating partner as this partner engages in emotional labour to ‘make’ the migrating partner ‘Swedish.’ Through their the migrating partner, the non-migrating partner is also aligned in a way that makes them a little bit less ‘Swedish,’ contributing to the non-migrating partner being ‘stopped’ in ways they have usually not experienced before. The study further shows how migration processes produces inequality, and the difficulties that arise when the couples try to live up to the Swedish ideal of the equal relationship.The interviews are analyzed as narratives, and both narratives and storytelling are important throughout the dissertation, not only as the method used in the analysis but as the form of the dissertation, making it a kind of super structure organizing the writing. Writing (how to write accessibly and interesting) and reading (how to write in order to invite an open and active reading) are important aspects of the dissertation.
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10.
  • Algotson, Albin, 1992- (author)
  • Entreprenöriell förvaltning : Om den lokala utvecklingspolitikens förvaltningslogik
  • 2022
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of entrepreneurship as an ideal and practice in local government administration. Organization, practices and the roles of civil servants in public administration are all grounded in certain ideals of what a modern public administration should look like. In order to capture the relationship between ideals and practices in local government administration, this introductory essay takes its point of departure in an institutional logic perspective.Entrepreneurial practices are well documented in a public administration context. Both civil servants and organizations can be more or less creative, alert and energetic, in other words more or less entrepreneurial. However, practices such as these are often understood to derive from the motives, driving forces and extraordinary characteristics of the specific actor. By contrast, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature on public administrative trends and reforms, by discussing entrepreneurship in terms of institutionalized ideals and patterns of action, i.e., institutional logics.The analysis is based on empirical studies of local development work in ten Swedish municipalities. The research design is grounded in an interpretative ethnographic approach and the development projects in each of the municipalities were closely followed for three years. Local development work is studied as a policy field where entrepreneurial ideals and practices are likely to arise, making it a suitable subject for studies that aim to deepen the theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship in a public administration context.The thesis demonstrates how an entrepreneurial logic is institutionalized in local government development work and embedded in governance and administrative practices as a natural consequence of certain contemporary reforms and trends in local policy and administration.Through ethnographic studies of local development work, the ideals and practices of the entrepreneurial logic are made visible. The entrepreneurial logic is contrasted to the still prevalent and institutionalized bureaucratic- rational administrative logic. These two logics are in many respects the logical opposite of one another and provide different answers to the question of which administrative practices are appropriate.The thesis makes three contributions to different theoretical discussions. First, the clarification of the entrepreneurial logic helps both researchers and practitioners make sense of and bring conceptual order to the messy practices of local development work.Second, the entrepreneurial logic expands the concept of entrepreneurship in a public sector context by viewing entrepreneurship as an institutional phenomenon rather than a phenomenon that represents a break from traditional institutions.Third, the entrepreneurial logic sheds light on institutionalized administrative ideals and practices that potentially imply major changes in public administration legitimacy, values and norms.
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11.
  • Alm, Charlotte, 1975- (author)
  • The Role of Causal Attribution and Self-Focused Attention for Shyness
  • 2006
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Syftet med denna avhandling var att undersöka på vilket sätt och i vilken utsträckning blyga personer skiljer sig från icke-blyga personer med avseende på deras attributionsmönster. Resultaten från 3 kvantitativa och 1 kvalitativ studie visar en något annorlunda bild av hur blyghet relaterar till social kognition jämfört med tidigare forskning i området. Följande 4 huvudsakliga slutsatser drogs. (1) Blyga personer har inte nödvändigtvis en snedvriden social kognition eftersom de uppvisade en mindre aktörs–observatörsskillnad jämfört med icke-blyga personer. (2) Det är sannolikt att blyga och självfokuserade personer bedömer sina emotionella reaktioner som orsakade av stabila interna orsaker snarare än mindre stabila interna och externa orsaker. Om blyga personer är mindre självfokuserade så tenderar dessa personer ändå att uppvisa detta attributionsmönster. (3) Blyghet snarare än beteendemässig inhibition har betydelse för vilka orsaker som tillskrivs emotionella reaktioner medan blyghet och beteendemässig inhibition interagerar när det gäller i vilken grad fritt valda orsaker upplevs vara orsakade av interna respektive externa faktorer. En slutsats av dessa resultat är att fortsatt forskning bör fokusera hur människor i sin vardag förklarar sina egna och andra människors beteenden och reaktioner. (4) Mycket blyga personer kan uppleva identitetsförvirring samt kan ha en ambivalent önskan om att vara blyg samtidigt som blygheten försvinner. Trots att dessa resultat pekar på ganska allvarliga konsekvenser av att vara blyg så verkar blyghet generellt betraktas i ett ganska positivt ljus.
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12.
  • Alm, Håkan, 1968- (author)
  • External relations in the product development process : a study of biotechnology firms in Sweden
  • 2004
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The purpose of the thesis is to investigate how and why firms use external relations and collaboration in the innovation process. These issues are discussed at both industry and firm levels. Both transaction cost economics and evolutionary/competence-based theories of the firm have been used and combined in order to understand and explain how and why external relations and collaboration are related to product development processes. These issues are rooted in the broader question concerning what determines the boundaries of firms. The empirical case material focuses on biotechnology-related human health care in Sweden.The empirical part of this study starts with a mapping of Swedish-based biotechnology firms involved in R&D. A database (BioSweden) was built in order to identify these firms' patterns of external relations. These patterns and fmdings are then related to a theoretical discussion about whether different types of firms develop different paths and patterns of external relations depending on differences in characteristics in technology and markets.These issues have also been investigated at the firm level, using a multiple-case study of 15 biotechnology firms. In this part the firms' origin and development over time are studied in order to shed more light onto how and why product development processes are related to in-house R&D and different types of external relations.The findings indicate that choices about governance modes related to product development are influenced by internal capabilities, resources, and competencies as well as technological and markets characteristics. It has also been shown that such choices are strongly influenced by firms' capabilities to interact with other organizations.
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13.
  • Alm, Maria (author)
  • Nationell kraft och lokal motkraft : En diskursanalys av konflikten kring SwePol Link
  • 2006
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Facility siting conflicts are increasing in our society. This is a study of a HVDC-link between Blekinge, Sweden and Slupsk, Poland called The SwePol Link. This link has transferred electricity between the two electricity systems since the year 2000 and the decision making process can be described as a struggle between conflicting interests. The aim of this study is to investigate where in the decision making process conflicting interests become visible, and how the actors involved have acted and argued in order to try to influence the process to benefit their respective causes. This aim is further developed through a discourse analysis of the variety of arguments, ideas and conceptions that in different situations of the process construct patterns and statements. The purpose of the discourse analysis is to identify and categorize patterns and statements that are expressed in three chosen practices; the concession practice, the court practice and the practice concerning the debate articles and editorials published in Blekinge Läns Tidning during the period 1996-2000. This practice is referred to as the mass media practice in the study. It is clear that the conflict deepens and that the system-builders and critical actors (including Blekinge Läns Tidning) started to distrust each other and their respective ways of acting during the process. Both supporters and critics used scientific and juridical enrolments in order to try to strengthen their positions in the conflict. Both scientifically and juridically formulated arguments were central patterns in the discourse. This was also the case with technically formulated arguments. These patterns of arguments were mainly expressed through academics, or experts, for or against the system and might thereby be looked upon as rather exclusive ways of arguing in the practices. One exception from this was, for example, when fishers argued against different scientific results on the basis of their experiences. This was, however, not a very successful way of criticizing scientific results. The study shows that there, for example, were conflicts around the meaning of a sustainable energy system, where a central system-builder pattern meets a peripheral systemcritical pattern and both sides held themselves as arguing for a sustainable energy system. Another result of the study is that the discourse varied depending on which practice it was expressed in. It became clear that holistic perspectives regarding a sustainable energy system or the landscape as such became peripheral in all of the “formal” practices, where the decisions regarding the system took place. These types of holistic patterns were mainly articulated in other practices like the mass media.
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14.
  • Alzén, Annika, 1946- (author)
  • Fabriken som kulturarv : Frågan om industrilandskapets bevarande i Norrköping 1950-1985
  • 1996
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This PhD dissertstion deals with the interest on preserving the heritage from the industrial society which arouse in Sweden during the 1970s.The remains from the industrial scoiety initially had difficulties in asserting themselves as objects of value, due to a number of inhibiting factors which excluded industry as a cultural heritage. In the 1970s, however, several factors can be distinguished which changed this situation. These factors included a new post-industrial era, the radicalisation of the cultural and political climate, extensive demolition in the heart of the Swedish cities, the influence of industrial archeology in England and a growing interest on the part of the antiquarian profession. In the long term, this meant that the discourse about cultural heritage changed so that industry could be included as a part of it.In Norrköping the old textile industries in the middle of the city were transformed from an outdated factory area to an attractive industrial landscape during the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the reasons, analysed in the dissertation, can be summarised as follows. First, the industrial area was "discovered" by pioneers who had been influenced by the industrial movement in England. Second, the industrial area had architecturally valuable buildings so that it could be regarded as an area worth preserving even according to traditional selection criteria. Third, the opening of the Museum of Work in the area influenced the survival of the industrial landscape. Through the Museum of Work, the expanding social movement "gräv där du står-rörelsen" ("the digging movement") also exerted an indirect influence on the process. Hence, it was a combination of different factors which resulted in the preservation of the industrial landscape in Norrköping.
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15.
