The aim of our study is to explore the empowerment process among micro-business owners in Kayamandi, a black township of Stellenbosch in South Africa. What are the positive and negative implications for the empowerment process? Another aim is to find out the role of local and international support in this process. The theoretical framework of this study revolves around the concepts of gender, power and empowerment. Our methods are qualitative interviews and observations.

The purpose of this essay is to review the Swedish international development cooperation carried out by Sida to control whether the implementation of the international aid is compatible with the policy. There are a lot of different ways to implement the economic aid that are being used by the donors today. The Swedish method has since the 1960s mainly been focused on attempting to diminish the poverty in the world. In the latest time another goal has been added, that is a focus on supporting the civil rights. This essay will be concentrated to aim on what kind of countries receiving aid from Sweden, and exactly why these countries are being chosen.The main question of this essay is: What countries are receiving the international developing aid, and how can this distribution be understood? To answer the main question there are two themes in the essay:? What kind of countries is supposed to receive developing aid from Sweden according to the policy?? What kind of countries is receiving the aid, and how can this be understood?This essay is mainly based on quantitative data obtained from Sida, together with index of corruption and poverty will the different types of Swedish cooperation countries be described.The conclusions of this essay are that there are two objectives of the policy: to fight poverty, and to strengthen the civil rights.

AbstractThe aim of this thesis is to examine Interreg as an instrument for regional policy in the European Union. Interreg is an initiative designed to strengthen economic and social cohesion throughout the European Union by fostering balanced development through cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation. But how does it work in practise? Three main questions are asked to answer this:How well does the implementation in the programmes work?How does the programme management look and how well does it work?What degree of efficiency does Interreg show in financial and physical effectiveness?With evaluation and implementation as theories the questions are answered together with a qualitative method. The conclusions that can be drawn is that Interreg strengthen European unions economic and social cohesion in form of integration and regional development that in many ways make it easier to travel and trade over the borders.

Today's industries are constantly evolving and the demands according to quality for products and services produced and performed are becoming more and higher. ISO 9001 is a standard that serves as a tool for organizations who wants to effectively control and manage their quality workforce on business different processes. A background to the introduction of a quality managementsystem towards Skärås svets och mekaniska in Västerås are that more and more customers demand this from a company to enable it to obtain an order of production.Efforts to introduce a quality system such as ISO 9001-2008 all begin with to carry out a situationanalysis of the business. Skärås svets och mekaniska currently has no existing quality management system so therefore there is no current directives regarding who is responsible, for a future certification in the business.By structuring a situation analysis of the business. You get a good overview of the business and how it is conducted today.

During the recent years the interest in entrepreneurial education has increased both in terms of research being made in the subject, but also in the extent of entrepreneurial courses in Swedish secondary schools, where as the concept Junior Achievement (JA) is particularly being used. A common goal of the entrepreneurial education is apart from teaching the students how to start and run a business, to develop the students? entrepreneurial skills and competences. The main purpose of the essay is to describe and illustrate the role of the teacher in the entrepreneurial pedagogy being used in courses with the JA concept and to investigate which entrepreneurial skills are being developed by the students participating in these courses. There is also the purpose of investigate what the characteristics are of this entrepreneurial pedagogy being used in the courses using the JA concept.

From a management point of view, enabling organizational creativity is often referred to as reducing immediate control, increasing autonomy and enhancing the access to slack resources. At the same time, the business environment of today is fiercer than it was only a decade ago, and this renders a quest for more efficient approaches to competitively run a business. This paper aims to examine creative industries and more specifically try to identify a set of elements that are common for successful companies. As this industry has not been subject to any considerable array of studies, this thesis seeks to establish a structure for how to take both organizational models and leadership theories into account when developing an understanding for the process, organization and leadership of the creative business. By studying six separate creative companies, our findings suggest that conventional theories on organizational creativity do not adequately account for all factors that contribute to these companies' creative success.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to study the relations between internal information and the principal business objectives in a knowledge organization. The questions are: how does the organization behave to its internal information resources, how is the information management related to the principal objectives and strategies, what information policy does the organization develop, and how is the management experienced by the employees. The purpose was to study the supply and management of information designed for internal use and the study was carried out with qualitative, semi-structured interviews to get a picture of the internal information management. The informants were mostly key persons with deep knowledge of internal information.

