Title: When municipalities are keeping upAuthors: Hansson Käll, Ida; Jonasson, MikaelaTutor: Waks, CarolineCourse: Bachelor thesis, 15hp, Department of Business Studies, HT 2010Background: During the recent years social media has evolved into a powerful communicative medium. From an organizational standpoint social media has become a way for organizations to get closer to, and create a dialogue with, their environment. Swedish municipalities have began to use social media in their daily communication with the environment, but a problem has been raised about how public organizations should organize their social media when formal guidelines from the government are missing.Objective: The objective of this thesis is to examine how eight Swedish municipalities have organized their use of social media due to the lack of official guidance from the government, and also what difficulties that have occurred during this process.Method: The method used is qualitative with data collected through interviews with one respondent from each municipality.Results: The result show that the organizational solutions varies through each municipality but also the choice of social media. It has been important for municipalities to have someone in charge of the new communication tool since social media is a fast and communicative channel. Seven out of eight municipalities have already developed or are in process of developing their own formal guidelines on how to use social media.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine children's communication and interaction during story time at the public library. The aim is also to examine how to develop the story time ? in terms of participation and equality ? at a specific library.Action research was used as a research strategy and participant observation, log, tutoring and interviews as methods to collect data. Since action research is done on the basis of practice, a significant collaboration with the librarian and the participant children is taking place within this study.Research from the fields of Library and Information Science, Education and Childhood Sociology form the interdisciplinary research area to which this study links. The theoretical framework consists of theory and concepts from the Socio-cultural Perspective, Poststrucuralist Feminism and Childhood Sociology.

Today, social media is used mostly by people in their private life. However, companies are more and more tapping into the area of social media. To this date, mostly B2C companies have been successful in their social media strategies. This qualitative thesis aims to investigate how B2B companies can benefit from using social media as a means to communicate and build relations with their customers. The medtech industry has been chosen as the object of study.Through depth interviews with people in the medtech industry and social media experts, data has been collected in order to answer the questions of (1) how ready customers in the medtech industry are to receive information through social media and (2) how companies can build the best possible social media strategy.

Due to a growing interest in communication in today?s society the demand for equipment that is used in communication networks increases while the competition between companies that produce this equipment grows. To meet the increasing demand and at the same time having a competitive product development many companies use some effective product design, such as the modular product design. When a modular product design is used it?s good to compare different module configurations for a certain product and to simplify these comparisons some tool can be used.

Title: A new battle, the same bottle: A case study of the visual communication of Absolut Vodka and how it?s positioned towards different market segments.Author: Anna von Friedrichs Grängsjö & Niklas SvanlindhTutor: Jessica GustafssonPurpose: To overview the visual communication of Absolut Vodka and how it?s positioned towards different market segments. Absolut Vodka is a brand that reaches a vast range of consumers through a single consistent marketing strategy. The hypothesis was that one can reach many different market segments with the marketing of a product by constantly keeping some components of the communication the same while constantly changing others. Key questions to be answered are: How do Absolut Vodka address their target audiences in their visual communication? Which market segments does the visual communication of Absolut Vodka seem to address?Method/Material: The research was conducted through a qualitative research study in which four Youtube videos by Absolut Vodka were analyzed.

The systems environments of today are often distributed and heterogeneous. These kind of systems have several advantages but also disadvantages. One problem is how to keep them secure.The security problems in these environments are mainly due to the communication between the connected computers. It is relatively easy to tap these communication channels from information. There is also a need for the possibility to secure these channels from modification of sent information and to be able to verify the sender and receiver of information in a secure manner.

The Swedish forest industry has put a lot of resources in the development of digital communications in hopes of improving collaboration with suppliers. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether VIDA would benefit from using digital communication with suppliers. The survey was conducted as a questionnaire study among the company?s staff and its suppliers. The result indicated needs and interests to use digital communications in both groups. Young suppliers and suppliers on a distance showed the most interest in using digital communication. In terms of using these digital communications, the staffs and suppliers were most interested in information regarding transaction and forestmanagement plans.