  • Ambrutytė, Zita, 1972- (author)
  • Management Control : Linking Strategy with Inter‐Organisational Relationships
  • 2008
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The alignment of strategies and control systems is believed to affect the chances for firms to successfully achieve competitive edge. Contemporary business trends like globalization, vertical disintegration, the reduction in supplier bases, the focusing of operations and outsourcing of non-core activities, have caused companies to rely increasingly on relationships with other firms. These trends strengthen the awareness of the fact that a company’s success is also built upon the contribution from other players in the total supply network. It is recognised that management control systems play an important role in the management of interdependencies between organisations; yet, there has not been much research into strategy and control systems in interorganisational relationships. The relationship between strategy and control systems in purchasing as an interface towards interorganisational relationships has not received attention in the strategy-management control literature either. Moreover, discussions on inter-organisational control seem often to be divorced from the internal process in the companies concerned.In this thesis, an attempt is made to relate strategy with intra- and inter-organisational controls. The overall purpose is to describe and analyse the effects of strategy on those management control systems used within the purchasing function and to control relationships with suppliers, and further, to propose a framework for understanding how strategy impacts purchasing management control systems and the control of inter-organisational relationships. Two research questions are developed for this purpose, i.e. to examine 1) how a business unit strategy affects management control in purchasing, and 2) how a business unit strategy affects the pattern of management control for inter-organisational relationships. The ideas behind the strategy-structure paradigm are thus extended towards understanding the effects of strategy on the use of controls in inter-organisational relationships. The fieldwork is based on twenty nine interviews with employees at two manufacturing and ten supplier companies, and the data was collected during two periods of time, i.e. 2002-2003 and 2006-2007.This thesis began with the assumption that two companies pursue different business strategies which could be classified by using Porter’s (1980) typologies. It was expected that these different strategies would result in the different use of management control systems in purchasing and in controlling relationships with suppliers. The contribution of this thesis is twofold: firstly, it establishes the pattern of the alignment of business strategy, functional strategy, functional control systems and control of interorganisational relationships, and secondly, it suggests the possible directions towards the refinement of this pattern.
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16.
  • Amir, Alia (author)
  • Doing Language Policy : A Micro-Interactional Study of Policy Practices in English as a Foreign Language Classes
  • 2013
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This study investigates foreign language classroom talk and micro-level language policy-in-process from an ethnomethodological conversation analytic perspective. The study is based on 20 hours of video recordings from 20 lessons in an English as a Foreign Language classroom (EFL) in grades 8 and 9 of an international compulsory school in Sweden between the years 2007 and 2010. The main purpose of the study is to shed light on some of the distinguishing features of how a target-language-only policy is materialised in situ in a foreign language classroom. The study demonstrates the relative ease with which teachers and pupils uphold a strict language policy in the classroom, but also the considerable interactional work that is done, by both teachers and pupils, in cases where upholding the policy becomes problematic. An interactional phenomenon which arises in such cases is language policing, where the teacher or pupils restore the policy-prescribed linguistic order. Such sequences are analysed in detail. The study increases our understanding of how language policy is lived out in practice, through interaction in the classroom.
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17.
  • Andersson, Anita, 1961- (author)
  • Estetik på klinik : Den estetiska kirurgins legitimerande retorik
  • 2005
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This dissertation deals with how esthetic surgery as a phenomenon and as a pursuit has been constructed to attain cultural legitimacy, that is, how esthetic surgery has been presented, advocated, and shaped so as to make it seem a possible, reasonable, acceptable, and meaningful practice in the contemporary culture and in people-s lives. Temporally, the study period ranges from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. During that period, esthetic surgery made its breakthrough in Sweden as a practical pursuit and as a cultural phenomenon. Cultural legitimacy is a pivotal concept in the study. It is used here to denote that a pursuit or a phenomenon - in this case esthetic surgery - has attained a status in the public discourse that makes it seem conceivable and acceptable. In this dissertation, I study how this cultural legitimacy is established through expressions in media. I analyze the work of construction that is leading to esthetic surgery reaching that position from a focus on the rhetoric of legitimization, that is, how esthetic surgery is talked about so that cultural legitimacy can be attained. It is a matter of appealing to the public so that esthetic surgery is accepted as a body modification practice, available and relevant to everyone. The work with the material showed that creating justification, appeal, and credibility plays a prominent role in this construction. The promise inherent in esthetic surgery has to be presented as realistic and realizable, while simultaneously referring to culturally anchored values and defining these as associated with esthetic surgery. In this process justification, appeal and credibility have been linked to such dominating values as freedom, health and naturalness.
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18.
  • Andersson, Daniel, 1989- (author)
  • Artificial Earth : On the Genealogy of Planetary Technicity
  • 2020
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • As technology transforms the conditions by which we come understand and interact with the world around us, it is relevant to ask questions about the historicalontological aspects of these patterns of change. The widespread adoption of the term “Anthropocene” during the last twenty years indicates the wide acceptance of the view that human activities have become such a powerful driving force for global environmental change that our destructive legacy will be recorded in geological history. Man, it is argued, has come to alter his terrestrial environment on such a global scale that the ontological difference between natural and technological patterns of change has lost its salience. Addressing our contemporary environmental problems, then, requires knowledge of how physical processes in the natural world operate. But it also necessitates a critical self-consciousness that pertains to the understanding of “the natural” vis-à-vis “the artificial” that underlies this kind of knowledge production. The latter forms the basis of this thesis, which treats the disclosure of technology as a “global” or “planetary” phenomenon – what, herein, is called “planetary technicity” – in earth system science and within the prevailing Anthropocene discourse, and argues that this disclosure gives rise to a research problem that necessitates the present study: insofar as natural and technological patterns of change are made ontologically equivalent, we are faced with a situation wherein technology is increasingly portrayed as beyond human control – just like the products of nature, artifice is depicted as self-organizing. Proceeding from an intellectual-historical point of departure, and within the framework of modern earth science, the methodological ambition of the thesis is to investigate the so-called “genealogical” provenance behind this particular disclosure of technology, with the intention of exposing its historical conditions. The thesis seeks to accomplish this by answering three main questions: how did the question of the nature of technology intersect with epistemological and methodological concerns in earth science; how were such concerns treated or resolved; and last but not least, what is the intellectualhistorical provenance of planetary technicity? In view of the genealogical examination, the thesis concludes that planetary technicity is a product of a certain intellectual-historical tradition in modern earth science that opposed itself toward mechanistic philosophy by taking up a holistic approach in order to study the earth, which meant that technology ontologically came to be attributed organic rather than mechanical features. In addition, the thesis highlights the historical coincidence – as opposed to the necessity – of this particular understanding of technology.
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19.
  • Andersson, David (author)
  • Deciding Fast and Slow : How Intuitive and Reflective Thinking Influence Decision Making
  • 2016
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Paper I “Intuition and cooperation reconsidered”: Does intuition make people more cooperative? Rand et al. (Rand, Greene, & Nowak, 2012) reported increased cooperation in social dilemmas after forcing individuals to decide quickly. We test the robustness of this finding in a series of five experiments involving about 2,500 subjects in three countries. None of the experiments confirms the Rand et al. (2012) finding, indicating that their result was an artefact of excluding about 50% of the subjects who failed to respond on time.Paper II “Intuition and moral decision-making – the effect of time pressure and cognitive load on moral judgment and altruistic behavior”: Do individuals intuitively favor certain moral actions over others? This study explores the role of intuitive thinking — induced by time pressure and cognitive load — in moral judgment and behavior. Overall we find converging evidence that intuitive states do not influence moral decisions. Across all samples and decision tasks men were more likely to make utilitarian moral judgments and act selfishly compared to women, providing further evidence that there are robust gender differences in moral decision-making.Paper III “Public views on policies involving nudges”: When should nudging be deemed as permissible and when should it be deemed as intrusive to individuals’ freedom of choice? The main objective of this study is to elicit public views on the use of nudges in policy. In particular we investigate attitudes toward two broad categories of nudges that we label pro-self (i.e. focusing on private welfare) and pro-social (i.e. focusing on social welfare) nudges. Results show that the level of acceptance toward nudge-policies was generally high. Nudge polices classified as pro-social had a significantly lower acceptance rate compared to pro-self nudges.Paper IV “The effect of fast and slow decisions on financial risk-taking”: Are individuals financial risk taking influenced by time available? We experimentally compare fast and slow decisions in a series of experiments on financial risk taking in three countries involving over 1,700 subjects. We find that time pressure increases risk aversion for gains and risk taking for losses compared to time delay; implying that time pressure increase the reflection effect of Prospect Theory.Paper V “Incidental effect and financial risk-taking – a neural investigation: This study builds on the results from Paper IV. Here I explore the influence of incidental negative emotions on financial risk-taking in an fMRI environment in order to assess underlying neural mechanisms. I experimentally compare neutral and unpleasant valence framing on gambles involving pure monetary gain and pure monetary loss. I find a significantly increased BOLD response in left amygdala and bilateral visual cortex when contrasting when showing unpleasant pictures, a neural effect which is in line with previous neuroimaging studies on negative emotions. However the neural effect of showing unpleasant pictures did not affect choices in the risk tasks. Consequently, I did not find any support for the hypothesis that the reflection effect of Prospect theory should be more pronounced when making risky choices influenced by incidental negative emotions.
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20.
