As the environmental requirements on businesses increase from various stakeholders, the incentives for businesses to work more with environmental issues also increase. Historically, the requirements were focusing on companies with direct emissions from operations. Lately, the environmental impacts that occur indirectly as results of corporate activities have become more topical. Companies and organizations that mainly offer services often have a greater indirect than direct environmental impact. This is because they are affecting third parties, which in turn have a direct environmental impact.

This essay deals with the social services cooperation with the private sector relating to foster care. The aim was to examine whether and what the causes may be that the social service transfer tasks of authority to private actors. Furthermore, we have examined and discussed if such a working procedure can lead to consequences for the individual child and how / if the children's legal security is affected. Survey methodology is qualitative in nature where we conducted semi-structured interviews with three persons who work in different ways to be involved in work with a foster family. We have also made use of questionnaires sent to social workers around the country.The result has been interpreted on the basis inter alia, legal texts, legislative history, and two theories which have their origin in organization theory.

Every tenth year a financial crisis tend to interfere with an economy. Price bubbles with an accompanying market plunge are therefore not a new phenomenon. Such market disruptions have been causing problems for centuries, as history has a tendency to repeat itself. The intention with this study is to learn more about the bubble phenomenon and increase the knowledge in this area in order to, if possible, prevent such a thing from happening again. The purpose of the essay is to identify factors that significantly affected the development of the so called IT-bubble in Sweden and Finland during the years of 1995-2000.

Payday loans are becoming a challenge of increasing gravity for society. Statistics show that the number of young adults with financial issues related to such loans has been growing over the past few years. Despite efforts to halt this trend, little is changing. Government mandated warning labels in commercials are typically used to inform about the risks associated with the consumption of certain goods and services, such as alcohol and tobacco. Despite issues related to payday loans, there is currently no legislation in Sweden mandating the inclusion of warnings in marketing of such loans.

In Sweden, prostitution is politically defined as a social problem, more precisely, as a form of male violence against women. The definition is distinctly manifested in the government bill Kvinnofrid, characterised by the unique Swedish law that prohibits the purchase of sexual services.This thesis examines how the Swedish solutions of prostitution are carried out. By interviewing central actors working with prostitution in different ways we aim to answer the question: What measures are taken to decrease prostitution and what implications does the Swedish solution have?The analysis is divided into two parts. First, we analyse the concrete measures taken against prostitution ? what is done, how, and why? Second, we analyse the complexity of prostitution measures by applying complementary analytical perspectives: the symbolic and the discourse perspective.The study shows that measures taken to decrease prostitution vary and depend on individual actors? understandings of the political definition.

Previous studies have shown that there is a relationship between voluntary disclosure and analysts' forecast accuracy. However, there has been no research conducted specifically on bridges. Bridges contain information on how components such as price, volume, foreign exchange rates and acquisitions have impacted the financial performance between two periods. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the usage of bridges in quarterly financial information of companies listed on Nasdaq Stockholm. We provide a descriptive mapping of bridges and find that 30 out of 268 companies are presenting bridges as a part of their voluntary disclosures, with large firms being the most frequent users.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and develop a useful theory of human behavior that recognizes the importance of our emotions. The new framework, called the theory of emotional choice, is developed by a holistic method in which results from the fields of psychology, sociology and (neuro-) biology are used to mutually support the conclusions. The theory is distilled into six preliminary points, which are based on the finding that we are not thinking as logical, rational and longsighted as is often assumed. Instead the regular human thinking is suggested to be shortsighted, intuitive and ruled by our emotions and our needs for generality, causality and normality.To demonstrate the usefulness of the new framework, it is used in an analysis of financial bubbles. Additionally, the fields of negotiation, election and ethics are suggested as potentially interesting to analyze with the new theory..

The aim of this Masters thesis is to, from a users perspective, investigate which factors affect the library use for six persons with disabilities or visual handicaps. My method has been a case study and the methods applied are interviews and observation. As a theoretical framework I use Tom Wilsons theories and models about information behaviour and transform them to a model about library use. Answers are sought to the following questions: - What does the library use look like for six persons with disabilities or visually handicaps? - How do they experience the library in their own municipality? - Which factors affect the disabled persons library use and experience of the library? All interviewees showed a very positive attitude towards the library and the majority of them visited the library regularly or received audio books by mail.

