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"In discussions relating to their role during the Middle Ages, women are typically assumed to only have been "pawns in a political game dominated by men", or to have primarily acted as intermediaries of power. In this book, however, the varying expressions of power are studied by changing the focus from a political and economic exercise of power controlled by men, to an approach based on interaction and communication between the sexes. In this volume, gender is instead interpreted as a total social phenomenon comprising all spheres of medieval society. This approach provides new opportunities to investigate how power operated on different levels within a societal structure. Thus, power is neither seen as emanating from a centre nor as dominated by only one sex. Instead, it is regarded as an all-embracing societal web, woven through threads of mutual dependence between men and women.

In this book, scholars belonging to various disciplines, such as history, history of arts and literary history, discuss how cooperation between the sexes found expression in culture, judicial spheres and social organisation. The contributions do not only consider the Nordic countries, but also how gender constructions were affected by, and transformed through, the influence of contemporary cultural, juridical and ideological currents in Europe. - Vanliga uppfattningar i diskussioner om kvinnornas roll under medeltiden är att de utgjorde "brickor i männens politiska spel" eller att de i första hand verkade som förmedlare av makt. I denna antologi studeras dock maktens olika uttrycksformer genom att fokus förflyttas från politisk och ekonomisk maktutövning kontrollerad av män till ett interaktionistiskt synsätt baserat på samspelet och kommunikationen mellan könen. Genom att se på genus som ett totalt socialt fenomen omfattande det medeltida samhällets alla sfärer öppnas möjligheter att undersöka hur makten verkade på olika nivåer inom samhällsstrukturen. Makten betraktas därmed varken som utgående från ett centrum eller helt dominerad av ett kön. I boken diskuterar forskare tillhörande olika discipliner såsom historia, konstvetenskap och litteraturvetenskap hur samverkan mellan könen tog sig uttryck inom kulturen, rättssamhället och den sociala organisationen. Bidragen behandlar inte bara Norden utan även hur könskonstruktioner påverkades och förändrades genom inflytande från samtida kulturella, juridiska och ideologiska strömningar i Europa.
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This dissertation is about municipal procurement of construction projects. Public procurement is often portrayed as inefficient since public organizations can have several, potentially conflicting, objectives. In this dissertation, I use Uppsala municipality as a case to study how procurement worked during a time when municipal procurement was not regulated by law. The main interest is how the administration balanced procedural and outcome-related objectives and how its choices can be explained. Earlier research has suggested that public organizations use discretionary decision-making and so-called low-powered incentives (negotiations and cost-plus contracts) to a lesser extent than private clients do, making procurement less efficient. Rigid rules and fear of corruption are usually mentioned as explanations. The results of this dissertation show that low-powered incentives and discretionary decision-making became more common when there were more rules and a more bureaucratized administration. It is suggested that the structure and institutions of the construction sector, in combination with government financing policies and the municipality's organizational capability, can explain the pattern. The results have implications for the literature on public procurement as well as on the development of the public administration in Sweden. First, they indicate that the relationship between formal rules and procurement practices is more complicated than previously suggested. Second, they highlight how discussions about the public administrative system can benefit from incorporating the local level as well as informal institutions and practices.

Narratives about northern Sweden are often narratives about nature. This has been true throughout history and is still true today. Different ways of understanding nature have become intertwined with the place and the people who live there. The nature in northern Sweden can be magnificent and impressive, but it can also be desolate, threatening and dangerous. A dominant image of nature in northern Sweden - then as now - is the image of resources, assets.
The overall aim of the study is to shed light on the role of nature in linguistic place-making in northern Sweden with a particular focus on the settler colonization during the 18th and 19th centuries. Through a selection of text sources, nature's central place in the story of the colonization, of the place, its history, change and future is highlighted.
The texts that are analyzed are the two journals in which Petrus Læstadius described his work as a missionary in Lapland, as well as Olov Petter Pettersson's detailed description of the settler colonization in the work Gamla byar i Vilhelmina.
The settler colonization took place in areas with Sami presence and history and this study connects to the research field of Settler Colonial Studies in a critical discussion of the linguistic place-making in the texts.
One of the aims of the study is to also shed light on the connections that exist between the settler colonization depicted in the texts, and the linguistic place-making with nature at the center that is ongoing in northern Sweden today.

Hymns to Durgā, Hindu deity; exhaustive work with seven classical Sanskrit commentaries; includes Hindi interpretation