Background: The Swedish life-insurance business has been extensively criticised lately due to broken promises to customers as well as due to scandals that some companies within the business have been involved in. The companies within the Swedish life-insurance business find themselves in a so- called crisis of confidence, something that is created in and by media. A company that finds itself in a crisis of confidence somehow have to manage the situation and crises of confidence can also result in different kinds of changes. Purpose: The aim of this thesis is to explore and analyse how individual life- insurance companies manage crises of confidence. As a consequence, the aim is also to investigate in what way crises of confidence are initiators to change.

Title: Strategies for competition ? a study of the Swedish contact lenses market.Authors: Pernilla AArskog and Annika Lange.Background: As a market gets more mature and the competition increases, it is more important for a company to apply the right strategic perspective. There are four fundamental strategic perspectives for a service-oriented business: a core product-, a price-, an image- and a service perspective. This study is a about service management and take its point from the theories from the Nordic School about strategies for competition, customer value, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.Purpose: The main purpose with this study is to analyze and evaluate how the actors at the Swedish market of contact lenses should compete to gain further competitive advantages.Method: The study includes four qualitative interviews with two traditional opticians and two Internet based businesses, but also a survey with 106 contact lens users is included.Analysis: In the analyse part of this thesis it was concluded that the traditional opticians conception about their customer not agrees with what the customer evaluate as important. Many of the customers have thought about changing their optician, and besides that do not recommend their optician, and can there for not be categorize as loyal customers.

The purpose of this study is to survey how the Sweden Democrats? success in the latest election to the Swedish parliament has changed teaching in social science. The main question is: in what way has the success of the Sweden Democrats influenced social science teaching? This leads to following sub-questions: 1) how do the social science teachers define the Sweden Democrats, 2) how do teachers relate to the Sweden Democrats in the classroom, 3) has there been a change in students? political opinions and 4) were there any discussions or proposals from the school administration which followed the parliamentary election of 2010? To answer these questions, interviews were made with four teachers. The main conclusion of this study is that the Sweden Democrats? success led to a simplification of teaching because phenomena and opinions that were previously taboo nowadays are normalized and thus have its place in the classroom.

AbstractAim: The aim of this study was to investigate if treatment with ?dry needling? in myofascial triggerpoints (MTrPs) in the rotatorcuff muscles may affect impingement symptoms such as pain during provocative tests, shoulder mobility, and function. The research questions were: Does the value of pain change on the Visual Analog Pain Scale (VAS) between before and after treatment? Do the positive provocative tests for impingement change between before and after treatment? Does the active shoulder mobility change between before and after treatment? Does the self-rated function change between before and after treatment?Method: The study was a prospective randomized intervention study and 19 persons with impingement symptoms (mean ± standard deviation; 58 ± 18 years, and shoulder pain duration 3.9 ± 1.6 months) were randomized into two groups. The groups were tested before, directly after and 3 weeks after treatment.

The aim of this study was to examine how individuals who have left a criminal lifestyle may experience their present life. A symbolic interaction approach was the theoretical framework for this research. Qualitative interviews were conducted with seven individuals who have stated having had and left a criminal lifestyle. The results showed that how individuals experience their present life is highly dependent on individuals? own view of themselves as well as on how others view them.

This graduation paper is based on my interest for wood and its different tonal quality?s.After some time of thinking I decided to write my paper on the tonal difference between two of the most common woods in guitars, East Indian Rosewood and European Maple. I had built two identical guitars before my graduation paper in which the difference was the wood the back and sides were made of. One was being made of East Indian Rosewood and the other being made of European Maple.I chose to speak with a number of people with different angle of approach to the two kinds of wood and its tonal difference and quality?s.

New technology and urban sprawl have resulted in almost half of the population in Sweden being insufficiently physically active. The sedentary lifestyle causes heart- and vascular diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, stress etc. in the population. One of the biggest priorities in the society is to promote more physical activity. Through literature studies and a questionnaire this paper will examine how we can design the built environment in order to promote physical exercise and if we can change the sedentary lifestyle with a outdoor environment that invite physical exercise. There are both internal and external factors that have importance for people?s physical activity.

