Companies and organizations recognize the importance of collaboration to develop responsibility and ability of change in the workplace. The concept of collaboration was a relatively new idea in business in the late 1980s. In a Nordic context, collaboration is a traditional approach that companies use successfully for competition, survival and development. Collaborative organizational efforts cover management of committed people who can help companies achieve flexibility, customer loyalty, innovation and economic success on a challenging and competitive market. Many theorists believe that collaboration is the key to integrating technology, financial competence and innovation.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to describe and analyse the origin and development of the libraries in the town of Värnamo, between the years 1908 and 1960, when a new modern public library was inaugurated. The method I have used is, to a great extent, examining and analysing source material from the archive of the municipality in Värnamo and the popular movement in Jönköping. As a background to my study I describe the development of the Swedish society, from the end of the nineteenth-, until the middle of the twentieth century. I also describe the local development of Värnamo, during the same period. Furthermore I also give a general description of the progress of the libraries in Sweden during the same time.

Background: The construction industry is Sweden?s single most important industry branch with a significant influence on Sweden?s wealth. The political restrictions that once controlled the industry are today almost gone. This combined with an unbalanced supply and demand situation on the Swedish constructions market, caused by urbanisation, has led to increased pressure on the Swedish construction companies who now are forced to find new methods in their struggle to contain or increase their competitive advantage. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to survey: which strategic variables are of great importance in today?s Swedish construction industry with focus on the four main actors, JM, NCC, PEAB and Skanska.

The preschool should lay the foundations for lifelong learning in a good educational activity. Preschool curriculum is designed to enhance the quality of the educational activities. To translate the curriculum in business, the importance of early childhood special education knowledge. With regard to the completion of theoretical knowledge requires the ability to translate theory into real action. Professionalism is essential to anchor the curriculum in daily operations.The study's purpose was to investigate preschool teachers' perception of professionalism and how the implementation of the preschool curriculum in their daily business functions.The study was an interview with four pre-school professionals with the spread in age and experience.

A Social Enterprise is a business that features a mixture of characteristics that originates from the third and private sector. A general conception of Social Enterprises is that they aim to improve social welfare by the use of sustainable business models. The mixture of social and business features has created ambiguity about how to define Social Enterprises. The purpose of this study is to clarify Swedish Social Enterprises as a phenomenon and to examine antagonism that arises from mixing the two different sets of organisational characteristics. This is achieved by conducting a qualitative study of ten Swedish companies that the market considers to be Social Enterprises.

The storm Gudrun in 2005 led to massive windthow damage in forests in southern Sweden. Since then there has been a growing interest in factors influencing wind damage in above all Norway spruce (Picea Abies) stands. Although many other interesting areas still need to be examined. In 2005 there where a lot of stands that suffered different degrees of damage, a lot of these stands weren?t cut, but instead left to grow. The future development of these stands is uncertain and the guidelines are unclear.

Global Software Development (GSD) is based on a geographical distance where teams are spread throughout the world. The related research have for a long time addressed the challenges presented by geographical distances. GSD is basically a necessity for many businesses to use in order to reduce development costs, reduce production time and to maintain high quality. The study aims to investigate the relationship between the reality of a specific maintenance project. Thus, our research question: How do distributed maintenance teams experience temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances? To achieve the purpose of the study, we chose to perform a case study of a global consulting company which recently started a new system maintenance project.

The purpose of this study is to examine how educationalists work with bilingual children's language by looking at how and what approaches are used to encourage language development. I have chosen to compare two educational philosophies: Montessori and Outdoor Education, to see how big the differences / similarities are in working methods. The background to this study is that preschools uses various approaches and have different methods to stimulate the children. This means that the conditions for children's language development might look different depending on the preschool they go to. The information used has been gathered through interviews, where I have taken note of educationalists thoughts on their working methods, and through professional literature dealing with this topic.

The purpose of this study is to examine how teachers and pupils experience the use of fictional literature as a tool for language development in the teaching of English as a foreign language. Through surveys and interviews and with Vygotsky?s theory on development in a social environment as a theoretical base, I examine which methods are used to promote language development and also which functions pupils and teachers consider fictional literature to have in the teaching of English. Results show that teachers consider fiction to be among the top methods to get pupils to learn English. Teachers and pupils both favour the use of fun and stimulating reading activities as well as group activities where learning is social to go along with the reading of fiction.

Visby is a city that at first glance is of medieval origins. The popular image of scientists today is that the city was formed in the Middle Ages. According to some of the researchers Visby was formed during the Viking Age, it is based on the basis that the area has been used for a long period. Urban development in the Nordic countries is complex and there are different opinions as to why the Nordic cities emerge. It is important to shed light on the underlying process on why cities are emerging to provide clarity as to why Visby city is emerging.

The major environmental problems that we have today are frequently mentioned in the media today. One example is the ongoing debate regarding global warming and its causes and consequences. There are also several other problems in our society such as segregation and social tensions. Most agree that we must do something to solve these problems and that we must try to achieve a sustainable development for the entire planet. But how should it actually be done and what trade-offs, compromises, sacrifices and changes must be made?The purpose of this paper is to examine how these issues are being dealt with in Swedish city planning.

The use of mobile devices has during the last years expanded and on the market you can see a huge amount of applications. The development of mobile applications differs from traditional systems development since mobility infers that mobile applications can be used in different technological and social contexts. Although previous research has recognized that mobility can present mobile application developers with certain challenges, empirical studies of how problems arise and how they can be handled has thus far been limited. In this study we focused on the requirements engineering process from a development view with the purpose of finding challenges emerging in the development process. The study is based on a qualitative case study that employed semi-structured interviews with both project managers and system developers active in the requirements process.

Service delivery acts like a process. This can enable the possibility of attracting attention towards the company who?s making use of this, furthermore generate several opportunities. However, it?s far from easy to deliver new services.

The present study deals with the importance of play for children's learning in preschool. The purpose is to investigate the importance of play for children's learning in preschool from a pedagogue?s perspective. The study is based on two issues: How does the pedagogue´s who were interviewed reason about the impact the play has on children's development? How does the pedagogue´s approach to make play a learning situation? The empirical data is based on semi-structured interviews with four preschool pedagogue´s.

Currently many organizations are transitioning from the traditional approach to the agile approach regarding systems development methods. It is evident that research has mainly focused on smaller organizations transitioning, whilst less focus has been given t0 larger organizations. We find this interesting and the purpose of this study is to gain a deeper and broader knowledge concerning the following research question: How is system development work affected by a change from traditional system development methods to Scrum in large global organizations. We also investigate how Scrum can be adapted to complex projects with an internal client. The study is based on a case study, which takes a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews for information gathering and was conducted on a major Swedish telecom company.