The main objective of this thesis is to study the brand manager?s role within a global business to business (B2B) company. In order to meet the main objective we have chosen to study and analyse one global B2B company, Alfa Laval AB, Alfa Laval DK, Alfa Laval PL and its co-partners such as an advertising agency. We have also studied three global business to customer (B2C) companies, Mars, Unilever and Nestlé, to get a picture of brand managers? role and responsibilities within the B2C environment which is already quite far ahead in the development of the brand management thinking..

When referring to the same event, people can have different assumptions. What is interesting to see is why these assumptions are different, why do people have different stories? Some of the reasons could be different levels of expectation, different communication channels or even different cultural backgrounds. We have analysed all these by having a case study within a company that has recently gone through a change management/strategy implementation process.The research reviewed in this paper originates in two different worlds. One world is a research world where stories come from textbooks and articles.

The financial sector includes insurance business, which is a crucial part of the infrastructure in a modern economy. There are different parts to protect within the financial sector which is the reason for a comprehensive inspection. History shows several examples of disasters a mismanaged financial sector can bring. This also affects the society and stability over all. The inspection is conducted by the Swedish inspection of finance, which ensures that the insurance companies follow the law for its practice.

The thesis aims to analyze strategic, cultural and structural aspects of Grameen Bank and its micro-credit project, in order to identify key success factors. A case study was performed with an inductive and qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews. The data was collected by field observations and interviews on site in Dhaka, Bangladesh and surrounding areas.The main conclusion is that the critical success factor of Grameen Bank is the relationship focus, guiding and aligning its strategy, culture and structure. Also, local offices have been observed to utilize practices not permitted by the bank?s management, ultimately increasing the organizational efficiency..

Recent corporate challenges require effective communication in order to secure a company?s reputation. Companies as a result, need to be committed to a series of corporate social and environmental practices along with their financial commitments to their shareholders and investors. In fact, businesses are required to go above their ordinary operations and involve all potential stakeholders that can be affected by their strategies. Companies also need to communicate social, environmental and economic consequences of their activities along with their CSR commitments to their internal and external stakeholders in order to make a better corporate image and improve their market opportunities.

Computers together with Internet have been growing enormously, during the last decade and the area of information technology has been growing in the same speed. As long as the surrounding environment evolves, the business models must within the IT-area, keep the same pace. So, how do business corporations handle this change to attract customers? How do the dominant business models look like? In many cases, they are apparently much the same. But what differences can we see and what areas can be improved? We have showed that the IT area isn?t just one, it consist of several segments.

The tourism industry in EU is one of the biggest sectors and employs about20 million people. A key factor of the industry is information, much oftourist information is today on the Internet. On Internet there is twoways information can flow, the information can either be pushed to aconsumer or the consumer of the Information can pull it from a source.In a feasibility study for the report the participants expressed thatthey thought the tourist information on the Internet was unpersonal anddidnt fill their informationneeds. The purpose of the report was to findout how push and pull of touristinformation can be balanced on Internet.The empirical data was collected with a feasibility study, a survey anda case. The survey was conducted at IT-University and School of Business,Economics and Law at Göteborg.

The legal courts in Sweden have developed a case law wherein the application criteria for being eligible to acquire unemployment insurance have become strict and rigid. This is in particular true when it comes to professional athletes who cannot make a living on their athlete wage. It is the 9th to 11th section of the Swedish Law (1998:238) on Unemployment Insurance that set the determinants for who of the unemployed is to be considered as being of disposal to the labour market. The strict and extensive interpretation of the relevant sections has been based upon a literal reading of the relevant preparatory works to the law in question. A substantial amount of relevant cases as well as preparatory works have been examined to investigate whether there is a need for revising this case law.

It is important to understand the process of appraisal of a business in order to establish its value. The purpose of our thesis is to establish which methods and models are used when evaluating a business and investigate the factors that may affect the value and price tag of a business. We have used a qualitative approach by conducting both indepth interviews and a survey as well as reading literature within the field. The main conslusion in our findings is that the common practice of discounted cash flow is widely used when bestowing a monetary value for a business, and in order to raise the value a well established customer relationship was the single most important factor. As far as lowering the value, the answers were of such a wide spread that a single factor could not be attributed.

In a dynamic and unpredictable reality, either rigid structures or silo architectures areappropriate ways to organize an agile organization. This thesis enlightens these relationsbetween Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an organization who acts in a varied andconstantly changing business environment. In other words, this thesis enlightens the question:?How suitable is SOA to organize the enterprise who will meet a constantly changing andheterogenic business environment?.The thesis presents a model where an efficient organization must be agile to be able to actquickly in the business environments with constantly changing desires, needs, expectations,desires etc. According to the same model a Service Oriented Architecture organizes theenterprise elements such as processes, resources, competences, responsibilities, informationsystems etc.

Gender balance within the business administration field at university level is an area that has gained increased attention in the last decade. As gender balance contributes positively to the scientific and educational achievements within all disciplines, many studies have tried to understand the decision-making processes of students when selecting a business specialisation. However, little attention has been devoted to the finance discipline although there is a remaining gender imbalance within the field at higher-level economic studies. This thesis was performed as a qualitative case study and is based on interviews with second-year bachelor students facing their choice of specialisation at the Stockholm School of Economics. Through an application of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), this study aims to examine factors that influence female business students' intentions to choose a specialisation.

Examensarbetets frågeställning berör användarnas medverkan i Requirements Engineering (RE). Under RE-fasen skall samtliga krav på det kommande systemet tas fram från intressenterna. En viktig intressentgrupp i kravutvinningsarbetet är de kommande användarna av systemet. Resultatet av RE-fasen är en viktig faktor som påverkar hela den fortsatta utvecklingsprocessen samt hur lyckat det slutliga systemet blir.Detta examensarbete innebär en undersökning av vad användarrepresentanterna anser om use case-modelleringen i RE-processen. Undersökningen har påvisat att användarrepresentanterna är positiva till use case-modellering som arbetsmetod för att kartlägga kraven.

AbstractBackgroundEvery company has some kind of employee turnover and we can tell that som business has higher employee turnover than other business. Employee turnover is individual for all companies but in companies that is in the same business simularities can be seen. The employee turnover in the line of business hotel, merchandise trade and restaurants was according to Confederation of Swedish Enterprise closer to 40 % during the period of 2006-2007 and close to the business with highest turnover, the service sector. This is comparable to the buildning activity that with it?s 22 % is one of the business with lowest turnover.

The aim of this study is to, by developing ideal types, describe why studententrepreneurs participate in self organised business network. The investigation is based on answers from 41 participants in the business network ?Företagare på Lnu?, as well astwo semi-focused groups, which where analysed by using Webers (1978) ideal types.The investigation shows that there are several reasons for student entrepreneurs to participate in self organised business network. For instance some people participate to gather knowledge from other student entrepreneurs for their own future, since they have an idea of soon starting their own business. Others participate just for the fun of knowing what?s going on at the university..

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a dynamic investment strategy on the Swedish asset market can accomplish better returns then a static investment strategy. The dynamic investment strategy is created by incorporating business cycle predictors and firm-level variables to predict future stock returns. The predictive regression is calculated wih 60 months of observation (1999 01-2005 12) and is then used to estimate future returns for 23 months in the period 2004 01 -2005 11. The structure of the regression, with linear functions of ? and ?, goes back to Shanken (1990) and Avramov and Chordia (2005) has had success with the variables chosen.