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This report presents a preliminary knowledge status about implications of the sharing economy for labour markets and employment relations in the Nordic countries. It also reviews how the Nordic countries and their social partners approach the sharing economy and issues relating, amongst other, to its legality, regulation, taxation, and terms of competition. There is so far scant supply of statistics, data and research in this field. The employment potentials and consequences of the sharing economy will, amongst other, depend on the governments' and the organized actors' responses to these challenges. Currently, all the actors seem to be in a phase of knowledge gathering and deliberation of possible policy options, cautiously avoiding taking steps that might obstruct the development of the sharing economy.

Fighting Fakes – the Nordic Way. Word matters and is the foundation for dialogue and democracy and so is trust. Thus, the phenomenon "Fake News" understood as propaganda, lies, disinformation and fake factory stories are serious threats to our democracies. The Nordic Council of Ministers urges for finding ways to meet this challenge and is launching a booklet to create a debate on how to counter fakes and build trust in words and facts. The booklet is based upon results from a meeting in September 2017 of a high-level group of key experts on the topic and in particular from four experts contributing by focusing on media and information literacy, ethical standards and quality journalism to be among the best tools to counter fakes. This booklet will be launched at the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day 2018 in Accra asking for international feedback on its recommendations.

This chapter revolves around political discussions in forum discussion threads on the Swedish online LGBTQ community Qruiser. Political discussions in online forum threads are studied as cultural participation in an online cultural public sphere. The specific question the paper seeks to answer is what role lurkers play for active participants' meaning-making practices. Lurkers could be understood as a fantasy, an imagined audience willing to listen and be persuaded by active participants' arguments. However, applying a Lacan inspired analytical framework, the paper concludes that the fantasy is not so much about the lurkers themselves, but the belief in persuasion. Hence, the answer to the question of why users participate in verbal battles with each other online would be because they are driven by a fantasy of persuasion as a way to cope with the lack of enjoyment in terms of them being split from a harmonious world of political unity.

In this presentation, Dr. Svensson will present results from two studies, one of Swedish political parties during the latest 2014 general elections and one study from an in-between election period in 2016. The results suggest that Instagram (regardless of being more visual oriented) is used in a similar manner as Facebook and Twitter (i.e. for mobilisation and image management) and that uses are centered on election campaigning.

Background/problem/issueOne feature that characterizes National Hockey League (NHL) is that NHL-owners run NHL-clubs in geographical cities/regions that have the best conditions for marketing NHL. Professionalization and commercialization of NHL has also huge impact on global elite ice hockey's development and commercialization (Kidd and Macfarlane, 1972). NHL influences (i.e. Americanization of sport) have also reached Swedish and Finnish elite ice hockey (Backman, 2012). Even though Sweden and Finland are countries with strong historical ties and a similar tradition of organizing sport (i.e. amateurism and promotion and relegation) representatives of elite ice hockey has chosen different paths (Backman, 2012). Swedish sport and elite ice hockey is organized according to the European Model of Sport with the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation as governing body for all Swedish ice hockey. In Finland the elite ice hockey representatives has chosen to implement several significant feature of the NHL (i.e. American Model of Sport). For example one from the Finnish Ice Hockey Federation autonomous SM-liiga, that runs the elite league, and a closed league, with no promotion or relegation (Backman, 2012). The main problem and research task question is hereby to analyze if this organizational difference has affected the geographical structure where Swedish and Finnish elite ice hockey clubs was located geographically in relation to the size of population 2015/2016 season. TheoryAmericanization. The term Americanization means of tradition that American influence and culture is received/imported/forced to a country (Alm, 2002). Americanization has mainly been used in three different meanings. According to the first meaning the concept of Americanization is seen as a center and periphery relationship between the US and the world. As the world's most powerful state, the US, through its economic and political strength have exported their culture to other countries (Alm, 2002). In a hockey perspective this is related to the NHL's ...

