Parenting and parental leave in a career context is a highly topical subject in which discussions about gender equality and corporate discrimination against parents occur daily. Media has recently raised the theory of parenting and parental leave as having positive impacts on personal development, such as creativity enhancement, which may promote the individual's work performance. Despite the subject's significant value for society and organizations, no scientific research is to be found. This paper examines how an individual's creativity at work is affected when becoming a parent and if parental leave has any contributory effect. Furthermore, the paper identifies and scrutinizes four creativity theories that may help explain these changes in creativity.

The largest project at the AICG lab at Linköping University, Cognitive models for virtual characters, focuses on creating an agent architecture for intelligent, virtual characters. The goal is to create an agent that acts naturally and gives a realistic user experience. The purpose of this thesis is to develop and implement an appropriate learning model that fits the existing agent architecture using an agile project methodology. The model developed can be seen as an online unsupervised reinforcement learning model that enhances experiences through reward. The model is based on Maes model where new effects are created depending on whether the agent is fulfilling its goals or not.The model we have developed is based on constant monitoring of the system.

Open access to scientific literature on Internet is a concept which is supposed to change librarians' work. The aim of the thesis was to examine librarians' perception of Open access. A questionnaire survey was conducted among librarians at libraries with specialisation in technique, natural sciences, medicine and pharmacy in Sweden. Even though Open access can be regarded as an alarming for librarians' work, the results of the survey showed that the future of the librarians' profession can be positive if they flexibly adopt their work routines according to changes in publication forms and library users' needs..

The objective of this thesis was to get more knowledge about how to design a dairy farm reducing the working hours and the work tasks whit high work load. I will try to reduce the working hours and the tasks whit high work load on my own farm witch I am about inherit. Today, the old stanchion barn has room for about 60 cows and 74 young cattle and need two men to run it every day. The total acre is 188 hectare, 100 hectare forest, 65 hectare farmlands and 23 hectare natural pasture. I have studied two solutions. In the first solution, I will use my old barn for young cattle and build a new barn for the cows.

This thesis presents my work at the company Fatshark AB in Stockholm. My supervisor Rikard Blomberg, who works as a chief technology officer at Fatshark and is one of the owners of the company, explained that they had experienced weaknesses in the methodology used when developing heads up displays (HUD) for their games. In the latest production, Lead  and Gold, the HUD had been redesigned a number of times, becoming an unnecessarily big expense due to the number of work hours invested. In modern software development, an iterative workflow is commonly encouraged. Despite this fact, the work efficiency could likely be increased by setting up guidelines as a help in the process of developing HUDs and reviewing the solutions.

Since a lot of the power in a professional bureaucracy lays within the operative profession with its strong corporate culture and strong co-workers the executive occupy a weak position. Their power comes from the complexity of the operative professionals work and the difficulties to supervise that work. To avoid conflicts it?s important to make all expectations on the executive equivalent. This can be done by defining the roles of the executives in a philosophy.

This paper presents the results of a workplace study of two smaller companies in the design industry. The core issue has been to investigate the companies use of technical tools and to what extent social praxis influence the daily work. The methods used are based on a qualitative analysis of interviews and observations. Various kind of work procedures, such as verbal and computerized, have been identified, but the most important occurrence was how spontaneous conversations between employees required certain flexibility, since the actors repeatedly were required to change focus and quickly perceive different information. For that reason, a thesis has been defined regarding how the use of spontaneous communication put an indirect need of a flexible working environment and also how this lead to more significant participation and exchange of information, as well as more awareness at the companies..

By studying the forms of work and methods teachers choose for their teaching on the Business and Administration Programme and by examining the experiences gained by these teachers, I hope to gain a clearer insight into how the demands of national policy/governing documents are met in the actual teaching of the courses within the programme. In my qualitative study,teachers in a team from a Business and Administrative Programme have been my informants. The team combines multiple forms of work and methods in line with the intentions of the national policy/governing documents. Students usually have an unbroken school day with block teaching where they work with case studies and interdisciplinary  work. Morals and ethics are integrated in class.

Abstract Essay in political science, C-level, by Jenny Senemgen, spring semester 2008. Tutor: Michele Micheletti. ?Hennes & Mauritz ? a case study of their CSR work and collaborations with NGOs.?The purpose of this essay is to examine if and how the transnational corporation Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) collaborates with NGOs in it?s work with human rights for workers and increased corporate social responsibility. I have looked at H&Ms CSR report from 2006, the Swedish network Clean Clothes Campaigns report about Swedish corporations in the textile industry and if their CSR work during the past ten years have given any results and I have also done two interviews with two NGOs.The examination is thereby a case study where I?m examining H&Ms CSR work and its collaborations with NGOs and the NGO?s opinions about H&Ms CSR work.My delimitation lies in the fact that I only have examined one corporation and what two NGOs thinks about the corporation.

