User friendly and usable are two words that are often mentioned in the context of marketing new products. By doing so it adds an extra sense of quality to the product. The meaning of these words is therefore something that every product wants. But what is it that makes a product usable and user friendly? What methodology exists formaking sure that a product is usable? Does it exist applicable processes to ensure user centered development? These questions together with a practical example are parts of what will be addressed in this report.The thesis was carried out for C2 Management, a company that works with supporting other companies in their work with quality and constant improvements.

Background: Inter-organisational ways of working have become more and more common during the last decades. In order to attain efficiency and productivity, such inter-organisational relationships need to be governed and controlled. However, studies have shown that inadequate control is one of the main reasons for why inter-organisational relationships fail. One of the means that can be used for governing and controlling a business is management control. The use of management control in inter-organisational contexts is a quite unexplored area of research at the present time, which might seem somewhat surprising considering the fact that inadequate control is a common explanation for why inter-organisational relationships fail.

Saab Component Maintenance in Linköping, Sweden, offers maintenance, repair andoverhaul (MRO) services for civilian and military aircraft components. Lately, thedepartment has struggled with slow throughput rates, despite various counteractingattempts. Studies show, that large parts of the delays derive from the logisticsdepartment where goods arrive and dispatch. Therefore, Saab wants to carry out anextensive analysis of the department in order to further investigate what is causing itsslow throughput rates.The thesis begins with extensive mapping over Component Maintenances whole valuestream to find out how departments interact with each other and which roleindividual departments have in the total supply chain. Out of 13 000 different partnumbers, components were divided into five product families.

Sandvik Wire needed a review of the administrative part of the order fulfillment process and especially the work around packing and the inventory of finished goods. Therefore we acquired the assignment to investigate the administrative part of the order fulfillment process in the company with the purpose to identify potential for improvement. This investigation was performed with focus on the terminal and packing functions. The purpose with the investigation was also to identify critical factors for an efficient order fulfillment process and investigate if information quality is such a factor.Data was collected through interviews and observations on Sandvik Wire. With the help of this data the information and material flows was mapped, the work within terminal and packing, and adjacent functions was investigated.

Few issues have been exposed in media recently as much as the climate change issue. Afterthe documentary film ?An Inconvenient Thruth? presented by Al Gore was released in 2006,most of the world saw a lot of attention directed towards global warming. This was a turningpoint that is refered to in this dissertation an history-graded critical event, which is assumed tohave a significant impact on peoples lives.The purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether or not political parties in Swedenresponded to this critical event in the way that they, in their party programmes, haveformulated policies related to climate change. Alternatively if media produces an image ofpolitical activity which does not comport with the forming of actual political standpoints.

The following study is a discourse analysis of the concept of critical thinking within pre-school teacher education. It considers the following questions: how does the concept of critical thinking appear in policy documents, central to the pre-school teacher education, and which possible conceptions of critical thinking are conveyed by students and teachers active within the education. Additionally, the study seeks to discuss, as well as suggest a possible relation, between the findings of those two questions. In reviewing the material (consisting of five semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and of a selection of policy documents central to the education), I argue the existence of a sort of project within the education, which presents critical thinking as a higher value. At the same time, I argue that the concept is not defined or concretized. This project, however, as I suggest while drawing upon Foucault?s ideas of discourse and government, involves a rather high degree of control.

China has a long tradition of using deception and psychological tactics. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China displayed extensive perception management, aiming at showing a better picture of China. The purpose of this study is to examine if China has continued to display a distorted image since the Olympics and if it could be classified as attempts on deception directed towards a western audience.By combining case studies with descriptive, comparative and a qualitative content analysis method, three cases are researched in order to establish how they are portrayed in the Chinese newspaper China Daily and the BBC News. The differences discovered are matched with the six different kinds of deception presented in Barton Whaley?s general deception theory.In all three cases, numerous examples can be found which indicates that China attempts to deceive their western audience through the media.

The communication and mediation of information and news has, under the latest decades, increased into an incalculable amount. In the newsflow that has come up it has become more and more urgent to sort and select the relevant and correct news. Simultaneously as the information has become one of the most important goods for the western world, the criticism against media has become more loudvoiced and especially the criticism aims at the fact that publicness has become less public and the public conversation is nowadays filtrated through media. The American Joey Skaggs can be reckoned among with the group of media critics, but his course of action and methods to reach out with his critical view, stand out strikingly from the traditional media critics. Instead of, as most, aiming the criticism against media, from an outside perspective, Skaggs chooses to attack the media from the inside.

