Suchergebnisse

This thesis examines the question of organization, governance and choice of seeds in Swedish agriculture. It consists of four papers: Paper I investigates the evolution of plant breeding industry in Sweden. The results suggest that the establishment of intellectual property rights (IPRs) schemes creates power in the seed value chain in Sweden and has therefore been a major driver of mergers and acquisitions, together with changes in domestic agricultural policy as well the country´s entrance to EU. Based on nationwide survey among farmers, papers II and III examine the impact of IPRs and specifically the implications of the enforcement of Plant Breeders Rights on farmers´ choice between certified versus farm saved seed (FSS). Paper II uses transaction cost theory and logistics regression to examine empirically the governance structure of farmers choosing certified or FSS. Farmers´ assessment of the quality seed in terms of the genetic purity of each channel has no impact on their choice while personal relations with their upstream partners, investments in the farm as well as delivery contracts affect their procurement strategy. In paper III, spatial autoregressive models are used in order to analyze the transfer of "know-how" between farmers, and the spillover effects of social learning in farmers´ choice of seed channel. Farmers are distinguished between neighbors, based on their relative distance; and peers, based on membership in farmers' cooperatives. The results indicate the existence of spatial dependence on Swedish farmers' choice of seed channel. Paper IV evaluates the impact of farmers' social networks on their decision to be involved in the governance of the agricultural cooperative. The findings suggest a relationship between network characteristics and farmers' involvement in the governance that persists over a long period.

Status of religious communities -- Constitutional guarantees: a historical overview -- Legal registration of religious communities -- State support for Islamic religious communities -- Muslims in integration laws -- Mosques and prayer houses -- Burial and cemeteries -- Education and schools -- Compulsory education -- Religious education -- Independent schools -- Further and higher (tertiary) education -- Islamic religious education training at universities -- Islamic chaplaincy in public institutions -- Employment, social laws and discrimination -- Religious holidays -- Islamic slaughter and food regulations -- Islamic goods and services -- Islamic dress -- Criminal law -- Male circumcision -- Female genital mutilation -- Forced marriages -- Family law -- Private international law -- Marriage and divorces -- Spouses' matrimonial property rights -- Inheritance law -- Substantive family law -- Marriage -- Divorce -- Spouses' matrimonial property rights -- Inheritance law -- Children -- General considerations -- Islamic custody and fostering in Swedish law -- Bibliography

Because of population clustering, it is increasingly difficult for the rural poor to access land in Zambia. Such a clustered space is along the line-of-rail, where more people are looking to make use of land. Simultaneously, in a country where multiple political authorities can perform recognition of land, people also have to balance and navigate within this pluralistic political landscape to enjoy secure access and use of land. As such, property has the potential to improve security and create legitimacy to land. Within 100 yards along the railway, land is in administrative limbo due to the lack of effective control by its legal owner, the state. This thesis investigates the property production in land occupied by rural people along the railway in Southern Province, Zambia, through ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork. With a widened understanding of property that goes beyond juridical interpretations inseparable from law, I show how property making abandons formalised scripts, and instead is performed through contextual and localised orders. Occupants of land along the railway put labour and material investments into the land to reinforce legitimacy, both among each other as well as when facing political authority. With the state as formal owners of railway land, chiefs and headmen (i.e. customary authority) get squeezed by engaging in administering the land since it is outside of their legal jurisdiction. At the same time, state authority also administers and recognizes land, albeit implicitly, when maintenance workers survey the railway tracks. I conclude that these findings together create a whole greater than the sum of its parts of how property production can take place on land in limbo.

In recent years, ideas of conscience and the liberty of conscience have become ever more salient in public discourse. Historically, these concepts have been used to mark out a certain scope of freedom and protection in moral, political and legal conflicts. In our time, individual conscience is frequently used to legitimate objections to, for instance, military service and medical interventions like abortion and vaccination. So too in Sweden – a country widely described as one of the most modern and secularized societies in the world. In this volume, a group of researchers in history, human rights, law, ethics and sociology of religion address some of the most central issues around conscience and the liberty of conscience in Sweden from the middle ages to the present. By situating conscience and liberty in wider intellectual, social and political settings, the essays provide alternative ways of thinking about the most intractable problems surrounding these concepts – the relationship between law and morality, the tension between individual and collective freedom, as well as the role of religion in public affairs. This volume will create new avenues of research for scholars and students interested in challenges related to conscience and liberty: both those in ethics, politics and law seeking a historical perspective, and those in history who want to tie their studies to the present.

There is a strong narrative on how the humanities were marginalized in postwar Sweden: in the land of engineers, technocrats and social scientists, there was no room for erudition, philosophy and history. This book challenges such a notion and shows how clearly the humanities were present in the public sphere of the time. By applying perspectives from the history of knowledge, the authors illustrate how humanists were key figures in the welfare society's culture and politics, media and book market, education and intellectual debate.
At the heart of the book is the public sphere of the 1960s and 1970s. In a first part, the authors highlight how humanists played a decisive role in the young television's educational program as well as in the popular science paperback publishing of the time and on the essay pages in the newspapers. In a second part, attention is drawn to the humanities' place in the Christian cultural sphere, the labour movement's education work and the New Left's book cafés. We meet people like Per I. Gedin, Gunnel Vallquist and Jan-Öjvind Swahn, but also TV producers, study circle organizers, translators of radical non-fiction and many others. They all helped to set humanistic knowledge in motion during the postwar decades.
Against an international background, the image of a humanistic knowledge system with deep roots and wide connections in Swedish society emerges. It is about these actors and arenas of knowledge that this book is about.