  • Andersson, Fräs Annika, 1974- (author)
  • Determination of Volatile Sulfur Compounds in Air and other Gas Matrices : Development and Applications of Solid-Phase Microextraction
  • 2003
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Volatile sulphur compounds (VSCs) are frequently emitted during bioindustrial activities, such as production of biogas, sewage treatment, landfilling, pulpmilling, and the slaughtering of animals and meat processing. VSCs are reactive and malodorous, and they can also be detrimental to human health, therefore it is of great interest to be able to analyze these compounds.However, the standard techniques that are now available for determination of VSCs entail detection limits that in some cases exceed the odor thresholds, and, what is more, they require the use of solvents and toxic reagents. In addition, a single standard method does not exist that can be used to analyze all the VSCs that are most often associated with bioindustrial processes.In the present studies, a technique based on solid-phase microextraction (SPME) was developed for analysis of the VSCs that are commonly found in the bioindustry. The method could even be applied to very complex gas matrices representing point-source emissions of these compounds in amounts below their odor thresholds. Furthermore, the procedure constitutes an improvement compared to the other techniques employed to determine VSCs, because SPME is less time-consuming, it does not require the use of solvents or other chemicals, and it can extract all the compounds simultaneously. The potential of applying SPME for time-weighted average sampling of VSCs was also investigated. These experiments showed that the connnercially available fiber coating with the highest affmity for VSCs (i.e., Carboxen-polydimethylsiloxane)could achieve accurate determination of dimethyldisulfide, whereas use of thatcoating to collect the other compounds was highly influenced by externalparameters that are subject to variation. This work also included investigationsof several important aspects of SPME analysis of VSCs, such as the choice offiber coating, artifact formation, and the impact of various parameters on theextraction.The current results demonstrate that the SPME methodology that was developed can be used to determine VSCs in different matrices and contexts within the bioindustry. More precisely, the technique was successfully employed for the following purposes: to determine background levels ofVSCs to which workers were exposed; to monitor VSC emissions during the biogas process; to supervise the quality of produced biogas; to investigate the efficiency of processes used for abatement of VSCs; and to ascertain the cause of odor problems.
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21.
  • Andersson, Fredrik, 1961- (author)
  • The international diffusion of new chemical entities : A cross-national study of the determinants of differences in drug lag
  • 1990
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The two main objectives of this thesis are to make a general contribution to the understanding of the international diffusion of new chemical entities (NCEs) and to improve the research methods by applying econometric methodology.The study is based on a data base including all 553 NCEs introduced in Sweden during the period 1960-1987 and their introductions in France, West Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and Norway. A complementary data base covering 11 countries for the period 1970-1983 is also examined.Large differences are found between the countries regarding the diffusion of NCEs - both in the number of NCEs that are diffused to the countries (level of diffusion) and in the time needed for the NCEs to diffuse (rate of diffusion). There is also a general tendency for an increasing amount of time to be needed for the NCEs to diffuse. Econometric methodology is applied in the search for the determinants of the rate of diffusion. The three earlier models of the rate of diffusion are all rejected and two new models are constructed, one Swedish and one international. In these models the regulation-related variables are found to have the largest influence on the rate of international diffusion of NCEs.At the end of the thesis, policy implications of the results and prospects for the future are discussed.
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22.
  • Andersson, Janicke, 1975- (author)
  • Konsten att leva längre : Föreställningar om livets förändring i handböcker 1700-1930
  • 2007
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The aim of this thesis is to explore discursive changes in conceptions of life course and ageing. I am particularly concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power in the distribution of prolongevity and body- technologies, and as referential frame in the definition of normal and deviant bodies and behaviour. Following the historical processes this study includes advisory literature in the field of prolongevity from 1700-1930. As a conclusion I have distinguished four categories of legends in the material. In analyzing the legends: Antediluvian legends, Hyperborean legends, Fountain legends, and Centenarian legends. The legends of prolongevity intermediate ideas of human ageing in, and between cultures, On a meta-level there has been three discourses intertwining each other in the making of present images on prolongevity and successful ageing: Religion, Science and The Natural. In e discursive struggle during the studied years those components have been competing for domination and space on the prolongevity agenda. The advices reflect a belief in the possibility to transform by means of moderation and harmony; a belief that grew in the eighteenth century and enhanced during the following centuries. The aim was to improve human nature to an ennobled version of her self according to divine standards. Prolongevity was in 1700-1930 a question of reaching a pre-designated length of life given by God or Nature. Today we do not believe in pre-designated life-length we only believe in prolongation. We do want the paradise but we want it here on earth, and we want to be in charge.
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23.
  • Andersson, Joakim, 1974- (author)
  • Skilda världar : Samtida föreställningar om kulturarvsplatser
  • 2008
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Kulturarvsplatser kan betraktas på olika sätt av olika människor. Samtidigt finns kol-lektiva föreställningar om hur en kulturarvsplats bör förstås. Mellan dessa utgångs-punkter sker förhandlingar om kulturarvsplatsens betydelse och värde. Syftet med studien är att förstå hur en plats, institutionellt utpekad som kulturarv, används och iscensätts genom mångsidiga och korsande praktiker, både via media och på plats.Två fall undersöks som har olika inriktningar men båda inom svensk kulturmiljö-vård: kulturreservatet komministerbostället Råshult i sydvästra Kronoberg i Småland som är botanikern Carl von Linnés födelseplats och den publika uppdragsarkeologiska verksamheten i Slättbygdsprojektet i västra Östergötland. Frågorna berör vilka arenor medieringen sker, dess tematik/innehåll, iscensättningen av kulturarvet samt hur besö-karna uppfattar sitt besök av platsen och de strategiska aktörernas visioner för platsen. Metodiskt följs en tänkt besökares väg till kulturarvsplatsen och faktiska besökare vid platsen.Både i slättbygdens undersökningsrum och vid Linnés Råshult synliggörs den kollektiva föreställningarna som huvudsakligen en vetenskaplig studieplats och en skattkammare för särskilt värdefulla ting. Besökarna lyfter dock fram de sociala aspekterna av besöket. Besökarens tolkning existerar och konkurrerar med andra bilder av platserna. Det saknas dock arenor som synliggör och sätter dessa i förbindelse med de strategiska aktörerna, trots mycket offentligt tal om demokratisering av kulturarvs-processerna under senare år. Olika materials bilder har på så sätt lagts jämte varandra för att synliggöra dynamik, förhandling, konkurrens och bristande dialog kring en plats.
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24.
  • Andersson, Kjerstin, 1975- (author)
  • Talking violence, constructing identities : young men in institutional care
  • 2008
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The aim of the study is to investigate how young men constructing identities in talk about their own use of violence. The study is based on a fieldwork at a youth detention home in Sweden. The data consists of individual interviews and video recordings of the treatment programme Aggression Replacement Training (ART). Detailed analyses have been made of conversations between the young men, between the young men and the trainers, and of the narratives generated in the individual interviews. The study has a social constructionist approach to identity, which is seen as constructed in a joint achievement in social interaction. An important analytical perspective in the study is how social categories and subcategories are constructed. The study has a particular focus on gender, primarily masculinity, but age and ethnicity are also being emphasised.The analysis draws on four empirical studies. It is shown how the young men construct a preferred self-presentation when talking about violent events. The narratives on violence are either based on experiences or talked about as a hypothetical use of violence. Violence based on personal experience is problematized and legitimized in terms of self-defence, defending friends, restraint and justified violence. Narratives of violence are shown to be interactional resources available to the young men. When talking about violence, the young men can be seen to regulate social relations, and to position themselves in relation to particular discourses of masculinity. The specific understanding of what it entails to be a man enables the use of violence with respect to social categorizations such as age, ethnicity or criminal identity. It is also argued that the treatment programme ART may, at times, facilitate maintaining a criminal identity.
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25.
  • Andersson, Lotta, 1958- (author)
  • Ecohydrological water flow analysis of a Swedish landscape in a 100 year perspective
  • 1989
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The study basically involves analysis in a 100 year perspective of the hydrological response on precipitation from different landscape elements in south-central Sweden, characterized by the interaction of topography, soil type, land management and canopy cover.For this purpose, a dynamic water partitioning model, based on the soil moisture balance, was developed together with a Geographical Information System (GIS)-supported method for the detection of the spatial distribution of soil wetness as an indicator of the probability to act as discharge or recharge areas respectively.A comparison was made of the performance of water balance models of various complexity. It was shown that, generally, increasing the complexity of the submodels did not improve the agreement with measured soil moisture dynamics. As an example, due to negative feedbacks, the rather conservative nature of transpiration was well described by using 30 years monthly means of potential evapotranspiration. However, two important physical processes that are often neglected in water balance models had to be included: the limitation of transpiration by low soil and air temperatures in spring and early summer, and the drainage of rainwater through unsaturated forest soils.The model was used to analyze main differences in hydrological response between forests and open grasslands. It was also used to analyze interannual fluctuations of soil moisture deficts. Ironically, the variability was never as high as in the beginning of the hydrological year. The study revealed considerable fluctuations of 10, 30 and 50-year mean soil moisture deficits, and a general secular trend towards higher summer deficits and larger fluctuations around the median. In the light of the detected critical importance of the choice of time period, the concepts of return and standard periods were challenged. It was shown that the water balance model could be calibrated to simulate also overall basin response. Thus, simulated monthly estimates of both basin evapotranspiration and recharge rates for the Velen Representative Basin agreed well with data determined with other methods.The model was also used to simulate the integrated basin response from different parts of the landscape mosaic as determined from GIS-overlays. The obvious advantage of GIS was demonstrated. Finally, changes due to the wetness-impacting human interventions were analyzed. Since the 1870s such activities were shown to, on average, have caused a slight desiccation of the landscape, although the impacts locally could be large.
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26.
