Human capital is professional service firms' most valuable resource and its quality is closely linked to the quality of its services. The purpose of this study is to investigate how professional service firms appraise their employees. A comparative study between an architecture firm and a management consulting firm is conducted with the aim to identify and explain similarities and differences in performance appraisal. Two qualitative case studies are performed and interviews as well as documents are used to explore the area. The thesis builds on a critical perspective and it has an explorative approach.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how nuns regard reading. The reading of the Bible is a regular element in their everyday life. This study however, focuses mainly on the nuns? self-chosen reading beyond the reading of the Bible.

Water connects heaven and earth. Water is the most obvious element of nature. To move in water is for me more than cooling of on a hot summer?s day. It is about freedom and the feeling of being above the state of things.

This study reviews outdoor educational activity, its contents and qualities, whose basis rests on reform educators as Dewey and Freire. These pedagogues? methodology is based on the interaction between theory and practice, reflection and action. It appears from previous research that: Nature has beneficial effects on human health; Physical activity has positive effects on schoolchildren's health and on their test scores in mathematics and swedish. Training in outdoor education for teachers has contributed to outdoor education having become part of elementary schools´ activities.The purpose of this study is to find out to what extent a School of Nature is useful for three primary school teachers´ activities.

This essay sets out to compare political participation in two e-petition systems: The Malmö initiative in Malmö, Sweden, and Better Reykjavik in Reykjavik, Iceland. The main question of the essay concerns the aggregative and deliberative qualities of the Malmö initiative and Better Reykjavik, as well as the relationship between aggregation and deliberation. This main question is divided into four subqueries that lead the empirical analysis. These are: (1) Which similarities and differences in terms of design are there between the Malmö initiative and Better Reykjavik? (2) To what extent have these systems mobilized an aggregative political participation? (3) What similarities and differences are there concerning aspects of deliberation? and (4) What is the correlation between aggregation and deliberation like in the two e-petition systems?The method in use is a comparative cross-sectional study with a 'most similar research design'.

Persons suffering from Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) struggle with complications within the functions that regulate and control the brain activities, due to deficiencies in these functions within the affected nerve-paths. ADHD is a cognitive function impairment characterised by inattention, impulsiveness and over activity. According to Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV), certain diagnostic criteria of ADHD must be fulfilled in order for a person to be diagnosed with ADHD. The everyday problems caused by ADHD are individual and medication can have positive effects relieving the person?s impairing behaviour.

Domestic weekly magazines in Sweden are characterized by an emphasis on practical editorial material such as cooking recipes and knitting patterns, and also contain a comparatively large share of reader material. This makes it possible to study the readers through texts produced by themselves. The aim of this study of columns of readers' tips on domestic work is to analyze how readers embody a specific femininity centered around the woman as responsible for the home, in the sense of everyday maintenance as well as aesthetic development. The author defines this femininity as "home maker". The theoretical framework for the analysis is the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu, and Jonathan Potter's and Margaret Wetherell's model of interpretive repertoire is also used where modality is discussed.

The purpose of this Bachelor degree project is to design different types of services that can increase the amount of re-used timber within the building sector and by that means improve their environmental efforts. By examining how the sectors environmental work concerning recycling and re-using timber as a building material is getting on at present, conclusions have been drawn about what further could be done for improvement.The project has shown that there is a scarcity of information and statistics within the sector, but that there are efforts in progress to change this. Questionnaires have been sent to a number of companies working with demolition and utilizing re-usable materials in order to find out what kind of problems there are within the trade. Unfortunately the survey gave insufficient result due to the low reply frequency.It is obvious that active environmental work within the building sector is important and the knowledge acquired while working with the project has led to the design of three suggestions for services regarded as being of interest for improving the negative environmental impact caused by the sector:Suggestion 1 ? Sale of construction parts prior to the demolition of a buildingSuggestion 2 ? Re-utilization circulation when manufacturing buildingsSuggestion 3 ? Education in relation to the purchase of houses  The positive and negative qualities of the suggestions have been examined with SWOT-analysis and further adaptions and the results have been interpreted.

The purpose of this study is to examine the implementation of the Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, CEDAW, in Uppsala local council and county council. The aim is to examine how the respondents, in their daily work, understand and implement the convention as well as how they consider the prerequisites for a successful implementation. The study was conducted using qualitative interviews with three civil servants and four politicians. The theoretical approach was implementation theory whose concepts willingness, comprehension and capability were used as tools for the analysis. The results portray CEDAW as a well-known treaty amongst the respondents but at the same time absent in local politics and everyday work.

What affect if an incident is reported?- an interview study with nursesABSTRACTEveryday in health care, there are incidents which can harm patients. However, reporting these incidents is not always a positive experience. The number of incident reports which are documented are a lot fewer than the number of incidents that actually occur. The purpose of the present study was to describe factors that affect nurses? decisions on whether to report an incident or not.

The aim of this study is to establish an understanding of how the concept educational materials can be interpreted, as well as to investigate how teachers describe their use of educational materials. The focus of this study is the subject ?Sign Language for the hearing?, at the upper secondary level. We, the authors of this essay, both have a great personal interest in this language. Swedish Sign Language is the sign language mainly used in Sweden.

Societies are surrounded by unaware attitudes and views about what is masculine and what is feminine and this can contribute to people being raced differently. Boys and girls are shaped to think and act in different ways from an early age because of their gender. According to the curriculum in the Swedish school system, the school has an important task to prevent such perceptions young people have about sex and gender. Reading books are still a central source where students gather information in the Swedish school. Therefore, I find it interesting to examine how gender is produced in three Swedish reading books from three different periods (1950s, 1970s and 2000s) to see what similarities and differences there are between the texts and the study has been based on three questions:How are men/boys and women/girls described in the reading books based on their characteristics, interests and pursuits?How much space in the texts are represented by men/boys and by women/girls?What masculinities and femininities can be found in the texts and which ones are the most desirable?I have used a text analysis in my research to analyse the three reading books and based my theory on that gender is a social construction.

The purpose of this study was to within a Swedish context and from five persons of foreign descent stories study how they have been affected by interpreting for their parents during their childhood and how this has affected the relationships within the family. Studies conducted in an American context have shown that children interpreting for their parents in everyday situations are prone to undertake roles similar of a family leader. Previous studies also show an increased danger of depression among children who interpreted for their parents. The study was conducted by the use of semi-structured interviews with five male respondents with a varying ethnic background. Using Antonovsky´s theoretical formulation ?sense of coherence? we were able to determine that although our respondents during their childhood were subjected to a large amount of stressful elements they also maintained a high sense of well-being.

It has long been discussed how to use music in a new way in the field of food and elderly, and in this study, the authors wanted to test this. Music is the language of emotions. It?s a powerful tool, but its effects are difficult to predict (Theorell, 2009). Malnutrition in the elderly is a serious condition that often gets overlooked (Edfors & Westergren, 2012).

This thesis examines young people's thoughts about their presence on social media. With asocial constructive approach the study focused on how young people think and act on socialmedia in relation to constructions of gender and normality. The analysis is based on fourgroup interviews with 13-year old boys and girls. The theoretical approach is based partly onsocial constructionism where discourses and ideas of normality are identified and analyzed.Erving Goffman's theory of social interaction was central to illustrate how young peoplepresents themselves based on the prevailing discourses. It is clear that they adjust theirrepresentations of themselves depending on the context.