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During the last few decades, education globally has been marked by being closely related to the economy. It always was, but today’s commodification and marketization reach into any aspect of the educational system (Ball, 2012; Bartlett et al., 2002). Sweden is a specific case at hand, since privatization and competition between schools have taken especially sinister forms, and have far-reaching effects not only on the free school market but also on public education (Lundahl, et al., 2013). This paper draws on an ongoing study, where we investigate the processes that are set in motion at the establishment of a strongly profiled municipal upper secondary school in a middle range Swedish university town.

Software projects can nowadays have complex infrastructures behind them, in the form of libraries and various other dependencies which need to be installed on the machines they are being developed on. Setting up this infrastructure on a new machine manually can be a tedious process prone to errors. This can be avoided by automating the process using a software provisioning tool, which can automatically transfer infrastructure between machines based on instructions which can be version controlled in similar ways as the source code. Docker and Vagrant are two tools which can achieve this. Docker encapsulates projects into containers, while Vagrant handles automatic setup of virtual machines. This study compares Docker and Vagrant regarding their performance for machine level provisioning, both when setting up an infrastructure for the first time on a new machine, as well as when implementing a change in the infrastructure configuration. This was done by provisioning a project using both tools, and performing experiments measuring the time taken for each tool to perform the tasks. The results of the experiments were analyzed, and showed that Docker performed significantly better than Vagrant in both tests. However, due to limitations of the study, this cannot be assumed to be true for all use cases and scenarios, and performance is not the only factor to consider when choosing a provisioning tool. According to the data collected in this study, Docker is thereby the recommended tool to choose, but more research is needed to determine whether other test cases yield different results. Moderna mjukvaruprojekt kan ha en komplex infrastruktur bakom sig, i form av bibliotek och andra beroenden som måste installeras på utvecklarmaskiner. Att konfigurera denna infrastruktur på en ny maskin manuellt kan vara en tidskrävande process, som även kan leda till en ofullständigt eller felaktigt konfigurerad lösning. Detta kan undvikas genom att automatisera processen med hjälp av provisioneringsverktyg, som automatiskt kan överföra infrastrukturer mellan maskiner baserat på instruktioner som kan versionshanteras på liknande sätt som källkoden. Docker och Vagrant är två verktyg som kan användas till detta ändamål. Docker kapslar in projektet i containers, medan Vagrant hanterar automatisk konfiguration av virtuella maskiner. Denna studie jämför Docker och Vagrant avseende deras prestanda för mjukvaruprovisionering på maskinnivå, både när det kommer till en förstagångsinstallation av infrastrukturen på en ny maskin, och även implementering av en ändring i konfigurationen av infrastrukturen. Denna jämförelse gjordes genom att implementera båda lösningarna, och sedan utföra experiment för att mäta tidsåtgången för båda verktygen att lösa de två uppgifterna. Resultaten av experimenten analyserades, och visade att Docker presterade bättre än Vagrant i båda tester. På grund av begränsningar i studien kan detta inte antas vara sant för alla användningsområden och scenarier, och prestanda är inte den enda faktorn att ha i åtanke när ett provisioneringsverktyg ska väljas. Baserat på datan insamlad i denna studie är Docker därmed verktyget som rekommenderas, men mer forskning krävs för att avgöra om andra testområden ger andra resultat.

