Since July 2005 the major companies listed on the Swedish stock exchanges are required to apply the Swedish Code of Corporate Governance. The code states that companies shall have a nomination committee responsible for nominating new board candidates and seek to obtain gender equality in the Board of Directors. This paper examines the trend of board as well as nomination committee composition among Sweden's 60 largest publicly traded companies between 2005 and 2008. Our overall finding is that neither the board nor the nomination committee composition has changed to a notable extent during the period and that the share of newly appointed female board members has actually decreased. However, the trends vary between different sectors.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate Swedish as a second language acquisition in a group of students with diverse culturul backgrounds. my intension is to find out if a dialogical posture in teaching with focus on the students earlier knowledge,experianses, thoughts and feelings, will contribute to a teaching enviroment where the students can express them selves and listen to each other. the teachers task is to help the students to explore their own thinking.According to the theoretical base of the essay, sucessfull second language asquisition occours in a meaningsfull context through dialogue and interaction between students and teacher as well as between student and student.I have used a qualitative method consisting in participating as a teacher in this group of second language learners during four lessons, observing, taking notes and writing diary. The teaching material used during the lessons was a book (fiction but based on a true story) and the dialogue in the group proceeded from the story we read together..

Corporate failures pose a problem for banks, investors, customers, employees andinsurers. With a multivariate discrimination method, the study aims to find the specificfinancial ratios that most accurate reveals a company's financial health, which is ofinterest to all of the above parties. The data consist of 1042 Swedish small enterprisesand 30 different financial ratios between the years 2005?2007. The result shows thatbankrupt firms three years before bankruptcy have a disadvantaged capital structurewith poor solvency and high debt.

Quality assurance for Scania engine componentsScania engines have become one of the world?s most renowned corporations in themanufacturing of engines. This is mostly due to the quality and performance thatScania have shown. However, this does not stop Scania from trying to achieve moresuccess in the fields of development and research to assure the quality of theirengines.The purpose of this thesis is to show how Scania ensures the quality of the enginecomponents, both those who made externally and internally at Scania, also inclusivethe manufacturing and assembly process.Three engine components were examined: D16 block engines, water pump andXP-Iinjectors. The study included the whole process from the step of supplying therow materials to the last step in production functional test.In this thesis an investigation of how other companies are working with qualityassurance was conducted.

In order to achieve comparability, which is one of the fundamental principles of accounting, companies should be consistent concerning the accounting policies they use. Only under certain circumstances changes in accounting policies are allowed, and when there is a change in accounting policies, it is important that the change is reported in a way that assures that the financial reports still achieve comparability. The purpose of this thesis is to establish which rules and recommendations about changes in accounting policies that exist in Swedish and German law and what their meaning is. Further, the purpose is to compare these rules and recommendations and discuss their differences and similarities, advantages and disadvantages. Since publicly traded European companies will be obliged to prepare their consolidated accounts in conformity with International Accounting Standards (IAS) from 2005, I also describe the content of IAS 8 which deals with changes in accounting policies, and discuss what the consequences of this transition might be for Swedish and German publicly traded companies considering changes in accounting policies.

Background: It is today common for companies to provide some sort of incentive for CEO's and senior management positions to motivate, retain and benefit employees within a company. This is in order to drive the goals of the CEO and management in the direction that is desired by the owner. Currently, the Swedish centre-right government has forbidden the use of such variable pay within state-owned companies. There are two different attitudes to variable pay, one that is in favour and one that rejects it. However most people agree on the fact that a well-functioning incentive scheme can be of great strategic importance for a company.Approach: has variable pay to CEO's had any effect on the company's profitability.Aim: the aim of the study is to compare companies who use variable pay to CEO's with companies that do not in relation to their profitability in terms of profit margins, yearly performance, returns on total capital and returns on equity.Method: the study uses a quantitative approach.

