It is a common view that companies should focus on building brands to increase profitability and stabilize cash flows. However, building and keeping brands alive is costly. Many firms spend large sums on branding only because they are supposed to, without knowing if they will actually gain from it. Up to date, there is limited convincing evidence that branding actually contributes to shareholder value creation. This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between brand strength and profitability and shareholder value.

The Public vs. private movement has over the past decades identified numerous significant differences between public and private organizations. The observed differences covers almost every field in administrative economics ranging from organizational structure, management accounting, goal-setting and in the past few years even leadership. Strangely, in the majority of these studies little or no regards are given to organizational characteristics or fundamental differences between compared organizations and if these organizations really are comparable when studying the effect of sector.The aim of this study is to compare leadership in relatively similar organizations from both the public and private sector and so clarify if earlier identified differences in leadership styles still surface when leaders working with approximately the same thing in a similar work context are studied.A sample of 348 Swedish principals was drawn from both municipal and private elementary schools. The respondents answered a web-based survey based on the CPE-model resulting in leadership styles mapped according to three orientations: change, production and employee.

At a manufacturing company, due to the competition the price is reducedtowards the manufacturing cost. Therefore it is important to maintain control ofones costs and keep calculations up-to-date.This thesis deals with cost accounting at a aluminium-processing company. The report focuses on calculating machine cost per hour since the manufacturing costs are the major part of the total product cost.Managers on the company believe that the costs they use in calculations todayneither is up-to-date nor advantageous in a market aspect and due to that their calculations need to be revised. The machines cost per hour is a major part in the manufacturing calculation. The company wants to provide a competitive price that also covers their costs.

This thesis investigates similarities and disparities between Swedish and Polish Labour Law concerning dismissals due to operational requirements and group redundancies. The study focuses on three important elements where the employers? liberty is legally infringed upon in a procedure of notice. These elements concerns the legal conditions of notice that must be fulfilled, the rules of the procedure and the rules for employment protection that is granted in connection with dismissals due to operational requirement or group redundancies. In the thesis there is a comparative map that outlines the most important rules within the Swedish and Polish legal systems concerning the subject.

Den nya revisionsstandarden i Sverige (RS) är en översättning av International Standards on Auditing (ISA). Den innebär en rad nyheter vid genomförandet av revision. Bland annat har revisorns roll förändrats genom att revisorerna ska granska och uttala sig om fler förhållanden än tidigare. Företagen är mer komplexa idag och det ställer krav på revisionen. Idag räcker det inte med en revision som enbart baseras på principer.

Harmonics are a well-known problem that has to be dealt with in the design of thegenerator. Internationally accepted standards limits the amount of harmonics allowedin the no-load voltage. These limits can be difficult to fulfill with integral slot winding,where the number of slots per pole and phase is an integer. The presence of thedamper winding often makes the problem with harmonics even worse and harmonicswith frequencies of order 6q±1 arise with significant amplitude. How the damperwinding is designed affect the content of harmonics in the no-load voltage and the aimwith these ? has been to investigate in which extent design of the damper windingaffects the contents of harmonics.Simulations with the 2-D finite element method have showed that if the damper barsis centered in the pole shoe, the amplitude of the harmonics of order 6q±1dependsboth on the ratio between the stator slot pitch and damper bars slot pitch and if thedamper bars are connected between the poles or not.If the damper bars is displaced with ¼ stator slot pitch alternately, the amplitude ofthe harmonics of order 6q±1 is reduced and the influence of the ratio between thestator slot pitch and the damper bars slot pitch will vanish.

The National Libraries task to save and preserve the national cultural heritage has turned to a new challenge in a digital world. The preservation of born-digital material for future use requires not only saving the digital object itself but also information about the object, preservation metadata. This is a relatively new issue and the library community has very little experience in this area. It has become evident that international cooperation is necessary to solve the task and that the development of international standards is of fundamental significance. This thesis investigates what has been done to meet the problems with the fast obsolescence of digital material with the focus on metadata.

Lund who has over 90 systems in 12 departments and now wants to streamline the management of these IT systems. Governance of IT systems is something that Lund would treat as it carried a large amount of changes in their practices, where the control is something missed in trying to standardize their systems. What's missing for Lund Municipality is routine to fall back on in order to streamline the management when they get into these complex situations.Given that Lund treat so many systems make it so that the situation quickly becomes very complex due of the organization's structure. The municipality is divided into twelve departments that have their own goals, it is an organization that is organized, which makes creating standards become complicated when all departments have different needs. Our study was based on a framework that deals with complex environments that lack a clear definition.An analysis was conducted where we started from the theory associated with the interviews conducted in which we aimed to understand their decision and understand the processes that affect system development.

