One year Master's thesis, Degree of master in Business and Economics, School ofBusiness and Economics at Linnaeus University, Management, 4FE10E SpringSemester 2014.Author: Johanna Björklund and Sarah Gustafsson.Mentor: Magnus Forslund.Title: Lean in the public sector - Potential barriers to a long-term Lean work.Background: Organizational changes are something that is constantly done inorganizations, and in the last decade, there has arisen a plethora of different changemodels. A reorganization that is popular among companies today is Lean. Lean is aconcept that was developed within the Japanese automotive industry, but has evolvedfrom the Japanese shop floor and is now a concept that can be found in, for example,several Swedish municipalities.Purpose: The purpose of this study was to create an understanding of why the conceptLean may have difficulty getting a hold in the in the long term.Methodology: The study was done with a qualitative research approach and through anabductive approach. As we intended to create an understanding, of what potentialbarriers that may affect that a Lean work, in some cases, does not become a long-termcondition, it seemed natural to choose a hermeneutic approach to knowledge. Theempirical data collected via individual unstructured interviews, through a groupinterview, and by non-participant observations.

Background:Life-cycle costing (LCC) is an investment calculation that takes intoaccount operating costs throughout the investee lifecycle. LCC calculations are mainly usedto evaluate investments that have no revenue side. Attempts to apply the LCC calculations forbuilding-related investments have occurred since the 1980s. Despite the advantages ofusing LCC calculations, use has not passed through in full. The main obstacles have beenidentified as a lack of relevant input data, and insufficient experience of workingwith LCC calculations.

This study aimed to describe children?s experience of living with overweight or obesity, by using a literature-review. The study includes eleven articles, data is from children between ages 5-15 year. The result occurring were in the areas; Quality of life and self-esteem, Social company, Body concept and weight reduction and Psychological unhealth. BMI above what is recommended gives a negative influence on quality of live and self-esteem.

As a Swedish landscape architecture student living in Australia for five years, I have often wondered if my memories and my associations with the landscape and the nature in Sweden, are the same as other Swedish people living in Melbourne. Most of the Swedish people who live here in Melbourne remember and associate Sweden?s nature and landscape with where they grew up or where they used to live. The plants that most of the Swedish people I asked missed from Sweden were associated to special feelings or activities. The general type of landscape people remember from Sweden is that of a landscape covered in forests, which you can walk freely through. With these memories as a foundation and with inspiration from the Swedish landscape architect Thorbjörn Anderson?s way of creating places, by letting a few strong changes play against the existing elements,2 but also with consideration of the climate and the severe shortage of water that is current in Melbourne, will I create a design concept for the garden surrounding the Swedish Church in Melbourne. A design concept that will generate memories and associations to Swedish landscapes..

This study was built on the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) as an ability with four branches, to effectively: (1) perceive (2) reason (3) understand and (4) manage emotions. By closely studying the four processes of EI through eight semistructured interviews with psychologists, counselors, CBT-therapists and psychotherapists, a study of participants' stories from real practice was done and then analyzed and interpreted. The purpose of this study was to get the participants to describe and put words on practical experiences that occur with clients that correspond to the four domains that define the concept of EI according to Mayer et al. (2008) and find out about if their way of "doing" EI gets trained and developed after several years of professional activity. The results shows that the practitioners used all four branches of EI in dialog with the client, both intra- and interpersonal.

More guns-less violence? A qualitative and comparative analysis between the swedish and the american daily news-press..

Background:Life-cycle costing (LCC) is an investment calculation that takes intoaccount operating costs throughout the investee lifecycle. LCC calculations are mainly usedto evaluate investments that have no revenue side. Attempts to apply the LCC calculations forbuilding-related investments have occurred since the 1980s. Despite the advantages ofusing LCC calculations, use has not passed through in full. The main obstacles have beenidentified as a lack of relevant input data, and insufficient experience of workingwith LCC calculations.

In this qualitative study of students? methods of calculating subtractions, I have used interviews, subtraction exercises and analysis of teaching material. The purpose of my study was to explore which methods students in grade three uses when calculating subtractions. I also wanted to highlight which strategies the students use and their comprehension of the concept of subtraction. In the study, I also highlight the different pedagogical ideas on which the teaching material is based on and the students? choice of methods.  The study shows that the students choose to use the methods?deduct? and ?kind of number? independently.

