During the last decade working with competence has emerged as a more strategically important area. Today the human resources in a company are considered a competitive advance and the HR-units play a significant role when it comes to HR-management. Different motives for investing in strategies that promote competence development and learning also exist. The purpose of this paper was to examine how the process of competence development was managed at a large global company. The empirical material consisted of four persons who were interviewed and the analysis of the material was inspired by grounded theory.From the analysis four major themes or core factors emerged as central to the interviewed persons' understanding of the competence development process; solid preparatory work in relation to competence development, communication, awareness of responsibilities and finally the taking action and evaluation of the action.

Abstract Title: Enabling Smart Research and Development through Knowledge Conversation Seminar date: 2005-06-08 Course: Master thesis in business administration, 10 Swedish credits (15 ECTS) Authors: Andreas Johnsson, Johan Rosendahl Advisors: Lars Bengtsson Key words: Knowledge management, Knowledge conversation, Research and development, Ba, Trelleborg Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to create a model that shows how knowledge management aimed at research and development processes can be used and how the theoretical fields can be connected. Methodology: The thesis is based on abductive perspective where empirical and theoretical material has been mixed to create a foundation for the analysis. Theoretical perspectives: Theories concerning knowledge management and research and development have primarily been used. These have been complemented with material about team structures and incentive systems. Empirical foundation: The empirical material is based on semi structured, mostly qualitative interviews and strictly quantitative inquiries performed at Industrial Hose within the Trelleborg group.

The purpose of this Master Thesis is to analyze what suitable hardware platforms there are on the market in order to build a low price control and information system for mobile applications, called small display module. The thesis will be underlying material for making a decision for further development. The result of the thesis consists mainly of a Windows CE kernel and a schematic for a CPU card, on which it would be suitable to build the display module. Another major part of the report is the introduction of different techniques that could be of interest when designing a processor based system. The processor architecture that was chosen is the x86.

AbstractThis thesis discusses and analyses a 19th century female author's vanishing from history. The study investigates social relationships as figured and described in the epistolary form, based on letters between the author herself and different members of her family. It also tries to identify the author's position and situation in her time and society according to important themes and motifs in her novels. The main purpose is not to reconstruct history, but rather to show the many complex histories that can also be described, apart from the simplified and generalized one. The aim of this study is to, from a post-structuralist perspective, analyze the position of author Marianne Lundegård-Hagberg, and her role as a performative, discursive person that history forgot..

The purpose of this study was to examine how social work professionals view their professional role and how they think about the concept of social work. I also wanted to investigate what they believe characterize a professional social work. For the purposes of this study, I chose a qualitative approach in which I interviewed five people linked to the social work. The theories which I have assumed in the analysis of the results are power theory, organization theory and professional theory. The results of this study show that the respondents believe that a professional social work is performed by someone who has training and experience in the field.

The subject for this paper is the Class Action against Skandia Association, a civil organization formed in 2003 with the aim of claiming compensation for some 1.2 million life insurance customers. The background to its formation was one of the largest financial scandals in Sweden in recent times, involving a number of questionable affairs within the insurance corporation Skandia and its subsidiaries, most notably the life insurance company Skandia Liv. The interests of both the stake- and stockholders of the company seem, in certain ways, to have been grossly misrepresented. The scandal, as well as the reaction it spawned, pose a number of questions. In this study, we focus on two: a possible, and in many ways apparent crisis in the representation of interests in Swedish society, and the role of civil society in upholding the balance between these interests.We argue that what is often held to be the ?greed? or ?immorality? of individuals in scandals such as Skandia is, to a great extent, a mere reflection of the ?rational? underpinnings of modern-day capitalism.We find that trust has been a key mechanism of control in the relationships between consumers and agents in pension and life insurance markets, and that ?the Swedish model? that distinguished post-WWII Swedish society was a model heavily based on trust towards existing models of bureaucratic governance.

This master thesis is a study of how city cemeteries can be used and contributes to a socially sustainable urban development. Today sustainable development and sustainable urban development is something that more or less every organization is working with. Therefore it is also relevant to integrate our cemeteries in this work so that they can become a part of the sustainable urban development process.The thesis gives a basic understanding of sustainability as a concept and also defines socially sustainable (urban) development. The work then immerse itself in various types of park structures and how the relationship between the human individual and the public space work, to satisfy the needs that different people have.The literature study that has been made is also the base for the design of the walking interview that has been made for the two city cemeteries. The cemeteries that where studied where the Assistens cemetery in Copenhagen and the Eastern cemetery in Gothenburg.

Process standardization is a topic that has generated a lot of research and literature. At first, the focus was on production; today processes are used in all different kind of business areas.The aim of this study has been to analyze how processes can be applied on development businesses and how IT systems affect the result of the process. To accomplish this, we have asked questions such as what standardization is in a development process? Why are the processes standardized? What difficulties can appear with standardization? And how the IT-systems affect the result of the process?To answer these questions, we have preformed a case study on Saab. Saab is a well know Swedish company who are working with a project called the GMS-project, where they develop processes to cover the whole company´s business areas.The literature gives the reader an understanding of processes and standardization.