 Collaboration is a tool many organizations use to achive a certain goal. In previous research it can be read about both advantages and disadvantages of collaboration and also that a well-functioning collaboration is difficult to achieve. In previous research there is a shortage of scientific researches illustrating the outcome of collaboration. I have chosen to examine the cooperation between the social services and schools of the municipality of Växjö. The purpose of this essay is to understand what experiences staff working with children/young people in school and social services have of collaboration between each others organizations.

The aim of the study was to examine how the public libraries participate in the integration of immigrants in the Malmö-/Lund region. Librarians and immigrants were interviewed about the services offered by the libraries in the area of multiculturalism and what kind of service that is requested by the immigrants. The interviews also included possibilities to contribute to increased knowledge among the native Swedish people about different cultures represented among immigrants in Sweden. From the qualitative analyses it is concluded that the libraries represented in the study contribute to the integration of immigrants. The respondents gave multiple examples of the libraries? usefulness in the integration process by offering immigrants possibilities to develop their knowledge in the Swedish language, and also to find information about the Swedish society and culture.

As a consumer, you can use cards for payment more or less everywhere you go, however, it is not certain that the card can be used for all purchases. When a customer pays with card there arises a card transaction fee charged to the merchant. This is a big problem for businesses where transactions with small amounts are a large portion of sales. An observation at the beginning of this study showed that seemingly similar merchants have chosen to solve this problem in different ways. Some merchant?s refuses card purchases below a certain amount, while others accept card with any purchase.

The purpose of this master thesis is to map and analyze the appropriate valuation approaches used for Intellectual Property rights and develope a model for valuing patents. This project has been executed on behalf of Electrolux?s Group Intellectual Property and is intended to be used for managerial purposes.Project limitations include patents that doesent concern technology oriented products and services, real option methods, financial forecasts, decisions concerning patents taken by the R&D division, patent applications in general and taking into account unexpected future management decisions regarding patents.Electrolux?s Intellextual Property team applies, manages and protects the groups Intellectual Property rights including patents, designs and trademarks. With an increased globalization and the rise of emerging markets, incentives have increased further to protect and safeguard the group?s innovations.Mainly there are three different valuations approaches for valuing intellectual property rights, these include the income based approach, cost base approach and market based approach.

The objective of this thesis is to examine the capital structure of Swedish small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Accounting data from Swedish game developers, combined with the result from a survey, is used to examine their financial conditions and capital structure decisions. We find that non-debt tax shield, firm size, growth opportunities and age are, to various extents, the determinants of capital structure in the game industry, while effective tax rate and asset structure have marginal effects. Our study also implicates that most of the existing capital structure theories can explain SMEs leverage decisions to some extent; however, some adaptation is needed to fit these theories into the SME context. Additionally, we find the existence of a financial gap in the game industry which might need efforts from both demand side and supply side to eliminate..

The main purpose of this master thesis is to identify the issues concerning the transformation process of a product oriented company into a service oriented company, and how these issues can be overcome. We will exemplify this by developing a dewatering pump rental concept for ABS, and identify the drivers and barriers for ABS when implementing the service oriented rental concept in Sweden and Poland. This master thesis is based on the systems perspective. The reason for this is the required holistic perspective, where the system has to be regarded from different points of departure in order to be understood. The theoretical studies include services and change management.

Employees of the criminal correctional system have a duty to notify social services if they suspect that children are exposed to maltreatment, according to Chapter 14, § 1 SoL. Despite the obligation to report, studies show that this is not done at all times. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze how the criminal correctional system in Kalmar looks at notification if they suspect that children are exposed to maltreatment. To examine this, we used qualitative research method based on semi-structuring interviews; these were carried out with six employees, working in the criminal correctional system. The answers that emerged during the interviews have been analyzed using Yeheskel Hasenfeld theory of human services organizations, and trough previous research.