  • Andersson, Lena, 1979- (author)
  • När strävan efter samsyn blir en kamp : Meningsskapande och meningsgivande i mångtydiga sammanhang
  • 2010
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • När personer och grupper med olika bakgrund och erfarenheter möts för att sam-arbeta förutsätts ofta att samsyn kring målen med verksamheten är en förutsätt-ning för koordinerad handling. Forskningen har dock inte kunnat visa empiriskt i vilken utsträckning samsyn är viktigt för att åstadkomma samhandling. I förelig-gande avhandling presenteras en studie som undersöker hur gemensam mening formas i sammanhang präglade av heterogenitet respektive mångtydighet samt hur koordinerad handling uppstår under sådana förutsättningar. Som empirisk grund för att kunna besvara frågeställningarna studeras FöretagsNära med stöd i me-ningsskapandeperspektiv. FöretagsNära är en ny verksamhet organiserad som ett projekt i samverkan mellan Norrköpings kommun och Arbetsförmedlingen i Norr-köping. Syftet med satsningen är att föra samman näringslivsutvecklande och ar-betsmarknadsinriktade insatser och bidra till fler arbetstillfällen i Norrköping. Ba-serat på en longitudinell fältstudie berättas om meningsskiljaktigheter och strävan efter samsyn. Den longitudinella ansatsen gör det möjligt att se utvecklingen av och komplexiteten i formandet av samsyn och samhandling. Skildringen av Före-tagsNära visar att meningsskapandet i processen tar sig olika uttryck. I fråga om syftet med FöretagsNära uppstår en kamp om meningen. Studien visar hur samsyn och samhandling relaterar till varandra på mer komplexa sätt än tidigare forskning föreslagit. Det finns ingen entydig relation mellan gemensam mening och koordi-nerad handling. Studiens resultat har både teoretisk relevans och stor praktisk be-tydelse.
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27.
  • Andersson, Per A, 1986- (author)
  • Norms in Prosocial Decisions : The Role of Observability, Avoidance, and Conditionality
  • 2022
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Prosocial behaviors benefit other people and range from donations to charity to behavior limiting the spread of disease, such as masking and vaccination. The overarching purpose of this thesis was to contribute to our understanding of how social norms and conformity affect prosocial behavior. Here, three norm-related factors that affect such prosocial behavior were investigated: observability, avoidance and conditionality. Observability concerns whether a person is being observed during prosocial decisions, which can typically increase conformity to norms. Avoidance concerns whether a person avoids or seeks out knowledge about prosocial norms. Conditionality concerns the conditional nature of when behavior shifts occur in relation to others behavior. For instance, a person may want to follow a prosocial norm only if a very large majority adheres to it, or only if the goal of the norm is realistic to attain. Paper I focused on observability of prosocial decisions. Making decisions while knowing they would be shown to others increased prosocial behavior in the form of cooperation in a Public Goods Game, and preferences for deontological choices in moral dilemmas, but not donations given to charity. Paper II examined the existence of avoidance behavior regarding social norm about donations. Such norm avoiders appeared to be comprised of both prosocial and less prosocial individuals. Paper III investigated the interplay between descriptive (what people do) and injunctive (what one should do) norms in regards to masking during COVID-19. Paper IV then explored how varying the goal set for a prosocial norm affects willingness to try to achieve the goal, in the context of thresholds for herd immunity and vaccines for COVID-19. Some individuals were demotivated by seeing a higher goal as harder to achieve and others were motivated by believing a higher goal to lead to more people getting vaccinated. Taken together, these papers point to the inherent complexity of how norms relate to prosocial behavior, and suggest relevant aspects to consider when wanting to promote prosocial behavior. 
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28.
  • Andersson, Peter, 1959- (author)
  • Deregulation and Internet : New challenges to postal services in Sweden
  • 2001
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The postal system is an old communication technology, now subject to internal competition from potential entrants and external from technological substitutes. This is a study of how the postal industry in Sweden responds to the dual challenge from deregulation and the Internet.The liberalisation process lasted throughout the 1990's. The role of actors for change is found to be crucial. The Post Office and the world's first new entrant on the postal market, City Mail, were the entrepreneurs working for change in the institutional framework. In the background were changing conditions in terms of increasing demand for postal services and a shift towards mass letters, technological improvements that made pre-sorting in computers possible and an ambiguous construction of the legal monopoly in Sweden. The most crucial issues after deregulation in 1993-94 have been access to common services and facilitates and the dominant incumbent's right to differentiate prices.The effects of the Internet and the use of e-mail on postal volumes are studied. Some substitution has already occurred and a further potential for it exists, particularly in certain segments like fmancial information. At the same time, communication in general is increasing, which appears to outweigh the negative effect on the demand for postal services. The evidence does not support the hypothesis of declining postal volumes.The effects on postal efficiency of the dual challenge are found to be positive but modest. The price structure has changed. The threat from the Internet has spurred some product innovation and strategic change whilst potential postal competition has been met by price adjustmentsand process innovation. The major effect is redistribution and the net effect on welfare is little. Owing to actual and potential competition, postal firms may not prosper in the future, but Post as a technology for communication probably will.
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29.
  • Andersson, Peter (author)
  • Informationsteknologi i organisationer : bestämningsfaktorer och mönster
  • 1989
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Researchers in this field have placed different emphasis on the structural constraints visa- vis the freedom of the actors. An awareness that IT is a social construction does not necessarily mean that some individual actor or actor entity can perform freely. An inflexible, tightly structured social situation can considerably limit the action space. Actors are hemmed in by "objective" circumstances, ie, a rather closely controlled situation established by other actors, and which is apparently unyielding in the face of technological decisions.By creating a perspective that addresses both structural and actor aspects, this study attempts a holistic understanding which will lay bare the probable dialectic process between the changeable and the nonchangeable. This aspiration to comprehend the whole, when viewed against the complex character of the subject, calls for an understanding oriented approach.The study at hand deals with the choice of information technology in organizations, with special focus on automatic data processing (ADP) for administrative purposes. Its main aim is to improve an understanding of factors that determine the choice of ADP technology in organizations.The empirical section of the work at hand consists of two case studies and an overview study. The case studies, which concern two extensive ADP projects, are emphasized. The purpose of these two projects was to raise the degree of computerization and to choose both a configuration and degree of uniformity. In both cases however the configuration turned out to be the most critical issue. One concerned the administration of social insurance in Sweden, Rationalisering av den allmänna försäkringens administration (Rationalization of the Swedish social insurance administration), hereafter called the RAFA project. The other case study, referred to here as the FFV study, deals with an administrative system for the manufacturing sector of the FFV Group  The overview study, called the Norrköping study, deals mainly with the technological level and the ADP configuration in a wide spectrum of organizations. The level and the configuration are viewed against an overarching organizational structure, the worksite placement of qualified ADP staff, the line of business and the size of the firm. The study consists of an opinion poll and three delimited secondary studies.In the initial stage of each project, rational motives dominated. These were founded on cost and effect assessments and on developments in the field of computer science. From a structural viewpoint, investments in computers seemed self-evident; efficiency goals were paramount. However, an ADP undertaking entails not only rationalization in the conventional sense, it also brings to the ideational aspects inherent in the organization. While ADP technology was believed necessary, it became, in the preplanning and argumentation phase, a means of projecting socially determined concepts and goals. An ADP solution was sought which would combine the latest innovations in computer science with the dominant actors' organizational ideas.The dominant actors at FFV were for the most part newly appointed managers, imprinted with other organizational ideals and relationships than those characterizing FFV. The choice stood between a departure from company tradition by selecting a solution based on local minicomputers, or expanding the existing centralized main frame facility. The critics were specialists who had taken part in the design of the existing configuration. At FFV, the structural determinants had to be toned down in favor of the deliberate performance of the dominant actors. In the RAF A case, the opposite was true. The critics wanted a certain change of existing circumstances, while the dominant actors sought to preserve status quo and its underlying ideas. In the RAF A case, ADP thus became a cementing force rather than the catalyst.The Norrkoping study clearly indicates that the direction and size of an enterprise has primary importance for how much the computers are used. The ADP configuration appearance varies mainly with the organizational relationships. This is true for the placement of ADP staff and the overall structure of the organization. The main tendency is that the configuration reflects the relationships in an organization. This supports the view in the case studies that proximity to and control of the ADP has a major organizational value.
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30.
  • Andersson, Ragnar, 1959- (author)
  • Mainstreaming av integration : Om översättning av policy och nätverksstyrning med förhinder inom den regionala utvecklingspolitiken, 1998 – 2007
  • 2011
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Det här är en fallstudie av hur integrationspolitiska mål översätts tvärsektoriellt inom den regionala utvecklingspolitiken: i en rad olika sammanhang på nationell, regional och kommunal nivå. I studien beskrivs och analyseras hur idén om integration genom mainstreaming översätts till den regionala utvecklingspolitiken, för att fortsätta med en fördjupad analys av det regionala tillväxtpartnerskapet i Östergötland samt olika lokala kommunala tillväxtpartnerskap. Avslutningsvis jämförs resultaten från Östergötland med utvecklingen i landets övriga 20 regionala tillväxtpartnerskap.I avhandlingen visas att det fanns höga ambitioner om att genomföra en mainstreaming, bland annat med hjälp av nätverksstyrning. Så skedde också i olika målsättningstexter och beslut. Men när dessa målsättningar och beslut skulle omvandlas till aktiviteter, fullföljdes inte mainstreamingen. Man avstod helt från att göra något inriktat mot invandrare eller så genomfördes olika former av säråtgärder för invandrare. Avhandlingen visar dock på stora skillnader mellan olika aktörer och sammanhang. I vissa fall var man nära på att uppfylla kraven på en mainstreaming, i andra valde man att inte försöka. I avhandlingen visas också att hinder för genomförandet varit föreställningar om invandrare och invandrarfrågor som ej bidragande i ekonomiska tillväxtsammanhang, brist på styrningskompetens och resurser samt ett bristande kunnande om hur man skulle mainstreama integration.
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31.