This thesis tries to explore how different strategies of internal communication are used in actual situations within an organization. Specifically, the purpose is to investigate how the internal communication within the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) has been carried out during their work to change their organizational structure, and, how this can be understood in terms of existing theories for strategic communication. The research questions explored are:What are the chosen strategies used to communicate the changes internally?How can these strategies be understood in terms of existing theories?What are the views of the employees on the communication and what are the relations between their views, the chosen strategies and existing theories?The theoretical ground work chosen is mainly the work by Cornelissen (2008), Dalfelt (2005), Johansson (2011) and Larsson (2008). The method chosen for the empirical part of the study is semi-structured qualitative interviews.

In this essay I compare the description of the Thirty Years? War in a number of German and Swedish encyclopedias published between 1854 and 2005. The essay is a historiographical research with focus on three areas; the description of the war background, the reason of the Swedish intervention in the war and the picture of the Swedish king Gustav II Adolf with the consequences of the war and the peace of Westphalia. I want to analyze the differences and similarities in the way the history is being told in the German and Swedish encyclopedias. The research shows a transformation from a narrative, nationalistic, partial description with focus on individuals and specific events to a more analytical and objective description with focus on structures.

Since the 19th century the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere hasincreased by 40 percent as an effect of the use of fossil energy sources.Increased concentration of CO2 will likely lead to increased temperature,changes in precipitation, rising sea level and increased frequency of extremeweather like storm events. A step to reduce emissions of CO2 and mitigateclimate change, for the property of Tagel, can be to adopt new silviculturalstrategies and analyse which is the most effective. As a result of that, threescenarios was produced, business-as-usual (BAU), increased set aside landand energy. An introduction of windpower at Tagels estate (property) andeffects on carbon balance was also examined. By using the Heureka systemand LCA-analysis in this study, it showed that the scenario of increased setaside land was the most efficient way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2)emissions for the analysed period of 100 years.

The aim of this study was to examine the readability of news articles published in the Swedish national newspaper Dagens Nyheter during the years 1999 - 2013. Our hypothesis was that the written language in newspapers is simpler today than it was 15 years ago. To measure the possible change of the written language in a quantitative study we chose to use a method to calculate the readability of 30 news articles, two from each year. We could not see any development of the language level so we chose to do a complementary qualitative study of the layout and presentation of the news articles. This secondary study showed a significant change in how news is presented throughout the years.

This thesis work has been performed at Volvo Aero Corporation in Trollhättan, at the department of ?hot structures? involving aircraft engine GP7000. The purpose with the study was to investigate the possibility to reduce size of the forging of flanges on the rear turbine frame when purchasing. Thereto examine the parameters that affect the flanges motion during the manufacturing process. The goal was to provide Volvo Aero with foundation to later bring in slimmed forgings.

Hospital Mergers have been proved to be troublesome, the most crucial ingredient is believed tobe the participation of members of the organization on all levels. When the hospital mergerbetween the hospital of Malmö and the hospital of Lund is a fact, it seems clear that knowledgeabout managing motivation is important. The knowledge could also lead to increased possibilitiesto improve support for motivation where needed at the hospital.I have through a literature review created a descriptive model of the theoretical view onmotivational factors for participation in change and their relationships. The theoretical modelwhere then tested in a empirical study in which additional data created a more true model of themotivation on participation at the hospital.The findings of the study show how the descriptive model illustrates how the twodifferent departments both work with a empowering philosophy that have built in properties thatenable the employees to gain more motivation. The model also underline the importance of thecommunication role to enlighten the employee in what, where, when and why the change takesplace.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to see why there seem to be little interest in the management position at the public libraries. Since librarianship is a field that are proportionally dominated by women we chose to approach the study with a gender perspective. This study has excluded men and our main interest is the women?s point of view.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how health information is integrated into knowledge in an everyday health related context on the web. The more specific aim is, from a LIS point of view, to map knowledge related discourses with the focus on pregnancy, in discussion forums on Swedish health related web sites. The following main questions in this paper are: (1) a) What discourses on pregnancy knowledge can be found and b) how are they expressed? (2) What are the functions of the recognised discourses? and (3) what are the relations between the identified discourses? The theoretical and methodological starting-point is discourse theory with the main focus on discursive psychology according to Wetherell?s and Potter?s theoretical and empirical work.