Farmers Cooperative has in recent years developed from national markets to cross-border, international, collaborations. One example is the merger between the Swedish dairy company Arla and Danish MD Foods, where the companies collectively are sought to reduce transaction costs and thus improve efficiency. The Swedish market for commodities (fertilizers and pesticides) in agriculture has for many years been dominated by a few large players, with little opportunity for grain associations and local grain companies to offer their customers a varied range of commodities with a competitive pricing.To change this state, a majority of Swedish and Danish grain associations and local grain companies have established a trans-national cooperation. Through the establishment of the organization DLA Agro, they offer their customers a good variety of products with competitive prices. This study investigates thus according to the theory of cooperative models to what extent and how the DLA Agro helps to create benefits for the Swedish member companies.

The title of this thesis is ?The preconditions of the acquisition guarantee- hard to design working political reforms?. The acquisition guarantee (förvärvsgaranti) is a form of credit guarantee issued by the Swedish government to credit institutes that give out housing loans to debtors with poor credit history. The reform hasn´t been used in any substantial extent.The purpose of the study is to investigate whether you could identify any problems with the preconditions that the governmental agency BKN was given to implement the acquisition guarantee, and if so describe which these problems are.Two questions are answered:1.      What preconditions for a working implementation of the guarantee, in the form of rules, objectives and directives was offered by the government in their steering of BKN?2.      How did the structural preconditions for a working implementation of the guarantee look like?By doing a text analysis of central documents I find that the lack of outcome could to some extent be related to weaknesses in how the reform was formulated.

The purpose of this paper is to perform an in-depth analysis on how the events that took place in Skandia AB during the end of the 1990s have been portrayed in media, and how this has affected the general debate concerning bonuses and incentive plans. The paper studies relevant newspaper articles published in Sweden?s largest business newspaper, Dagens Industri (DI), over a period ranging from 2002 to 2008. The major findings of this paper include that bonuses are widely used as incentives in Swedish companies and that the issue of bonuses as an incentive form has lead to a prevalent debate. Furthermore, the questionable events that took place in Skandia AB during the end of 1990s have affected the general debate concerning bonuses.

The purpose of the thesis was to analyse three action films; Collateral Damage from 2002; Clear and Present Danger from 1994; and Scarface from 1983, in order to see how Colombians are represented in these movies.The action genre comprises of different stereotypes where the hero and the villain are represented in conjunction to each other. The analysis is about the way the films content and form are used to uphold the representation of Colombians, but also the villain and the hero more generally.Critical Discourse Analysis was used, as main method, and the concepts of denotation and connotation guided the analysis. The main conclusion is that the three movies reproduced an already established collective stereotype of Latin Americans, stereotype that includes both Colombia and Colombians..

The foremost objective of business organizations is to generate value for shareholders and to opt for strategies which optimize it. Hence it is of key concern for business leaders to appreciate how operations best are run to maximize value creation. This study explores how financial theory can reveal the link between one particular business strategy and the corresponding effect on shareholder wealth. The question in focus is whether construction companies can enhance their value creation by implementing shift-work to increase the weekly production rate. The thesis particularly targets apartment block projects in Sweden and has the construction company Peab AB as primary object of study.

This study examines whether the ownership structure of Swedish firms contributes to explain the variations in executive pay. A regression analysis was performed on 102 companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The analysis suggests a negative relationship between ownership structure and executive pay after taking company profitability and size into account. The result is in line with previous studies and the agency theory. This indicates that large shareholders have a stronger position in Swedish companies or that large shareholders monitor the management to a larger extent, rather than providing incentives.

The purpose of the study is to investigate and elucidate how and why municipalities cooperate across municipal boundaries with destination development. To answer the purpose the authors chose two research questions:What are the incentives of cooperation between the municipalities in Roslagen? What are the possibilities and difficulties of cooperation? In order to answer the research questions interviews with local business managers, administrative director, the acting Head of destination and tourist office staff were made. Municipalities have signed a cooperation agreement in October/November 2008, where they will work more formal together to strengthen the destination Roslagen. The result of the study shows that the main motive for municipal cooperation is the sharing of financial resources to promote and develop the destination Roslagen together.