How do political parties use Instagram – a platform that is centred around images – when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform during election campaigns? To find answers to this question, Uta Russmann and Jakob Svensson examined Swedish political parties Instagram accounts during the 2014 national elections. A particular focus is on the deliberative potential (in a Habermasian understanding of the term) of Instagram. The results are similar to findings from other social media platforms: Political parties hardly used Instagram to interact with their followers, and the few interactions taking place did not contribute to deliberation. Interaction and deliberation is thus not enhanced by the images on Instagram.

In the networked information and knowledge-based economy and society, the notions of 'open' and 'openness' are used in a variety of contexts; open source, open access, open economy, open government, open innovation – just to name a few. This paper aims at discussing openness and developing a taxonomy that may be used to analyse the concept of openness. Are there different qualities of openness? How are these qualities interrelated? What analytical tools may be used to understand openness? In this paper four qualities of openness recurrent in literature and debate are explored: accessibility, transparency, participation and sharing. To further analyse openness new institutional theory as interpreted by Williamson (2000) is used, encompassing four different institutional levels; cultural embeddedness, institutional environment, governance structure and resource allocations. At what institutional levels is openness supported and/or constrained?Accessibility as a quality of openness seems to have a particularly strong relation to the other qualities of openness, whereas the notions of sharing and collaborative economics seem to be the most complex and contested quality of openness in the knowledge-based economy. This research contributes to academia, policy and governance, as handling of challenges with regard to openness vs. closure in different contexts, territorial, institutional and/or organizational, demand not only a better understanding of the concept, but also tools for analysis. ; QC 20170914

The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested in the interaction of water and society. This includes the way water travels in time and space and is shaped by culture and geography. In this article, we pay particular attention to the study of the waterscape in the political ecology tradition. Scholars following this tradition have placed strong emphasis on understanding the role of power and the contested nature of water in diverse rural, urban, and periurban landscapes. The article provides a brief account of the main strands of literature and serves the purpose of an introductory overview of the waterscape for beginners. We focus both on major works that have helped define the waterscape as a perspective in political ecology and recent studies on the role of unequal power and gender relationships, informal water practices, and local water flows such as ponds and wastewater. ; QC 20181217

The Nordic energy ministers present a new Nordic energy policy co-operation programme for the period 2018–2021. The vision for Nordic energy co-operation is to develop Nordic energy systems through strong, trust-based, adaptable co-operation in order to secure the world's most integrated and intelligent low-emission green economy, characterised by security of supply and a high level of competitiveness. Nordic energy co-operation in the period 2018–2021 will specifically address the following areas: • Further development of the Nordic electricity market • Renewable energy • Energy efficiency • Exchange of information and dialogue on the Nordic countries' energy policies and strategies • Energy research and innovation, via Nordic Energy Research • The Nordic Region in Europe, including implementation of the EU Energy Union • Neighbouring countries, particularly the Baltic states • Energy-related transport issues • The energy sector in the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland • Other horizontal programmes and projects, as well as international co-operation.

This study attends to the emotional framing of interactions between politics and traditional broadcast news media in an online space of social networking. Today we live in a hybrid media system in which the online and the offline intersect and feed off each other in intriguing manners (Chadwick, 2013). For example, studying campaigning Parliamentarians on Twitter during the 2014 elections in Sweden, broadcast news media and their online presence represented a form of authority (Svensson & Larsson, 2016). These interactions were often also charged with emotions. Displaying emotion in general could be considered as a way to negotiate status and group belonging (Elliot, 1959), something that is particularly important for campaigning politicians in a party-based democracy like Sweden (Svensson, 2013). By studying Parliamentarians emotion displays when interacting with broadcast news media I find that Parliamentarianswere expected to be angry and upset with political opponents. These emotion displays were largely directed towards the in-group of their own party comrades. What does this say about the media logics in this hybrid settting? In the presentation I will discuss this in terms of the mass media logic of conflict (Asp, 1986) being transferred online and intersecting with network media logic favouring attention maximising witty one-liners(Klinger & Svensson, 2015). The result is that polarisation and dissent becomes foregrounded in this hybrid media setting at the expense of reason discussion and debate. But before becoming too pessimistic about the state of political communication today, it is important to remember that Twitter is just one arena in the communication ecology of a national election. And while Twitter is not geared towards dialogue and reasoned debate and we should perhaps not expect it to be in the future either, there might be other arenas for more deliberative style of communication.