This essay examines the policy process of specialist medical training in three Swedish counties. The essay will first describe the policy process. Secondly the politicians parti-cipating in the process is examined. Thirdly, it is tested whether it is possible to analyze the policy process based on Ostrom's theories of cooperation around a common pool resource. In this case, the common pool resource is specialized medical practitioners skills that the Swedish county councils must collaborate on to competence should be sufficient for the county council needs, something that is not the case today.One conclusion of the study is that the health care law is not clear enough when it comes to who is responsible for providing a sufficient number of specialists.

Context: During the 21st century several alarming reports have been published that deals with the depletion and pollutant of the earth by human interference. The earth is an ending resource and so are the mountains and bedrocks which are continuously mined in order to harvest its minerals. The idea behind Urban Mining is to (re)invent processes enabling further purpose for materials both from old deposits and new products providing secondary raw materials and energy. This thesis aims to investigate the challenges and opportunities of how firms and organizations can and will be able to strike a better balance between product-/service systems, economic growth and environmental stewardship in the context of Urban Mining as an approach. With the innovation of processes, technology, business- planning and creation in focus.Objective: How to future proof a business model for Urban Mining by the usage of business model design.Method: This thesis will be conducted using a case study approach, meaning that it will incorporate qualitative, exploratory and descriptive characteristics - aiming towards enabling both applied and fundamental research.Results: The result evaluates the business model element differences between traditional C&D industry and Urban Mining industry.

The main purpose of this master thesis is to investigate in what ways library and public preschool cooperate with families with immigrants background in developing and protecting children's languages and cultures in two districts, Hässleholmen and Norrby, in the community of Borås. I want to investigate the parent's meaning of view according to which roles the libraries and public preschools involvement play. The study is based on qualitative interviews. Nine interviews were undertaken with parents who live in these two districts and five interviews with the librarians and preschool teachers who work in the libraries or the public preschools. The study of relevant literature, which describes topics such as psychological aspects of immigration, facts about children with immigrant's background and their language development and multicultural librarianship, provides a basis for the discussion.

With a starting point in a project for reinforcing small scale business among immigrants in Sweden, carried out within Swedish for immigrants (sfi), the aim for this thesis is to examine the project from the view and experiences of the participants. Interviews with participants in the project have been inspired by the teoretical and methodological views of Grounded Theory.The interviews show that some participants want to start their own business, but almost as many don?t have that dream. The former group all have experience of being self-employed. They are aware of the difficulties but are nevertheless determined to proceed their dream.

This paper discusses the strategy and strategic change in the Swedish freight forwarding business and analysis factors that influence the forces of the business. Three companies of various sizes are chosen to be investigated as a case study, outline that cost leadership and differentiation are both important strategies for companies to compete in the market. However, companies outpacing competition do not only pursue either of the two strategies, the need the ability to add one (cost leadership) to the other (differentiation) in relationship to environmental change over time..

The purpose of this thesis was to study local bank offices work with customer satisfaction. A case study concerning two local bank offices was made, the cases were based on interviews with the managers at the bank offices. The research questions that we wanted this thesis to answer was how local bank offices create customer satisfaction among small business customers, and how local bank offices assess customer satisfaction among small business customers. The study showed that local bank offices find customer satisfaction among small business customers important and use complaints as the primary source in the process of creating customer satisfaction..

ERP system is the information technology that has had the biggest impact in companies? development and way of working in today?s world. ERP system is divided in several applications with a modular software design that allow people in every department in a company to store and retrieve information accurately and in real-time. This master thesis investigates attitudes toward ERP systems among business organisations and ERP suppliers with the overall purpose of analysing to which extent a new ERP system will bring change in the business process. The purpose of this thesis is to make a survey of attitudes toward ERP systems among business organisations and ERP suppliers.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to contribute to the development of business relationships between a supplier and its customers. The research area and research problem was further developed into three research questions. The research questions concerns the following subjects: the substance of business relationships and dimensions within relationships management that can be used in order to contribute to the development of a company?s business relationships.