The origin of the word ?communication? is the Latin word communicare, meaning to make common. The reason for our communication is to share thoughts, feelings and information, we want to affect and confirm.We are used to interpersonal communication, but even if we have had a lot of practice at it during our lives, we still find our selves facing misunderstandings and conflicts. The more people we meet during a day, the greater the chance is for interruptions in the communication.In pharmacy practice, good communication is vital for the client?s health and quality of life.

How do young adult students communicate through their smartphones today? Which applications and features do they choose? What motivates their choices for the various possible situations? In this paper we investigate which communication channels young adult students in Sweden use for private message communication in their smartphones, in what way they use the channels and why they choose specific channels for different types of communication. In Sweden today, there are numerous of different ways of communicate through smartphones. We have interviewed ten Swedish young adult students regarding their use. The results speaks for that SMS has proven to still be used very frequently, even though it has existed for many years and that there are plenty of other ways to communicate through private messages today.

The aim of this study is to examine the investment decision process for investments that arise due to strategic changes and are of strategic importance to the company. At the foundation of this study is the previous research in this area, done by King (1975) and Bower (1970), which examines the investment process on a more generic level. At the core is the investment decision process pertaining to Projekt X, an investment performed by NordiCorp. Having conducted a case study including six interviews with employees from various parts of the organization, combined with a large number of internal documents, the process regarding the investment decision was carefully illuminated. The results show that in many regards, this process follows the more generic investment process.

From an early age kids learn that their good performance and efforts will be rewarded. Unfortunately, not all leaders in the media industry are rewarded or given the same opportunities to exercise their communicative leadership, according to studies in media research. The aim of our study is to highlight female managers' experiences of their communicative leadership in the Swe-dish media industry. This study was based on qualitative interviews with four female respondents in management positions. The core of the study concerns female communicative leadership and interpersonal communication.

This is a qualitative interview study of the importance of the non-verbal communication related to the reference situation at public libraries. The experiences of both librarians and users of the reference service have been explored with regards to non-verbal communication. Eight interviews have been carried out. The results reveal that the users and librarians consider that it is important that the librarian find eye contact as well as give affirmation through nodding and smiling. To demonstrate interest and involvement in the questions through attentive listening is also of great value.

 Title:              Not just words, classroom communication about subtraction in year 2Language:      Swedish with summary in English.Keywords:     Communication, mathematics, subtraction, teaching The purpose of this study is to analyze the mathematical communication in a classroom during a lesson in the field subtraction, and to find out how students describe their perception of mathematics that is communicated in the classroom.The study consists of the observations through the videotaping of two lessons in primary school grades 2 and student and teacher interviews related to these lecture occasions.Research indicates that Swedish pupils' mathematical skill continuously deteriorates in a national and international perspective, and that student experiences of mathematics in general are negative. The literature emphasizes the importance of communicating mathematics in various forms to deepen and develop understanding of concepts and mathematical operations. Communication must be generated between teachers and students but also between student and student to have a beneficial impact for the student.Our result demonstrate the different types of communication in the classroom but that communication does not always have a clear mathematical content in spite of teachers' mathematical intentions with teaching. The result also indicates that the mathematical communication that takes place, in essence, is a one-way communication where the teacher has a great opportunity to speak. The teachers perceived as oblivious to their own ways of communicating, but stressed in the interviews with an understanding of the importance of communication learning.

The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding and knowledge of how Cubans living in Sweden experience the Swedish pattern of communication in relation to the Cuban. The questions asked by the authors were: Do the Cubans experience any differences or similarities between the Swedish and the Cuban patterns of communication? If that is the case, what are they and how would they describe them? The questions were answered through a qualitative method, based on interviews with five Cubans who were raised in Cuba and are now living in Sweden. Communication Theory has constituted the fundamental theoretical tool of analysis, complemented by Social Psychological Role theory. The results of the study have been analyzed using both phenomenological and hermeneutical methods.

The aim of this study is to examine which communication channels and communication strategies Umea? municipality could use for information concerning outdoor recreation. To achieve this aim the following theories and views have been applied: social communication, communication strategies, two-way symmetrical communication, social media and uses and gratifications. The study was conducted through four focus group interviews and one informant interview. The focus groups consisted of four groups of outdoor enthusiasts in Umea? municipality: outdoor interested students, organized outdoor enthusiasts, active families and active seniors.