This paper reports a study on the usability of e-commerce accessed through smartphones. There is much research in the usability of mobile interfaces and many sets of design patterns have been created but a few studies are available for specific domains, and in this report we focus on mobile e-commerce. In this study a framework is developed for how to design mobile e-commerce interfaces with a high degree of usability. Furthermore, the study also contributes a method to how other specific domain can develop a framework with general standards to work from when creating a web interface. By examining two sets of design principles and 14 design patterns, we evaluate which ones are critical in the design of a mobile e-commerce interface for achieving a high degree of usability.

The Methodology used to gather empirical materials for this thesis has been different types of interviews. The interviews have been mainly unstructured personal interviews directly with our respondents, due to limiting factors some of the interviews have been carried out via phone or email.The theoretical framework consists of literature from well-recognised authors and is divided into four different parts: Insourcing & Outsourcing, Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management, China & Intercultural understanding. The empirical foundation has been gathered from a great variety of different sources in an attempt to cover the many complex angels in which this subject can be looked upon. Chinese students, managers in international companies with experience from China, Chinese employees in Swedish companies and different people with good knowledge of different areas of China are all among our respondents.In our conclusion we have reached the three following conclusions for why one should start a ?bridge building? enterprise in between qualified Chinese human capital and Swedish structure capital: 1.

AbstractFor an audit organization, it is important to work toward maintaininga high error climate to handle errors in an efficient and propermanner. This means that it is important for accountants to worktowards high quality of work, reduce and manage errors that mayoccur in their daily work. Therefore, auditors must know how tohandle errors in order to improve efficiency, which can be affected byhow leadership is exercised in the workplace. The error climatemeans being able to act in a manner which will ensure a good jobtowards customers but also within the internal operations.The ethical leadership may thus have an impact on how auditorshandle the error environment both internally and externally. It is veryimportant for customers to have confidence in the business but also tomaintain the order and the general rules of society for accountingfirms.My study aims to show the thinkable relationship between ethicalleadership and the error climate.

Vad styr valet av revisionsbyrå? Revisionsbyråers kunder kan ha svårt att uppfatta konkreta skillnader mellan byråernas revision, då dess utformning är standardiserad. Revisionens homogena utformning, kravet på oberoende i relation med företaget som ska revideras, vissa normer vid prissättningen av revision och kravet på saklighet i marknadskommunikationen medför begränsningar för revisionsbyråerna när det gäller differentiering av revisionstjänsten. Vi ville komma fram till vad i revisionsbyråernas marknadsföring som köpande bolag attraheras av samt vad som utmärker bolag som reagerar på en viss konkurrensfördel. Kundens köpbeteende kan förklaras utifrån dess preferenser och bakgrund.

Today, the requirements on doors and door sections in buildings are often many andtightly restricted. Especially in public buildings, the requirements for safety andfunctionality must cover the needs of larger groups of people. These strictrequirements have often led to doors and door sections in public buildings being verycomplex and difficult to correctly install without any complications.This diploma work has been carried out in cooperation with Werket Architects,which estimates a high percentage of flaws regarding aforementioned components, inprojects of the type described. The company therefore wanted to investigate howthey could develop their remit in door production, which is the projection and designof blueprints. By taking part of installers opinions on how they want the blueprints ofdoors and door - sections to be designed for the best installation possibilities,develop¬ment areas, and to some extent improvements regarding the company's useof accounting techniques, could be provided to the company.The study shows, among other things, that there is a possibility of development in thefunctional descriptions that entail the doors' fitting components.

BAKGRUND Sjukfrånvaro är och kommer alltid att vara ett problem för företagen då den ärsvårt att undvika. Dock läggs relativt lite tid på att identifiera kostnaderna bakom sjukfrånvaro och då framförallt den kortsiktiga. Kortsiktig sjukfrånvaro orsakar mer kostnader för företaget än vad de flesta kanske tror då företaget måste kompensera den sjuka anställda om han eller hon är frånvarande.PROBLEMFORMULERING Hur kan man mäta ett företags kostnader för kortsiktig sjukfrånvaro?SYFTE Syftet med denna uppsats är att med empiriskt material och valda teorier beskriva hur man kan mäta kostnader för sjukfrånvaro i ett företag. Uppsatsen syftar att generera en kostnadsmätning gällande korttidssjukfrånvaron hos det studerade företaget.METOD Studien har genomförts med en kvalitativ forskningsmetod.

De senaste decenniernas ökade globalisering och konkurrensutsättning har inneburit högre krav på styrmetoder hos såväl privata som offentliga organisationer. Innes & Mitchell (1990) har utvecklat en modell för förändringar i styrmetod (på engelska management accounting change) som Cobb, et al. (1995) och Kasurinen (2002) sedan vidareutvecklat. Denna modell beskriver vad som på företagsnivå driver förändring i styrmetod och vilka barriärer som organisationen måste övervinna för att lyckas med förändringen. Offentliga organisationer styrs ofta av andra mål än privata organisationer vars mål många gånger är att tjäna pengar.