The purpose of this master thesis is to present a model that illuminates the important factors when deriving technical information from market data within a company. For companies to be able to become and stay competitive in the market, product quality is an important factor. Whilst good product quality leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty, lack of quality brings costs in service and replacements. To improve product quality, the developers need information and knowledge about what quality issues affect existing products. Most companies gather data from market about known issues, but in order eliminate known quality issues in new products; this data has to be transformed into information and knowledge.

The purpose of this thesis has been to explore the topic of business simulation from a theoretical foundation in social constructivism and theories concerning leadership as the management of meaning. The most important findings are that business simulation can be used for strategical leadership by management to create a common vision in the organisation members, which affects their perception of the business and the decisions and actions they make, which in turn can lead to a more efficient organisation that becomes better at meeting set goals. This can be viewed in different ways from different theoretical viewpoints: as inducing targeted changes in mental models to create changes in decision making and actions; as a secondary socialization process where the vision of management is externalized as a business simulation that is in turn internalized by the organisation members that participate in the business simulation, or as a way to frame and define the reality of the organisational members which creates a shared reference point against which a feeling of organisation and direction can emerge. In the future, business simulations may become increasingly used by organizations to create a common vision or to communicate a new decision to the organization members..

The purpose of this Masters thesis was to examine women printers conditions in Sweden from 1483 to 1883. Women printers usually inherited their printing businesses from their husbands. We wanted to examine the circumstances surrounding women printers, how they managed to keep their companies and for how long. Of these 108 women we also wanted to focus on one in particular, Mrs Fougt. Mrs Fougts ownership of Kongl.

Several surveys indicate that corporate leaders still consider the aligning of IT and business functions as a top management issue. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate how coordination emerges between IT and business departments and how formal structures intended to coordinate are influenced by human action. To deepen the understanding of this phenomenon we seek to analyze IT/business coordination from a perspective based on practice theory. A field study was conducted where observations and informal interviews were carried out at the IT department of a global company. The empirical analysis indicate that coordination problems between IT and business departments is in part affected by embedded factors such as different goals and perspectives on how IT is to be used in the organization or how to design IT related processes.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att beskriva hur företag i logistikkedjan, rederi ? hamn ? åkeri, förberett sig inför de nya länderna, Lettland, Litauen och Polens inträde i den Europeiska Unionen den 1 maj 2004. Vi har även valt att undersöka vilka omvärldsanalysmetoder företagen använder sig utav, hur de i så fall tillämpar dessa och ge eventuella förslag på omvärldsanalysmetoder..

High technology companies in Sweden spend a huge amount of money on research and product development in proportion to what they get back in earnings from their inventions. Product development has traditionally been regarded as much more important than business development. This thesis aims to point out the critical factors behind successful business development processes for high technology companies. We have chosen to make a case study of Hexagon, a highly successful and innovative company within the measurement technology business. Internal and external actors that are important for business development have been identified and interviewed in order to understand how ideas are developed and executed.

AbstractBachelor Thesis, School of Economics at Vaxjo universityProgram: Enterprising and Business Development, EBD 362, Spring 2006Authors: Jens Asp, Vivianne Holmer, Carl-Marcus WahlstromExaminer: Stig G JohanssonKeywords: Services, cooperation, collaboration, customer offer, knowledgeTitle: Service firms in collaboration ? A study of the development of small service firms in collaborationNutek presented numbers during year 2005 witched show that the Swedish service sector, for the first time ever, was greater than the industrial sector. The kind of firms that develop most is small service firms without employees. The topic of interest in this bachelor thesis is to study how this kind of firms can develop. There is a great number of strategic options for firms to choose.

This essay investigates the knowledge about the dialect in Jönköping among youths in the same city. My aim is primarily to focus on their knowledge around words and expressions in the dialect of Jönköping. My method is both qualitative and quantitative and the survey was performed through questionnaires that were sent out to 50 students. In the questionnaires the students were asked to translate words from the dialect in Jönköping but also to freely speculate around the features in the dialect. My findings indicate that the knowledge around the students own dialect is very poor. Knowledge about the words and expressions that were used in my questionnaire were also poor but among those words that the students actually recognized many originated from the Romany language.

In recent years, the demands for effectiveness and evidence in social work have increased in all work areas, including that of healthcare. This has sparked the discussion on concepts such as practical- and theoretical knowledge and their respective roles in social work. In the light of this, the purpose of this candidate thesis is to investigate healthcare social workers understanding of practical- and theoretical knowledge in the working process as well as their respective influence and importance. This candidate thesis is based on three interviews with social workers from different departments in Norrlands Universitetssjukhus in Umeå, Sweden. To provide range to the thesis, the interviewees were chosen from a purposeful sampling.

This is a project in Entrepreneurship and Creativity on masters? degree. The purpose was to verify whether the Swedish retail trade within the beauty care business was ready for an in-troduction of colour cosmetics. Through the qualitative research grounded theory, I made several phone interviews with independence retail traders within the Swedish beauty care business. The selection of respondents is based on statistical facts and geographic coverage of Swedish beauty care shops.

Zero knowledge protocols is a lesser known type of protocol that can be used for identification. These protocols are especially designed not to reveal any information during an identification process that can be misused later on, neither by the one who should be convinced of the identity of the user, nor by anyone else that is eavesdropping. Many of these protocols are also especially designed for implementation in smart cards. The more common type of card with a magnetic stripe has during the last few years become more susceptible to attacks since they are easily copied. Smart cards combined with a secure identification protocol has been predicted to be the solution to this problem.

There is an awareness of the importance of gender equality in most western societies, both at the political level and in everyday life. In academia, for instance, gender is nowadays a scientific field which indicates that there is a lot of knowledge about the subject. What we do not have much knowledge about is whether gender knowledge leads to changes in gender relations in practice. The aim of this study is to explore how gender scholars relate to using ? practicing ? gender knowledge.

Today?s farmers are constantly affected by the fluctuating world market prices on grain and thereby the price risk that comes with the price fluctuations. The volatile prices of grain increase the price risk within the business, which in turn affects the profitability of the business. The fluctuating prices together with the increased price risk within the farm business have opened up the market for hedging instruments. In this master thesis project, the aim is to identify the underlying end-values of 30 Swedish farmers? related to their choice of using hedging and the product; forward contract.

Det finns ingen entydig bild av hur man ska uppfatta innovation. Vi kan dock säga att det hänger intimt samman med kunskap. Ur denna synvinkel är det intressant att styra kunskaper så att de blir en resurs för företaget via knowledge management. Vårt syfte är att undersöka hur styrsystem förhåller sig till kunskap och innovation i ett kunskapsintensivt företag genom att med kvalitativ metod studera hur medarbetare på Öhrlings PricewaterhouseCoopers i Lund upplever sin arbetssituation.Vi kommer till slutsatsen att styrsystem påverkar kunskapsutveckling och innovation via vertikal elasticitet. Strukturella, sociala och kulturella dimensioner menar vi inte i sig ger en tillfredställande bild av de erfarenheter undersökningen gör..

This master thesis concerns itself with the actual work of knowledge workers, consultants to be specific. We have through interviews and observation tried to get inside of the ?black box? of the consultants firm Consult in an effort to describe their way of working through a theoretical framework. In this framework we attempt to combine knowledge work theory with that of organizational development, OD. We try to introduce the situation of the individuals we study, the consultants, through Alvesson (2004) and Løwendahl (2005).