Denna uppsats handlar om en debatt, som fördes i en brytningstid, då den gifta kvinnans rätt till yrkesarbete ifrågasattes. Ett funktionalistiskt förslag om kollektivhus, där hushållsarbetet och en del av barnavården skulle skötas av kollektivt anställd personal, avsåg att underlätta kvinnans yrkesarbete. Den gällande normen förutsatte, att den gifta kvinnan var hemarbetande och mannen försörjare. Debatten kom att kretsa kring hustruns plikter mot familjen och barnens liv i det kollektiva huset. Här stod bevarare av traditionen mot anhängare av ett nytt familjemönster.Syftet har varit att fokusera anhängare och motståndare och analysera deras argument och strategier.

Title: Creating meetings - a study in interactionism and creating music. In this study I had my focus on teenagers in a school class. My aim was to explore how pupils experience the processes of creating music together and how they choose to organize their interactions during these creative processes. As analytical tools I used sociological and sociopedagogical concepts and theories. Interactionism provided models toward individualization as well as socialization, related to learning, knowledge and creativity.

The Baltic Sea is threatened by eutrophication that largely is due to nutrient leaching from farmland within the catchment area. To solve this problem the surrounding countries cooperate within various configurations such as HELCOM and the EU-financed project Baltic Compass. Poor manure management in Russia has been discussed frequently the last couple of years. A literature review of different types of reports and legal acts is the core of this degree project which has been performed in connection to two ongoing research projects financed by EU (Baltic Compass) and SIDA. It is supplemented with interviews with Swedish agricultural consultants and travel reports from two occasions when I had the opportunity to discuss with Russians active within the agricultural sector. Different hypotheses were investigated and discussed. The environmental debate in Russia is quiet and there is a widespread approach that economic profit always trumps environmental concern ? a Soviet heritage that influence the Russian agriculture considerably. The Russian legal acts on stable manure management focus mainly on sanitary questions and only secondary on nutrient leaching.

The implementation of IFRS 2 led to significant changes in the accounting practices for corporations regarding stock related compensation. The new regulations required firms to account for the stock based compensation as an expense in the financial statements, rather than merely disclosing the information in the notes section to the statements. Following prior research on the area; specifically studies made in the U.S., where researchers find that companies change their use of stock based compensation due to the increased accounted expenses, this study hypothesizes that the same pattern may be found among companies listed on the Swedish stock market. The results of this study show that the use of option incentives has decreased during the studied period 2001-2008 and that the decrease in part can be derived from IFRS 2 and in part from other factors. The results are useful to future research, as they provide an overview of the effects that IFRS 2 had on companies, and various factors that influence the behavior of corporations, as well as in a larger perspective be a factor to take into account for future modifications of the IFRS..

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the phenomenon called bookcrossing. To fulfill this I have asked the following research questions: Why do people participate in bookcrossing?What functions do books have for bookcrossers? The method used is qualitative, semi structured interviews. Four active bookcrossers have been interviewed. These interviews revealed that bookcrossing as an activity in a medium sized town is very small.

Faith is a phenomenon that engages the individual into emotional, social and daily manners.Religion tends to engage the individual in different levels in the daily life. In the church communion, there is a belief to the traditional and the repeteated behaviour. This shared group is strength by ceremonies and rituals and people in this collective somehow experience another type of reality. This study has a social - psychological perspective and the purpose is to study people?s know-how of faith and why they seek religion in today´s secularized society.

Finns det ett samband mellan den individuella självkänslan och den kollektiva självkänslan? Har kön och studieinriktning betydelse för självkänsla, såväl som den individuella som den kollektiva? Studien är gjord som en kvantitativ undersökning med hjälp av enkäter, bestående av Som Jag Ser Mig Själv (Irhammar & Birgerstam) som mäter självkänsla på individnivå med fem delskalor, och Collective Self Esteem Scale (Luhtanen & Crocker) som mäter den kollektiva självkänslan med fyra delskalor. Det ena testet innehöll 67 frågor, medan det andra innehöll 16 frågor. Totalt deltog 60 försökspersoner hämtade från ett gymnasium i Kristianstad, och dessa var i sin tur uppdelade i två samhällsklasser med olika inriktningar ? IT och Ekonomi.

Franchise theorists have to a large extent failed to keep up with the actual development in global franchise chains. The recent emergence of fast growing multi-unit-franchisees has fundamentally been ignored, and it has been claimed that the new phenomenon can be regarded as a mere replication of the franchisors? structure and control system into sub hierarchies. This study however, suggests that the reality is more complex. Through conducting case studies of two Nordic multi-unit-franchisees, new theories are built explaining how and why control systems are designed the way they are.