AbstractLean production has become one common concept within industries to make the work more effective and to meet today?s hard competition. A challenge for Chinese production is the threat from new low cost countries. It will become very difficult to succeed to produce to a lower cost than these countries; this led to that Chinese companies must develop new strategies, according to Lee and Zhou (2000). This will put China in front of new challenges and new strategies can be needed to retain their strong competitive advantages.

Title: Establishing in China?s ?good-enough? market - A benchmarking study on Scandinavian engineering industries? further establishment in China. Problem discussion: The Chinese market is gaining importance for Scandinavian engineering industries and is by many considered a crucial market to be successful in. These companies have a tradition of producing premium products for premium customers. However, in China many are currently experiencing the threat from local competitors producing products of somewhat less quality aimed at the vast Chinese middle market - the good-enough market.

It is important that organizations today focus on continuous improvements in order to face the growing competition in the world. A company needs a corporate culture that supports and encourages the employees to be creative and innovative in their work. This is necessary for the company if they are striving towards continuous learning and development within their organization.The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how the culture differences between Sweden and China affect Sandvik AB. We will also study how the company manages continuous improvements and what consequences culture differences have on their work.Our paper is a single case study at Sandvik AB in Sweden and China. We have visited Sandvik in Sandviken to conduct a series of interviews with employees of different position within the company and with dissimilar work tasks.

The lifecycle of fashion products get shorter and shorter. Companies in the fashion business needto make sure that they can offer their customers the right products, in the right quantity at theexact right time. The competition on the fashion market today is tough and if companies aregoing to be successful they need to have access to the most reliable suppliers, and also offer theircustomers products with high quality to attractive prices. It is therefore of highest importance toevaluate and choose the right sourcing strategy. Product category and type of organisation aresome of the factors that will determine which strategy that is most appropriate.

The purpose of this thesis was to study how an internationalization process to China may appear for a small Swedish enterprise and to identify important factors that may be essential for the process. The focus extends from the point where the enterprise makes its first connection with China up to the point where they are well established. Their business is up and running and they have begun production. To gain a deeper understanding of the subject a gathering of existing theory and research articles was conducted. The gathering of theory yielded knowledge of different approaches and methods that can be used to implement internationalization and provided a greater understanding of cultural and regional differences in China compared to Sweden.

In recent years more countries have started to blur out their national boundaries to create andrely on international collaborations. China is one of the fastest growing markets in the worldand play an important role on export and import of commodities across the globe. ManySwedish companies have more business collaborations with China than ever. Differencesbetween the cultures can lead to many difficulties for both the employees and the employer.There is both a challenge and a necessityto find ways to communicate, and to get moreknowledge in how to follow and lead people from different background and perspectives. Theaim of this study is to investigate how leaders through their leadership deal with contextualdifferences between China and Sweden and which effect these differences can have.

SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] penetrated China in spring of 2003, created havoc in the social society, exposed weaknesses within the political system and pushed the nation towards a crisis of confidence. At the same time the crisis revitalised the Party's position, brought people from different social stratum together and had a beneficial impact on the populace's knowledge on health related issues.What makes the SARS crisis in China interesting for further and deeper investigation is the method it chose to respond to its national crisis. They plan of response was indeed a retrogression back to "older" times, using methods and propaganda very much like those used during Mao Zedong and later Deng Xiaoping. The first step of response was denial and cover up of the real situation, which quickly turned to unprecedented transparency, as the magnitude of SARS became known. The Party and the government were quick to proclaim themselves as the bearer of the key knowledge and information on how to best fight the disease, this in sharp contrast to the political trend of more co-operation between the private and public sector and political transparency.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, China has opened itself to the outside world and in an enormous pace increased its contacts and relationships with other countries. The trigger to these dramatic changes of economic and foreign policies is the insight that China can no longer sustain its rapid economic growth, largely based on industrial production, on energy and raw materials from China alone.Good relations with African countries have been of highest priority in China?s strategy of ?Going global?. The new African policy is based on the two principles of mutual benefit and non-interference in internal affairs ? as opposite to the West?s strategy of structural adjustment programmes (SAP), which include massive interference in internal affairs.