The object of this examination project is to produce a method of work sampling at Rapid Granulator AB. The aim is to perform the method at the company and evaluate if it is executable. The study is delimited to the basic construction of the 45-series in the assembly hall.Preparations to produce the method of the work sampling resulted in definitions of activities, a form and a product tree. Several days were spent studying the assembling to learn and understand the entirety.The work sampling result showed a large amount of no value adding time that was used in the assembling. Some of the activities could be reduced and we observed some problems during the assembly process.

Throughout the years more and more charitable organisations have appeared and the competition between them has increased. This has forced the charities to use more marketing strategies in their work in order to strengthen their competitiveness. Research in philanthropy in terms of economy and marketing has been neglected in Sweden and the research that is done today is mainly focused on why individuals donate to charity. A donation, according to the writers of this thesis, has been seen as an economical activity and can therefore be explained and understood through economical models and theories. This thesis aims to see how a contributor to charity makes the decision to donate money, consequently see how the donation decision process actually works from a theoretical model of a buying decision process from marketing literature. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to from a buying decision process concerning products describe the donation decision process for contributors to charity. By achieving this purpose the writers aim to compare if a donation decision process go through certain steps similar to a buying decision process.

The research work performed in this thesis has been carried out at the Production Tech-nology Centre where the Thermal Spray research group of University West has its work-shop and labs.This research work has been performed in collaboration with the International Advanced Research Centre for Powder Metallurgy and New Materials (ARCI), Hyderabad, India.First of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks and gratitude to my supervisors Dr. Nicolaie Markocsan and Dr. Nicholas Curry for their guidance, great support and valuable suggestions without which this work could not have been possible. I would also like to thanks Prof. Per Nylén for keeping faith in me and providing me an opportunity to work at PTC, which is a great place to perform research.

This thesis is carried out on behalf of watermixer manufacturer Ostnor AB in Mora.The thesis deals with the area of Article Bound Instructions (ABI) at the company'sassembly department, regarding the layout and management routines involved withthese instructions.In the current situation there are problems with no uniformity in the manner in whichthe ABI is written, then referred to both the civil structure, images and specificityrates in the text.Another problem is that operators do not make use of the ABI that are available inthe current situation, and that there are no clear procedures for who has theresponsibility to write, update and change these ABI.During this work has several people that were identified as key personnel of thethesis held in order to get a handle on how the current situation of the variousobjects of the work looks like, and to examine different desires about the future ofthese should look like from the different subjects perspectives been interviewed.During the work, a number of deficiencies, including that the current program that isused to write the ABI, Lotus Notes, do not possess near the prerequisites for being asimple program to deal with when writing the ABI, which is a condition since wishesare about to put the responsibility for the ABI generation to the departmentsoperators, since their main task is to assemble and do not bother with a program in acomputer.The result of this work has generated new layout and structure of the ABI, designedto be used continuously in the assembly for evaluation, routines regardingresponsibility of the ABI for the Department of Production Engineering (PT),procedures for how the ABI should be written regarding amount of detaileddescriptions in the text and use of pictures.In addition, proposals for further work and improvements has been developed basedon experience during the work and presented at the end of the report..

This study, entitled A constant balance ? Gender equality work in an organisation dominated by women and an organisation dominated by men focuses on attitudes towards gender equality issues in two organisations ? one that is dominated by women and one that is dominated by men. The study is based on the Doing gender theory, which primarily means that gender is something people do, it is constantly changing and it depends on the surrounding context.The organisations in the study are both working with gender equality issues, but the attitudes towards gender equality work are ambiguous. The primary gender equality issue in both organisations is to increase the number of employees of the non-dominant gender. The gender equality work in both organisations is formally supported but it is also being met with informal resistance.

Laboratory work is a big part of chemistry education in high school. During our student training placement we have noticed that the laboratory work is not fully utilized to develop students´ chemistry knowledge. This problem made us want to investigate how the laboratory work in chemistry could be set, to become more meaningful for students. We introduced two preparation methods, and examined the outcome of students learning experiences and their acquisition of chemistry knowledge. This was examined both through surveys and observation.