Small!size!enterprises!within!the!outdoor!industry!seldom!use!a!structured!process!or!method!when!involving!users!in!product!development.!One!reason!for!this!is!that!many!structured!development!processes!are!designed!for!large!companies!with!very!different!resources.!When!involving!users!in!product!development!processes,!the!most!common!user! is! an! elite! athlete.! She! or! he! often! has! different! requirements! than! the! regular!consumer!and!in!the!customers?!point!of!view;!this!leads!to!nonCmaximized!developed!products.!!The! result! of! this! thesis! is! a! user! involvement! process! for! small! outdoor! companies!based! on! the! Sister! Kenny! Research! Center! Innovation! Handbook,! a! product!development!process,!which!itself!is!based!on!a!phaseCgate!model.!The!process!focuses!on!the!user!category!enthusiastic!amateurs,!since!this!is!what!companies!in!the!industry!require.!The!process!also! focuses!on!how!and!where! small!outdoor! companies! should!involve!users!and!give!recommendations!on!how!many!users!that!should!be!involved!in!a! product! development! process,! different! from! what! the! theory! recommend.! The!process! also! builds! on! that! ideas! should! come! from! the! users! first,! and! then! being!further!developed!by!the!company's!product!developers.!The!degree!of!communication!between!users!and!the!company!is!shown!and!the!report!clarifies!the!user!involvement!intensity!in!product!development!processes.!!The!involvement!process!that!has!been!developed!has!also!been!summarized!in!a!guide!that! can!be!used!by! a! company!on! a!daily!basis.!This! contains! information!on,! among!other!things,!how!users!are!selected!and!how!to!plan!a!workshop.!!! !.

This essay deals with the principle of surprise warfare and its development as well as the adaptation of military action that had to be made to surprise the opponent in the modern era.The concept of surprise is divided into its components in order to clarify what is required to implement a surprising maneuver, to understand the complex concept and form a theoretical framework for gathering facts in the case study.Development and adaption are demonstrated by a comparative case study where Pearl Harbor illustrates an example of historical surprise and Operation Desert Storm illustrates a modern surprise. The product will then be analyzed in order to detect the development and how military conduct is forced to adapt in order to carry out a surprising maneuver. The results shows that the military action of performing a surprise attack has had a major development and is now carried out in a different stage of the attack..

This master essay deals with the changes in the use of and the abandonment of the Avebury monument and the change of the surrounding landscape during the late Neolitihic, about 3000 B.C, and into the Bronze age, about 1500 B.C. The change in the way people supported themselves, the development of agriculture, brought along many other changes as well. I am in this paper dealing with these issues, how and what lead up to these changes, the peoples own part in the development, and I am also looking into the fact that these changes might not have meant an end of old ideologies, but rather a development in the expression of beliefs where the monuments of the neolithic no longer had a place in society..

Title: A hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. To learn using tools to make software development more effective should be self-evident at a high level institution as the competitive industry races on. The absence of directives for programming students in Sweden to use source code management (SCM) was the basis for this report. The report describing the developing of a hosting service for software development to use SCM of Git, which includes a web application, storage, API and authentication of students. The project resulted in a hosting service and a smaller survey of how the today Swedish students using habits of SCM during their studies..

The aim of this thesis is to investigate, and thereby highlight, the new role of special needs teachers in conducting educational development in the fields of linguistics and literacy. The thesis defines how educational development, as described by special needs teachers, can be conducted and what conditions they perceive for such development. Factors which, according to special needs teachers, promote or hinder the development are discussed.The study uses a qualitative method involving knowledge-creating dialogues, analyzed hermeneutically, with two special needs teachers. Results are then discussed in light of relevant research and sociocultural theory. The study indicates that special needs teachers? main tool, to support teachers, is diverse use of dialogue.

The meeting industry is a growing industry around the world, and the technological development in recent decades is one of the contributing factors to the increased travel opportunities and meeting industry's expansion. It can be assumed that the technology could replace some of the personal meetings, but humans have always had a need to meet in physical locations in work related purposes, therefore there is no evidence that personal meetings will disappear. Technological development should be seen as complementary rather than a substitute to the existing professional meetings. Public and private sectors within countries has drawn attention to meeting industry's potential, as favored destinations in terms of economic administration, image creation, expansion and acquisition of further market share in the global market. Meeting industry is complex precisely because there are so many different actors and stakeholders that integrate.

The aim of our study was to examine how homosexual and heterosexual men and women are represented in the Swedish magazine QX, a magazine for gay, bisexual and transgender people. We wanted to find out what kind of roles the persons in QX appears in, and inquire the relationships that exist between them.We analyzed the texts in twelve magazines, from December 2008 to November 2009, in order to get the most current results as possible. We used a discourse analysis, with focus on identities, relationships and the representation of the world. Representations, gender, hegemonic masculinity and stereotypes have been significant theories to analyze our results.The results showed that the successful gay man is the most important person in QX. He is the perfect masculine macho fagot, who is highest in rank.