This study deals with sustainability reporting in three governmental and three non-governmental Swedish companies in different industries. With increasing demands from the society regarding company?s CSR - Corporate social responsibility, the perspective of accounting gets broader and covers even non-financial information to meet not only the owners? demands but also others stakeholders' requirements. Sustainability has become an important tool for creating company?s business value and a positive sustainable external image.

In classic academic social studies of East Europe, terms as Communism and Post-Communism are commonly used to describe the main characteristics of this geographically imagined area. This paper makes a not so frequently seen attempt to apply Post Colonial Theory for the same field. With start point in Post Colonial theoretical writers, the author wants to find a East European Post Colonial version for the internal Europe which will supply tools for a discourse analysis of the European mind map divided into West and East. The material consists of interviews with three Swedish and three Czech officials, all working with European politics in their country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The analysis is carried out with inspiration of Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes Discourse theory.

Background: In previous studies on the subject hope it has been revealed that hope is an important condition for the experience of health, quality of life and well-being. In the literature hope is described as a great support in life that is vital for a person's life and for how the person manages to become afflicted with a fatal disease. Within palliative care the 6S: s is a person-centered model for care that is directed towards the promotion of patient´s participation, relief from suffering and enablement of well-being and support of the patient and his or her family members. Aim: To describe how patients find hope in their situation in palliative care, and to examine whether there is an interaction between the different dimensions of 6 S: s model and with patients' experiences of hope. Methods: This degree project is literature study.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the subject matter of visual communication in presentation brochures of two Swedish regions: Region Halland and Region Dalarna. My focuses are the following questions: what is the aim of the brochures and in what ways does the visual material relate to that aim? How can strategic communication be defined through a visual perspective and in what ways is it useful in the context of presentation brochures of the regions? What sort of communicational functions are specific for the visual material in relation to the written language of the brochures? Lead by these questions, I start by analyzing the brochures through a textual analysis and a social semiotic approach. The result shows that the aim seems to be both political and commercial, but that the visual elements relate more strongly to the commercial aim than to the political aim by the way they strive to present a positive image of the region. The visual elements work in strategic ways that I define as visual strategies.

I denna studie har vi gjort en fallstudie av Falkenberg där vi kunnat se att de är framgångsrika inom kulturella upplevelser. Enligt teorier om platsmarknadsföring bör en plats framhålla sådant som skiljer dem från andra i sin marknadsföring för att skapa konkurrensfördelar. I analysen framgår det dock att Falkenbergs stad inte har tagit tillvara på de kulturella upplevelseutbuden i sin marknadsföring. Staden har trots detta lyckats förbättra sin turismnäring de senaste åren varpå vi kan dra slutsatsen att även andra faktorer bidrar till att skapa ett attraktivt besöksmål. Vi har till exempel sett att engagerade människor, positiva attityder samt ett samarbete mellan stadens aktörer i ett nätverkär viktiga för att skapa en positiv image av staden..

Rapporten som följer är en analys av en metod som genererar regler från neurala nätverk. Metoden heter VI-Analysis (Validity Interval Analysis) och är framtagen av Sebastian B. Thrun [Thrun]. VI-Analysis arbetar på det sättet att det neurala nätverket ses som en svart låda där endast de inputvärden och outputvärden som finns i nätverket används som underlag när regler ska genereras. Dessa inputvärden och outputvärden kommer sedan att få tillåtna intervall av VI-Analysis.

The aim of this essay is to study how cultures are presented in English textbooks for A-level students in Sweden. The aim is divided into three research questions, what does culture in English teaching mean, how is the English-speaking world presented in the textbooks and is the image that is presented stereotyped or does it try to challenge it? The study comprises of four textbooks from 1998-2008. The theoretical frame used in the essay is Edward Said?s Orientalism.

Background and problem: The background to this study is the organizations increased difficulty to retain employees in the organization when more and more employees today choose to do their career in several organizations. The problem to keep the employees in the organization leads to several problems where the loss of experience reduces efficiency and increased risks and cost associated with recruitment are some problems that arise. The problem therefore faced for this study is: How can opportunities for career development within an organization created to get employees to stay over time?Purpose and method: The purpose for this study is to describe how organizations can create opportunities for the development of career that gets employees to stay within the same organization and make their career in this organization. The method used for this study is a qualitative approach where data is collected through semi-structured interviews in a case study.Empiricism: The empirical result have shown there are four factors that an organization should overhaul to create an opportunity for the development of a career that gets employees to stay in an organization over time.

