This study is made in cooperation with the insurance company, Skandia. Skandia is a part of Old Mutual group?s Nordic division and is one of Swedens largest insurance companies with a total of 1.9 million customers. The company offers traditional life assurance, unit-linked insurance, private healthcare insurance and banking services. Insurance companies such as Skandia operate in a highly competitive environment.

VBG Produkter AB is a process-orientated company that develops, manufactures and markets trailer couplings with belonging coupling equipment, protection equipment against skidding and stands for wagon-bridge for heavy vehicles. The company feels that their set-up time in production for couplings is not at an acceptable level. Due to high demands of customer oriented production the intermediate stock level of included products within the assembly of couplings has gradually increased which has resulted in high inventory holding costs. VBG Produkter applies Kanban in their production, therefore it is important to produce exactly the necessary amount and avoid overproduction. The objective of this project is to suggest appropriate solutions so that VBG Produkter is able to reduce their set-up time in assembly of couplings, by identifying internal and external set-up time for the chosen process bushing cell.

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.

This paper addresses the role of homework within the home and school environments using a qualitatively approach inspired by discourse analysis method and theory. The paper considers three newspaper articles to identify current attitudes and understanding regarding homework?s role. The paper?s structure brings results and analysis together allowing the discussion to be continuously extended and deepened.

This report contains a risk analysis of transportation of dangerous goods in Kalmar. The analysis is based on quantitative data and an evaluation of the risks based on both the probability of occurring accidents as well as the consequences of those. The risks are presented as both individual and societal risks..

This study is an evaluation of the runtime watch function in a OEE software, knownas ProTAK. OEE stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness, it?s a way to measurethe factories process efficiency. The runtimewatch function allows the user to setup and monitor certain critical objects that are of importance for the pulp and paper process at the mill. The data from the runtimewatch can be correlated towards the suppliers specification for the components.

Thesis purpose: The purpose of the master thesis is to analyse the battle of meaning creation regarding the notion of smoking and to reveal the production of unequal power relations. The battle is fought by different stakeholders through means of language and the study focuses on the tobacco industry in Germany. Methodology: A critical discourse analysis is applied with a qualitative research strategy. Our data collection was inspired by grounded theory and is limited in scope through a relevant case within the context of smoking in Germany. Empirical data is collected by means of an internet based document study of publicly available texts.

The purpose of this study was to examine how girls and boys are described by social workersin psycho-social assessments in child and adolescent psychiatry. The questions at issue wereif girls and boys are described in different ways and if gender related patterns could be found.The study was both qualitative and quantitative. I used textual analysis as a method anddiscourse analysis as theory.Results: Sexes were generally described differently. Girls are depicted from how they are andhow they look and boys are described by what they do and their behaviour. The mother isdescribed as the person who is most responsible for children of both sexes.

The last years? financial situation has contributed to an increased willingness from the banks to handle risks. The most important risk to cope with is a risk that is related to a customer?s ability to repay loans. Forecasts indicate that in the future, Swedish farmers will be facing profitability challenges, which points to a need to reconsider the banks procedures considering risk management in credit granting for agricultural businesses.Today?s risk management will be given two complements in this study.

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..

Syftet med undersökningen är att undersöka, beskriva och analysera kring hur vida det finns ett bra substitut till bomull. Undersökningen kommer att belysa hur marknaden ser ut i dag och vilka material som används. Vidare utreds parametrarna funktion, kundnytta och hållbarhet, som kan komma att spela roll i valet av material för producenter av yrkeskläder. I dagsläget finns det inget solklart val av material som skulle kunna mäta sig med bomullen gällande de parametrarna som uppsatsen tar upp. Vad man väljer att använda istället för bomull beror mycket på hur företagen väljer att fokusera gällande just funktion, kundnytta och hållbarhet.

This essay is an analysis of mythologies in the Swedish women´s magazine VeckoRevyn. The magazine?s own explicit purpose is to break down the unhealthy opinion of what beauty is in their industry today. By content and linguistic analysis the results of this study are interconnected to the beauty myth as it was established by Naomi Wolf in 1991. The goal is to pinpoint how VeckoRevyn?s question and answer columns construct relationships to their readers, and the mythologies that they maintain.

The last years? financial situation has contributed to an increased willingness from the banks to handle risks. The most important risk to cope with is a risk that is related to a customer?s ability to repay loans. Forecasts indicate that in the future, Swedish farmers will be facing profitability challenges, which points to a need to reconsider the banks procedures considering risk management in credit granting for agricultural businesses.Today?s risk management will be given two complements in this study.

In today's society, the availability of energy plays an integral part in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, the price of energy in Sweden has increased in recent decades. A large part of our energy consumption goes to heating modules for houses, where heating methods that depend on energy sources such as electricity, district heating, fuel oil, gas and biofuels are the most common ones. During the winter period, the increase in energy costs becomes significantly evident, especially for small property owners. This increase in energy cost is most noticeable for home owners with electric heating.This thesis is written at the Halmstad University, in cooperation with a company, which makes parts of this thesis confidential.

Today, we live in a consumption society. We buy products to soothe our needs and desires. Thru material things we can express our own personal identity and shopping is seen more as a pleasure than a need to survive. With the background media- and communication studies, the reason of this study was to explore how blogs as a social medium can influence the consumption ideal in society. With dialogical analysis and semiotic analysis we wanted to see if we could find a specific consumption culture in the content of six blogs we did our studies on. We found that the blogs showed us that there is normal to have everyday luxury and spoil oneself with expensive things.