  • Andersson, Sven, 1940- (author)
  • Social scaling and children's graphic strategies : A comparative study of children's drawings in three cultures
  • 1994
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This cultural comparative study examines social scaling in children's drawings and whether children's formal graphic strategies follow the lines of traditional develop­mental stage models. Moreover, an attempt is made to develop methodological tools for comparative cultural research on children's social worlds.For this purpose, children in three communities were asked to make drawings of classroom life (fourth-graders) and their future family (fifth-graders). In total, 591 children were recruited from three settings: a Tanzanian town, a refugee settlement in Tanzania of the African National Congress, South Africa and a Swedish small-town. These settings were chosen in order to involve cultural variation in terms of pedagogical practices and child-rearing ideologies. Instead of absolute measures, relative rating scales (within drawings) were developed for the scoring of children's drawings and for the comparison of drawings between cultures.The findings of the present work lend support to the notion of social scaling, that is, social space in drawings (relative size, distances and degree of detailing, etc.) reflects children's hierarchies of importance. Thus, children's self-representations in relation to teacher representation vary with pedagogical practices across cultures. Swedish children produced more self-centered (child-centered) representations of classroom life than any of the African groups. The children in the traditional respect-oriented culture (Tanzanian town group) drew the most sociocentric and least child-centered representations, whereas children from South Africa produced drawings that were intermediate. Differences in social scaling were thus related to cultural differences in pedagogical practices and child-rearing ideologies. Likewise, children's social worlds, as reflected in family figure drawings, vary with child-rearing ideologies in the three different settings.The analyses of graphic strategies for both tasks indicated that the African groups employed X-ray strategies to a greater extent than the Swedish children. Quite contradictorily, if viewed from stage-type theorising, the African children simultaneously employed advanced projection systems to a greater extent than the Swedish children. Moreover, the children in the two African settings would in many cases combine these theoretically incompatible drawing strategies. A second analysis of formal graphic strategies showed that children in the two African settings independently employed the same specific local drawing conventions by depicting buildings in a non-representational way. Such local conventions are of theoretical interest in that they question representational models of drawing development. The present results challenge claims for universal or stage-type models in the way children's drawing develops. Instead, the results can be seen to support sociocultural approaches to child development.
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32.
  • Andin, Josefine (author)
  • Dealing with Digits : Arithmetic, Memory and Phonology in Deaf Signers
  • 2014
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Deafness has been associated with poor abilities to deal with digits in the context of arithmetic and memory, and language modality-specific differences in the phonological similarity of digits have been shown to influence short-term memory (STM). Therefore, the overall aim of the present thesis was to find out whether language modality-specific differences in phonological processing between sign and speech can explain why deaf signers perform at lower levels than hearing peers when dealing with digits. To explore this aim, the role of phonological processing in digit-based arithmetic and memory tasks was investigated, using both behavioural and neuroimaging methods, in adult deaf signers and hearing non-signers, carefully matched on age, sex, education and non-verbal intelligence. To make task demands as equal as possible for both groups, and to control for material effects, arithmetic, phonological processing, STM and working memory (WM) were all assessed using the same presentation and response mode for both groups. The results suggested that in digit-based STM, phonological similarity of manual numerals causes deaf signers to perform more poorly than hearing non-signers. However, for  digit-based WM there was no difference between the groups, possibly due to differences in allocation of resources during WM. This indicates that similar WM for the two groups can be generalized from lexical items to digits. Further, we found that in the present work deaf signers performed better than expected and on a par with hearing peers on all arithmetic tasks, except for multiplication, possibly because the groups studied here were very carefully matched. However, the neural networks recruited for arithmetic and phonology differed between groups. During multiplication tasks, deaf signers showed an increased  reliance on cortex of the right parietal lobe complemented by the left inferior frontal gyrus. In contrast, hearing non-signers relied on cortex of the left frontal and parietal lobes during multiplication. This suggests that while hearing non-signers recruit phonology-dependent arithmetic fact retrieval processes for multiplication, deaf signers recruit non-verbal magnitude manipulation processes. For phonology, the hearing non-signers engaged left lateralized frontal and parietal areas within the classical perisylvian language network. In deaf signers, however, phonological processing was limited to cortex of the left occipital lobe, suggesting that sign-based phonological processing does not necessarily activate the classical language network. In conclusion, the findings of the present thesis suggest that language modality-specific differences between sign and speech in different ways can explain why deaf signers perform at lower levels than hearing non-signers on tasks that include dealing with digits.
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33.
  • Andréasson, Ester (author)
  • Digitalisering i den offentliga förvaltningen : IT, värden och legitimitet
  • 2015
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Vi lever i ett samhälle där elektronisk information och kommunikation får en allt större betydelse både i vardags- och arbetslivet. I föreliggande avhandling studeras den utveckling som innebär att offentliga organisationer digitaliseras, det som kan kallas för e-förvaltning. Utgångspunkten för dessa studier är en vilja att undersöka vilka betydelser värden har i digitaliseringsprocesser i offentliga organisationer. Tre kvalitativa, tolkande, studier har genomförts. En av dessa var en studie av svenska e-förvaltningspolicyer. De två andra delstudierna var fallstudier av digitalisering som företogs i dels Landstinget i Östergötland, dels på Försäkringskassan. Fallstudierna har baserats på intervjuer, dokumentstudier och observationer. Teoretiskt bygger avhandlingens analyser på teorier om offentliga värden, legitimitet samt samspelet mellan teknik och organisation. Analyserna visar på vilka värden som ges betydelse i digitaliseringsprocesser i det offentliga och hur digitaliseringen kan påverka grundläggande demokratiska värden i offentliga organisationer. Avhandlingens resultat kan sammanfattas i tre övergripande slutsatser: 1) Digitaliseringen av den offentliga förvaltningen är kontextberoende och sker i ett samspel mellan teknik, policy och förvaltning samt de värden som är knutna till dessa. 2) Utvecklingen mot e-förvaltning ger uttryck för en mångfald av värden, och inspireras och formas av tankegods från olika värdegrunder. 3) Digitaliseringen kan påverka de demokratiska värdenas ställning i offentliga organisationer, och därmed ha betydelse för förvaltningens legitimitet. Avhandlingens centrala kunskapsbidrag är en större förståelse för vilka implikationer e-förvaltningsreformer kan ha för förvaltningens demokratiska och byråkratiska värden och dess legitimitet. Digitaliseringsprocesser är inte värdeneutrala, utan både formas av och formar värden i samspelet mellan teknik, politiska målsättningar och förvaltningens unika organisatoriska och verksamhetsmässiga förutsättningar. En medvetenhet kring digitaliseringens värden är därför betydelsefull när e-förvaltningsreformer initieras och genomförs. Ytterligare forskning om hur de processer ser ut där värden hos teknik och offentliga organisationer formar och präglar varandra kan bidra till att upprätthålla den offentliga förvaltningens legitimitet i en digitaliserad värld.
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34.
  • Anshelm, Jonas, 1960- (author)
  • Förnuftets brytpunkt : om teknikkritiken i P C Jersilds författarskap
  • 1990
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Modern technology has enabled us to realise objectives our forebearers could only dream of. Our capacity to do both good and evil has grown dramatically. With these new capacities ensue extremely weighty moral responsibilities.P C Jersild is a Swedish author who has dedicated his work to the investigation of morality in the technological society. This is why his authorship has been chosen as the object for analysis in this thesis. The analysis of Jersild's work is divided inta two sections. The first of these (chapters 3-5) has the character of a general survey and therefore follows a chronological disposition. We follow the changing course of Jersild's authorship in relation to the changing face of public debate. In addition to relativety detailed interpretations of individual texts and analyses of the motif of technology criticism, Jersild's literary production is campared with his social commentary and brief reflections on the public reception of his books are offered. In this fashion the foundations for the second half of the study which is camposed of four thematic chapters (chapters 6-9) are laid. This thematic approach focuses on several essential issues in Jersild's discussion of technology. Consequently, abstraction and generalization tend to assume a more significant position.It is shown in this thesis that Jersild critically assesses modern technology as both abstract rationality and concrete lived experience and pennits both perspectives to enrich and stimulate each other. In his discussion of modern technology and its social implications, Jersild repeatedly retums to essentially the same situation: the individual who has teen placed in a predicament due to a harmful pattern of technological development. However, each time he returns to this unsatisfactory situation he views it from a different perspective. He views it through the eyes of a bureaucrat, psychologist, engineer, factory worker, housewife, child, pensioner, lonely alcoholic, hospital patient and animal. This versatility of perspective imbues his narrative with a prismatic acuity; the image of a technological society is complemented and enlarged with every new angle of approach.Jersild's work can be seen as a critical investigation of those areas of modern society where the "modem project" has gone astray; where a cognitive-instrumental rationally has been allowed to suppress moral-practical reason. In spite of this criticism, it is made clear, Jersild remains a faithful disciple of the Enlightenment and defends modemity; albeit with restrained optimism and a critical scepticism which continually encaurages reflexivity and a sense of moral responsibility. He reclaims a normative fraction and a measare of critical reason which can be used to advance rather than dismantie the "modem project". Somewhat magniloquently, it can be asserted that Jersild' s work is characterised by an attempt to establish a sensible moral argumentation capable of resening the "modern project" from self-inflicted ruin.
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35.