Bolivia is a multiethnic country where the indigenous people constitute the majority of the population. Despite two decades of attempts to take the democracy further is its foundation more volatile than ever. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to examine if exclusion is taken place in Bolivia from year 1982 until today and if so in which way political exclusion constitute problems of democracy in Bolivia. The answer depends on the understanding of democracy used in the analysis. In this thesis I use theories of process-, participation- and deliberative democracy.

This study aims to analyse the Swedish Armed Forces website. Through a content analysis with a gender- and organisational culture perspective the study attempts to see how the Swedish Armed Forces portrays women and men. The Swedish Armed Forces is one of the strongest masculine gender coded organisations in our time. Distance caused by gender roles between women and men has been a problem within the organisation, and at the same time they have expectation?s from the society to alter these problems.

Title:Employer Branding ? Medias Influence on Vattenfall?s Employer Brand (Employer Branding ? Medias påverkan på Vattenfalls arbetsgivarvarumärke) Purpose/Aim:The aim of this study is to examine how a negative media image influences the Employer Brand of the Swedish company Vattenfall. First of all I will examine if Vattenfall have a strong Employer Brand and then if the media image have any influence over the Employer Brand. My hypothesis is that Vattenfall?s Corporate Culture is a big part of the Employer Brand and because of that negative media images has no power to influence on Vattenfall?s Employer Brand.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the conditions that prevail when companies put their marketing in social media with the purpose of creating a perception of the risks and opportunities it brings to businesses and ultimately how it may affect the corporate image and identity.Theories: The basis of the problem area are presented through a theoretical framework with the purpose of highlighting the notions of social media, communi- cation, marketing communication, groundswell, corporate identity and image.Methodology: To investigate the research questions this study adopted a qualitative approach in which the authors study the properties of a phenomenon in order to seek a deeper understanding of the problems we have presented. There is an exploratory approach to knowledge and the authors have chosen to conduct qualitative research interviews based upon three themes: driving forces, challenges and impacts.Conclusion: The study revealed that traditional models of communication are no longer applicable in social media. Companies are up for a challenge and must clarify their sole purpose when establishing communication in the social landscape. The general motivation for marketing in social media is making profit, however, building relationships is not a natural motive for most companies. The risks companies expe- rience is the exposure caused by social media and the study also reveals that this fear is firmly attached to their lack of knowledge of these new channels of communicat- ion and their primary areas of use which indicates that skilled employees plays a vi- tal role with their use of social media in their communication process.

The strive for control over employees has developed throughout the years. This paper has its focus on how normative control can work as a powerful method to create and uphold a sought for behavior. Many companies have found an interest in a higher moral stance to get competitive advantages, and offer their customers and partners a more ethical product. This phenomenon has in Sweden resulted in a sphere of companies who has earned the R-licens. The R-licens is earned by companies if they fulfill ethical and cultural criteria.

Responsible production is a subject of increasing importance for companies toadopt and communicate to their environment and many companies choose to implementenvironmental ? and ethic considerations into their brand strategy. There is, however, adividing line between companies according to what extent they choose to implementresponsible production into their brand strategy and to which extent they choose tocommunicate it to their stakeholders and surroundings. It is the hypothesis about a dividingline that is the foundation for this essay and something we believed could be interesting forfurther analysis.The purpose of our essay is to find out how the brand strategy of a company is affected by theresponsible production and in what extent they communicate it to their environment. Byanswering those questions we hope to find out why some companies communicateresponsible production more actively than others.We have conducted in-depth interviews with the Swedish clothing companies; MariaWesterlind, Zion and Dem Collective and we have through our analysis reached interestingconclusions.

The aim of this thesis was to develop an objective and automatic method for identifying capillaries in microscope images of the skin. Furthermore, statistical data about the identified capillaries and the capillary distribution should be computed and stored in a database. The method was implemented using the platform independent programming language Java. An analysis of microscope improvement using various polarization filter setups and wavelength filtershas also been performed, as well as a pilot study of the effect of applying a local anaesthetic cream on the skin. The method is developed and aimed at research on various pathological skin conditions affecting the capillary distribution.