Using a semiotic-interpretive approach to the concept of political acculturation this paper explores the processes of political cultural reconstruction of 60 members of the Mexican community in New Zealand. Based on four years of ethnographic research it argues that the post-migratory reconstruction of the political arena follows common cognitive and emotional lines. These are illustrated in a four-stage process of cultural mediation through which individuals ascribe meaning to symbolic representations of politics experienced in two political settings. The paper depicts political acculturative phenomena as endless processes of negotiation resulting in constantly evolving hybrid frameworks through which migrants understand and respond to the challenges posited by the polities they inhabit. ; Bio notes Guillermo Merelo is a doctoral candidate in politics and international relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research revolves around the topic of culture and its implications on public policy, democracy, citizen formation, elections, and migrants' integration to their new polities. He is also policy maker in the fields of elections and democracy and until 2011 he served as Executive Director of the Electoral Service in Mexico City.

Young people in the Nordic countries participate less in elections than the overall population. The turnout is lowest among youth in their early twenties. Meanwhile, Nordic youth have high rates of participation when it comes to other forms of democratic participation. Certain groups of Nordic youth in particular have low turnouts. Youth with non-western or Eastern European immigrant background, with low levels of education, low income, that have parents with low educational levels, and who are children of non-voters have strikingly lower turnouts.Several successful and partly successful measures to increase youth turnout have been carried out in the Nordic countries. It is essential that Nordic politicians and policymakers prioritise the work towards increasing the turnout of youth. If not, we may risk the permanent de facto exclusion from democracy of certain groups.

An inclusive, sustainable, innovative, secure and open Nordic region is the starting point when Sweden takes over the Presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2018. Digitalisation is a recurrent themethroughout Sweden's presidency programme. The Nordic countries have a strong democratic and civil society tradition characterised by equity, gender equality, sustainability and co-operation.The continuous exchange of knowledge and culture provides the basis for the Nordic prime ministers' vision of the Nordic region as the world's most integrated region. The Nordic countries have a strong international engagement and value European cohesion and an active UN. The Nordic prime ministers' initiative – Nordic Solutions to Global Challenges – aims to spread positive Nordic experience to the rest of the world.

We often hear that the Nordic countries are at the top of one international index or another. International indices are lists ranking countries in a variety ofdifferent areas, such as inhabitants' happiness or economic competitiveness. The number of indices and the attention they attract have increased markedlyin recent years, acquiring a significant degree of authority and legitimacy. Consequently the Nordic Council of Ministers' policy analysis unit has studiedhow the Nordic Region would be ranked in some selected international indices if the region were one country. The indices we have looked at show that life in the Nordic Region is good. The region's inhabitants are among the most prosperous in the world. There isconsiderable freedom of the press, and the region is one of the world's least corrupt. Men and women enjoy greater equality than anywhere else on theplanet. And the region's inhabitants are among the world's happiest. That said, there is no certainty that the Nordic Region will retain its good rankings in theseindices. Like all other countries, the Nordic countries face major challenges in the years ahead. In order for life in the Nordic Region to remain good, the countriesmust maintain the mechanisms that support a high level of social capital, effective governance, and relatively egalitarian and equal societies. This report is written by the Nordic Council of Ministers' policy analysis unit. The report series will highlight relevant topics that are central from a Nordicperspective. This is the second report in the series. The first was "Trust – the Nordic Gold", which was published in spring 2017.

This strategy sets out the main priorities for the Nordic Council's international work in the five-year period from 2018 until 2022. The strategy builds on what the Nordic Council has learned about international work in recent years and on an assessment of the current state of international affairs. It provides guidance about the relationships and themes that the Nordic Council will prioritise going forward. The strategy also identifies areas in which the Nordic Council calls upon the Nordic governments to play a more prominent international role.