  • Antelius, Eleonor, 1978- (author)
  • Different Voices - Different Stories : Communication, identity and meaning among people with acquired brain damage
  • 2009
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The main purpose of the dissertation is to understand meaning-making practices used by people suffering from acquired brain damage with severe physical and communicative disabilities, in order to create and sustain their identity and personhood in relation to other people. The study emanates from the idea that identity and personhood, also in relation to disability, are created/sustained in ongoing interaction between people in everyday situations, and that the ability to narrate is central to such a creation of identity. Therefore, it is of particular interest to try to understand what communicative and storytelling abilities/possibilities people with severe acquired brain damage have in presenting their identity.The study is ethnographic and based upon a year-long field study of participant observations at a day centre for people with acquired brain damage. Gathered data consist of written field notes, informal interviews conducted with both participants and personnel and approximately 70 hours of video data.The study shows how an identity as ‘severely disabled’ is created in the co-created storytelling between participants and personnel and that this identity seems to mean that one is dependent upon others to get along in everyday life at least if one listens only to spoken stories. Yet the study also shows that there exist different opinions about what this identity as ‘severely disabled’ could mean that there is a wish among the participants to be able to present a desirable identity as “normal”, and that such an identity comes to mean to be independent and self-determined. Normality, however, must be understood in relation to surrounding society (and the grand cultural narratives that surround us). Thus the study shows that normality in relation to severe disabilities is almost impossible to achieve because normality in relation to illness/disease/body contains the hope of a cure or an improvement. The participants in this study, however, have all been labelled as incurable – there is no hope of such a cure or improvement. That, on the other hand, does not mean that the participants do not try to tell such stories anyway in their quest to achieve this desirable identity. However, in order to hear this story we need to listen to stories that usually remain untold. A palpable hierarchy between different modes of language use was identified, where verbal/spoken language is supreme, resulting in the disabled participants not being perceived as competent interactors/communicators due to their difficulties in using verbal communication. Hence their ways of creating/telling stories, through embodiment and enactment, are not recognised as valid ways to create/tell stories; this is discussed in relation to both practical implications for health care settings as well as for further narrative research.
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36.
  • Appelkvist, Jenny (author)
  • Professionsföretagare : I skärningspunkten mellan småföretagande, profession och genus
  • 2016
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Den här avhandlingen handlar om kvinnors företagande i en profession stadd i förändring. Flera professioner i Sverige, men också internationellt, präglas av en ökad andel kvinnor men även av de strukturella omvandlingar som under 1900-talet lett från ett industri- till ett tjänstesamhälle. Ett ökat småföretagande är en annan förändring som uppkommit under senare år.I föreliggande studie beskrivs och analyseras kvinnors företagande inom en profession utifrån vad som sker i skärningspunkten mellan företagande, profession och genus. Ett tydligt exempel i Sverige på en profession stadd i förändring är veterinärprofessionen som de senaste 50 åren genomgått en rad förändringar. Den teoretiska referensramen består av en kombination av teorier om småföretagande, profession och genus. Det empiriska materialet består av intervjuer med samtliga veterinärer som är företagare och kvinnor i Östergötland. I avhandlingen myntas begreppet professionsföretagare med avsikt att synliggöra samspelet mellan företagande och profession. Studiens resultat visar att professionen i många fall prioriteras framför företagandet. Professionsföretagarna gör genus på skilda sätt i olika dimensioner och på olika nivåer. Det är stabilitet i hur genus görs på generell nivå medan genus på specifik nivå görs på ett sätt som i vissa dimensioner utmanar genussystemet. Även om stabilitet är dominerande visar studien exempel på att professionsföretagande skapar förutsättningar för vissa glipor i genussystemets mönster.
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37.
  • Areschoug, Judith, 1971- (author)
  • Det sinnesslöa skolbarnet : Undervisning tvång och medborgarskap 1925-1954
  • 2000
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • In 1944 special compulsory schooling for feeble-minded children was introduced in Sweden. This meant that these children could no longer be taught in ordinary elementary school classes. Instead they now had to be transferred to schools for the feeble-minded.The main purpose of the study is to investigate the meaning assigned to feeble-mindedness, the arguments in favour of compulsory schooling for the feeble-minded, and the significance that it subsequently had for the citizenship of these individuals in society. For this purpose, articles published in 1925-54 in four professional journals, reports of inquiries, legislation, and material from two schools for the feeble-minded have been studied.In the study the complexity that characterized compulsory tuition for the feeble-minded is revealed and related to contemporary welfare policy as a whole. Because of the special compulsory schooling, its institutional form, and the link to legislation on sterilization, the special education for the feeble-minded was to be both a form of tuition adjusted to the special needs of the children and an efficient instrument of control, at once a benefit and an imposition. The compulsory schooling made it possible to enrol feeble-minded children and keep them in the institutions, if necessary against their will and that of the parents. The sterilization laws also meant that sterilization could be made a condition for discharge. At the same time, the feeble-minded children were said to be given not only tuition adjusted to their abilities but also a suitable and sheltered environment in which to grow up with classmates of equal status and in many cases a better home than their parents could offer.Arguments in favour of special tuition for the feeble-minded were that it prevented them from growing up into asocial adults, while furthering their development into socially well-adjusted citizens. Work and social adjustment were also the characteristics of the feeble-minded individuals- citizenship, as this was described both in the professional debate and in the parents- correspondence with the Storängen institution for the feeble-minded. However, this citizenship did not include the right to form a family and have children.
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38.
  • Aretun, Åsa, 1970- (author)
  • Barns ”växa vilt” och vuxnas vilja att forma : Formell och informell socialisation i en muslimsk skola
  • 2007
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The aim of the thesis is to examine how children as social beings and actors form themselves within the framework of a school institution that adults have set up in order to shape them in deliberate ways through nurturing education. The study is based on long-term fieldwork in a Muslim faith school in Sweden.Muslim schools have aroused a great deal of debate in Swedish society.Opponents have argued that Muslim schools lead to segregation and social exclusion, that these schools risk not promoting the fundamental values of society and that children in these schools are met by religious propaganda. Advocates of these schools have maintained that in public schools the Muslim identity is eroded by ignorance, lack of understanding and racism. Muslim schools instead offer children knowledge of their culture and religion in a way that enhances their identity and makes them secure and whole human beings who can be integrated into society. The debate reflects that school institutions function as loci for contested forms of socialisation in society; national, ethnic, religious, or the struggle of other groups for cultural production and social reproduction in which they are united in the role and importance attached to the school institution in the shaping of young people. In the debate children appear as passive receivers and products of adults’ upbringing and education, which represents both threat and opportunity.The debate around Muslim schools reflects adult-centred ideas of socialisation, where the adults’ upbringing and education is placed at the centre of the process in which children are formed into social persons. What emerged from this study is that children are social actors who shape themselves and that this shaping is more of an informal social process than a formal education process. The study raises the profile of how the school constitutes an environment in which children are in the majority and adults in the minority; a social environment in which children have significantly more social contact and a greater number of social relations with each other than with adults. The school as a child-centred social environment is reflected in the fact that it is principally children who shape each other rather than adults shaping children.
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39.
  • Arheimer, Berit, 1966- (author)
  • Riverine nitrogen : Analysis and modelling under Nordic conditions
  • 1999
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The Baltic Sea in northern Europe is a brackish water body where eutrophication is considered a serious problem, partly as a result of high nitrogen load from rivers. This thesis includes statistical analysis of nitrogen behaviour in 55 small catchments. The results were used for further development of a dynamic model (HBV-N). This model was then applied in case studies of southern Sweden, including dynamic modelling in 3725 subbasins (totalling 145,000 km2) using time-series from 722 sites. The riverine nitrogen transport to the Swedish coast was simulated. Nitrogen reduction measures within the agricultural sector undertaken during 1985-1994 were found to decrease the normalised load by 7%. Constructed wetlands were found to reduce the load by 16% if 1% of a drainage basin were converted into wetlands. The spatial and temporal variations in terrestrial nitrogen leakage were to a great extent explained by catchment characteristics and hydrometeorological conditions. More detailed studies are needed, however, to distinguish between the influences of the various underlying processes (e.g., flow composition and washout processes). Large-scale studies of nitrogen transport and measure-allocation strategies must consider transformation processes in the aquatic system. The net load was considerably lower than the gross load, and it was temporally and spatially highly variable depending on climate, landscape mosaic, flow path, and watercourses. The HBV-N model is shown to have good potential as a decision-support tool for the improvement of water-quality management and environmental planning under Nordic conditions. For more sophisticated retention modeling, empirical studies are needed to quantify the impact of the various retention processes in the aquatic system.
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40.
  • Árnason, Þorvardur, 1969- (author)
  • Views of Nature and Environmental Concern in Iceland
  • 2005
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Environmental concern in contemporary societies is a complex phenomenon which is shaped and influenced by a host of different factors. One of the most important of these is the interplay between culture and nature that has taken place during the course of a nation’s history and the various ‛views of nature’ that such interplay has generated. Such views can e.g. manifest themselves in aesthetic judgments of natural scenery or, more generally, in the values that nature is seen to contain or carry. They form the base from which contemporary ideas, conceptions, and evaluations of nature are generated and debated.The five studies that together comprise this thesis explore the socio-cultural background of Icelandic environmentalism from a number of different perspectives. The first study concerns the depiction(s) of nature that can be found in the oldest literary works that have survived in Iceland. The second study deals with the first attempts by an Icelander to visualize nature in his homeland, using photographic media. The third study seeks to compare contemporary views of nature amongst Icelanders, e.g. concerning the appreciation of natural beauty, with those of Swedes and Danes. The fourth study reports the results of an extensive survey which probed the environmental values, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of presentday Icelanders. The fifth study builds on this same survey but focuses on the public understanding and perceptions of sustainable development, and also on the connections between attitudes toward environmental and developmental issues.This overall thesis project was multi-disciplinary in nature, combining theory drawn from environmental philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, with the theories and methods of environmental sociology, politics and history. The empirical studies employed, furthermore sought to operationalize certain key theoretical constructs relating to views of nature, such as environmental value orientations and aesthetic appreciation of nature, and thus ‛build bridges’ between the concerns, theories and methods of the humanities, on one side, and those of the social sciences, on the other.
