It is important that organizations today focus on continuous improvements in order to face the growing competition in the world. A company needs a corporate culture that supports and encourages the employees to be creative and innovative in their work. This is necessary for the company if they are striving towards continuous learning and development within their organization.The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how the culture differences between Sweden and China affect Sandvik AB. We will also study how the company manages continuous improvements and what consequences culture differences have on their work.Our paper is a single case study at Sandvik AB in Sweden and China. We have visited Sandvik in Sandviken to conduct a series of interviews with employees of different position within the company and with dissimilar work tasks.

Background: Enterprises often refer to their employees as ?Our most valuable assets? in annual reports and other written statements. In reality, employees are seen as an expense rather than an asset in annual reports and the voluntary disclosure is often insufficient. Human capital disclosure has been discussed through decades and the latest topic in voluntary disclosure is called integrated reporting. Knowledge firms should disclose more about their employees than industrial companies due to the fact that the employees are a considerably more important asset to these types of enterprises.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to study the disclosure of human capital, compare the disclosures between knowledge firms and industrial companies, and study the development of the human capital disclosures between the years 2003-2013.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the Swedish governments discourse on integration of immigrants and thereby examine what social reality it constructs. The aim is to examine how integration and immigrants are constructed within the discourse. The method and theory being used in this essay is discourse theory. As a methodological instrument we use the policy on functional impairment as a comparison. The material being analyzed in this essay is political documents on the strategy on integration policy and the strategy on the policy of functional impairment.

This study aims to examine how the interventions for homeless persons in the municipality of Kalmar are organized. The study is based on four half-structured qualitative interviews with both representatives from different instances and also from persons who have experience of being homeless.The theoretical bases we have used to analyze the material are organization theory, specifically the concept of bureaucracy. Our results show that homelessness is not seen as a problem in itself, since the general view is that homeless people often have a complex problem scenario where drug- and alcohol abuse and mental illness are common.It is often the latter that takes priority in the interventions and the housing question is therefore neglected. We also found that social services do not have a satisfactory structure around the organization of the work on homelessness. They do not have any specific device in Kalmar that focus on homelessness issues with the result that the existing units are forced to take care of the work of homelessness.

This work aims to evaluate the possibility of using a graphical programming language to develop software for a digital signal processor. A fixed-point digital signal processor called Blackfin BF-537 is used for this. Instead of using conventional programming languages, like C or assembler, for software development the possibilities to use a graphical environment to fill the same purpose are examined. The development environment primarily used is NI LabVIEW, but also the use of Mathworks Matlab Simulink is investigated. A variety of programs consisting of various signal processing operations and utilities are developed using these development environments.

The high incidence of cranial cruciate ligament injury in dogs results in both suffering and significant costs due to treatment and care of affected dogs. Today there are several different technics for surgical treatment in dogs with ruptured cranial cruciate ligament. At University Animal Hospital (UDS), SLU, in Uppsala two fundamentally different methods; TPLO (Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy) and external fixation with suture material are practiced. The aim of this study was to estimate if the different surgery technics result in any difference regarding the function of the dog in a long term perspective. Since motion and function are very affected by arthritis, was the purpose also to determine if there are any differences in developing arthritis between dogs surgical treated with external fixation respectively with TPLO. Development of arthritis is common after surgery or traumatic injuries in a joint, such as cruciate ligament rupture. Unfortunately was the number of dogs in the study to small to achieve two comparable groups.

Good conditions in the workplace, fairness in the workplace and the social differences contribute to a general improvement in public health. A health-promoting leader is working to create a workplace that promotes health, supports its employees and contributes to their wellbeing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the first-line managers in the city of Västerås experience and deal with their conditions and obstacles in the health-promoting leadership. A qualitative approach was chosen and the selection was six first-line managers working in three different areas of the City of Västerås. Managers were interviewed by an interviewguide and the material was analyzed with a manifest content analysis, with an inductive approach.

Today?s society has become more and more digitalized and we have access to more information than ever before. This has had a major impact on organizations and their work processes. For example have intranets become a common technical groupware to communicate and get relevant information from inside the organization. A common problem related to this is an over-reliance on the technology, where there's not taking into account that some informal and communicative means are difficult to occur through digital resources.The aim of this study is to examine the use of an intranet in a municipality, which consists of many different employees with various work situations.

The study is a case study about the green urban district, East Kvillebäcken, located in Gothenburg, Hisingen. East Kvillebäcken is the first urban district in Sweden with ambition to build sustainable according to the certification system Miljöbyggnad, which make it a pioneer project. The purpose is to investigate the upcoming and the meaning of the green urban district in East Kvillebäcken and show how public employees think the urban district can affect social, ecologic and economic aspects in the area. Dialogue interviews were done with four public employees, one estate agent and two residents. Local plans and other authority documents were used to get a deeper understanding for the case study.

Music streaming services are changing the music industry from the inside. After being struck by the piracy wave in the early 2000's, the industry was characterized by declining sales, layoffs, and a seemingly futile battle on what had become a culture of copyright infringement. After the successful launch of the music streaming service Spotify, the Swedish recording industry took a turn for the better. Music streaming services are creating both new opportunities and challenges to the music industry. This paper aims to study some of the opportunities and challenges concerning the creation of new music.

We would like to gain a more in depth knowledge of whether the modern orientations both within corporate governance and control philosophy lay the foundation for enterprises? more sustainable success. These both modern orientations are increasingly focusing on the importance of enterprises? setting of goals and visions on the basis of stake holders? interests and the employees? more active engagement in and motivation for the goal achievement. Despite these common inherent characteristics, it is not evident from current scientific debate how such integration actually emerges in the control philosophies of the enterprises.

This examination has been made in cooperation with Jernhusen which is an estate company owned by the government, with estates along the railways in Sweden. This assignment is to help Jernhusens business area Projektfastigheter with their experience feedback, which is to-day almost absent. Business area Projektfastigheter has the task of supporting Jernhusens three other business areas with skills and resources for the estate projects that Jernhusen runs. Jernhusen must become stronger with the collecting of experiences and as a business because of the liberalization of the railways, which leads to a more competitive market. A tool for this is successful experience feedback.The concept of experience feedback is to gain experience across a variety of cases, where individuals and/or groups can chose situations with relevant similarities and differences with current case.

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.

Thinning is the partial removal of trees in a forest stand prior to final harvest. The term can be divided in pre-commercial thinning where little if any volume is removed from the stand and commercial thinning where removals are intended to provide a positive economic result. From a silvicultural point of view, the goal of thinning is to enhance future crop tree quality by removing low-quality stems and providing sufficient space for the accelerated development of retained ones (Huuskonen & Hynynen, 2006). The goals of this study was to see if commercial thinning could positively affect the short and medium term timber supply (MTTS) in the Interior regions of British Columbia (BC), and whether or not Scandinavian forestry practices could be adopted in the BC context. The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) has created significant forest planning problems in BC. The annual allowable cut (AAC) was raised to capture beetle-killed timber while still merchantable.

Boliden Mineral Ab's mine in Garpenberg, Dalarna is going through a massiveexpansion. The annual ore production is being increased from 1,4 million tons to 2,5million tons in less than two years period of time. Along this expansion thedepartment of mining techniques is administrating a project of optimizing the shortterm planning for the mining production. Garpenberg have since mid 90s storedinformation from all mining processes in a database.The information consists of time data from all the different activities required in themining process, for example charging, blasting, loading etc. The database also containstime data of delays that are affecting the production.