This report describes the results of the project "Concept development of jet engine inspection plugs" carried out in the spring of 2008. The work was done at the department of product definition at the company Volvo Aero in Trollhättan. The objective of the work was to develop concepts for a "Volvo-unique" inspection plug. The work is part of Volvo Aero's focus on proprietary (self-developed) technologies. Inspection plugs can be found on virtually all aircraft engines and gas turbines.

The Swedish government ratified on May 1 2009 an amendment of marital law, resulting in same-sex marriage becoming legalized. With the rights of the Christian Swedish state church to officiate weddings originating from the same law, the church was thereby faced with two options: Either officially include same-sex couples in the Christian concept of holy matrimony and keep the right to officiate weddings; or give up the right to officiate weddings altogether. An official decision to accept the terms was reached on October 22 2009, but not without being preceded by an agitated medial debate.This research attempts to analyze the arguments of the debate in three stages: In the first stage the arguments are categorized according to their respective ideological standpoint. In the second stage these categories are examined from post-modern, social constructivist and socialization theory perspectives. Based on this, the third stage sees the arguments analyzed from a viewpoint based in the Copenhagen school concept of securization.The research concludes that the debate does not only simply feature two sides with differences of opinion; but rather that the arguments of the two opposing sides are founded in a common view of the other side as a fundamental threat to ones conception of a sound society..

This thesis focuses on Chinese?Swedish code-switching of bilingual children in Sweden. The purpose is to, through a case study, study what Chinese?Swedish code-switching looks like in daily conversations between bilingual children and their parents. Three main questions are formulated from the purpose of the thesis, foucusing on the types and frequencies of code-switching, the grammar of code-switching, and the motivation of code-switching.The linguistic material comes from voice recordings of naturally occurring conversations between three children and their parents, which are transcribed afterwards.

This essay shows how administrators in two different organizations are experiencing freedom of action in their work situation. The essay is made based on a qualitative method and interviews were used to implement the study. People chosen for this study are four administrators at a governmentagency - the Social Insurance agency, and four municipal officers from different Social service offices in southern Sweden. The theoretical framework consists of Weber's theory of bureaucracy, and his discussion of the legal authority. The analysis is designed as adiscussion of the parts that were especially prominent during the interviews.

This study concerns how Muslims are portrayed in a choice of twelve news articles from Swedish dailies and tabloid newspapers on the aftermath of the film Innocence of Muslims published on YouTube. All articles are distributed in the newspapers Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet in the period of September 11th, 2012 until September 30th, 2012.For this study, a qualitative text analysis has been embraced and focus has been on van Dijk?s Critical discourse analysis to the texts, with additional features from semiotics applied on the images.The theories consist of Critical discourse analysis, hegemony, ideology and power, postcolonialism and stereotyping.In the qualitative content analysis, concrete examples from the articles are retrieved and commented. These have been divided into various themes, which are trends that the authors have been able to distinguish in the analysis.The result shows that Muslims in the analyzed newspapers are portrayed as the others, unimportant and extremely religious, in a negative manner rather than a positive. Moreover the press has tendencies to generalize Muslims as a group.

AbstractThe project "Sound and Play" have been implemented in collaboration with the toy company BRIO in Malmo. The purpose of the project was to examine whether and how BRIO in the future could develop toys around sound for Toddlers.The problem formulations that would be answered after completion of the project was "How could BRIO broaden its product range with the help of audio toys?", "How can you combine toys and sounds in an interesting way for children?", "How do you create a toy with sound that is fun for the child, but not annoying for parents?". Currently BRIO only has two toys with sound in this age group.The expression of the toy was going to be a mix of classic and cool and the overall feeling of the toy was going to be explorative and arouse curiosity in the child. This feeling would be communicated through simplicity and joy.

Arcoma is a company that develops and manufactures X-ray equipment for hospitals. One of the most crucial components is the digital detector. Due to the high cost it is made removable so it could be transferred and used in other X-ray apparatus. The detector is placed in a so called detector holder. The current detector has a rectangular shape which sometimes requires a 90 degree rotation to match the shape of the patient.