This dissertation is about the view of writing. One of the intentions of the study is to analyse different notions of writing that become manifest in media debates about student writing. Another intention is to analyse conceptions of writing in curricula and course plans for upper secondary school in Sweden from 1970 to 2011. Drawing from theories of critical discourse analysis, the study aims at answering what is said about student writing, describing the language tools the debaters use, and discussing and explaining how and why the discursive struggle about the view of writing evolves and develops. The source material consists of newspaper articles and periodicals from the 70’s, the 90’s and our time in mostly Swedish, and some American, publications and the curricula and course plans of Lgy 70, Lpf 94 and Gy 2011. The results show that there is and has been a popular discourse of writing in Sweden about the students’ lacking writing abilities. The articles are often structured in a similar fashion and share elements. There is, thus, a specific writing crisis genre, which is consistent over time and can also be identified in articles from the U.S. The articles are overly dramatic with an extensive use of paratextual elements, and the authors often use the language manipulatively, for instance by presupposing that the students’ skills are deficient, without any evidence to support the statements. The authors repeatedly draw on a number of discourses and myths about writing. The curricula and course plans have mostly focused on skills and academic preparation, even though the general parts of the curricula have been progressive. In Lgy 70, writing in vocational programmes is skills-oriented; in the theoretical programmes writing is mostly skills- and academically oriented, but there are progressive ideals as well. In Lpf 94, the general view of writing is socially oriented, even though the skills orientation is also evident. In Gy 2011, the vocational programmes are skills-oriented, whereas writing is more varied in the theoretical programmes, but the more advanced, the more instrumental the course becomes, a tendency that is manifest in the view of academic writing. The curricula are, at least to some extent, shaped by the popular discourse of writing. The crisis rhetoric has been overwhelming over the years. Conflicting voices have efficiently been silenced. When the crisis rhetoric becomes hegemonic, it is almost impossible to voice alternative thoughts about writing in school and higher education.

This licentiate thesis investigates fiction writing and reading in up- per secondary school in Sweden. Inspired by fanfiction I created a teaching project of derivative writing in which the students in a se- cond-year social science class wrote short stories derived from 20th century novels. They also gave peer response, both orally and in writing. Finally they wrote a reflective text about the project. The main purpose of the study is to describe and analyse the teaching project. The primary material is the students’ short sto- ries. Drawing from theories of intertextuality, most notably Genette’s transtextuality theory and fanfiction theories, I analyse how the students make use of the source text. Theories of narratology have been used to analyse techniques of storytelling, mainly characterization and focalization. In the analysis of the stu- dents’ written comments on each other’s texts I draw from re- sponse theories. The results show that the students tend to stay close to the source texts. The most common subgenre is refocalization, that is to change the perspective to one of the secondary characters’ view. Refocalization seems to be an efficient way of deepening the under- standing of the main character of the source text; in many of the students’ stories the protagonist functions as the focalized object. Which novel the students read plays an important part in how fo- calization is expressed, however. Short stories based on novels with complex focalization tend to be focalized in a variety of ways whereas stories based on novels with fixed focalization mostly fol- low the pattern of the source text. Reading the short stories and, not least, the reflective texts it becomes evident that the characters  are extremely important in this kind of literature, more so than semiotic theories of characters have acknowledged; the characters are more than merely functions. In the chapter about peer response I argue that many students write analyses of the text they are about to respond to rather than give advice about how to proceed. It is difficult to see if the response is of any help to the writer. Thus, I question whether peer response has any other effect than strength- ening the social bonds between the group members. The study shows that creative writing could very well be an in- tegral part of the education in Swedish in upper secondary school. Derivative writing may function as an alternative to traditional lit- erary analyses. Refocalizing is a way of seeing the story from a dif- ferent viewpoint, which could enhance the students’ sense of empa- thy. Questions of focalization might also lead to discussions of power. Furthermore, creative writing may make the students more attentive as writers. In the new syllabus Gy 11, however, the op- portunities for working with creative writing are, unfortunately, limited.

This paper aims to examine how the driving forces of the Swedish CNG market have impacted OKQ8’s strategies. This has been conducted through the four drivers’ coercive-, market-, resource- and social drivers. The papers conclusion is that all drivers impact on OKQ8’s strategy but that coercive drivers have the most significant impact on the CNG market and OKQ8’s strategy. OKQ8’s decision to establish a cooperation together with E.ON was smart decision since they minimized their own ambiguity in this market that depends on governmental policies and incentives.

This paper aims to examine how employee motivation is affected during the operational combination stage of a merger between two relatively small Swedish professional service firms. This is done through a quantitative study conducted by examining the relationship between employee motivation and three approaches; social identity, role conflict and acculturation. Those approaches were first by themselves tested in order to examine the relationship between their respective indicators that represent respective approach. The main result of this study is that the three approaches have a positive significant impact on employee motivation. Therefore, it is important for the professional service firm to take those variables into consideration when formulating future strategies and when trying to improve the organizational climate.