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41.
  • Arnold, Karin von, 1975- (author)
  • Forests and Greenhouse gases. Fluxes of CO2, CH4 and N2O from drained forests on organic soils
  • 2004
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • One of the largest environmental threats believed to be facing us today is global warming due to the accumulation of green house gases (GHG). The concentrations of GHG in the atmosphere are a result of the net strength of different sinks and sources. Forests, in this context, are of particular interest because of their dual role as both sinks and sources. Most forests are net sinks for CO2 but others, such as drained forests, may be significant sources of both CO2 and N20. Consequently, it is essential to understand the fluxes of GHG between drained forests and the atmosphere in order to obtain accurate estimates of national GHG budgets.The findings reported in this thesis and the accompanying papers are based on dark chamber flux measurements of soil GHG fluxes and modelled annual net primary productions in five drained forest sites and two undrained sites situated on organic soil.Temporal variations in forest floor CO2, release could be explained, to a large extent, by differencies in temperature and groundwater level. The within-site spatial variation in soil GHG fluxes could only be explained to a very small extent by distance to tree stems. Much of the among-site variations in soil CO2 and CH4 release could be caused by differences in the mean annual groundwater table, while N20 emissions were strongly correlated to the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of soil organic matter. Most poorly drained forested areas are probably net sinks for GHG as the CO2 uptake by trees more than compensates for the soil GHG emissions. However, the total drained forested area in Sweden was estimated to be a net source of GHG. The CO2 release from decomposition of soil organic matter stored before drainage was estimated to be substantial. Corresponding to 15% of the CO2 release from the consumption of fossil fuels.
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42.
  • Artman, Henrik (author)
  • Fördelade kunskapsprocesser i ledningscentraler vid nödsituationer : Koordination och situationsmedvetenhet
  • 1999
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This thesis contributes to an understanding of how people work in co-ordination centres for controlling dynamic environments. It examines several theoretical perspectives that have been used to analyse cognition, co-operation and technology within dynamic decision-making. The author finds that all these perspectives contribute to specific parts of the puzzle, but that no theoretical approach alone seems to give a thorough and coherent understanding of how the parts hang together. From this stance the perspective of distributed cognition is examined, as it seems to be a promising approach for such aspects. The distributed cognition approach has been constructed in order to explain and describe how cognition is distributed over artefacts and people and how each part contributes to the system's functionality. This approach is examined from its explicit theoretical constituent parts, but is also developed in regard to the concepts of co-ordination and situation awareness. The notion of co-ordination is analysed as the way in which agents relate to each other, in terms of institutional organisation as well as in terms of the contribution of technical means and co-operation practices. Situation awareness is a theoretical construct developed from a cognitive psychology perspective that has mainly been used in aviation research to explain people's awareness of environmental factors and future developments in the environment. The limited notion of situation awareness that cognitive psychology offers is criticized, but is then developed in order to include system characteristics such as information access, procedures to investigate the environment, representational artefacts and communication between different actors. The empirical material used consist of video-recordings from a full-scale simulated military command and control unit, an authentic emergency co-ordination centre as well as two experiments with computer-aided microworlds. These microworlds have been used as a means of further investigating hypotheses that have been constructed from analyzing real-world co-ordination centres. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been carried out. Field studies and microworld studies complement each other. Microworlds are not as constrained as traditional laboratory experiments are, but at the same time they are not as variable as real-world situations. Studies within microworlds also have the advantage that several aspects of environments that are both costly and dangerous can be examined safely and economically. Results include the following points: (i) co-ordination is dependent upon what material resources the actors have and use, as well as on each individual's knowledge and the goals of the system (ii) situation awareness should be regarded as a constructive process (iii) situation awareness and co-ordination practices should be regarded as interdependent (iv) situation awareness is dependent upon information processing procedures and information representation.
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43.
  • Arvidsson, Martin, 1990- (author)
  • Beyond Generative Sufficiency : On Interactions, Heterogeneity & Middle-Range Dynamics
  • 2022
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Explaining how properties at the level of individuals translate into properties at the level of collectives is a core objective of sociology. Because the social world is characterized by complex webs of social interdependencies, establishing how micro and macro are related to one another requires a detailed understanding of how individuals are influenced by their social environments and the consequences that such influences have for the dynamics of the social process. However, until very recently, it has been difficult to conduct detailed empirical investigations of micro-macro linkages due to the lack of large-scale data containing information on how individuals interact with one another. In the absence of such data, substantive research has tended to (a) focus its attention elsewhere: studying how social factors influence individual outcomes, rather than how actors in interaction with one another bring about collective outcomes, or (b) propose models of micro-macro linkages that—for reasons of parsimony and tractability—often assume artificially high levels of homogeneity. Against this background, this thesis sets out to investigate, first, how the data and tools that have emerged from the digital and computational revolution can help sociologists construct empirically well-founded mappings from the micro to the macro level, and second, how the conclusions about the role of social interdependencies and networks change when the analysis is informed by real-world heterogeneities.In the introductory chapter, a conceptual and analytical framework for studying micro-macro processes is proposed that integrates the theoretical principles of analytical sociology with the data and methods of computational social science. This framework constitutes the foundation of the thesis. It is used in Essays I-III, and it is methodologically built upon in Essay IV.In Essay I, the role of social networks in labor-market segregation processes is examined. Scholarship on labor-market segregation commonly assume that social networks have a segregating effect because of homophilous selection tendencies in network-based recruitment. Using large-scale register data and focusing attention on individuals’ heterogenous opportunities to form same-category ties in different workplaces, Essay I finds that opportunity structures often dominate homophilic preferences. In particular, a mechanism is identified which shows—in contradiction with the main tenet of previous research—that networks often reduce rather than increase segregation by triggering mobility events that counteract the impact of segregating mobility events.Essay II examines the conditions under which social influence can decouple adoption behaviour from individual preferences and thereby bring about unexpected collective outcomes. Prior research has shown that such decoupling can occur, but conflicting evidence and implicit assumptions of strong homogeneity mean that we still know little about the conditions under which this is likely to occur in the real world. Addressing these limitations, this study uses fine-grained, real-world behavioural data from Spotify to estimate heterogeneous social influence effects conditional on properties of individuals’ social environments, and then examine their macro-implications in empirically calibrated simulations. It is found that partial overlap in preferences and strong social ties between the senders and receivers of social influence is needed for social influence to produce decoupling.Essay III centers on the phenomenon of urban scaling and examines the relationship between within-city and between-city inequality. Previous urban scaling research has documented how cities’ total outputs increase more than proportionally with city size and has proposed theoretical models which demonstrate impressive predictive accuracy at aggregate levels. However, this research has overlooked the stark inequalities that exist within cities. Using microdata from multiple countries, it is found that between 36–80% of the previously reported scaling effects can be explained by differences in the distributional tails of cities. Providing explanatory depth to these findings, a cumulative advantage mechanism is identified which elucidates one important channel through which differences in the size of cities’ tails emerge.In Essay IV, a method is proposed for inferring theoretically meaningful dimensions from complex high-dimensional data such as text. The results show that the method captures latent semantic concepts better than or on-par with the current state of the art. For the study of social interactions, the method constitutes a new and potentially important tool for inferring theoretically meaningful dimensions about individuals and their social environments, and in so doing, improves our ability to adjust for specific types of homophily and enables richer and more precise measures of heterogeneity in social interaction processes.
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44.
  • Arvidsson, Maria, 1970- (author)
  • När arbetet blev farligt : arbetarskyddet och det medicinska tänkandet 1884-1919
  • 2002
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • In the end of the1940's Occupational Medicine was institutionalised in Sweden. Health hazilards in the work place was not a new field for the Swedish physicians. They had been preocrcupied with these problems for a long time.The aim of this thesis is to analyse and describe how health hazards in the work placees, ecpecially in the factories, were perceived and described by Swedish physicians at the turn of the 20t century. The aim is also to clarify the physicians' role m shaping, developing and supervising the Occupational Safety and Health Acts. The city of Norrköping is used as anexample in discussing how physicians at a local level paid attention to health and safety issues in the work place.According to the physicians, there were a number of harmful factors in the factory work that could endanger health, but these were also seen to be dependent on the worker. Workers ldisplayed different kinds of vulnerability to the harmful factors. Sex, heredity, age, health, physique, habits and behaviour were understood as determining components. The preventive measures not only contained guidelines for the factories. They also included advises on how '!the workers should organise and live their lives outside work.The life style and behaviour the physicians would like to encourage were aligned with the !cultural values of the bourgeoisie at the tum of the 20th century. It is vital to recognise the cultural lens through which the physicians perceived and spoke of the workers' situation, their way of life and their behaviour inside as well as outside the factory.
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45.
  • Asplund, Therese, 1979- (author)
  • Climate change frames and frame formation : An analysis of climate change communication in the Swedish agricultural sector
  • 2014
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • While previous research into understandings of climate change has usually examined general public perceptions and mainstream media representations, this thesis offers an audience-specific departure point by analysing climate change frames and frame formation in Swedish agriculture. The empirical material consists of Swedish farm magazines’ reporting on climate change, as well as eight focus group discussions among Swedish farmers on the topic of climate change and climate change information. The analysis demonstrates that while Swedish farm magazines frame climate change in terms of conflict, scientific uncertainty, and economic burden, farmers in the focus groups tended to concentrate on whether climate change was a natural or human-induced phenomenon, and viewed climate change communication as an issue of credibility. It was found that farm magazines use metaphorical representations of war and games to form the overall frames of climate change. In contrast, the farmers’  frames of natural versus human-induced climate change were formed primarily using experience-based and non-experience-based arguments, both supported with analogies, distinctions, keywords, metaphors, and prototypical examples. Furthermore, discussions of what constitutes credible climate information centred on conflict-versus consensus-oriented frames of climate change communication along with different views of the extent to which knowledge of climate change is and should be practically or analytically based. This analysis of climate change communication in the Swedish agricultural sector proposes that the sense-making processes of climate change are complex, involving associative thinking and experience-based knowledge that form interpretations of climate change and climate change information.