This master thesis examines commercial video games and their relation to the concept of immersion and realism. Games as a communicative medium is quite a new area of interest within rhetorical research in Sweden. Most of the research conducted has, however, been focused on gaming and formation on opinion ? games that explicitly tries to persuade the player, unlike commercial games that focus on entertainment, that is. But that does not mean that commercial games cannot influence us.

China is one of the fastest growing markets of today and attracts billions of dollars in foreign direct investments. Swedish companies have not been late to follow and operate on the Chinese market driven by opportunities in sales, production, and sourcing. However, there has been limited research made on how and why Swedish companies extend their sourcing efforts in China. By combining research within the internationalization of export activities, concepts from global sourcing, and gathered empirical data from leading Swedish companies operating in China, the thesis develops a framework for analyzing the internationalization process of sourcing in China..

Piratkopiering i Kina har varit ett ämne som flitigt debatterats internationellt de senaste åren. Denna uppsats ämnar analysera åtgärder vidtagna för att implementera immateriella rättigheter i Kina i en ekonomisk, politisk och historisk kontext. Sedan Kina gick med i WTO har landet varit tvunget att ändra sin lagstiftning inom många områden, speciellt rörande immateriella rättigheter. Positiva och negativa aspekter av full implementering av dessa regler i Kina analyseras även..

Syftet med denna studie har varit att undersöka de multinationella företagens ?tvingande joint venture-avtal? med de kinesiska tillverkarna, och hur det påverkar teknologisk överföring. Som metod för att samla in information valde uppsatsförfattaren att genomföra kvalitativa intervjuer, vilka var semi-strukturerade. Genom ett icke-sannolikhetsurval valdes tre företag ut för att delta i studien.Studiens slutsatser tyder på förutsatt att den kinesiska regeringens krav på joint venture-avtal reviderades eller helt slopades och de multinationella fordonstillverkarna därmed fick valfri möjlighet till FDI, då skulle det leda till att färre företag ingår joint ventures med kinesiska tillverkare. Dessutom ökar incitamenten för de multinationella företagen att överföra teknologier till den kinesiska fordonsindustrin om de har möjligheten att fritt bestämma FDI, däremot är det ingen garanti för mer effektiva teknologier.

The Third International Assessment of Educational Progress (TIMMS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) during the last decades regarding the results of mathematics teaching shows that China have a better performance than Sweden?s.Swedish teacher-guidelines focus on developing student?s individual interest and confidence for mathematics. In the Chinese teaching-guidelines for Mathematics Curriculum Standards, Ordninary Senior Secondary, the focus is given on: Elevate their mathematics literacy necessary for future citizenship and Development of citizen´s qualities (s.3).Teachers are the primary factors that impact teaching and learning of mathematics. Two teachers from Sweden and two from China were interviewed and their methods were compared in my study. The aim of my study was to understand mathematics teaching in China and Sweden.

The eighth of august the Olympic games in Beijing started. The Chinese regime promised to improve the human rights situation in the country if awarded the Olympic games 2008. The decision to place the games in Beijing arouse severe critique and many questioned how the International Olympic Committe could place the games in a country that so obviously violate basic human rights.The main purpose of this essay has been to analyse what consequences the Olympic Games has given the human rights situation in China. In order to accomplish this I have studied some specific human rights, which I consider to be directly linked to the games. I found that the situation for these human rights has infact worsened since 2001 when China was awarded the games.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the Chinese destination of Hainan, with background in a globalizing tourism destination development, for tourism from Finland and Sweden. The questions at issue are regarding what kind of an impact the status as a special economic zone have had upon Hainan, what kind of conditions there are for tourism on the island, in what form participants of the tourism industry want the development to proceed, what the prevailing trend is for distant destinations for Nordic markets and also regarding what kind of potential there is for organized tourism to Hainan from Finland and Sweden.As a foundation for the paper, I?ve composed a theoretical reference for knowledge of China, Hainan and the study of destinations. The sources of secondary kind are literature related to the subject. The primary sources are mainly interviews, field work done at Hainan has given a concrete and personal knowledge of the place.