The aim of this work was to investigate possible risk factors for colic in horses, and to describe what horse owners can do to prevent this condition. The gastrointestinal system of the horse is constructed for continuous high fibre consumption for a period up to eighteen hours a day. Under those conditions, the continuous flow of digesta stimulates gut motility so that the intestines move constantly. When the diet is changed rapidly and the horse is being fed high rations of concentrates each day, the risk of getting colic is higher compared to when consuming less concentrates and giving the horse a stable diet. Lack or absence of access to water and restricted allowance to move freely every day increases the risk of colic. Changed management practices and decreased activity contributes to increased risks, as well as other critical risk factors such as breed, season and age combined with rapidly changed management. More knowledge and education is required of the horse owners about feed requirements in the horse, management routines and rapidly changed activity..

In public relations and marketing, lawsuits traditionally connote crisis. The purpose of this study is to explore the design and critical considerations concerning risks and opportunities when companies voluntarily initiate lawsuits with the partial aim to get publicity in the mass media. In the following paper, the communicative aspects of two such Swedish cases in the European Court of Justice are studied?a large corporation challenging the Swedish monopoly on gambling and a small company challenging the government on their restrictions for individuals to import alcoholic beverages. The case studies have been conducted through interviews, analysis of legal acts and press articles.

The present thesis deals with Qur'anic Studies among Turkish immigrants inSweden. The aim is to investigate the significance of Qur'anic Studies forMuslims in a country like Sweden. This thesis also highlights the role ofthe Turkish state in encouraging and funding Qur'anic Studies in Sweden.I have carried out a case study on a Mosque outside Stockholm, where anImam, sent by the Turkish government, is in charge of the Qur'anic Studies.It is found that Qur'anic Studies is important for Muslims in Sweden in theirefforts to preserve their religious identity. The results also indicate thatQur'anic Studies also has an ideological dimension insofar as it is a meansfor Islamic governments, groups and individuals to further the interests of political Islam..

The aim of this essay was to investigate how religious topics and events are presented in five coursebooks in social studies. To do this the following questions were answered: In which context do discussions about religion take place? Are religions brought up in different contexts? To which extent do discussions about religion occur? The method consisted of a both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The results of this essay showed that discussion regarding religion in social studies coursebooks mainly focuses on wars, conflicts, terrorism and to some degree the human rights. Islam was the religion that occurred most frequently in the coursebooks.

Att genom studier på byggbranschen i Sverige lämna ett bidrag till den idag aktuella debatten kring kvartalskapitalism på börsen. En kvalitativ studie genomförd på tre fallföretag inom byggbranschen. Vi finner inget stöd för att företagen i vår studies investeringar har någon påverkan på utdelningsnivåer. Orsaken till detta tycks bero på att den finansiella ställningen under åren i studien varit god nog att möjliggöra bådadera..

The aim: was to describe and compare a group of experts and critical care nurses' agreement in detecting delirium in intubated, ventilator treated patients with sedation / analgesia, before and after an in house training intervention with the instrument Confusion Assessment Method for the Intensive Care Unit (CAM-ICU).Method: A quasi-experimental study, one group pretest - posttest design. A convenience sample of 17 critical care nurses in a general intensive care unit included. To detect delirium the instrument CAM-ICU was used, 21 paired tests before and 22 after an educational intervention.Main Results: The results showed that after an in house training intervention sensitivity and kappa coefficient improved of the characteristic 1 "acute onset and fluctuating course," an improvement that was significant. In other features, and overall values were signs of numerical improvement and deterioration in sensitivity, specificity and kappa coefficient but no significant change.Conclusion: Implementing a new instrument for detecting delirium in clinical practice requires education and follow-up. A small sample of critical care nurses with varying ability to use the new instrument and the fact that patients' status may change rapidly making it difficult to draw any conclusions from this study.

The purpose of this study is to perform an in-depth analysis of what effects a privatization of a service organization has on the management control system within the organization. The paper studies a service organization which provides service for the county council in Östergötland, Sweden. The result is based on interviews with several people, both within the acquiring private company and also within the county council in Östergötland, and analyzed using Samuelson?s (2005) framework from his study ?Organizational, Governance and Control ?. The major finding in the thesis is that the factors that have had the largest impact on the changes in management control are the new owner demands and the degree of operationalization of the overall goal..