  •  
46.
  • Aurell, Marie, 1971- (author)
  • Arbete och identitet : Om hur städare blir städare
  • 2001
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • This thesis examines identity construction processes among contract cleaners. The analysis is based on the assumption that identity is about both being and becoming; identities are never given, but always subject to change. Social identity theory, according to which identity construction is a social categorisation process, is part of the theoretical framework,which also includes literature on organisation vs. task oriented identity and dirty work. Different theoretical perspectives are combined to give a nuanced understanding of identity construction processes.The analysis is based on empirical material from one of the largest cleaning contractors in Sweden. Participant observations and interviews were the main methods used in this study. The results show that gender, technology, competence and time and space are significant aspects of the cleaners' identity contents. Gender is important in both the division of labour within the organisation, and the way it defines a good cleaner as having feminine characteristics. Technology and competence are not part of the general image of cleaning, but the contractor management are trying to change that. This results in ambiguous signals received by the cleaners. Time and space are significant as the cleaners are always under stress, and always in somebody else's space. To a large extent, the nature of the space also defines the nature of the cleaning work.In terms of processes through which identities are constructed, the results show that social interactions and reconstructions of the work contents are of great importance. Many different groups are involved in the social interactions, both within and outside the organisation. Reconstructions of the work contents are actively used by the cleaners in order to reconstruct identities. Given the structures working against them, the cleaners usetheir agency to construct a space of action, although small. Their attempts to strengthen their identities often result in a strengthening of the power relations in which they are subordinated. However, the cleaners' actions can also bring about change.
  •  
47.
  • Avby, Gunilla (author)
  • Evidence in practice : On knowledge use and learning in social work
  • 2015
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Against the backdrop of the transformations in the entire framing of professional work, social work has come under close scrutiny in many countries, including Sweden. Doubts have been raised about practitioners’ existing knowledge base, and the importance of practitioners engaging in learning and the renewal and extension of professional capacities has been emphasized.The present thesis concerns knowledge use and learning in the daily practices of child investigation work. The aim is to explore processes of knowledge use and learning in practice. The study is based on a mix of qualitative approaches, basically from ethnography, comprising methods such as participant observations, interviews, reflective dialogues and documentary analysis of case data.The main findings demonstrate that investigation work is characterized mainly by the use of practice-based knowledge. Research-based knowledge is predominantly used as a means of explaining a client’s situation or to underpin and legitimize one’s own beliefs and decisions made on other grounds. Professional learning is largely adaptive in character, as the social workers learn to handle tasks in a fairly routinized way on the basis of rules or procedures that draw on existing knowledge in the practice setting.Two conclusions are drawn: First, the use of knowledge in child investigation work bears little resemblance to principles of evidence-based practice. Second, the reproduction of professional knowledge is largely implicit and taken for granted. The study offers insight into the much-discussed topic of putting knowledge into practice, which is of importance to strategies for organizing profes sional learning and knowledgeable practice.
  •  
48.
  • Avdan, Nazli (author)
  • ‘Collaborative Competition’ : Stance-taking and Positioning in the European Parliament
  • 2017
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The European Parliament (EP) is the scene where certain issues concerning over 500 million ‘Europeans’ are publicly debated and where politically relevant groupings are discursively coconstructed. While the Members of the Parliament (MEPs) pursue their political agendas, intergroup boundaries are drawn, reinforced, and/or transgressed. Speakers constantly take stances on behalf of groupings in relation to some presupposed other groupings and argue what differentiates ‘Self’ from ‘Others’. This study examines patterns of language use by the MEPs as they engage in the contextually and historically situated dialogical processes of intergroup positioning and stance-taking. It further focuses on the strategic and competitive activities of grouping, grounding, and alignment in order to reveal the dynamic construction of intergroup boundaries.The study is based on a collection of Blue-card question-answer sequences from the plenary debates held at the EP in 2011, when the Sovereign Debt Crisis had been stabilized to some degree but still evoked plenty of controversy.Theoretically the study builds on Stance Theory (Du Bois, 2007), Positioning Theory (Davies & Harré, 1990), and several broadly social constructivist approaches to discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995).The analysis shows that intergroup positioning in the EP emerges as what I call a ‘collaborative competition’ between contradictory ideologies and political agendas. The MEPs strategically manipulate their opponents' prior or projected utterances in order to set up positions for self, a grouping he or she stands for, and thereby its adversaries. All participants engage in the maintenance and negotiation of intergroup boundaries, even though the boundaries hardly ever coincide between the different speakers. They discursively fence off some imaginary territories, leaving their adversaries with vague positions.When asking Blue-card questions, the MEPs use a particular turn organization, which involves routine forms of interactional units, namely addressing, question framing and question forms, each of which is shown to contribute to stance-taking. A dynamic model of stance-taking is suggested, allowing for a fluid transformation of the stance object as well as the discursively constructed stance-takers.While Blue-card questions are meant to serve as a structured procedure for eliciting information from a speaker, the analysis demonstrates that the MEPs accomplish various divergent actions that serve intergroup positioning. The dissertation thus contributes to the understanding of the discursive games played in the EP as the MEPs strive to construct social realities that fit their political ends.
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49.
  • Avrahami, Dina, 1949- (author)
  • Vi dansar inte på bordet : Lesbiska invandrarkvinnor i Sverige: stigmatisering & stolthet
  • 2007
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • Denna forskning genomfördes under åren 2000–2004. Forskningssammanhanget är både Lesbiska studier och IMER forskning. I avhandlingen studeras livserfarenheter som 21 lesbiska informanter från 15 olika länder, alla invandrare i Sverige, berättar om. Utgångspunkten för forskningen är sexualitet och migration. De övergripande forskningsfrågorna är: Genom vilka processer blir kvinnor medvetna om sin sexuella dragning till kvinnor? Hur ”lär” de sig att leva lesbiskt, samt inom vilket socialt sammanhang sker dessa processer? Forskningsfrågorna belyses genom de livserfarenheter som de 21 lesbiska informanterna berättar om. Analysen görs genom fokusering på det samband och den växelverkan som fi nns mellan lesbiskhet och migration i datamaterialet.Studien är etnografi sk och kvalitativ. Den narrativa metoden används för inhämtning av det empiriska materialet, vilket består av utskrivna intervjuer och anteckningar från deltagande observation. Analysen görs med hjälp av teorier om sociala relationer, heteronormativitet, stigmatisering, aktörskap och migration. Studien visar att informanternas erfarenheter av stigmatisering och marginalisering liknar varandra oavsett i vilket samhälle de växt upp. Marginaliseringen av lesbiska kvinnor hänger till stor del samman med en samhällsstruktur som förtrycker kvinnlig sexualitet. Det är genom komma-ut-processen som den lesbiska kvinnan ”lär” sig att ”vara” lesbisk. Stigmatisering är det sociala sammanhang i vilket den lesbiska kvinnan blir medveten om sin sexuella orientering. Genom sitt aktörskap ändrar den lesbiska kvinnan sin sociala position i marginalen och växer som ett självständigt och stolt lesbiskt subjekt. Detta leder henne till att söka sig till andra homosexuella (kvinnor och män). Känslan av grupptillhörighet baserad på likartade livserfarenheter, som har sin grund i samhällets attityd till deras lesbiskhet är centralt för informanternas liv och avgörande för bygget av ett lesbiskt samhälle, oavsett etnisk och nationell bakgrund. Det lesbiska samhället (och gaysamhället) är internationellt.
  •  
50.
  • Axelsson, Bodil, 1965- (author)
  • Meningsfulla förflutenheter : Traditionalisering och teatralisering i en klosterruin
  • 2003
  • Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
    • The major objective of this thesis is to study the processes of traditionalisation that are being enacted in relation to both the external and internal production of the play "The Power and the Glory" that has been performed in Alvastra Abbey ruin since 1988. During three weeks in July the ruins and their environs are transformed into a rehearsal area, and a live stage, with lay actors performing different roles, a supporting staff and an audience. The thesis asks questions about how the staging of the play is impacted by a politics of culture, why this particular site or topography can be read as a story about a nation, what mediating connections there are between the yearly productions and, finally, how the rehearsals activate and reproduce the accumulated memory of the play and the place.The thesis connects with discussions on how "space" is charged with symbolic and cultural meanings, the use of history and cultural heritage, and story-telling. These approaches are combined with analysis of how participants in interaction use multiple resources (talk, spatial organisation, gestures, gazes, movements and postures) to invokethe spatial aspects of the play as well as to put the story of the play in place. The methodological approach of the thesis combines fieldwork (personal observations, videotaping and audio-recordings) with analysis of written material, press cuttings, archival material, and books and illustrations about the area and its history.In conclusion, this dissertation makes visible how Alvastra Abbey is associated with imagined cultural, political and social entities such as a nation, a province, and a local community. "The Power and the Glory", it appears, constitutes one agent among others in a long term meaning making process. One point made in this book is that although the story of the play is legitimised through references to a past that already has become meaningful in earlier processes of traditionalisation, the work of the Association of Alvastra Chronicle Play and the rehearsal process also creates a traditionalisation process of its own.
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