It is important for all companies to be seen on a competitive market. It?s all about positioning yourself so that you?re seen and that you?re are attractive for both customers and employees. A crucial factor to achieve this are how the brand are handle directly by the company it self and by the market. Establishing a brand on the market is not easy and it takes time to establish what the company stands for. To be able to succeed with this you need to have a strategy and a strong belief on the brand.

Today?s companies offer their products and services through multiple distribution channels in an increasing extent, in order to reach bigger markets and more customers. Multiple channels result in an increased risk for channel conflict.This essay is an exploratory and descriptive study with the purpose to explore some companies? channel conflicts on the basis of sales commission and price differences. A case study has been made at two different companies and the empirical material has been collected with qualitative interviews.We found more channel conflicts in the company that uses sales commissions than in the company that doesn?t.

The purpose of this study was to find out how special needs users ' autonomy and influence in their daily routines is described by their assistants. What interpretations of the concepts of self-determination and influence on special needs users' daily routines emerge from the assistants statements and what conditions can be seen? To reach a conclusion, focus group as a method was used. The focus group met twice to discuss this topic. The diamond method was used as stimulus material to support the discussion in the focus group.

Many companies are currently working to optimize and streamline their processes and production lines to achieve higher profitability. In increasingly competitive markets, companies are working to find solutions to increase the value of their production with such a small use of resources as possible. A tool used to accomplish this is the Lean management system. Lean comes from the production system that Toyota has been developing since the early 1900's, The Toyota Production System (TPS). The Lean philosophy helps companies, by working towards continuous improvement in its operations, to achieve higher customer satisfaction, more efficient production and ultimately higher profitability. Many companies are working to implement Lean in their organization. But there are many who fail to implement a complete change towards Lean.

The aim of this thesis is to answer whether a group of databases dedicated to selling books or a group of databases dedicated to lending books is more efficient. The measurements used to determine the efficiency of the two kinds of databases are Cumulated Gain and precision in modified versions. The inquiry has been conducted thus that the same 18 queries have been put forth to six databases and these results have consequently been judged according to relevance on a 4-graded scale by five respondents. The rankinglevels have then been merged to one average value per respondent and ranking. These values have then been used to determine CG/iCG/nCG and P@n per query, rank 1-10, per database and per group (the groups being STORE (BUTIK) and LIBRARY (BIBLIOTEK).

Consumption of meat and poultry has increased during the last ten years while the production in Sweden has decreased. Cheap imports are competing with Swedish products and consumers, restaurant and retail let the price decided what to purchase. Swedish food producers can become better at communicating the added values that meat and poultry produced in Sweden has. Social media gives companies a possible tool for communication in order to communicate and create a relationship with consumers. The rise of social media does not only affect consumer decisions making, but also corporate communication. The objective of this project is to investigate how social media can connect the farmer to the consumer.

In companies today, it is becoming more and more common for employees to work in a project based environment, as a result many companies have developed their own project models. Companies with a well developed product culture are striving to improve their existing models, and businesses relatively new in the marketplace are aiming to reach a high level of maturity as well as reach high levels of efficiency in the shortest time possible. As the number of mature and efficient companies with well developed project model increase, so does the level of competition in the market. Since a well developed project model often leads to a more efficient and accurate way of carrying out the project, which in turn leads to shorter delivery time towards the client. This is crucial as time is one of the most valuable parameters of competition in today?s business environment.

Title: Creativity and blockings: Non-musicians? experiences of music making The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the ability of music-making can benefit from and/or be inhibited by extra-musical factors, such as one's own or other people's opinions, criticism, prejudice and values. An experiment was carried out, where 10 nonmusicians were instructed to solve a compositional problem (writing pieces of music to a picture) which had been expressed in two different ways, one of which (A) was intended to block creativity and the other (B) to facilitate the creative process. All subjects also had to answer a questionnaire, where their experiences in connection with the task and their attitudes towards music and composition were mapped. The result was that all subjects succeeded in composing one or more pieces of music, regardless of which instruction they had been given.

This study illuminates one part of the mathematic teaching in school, which is mathematical problem solving in groups. It examines teacher?s and student?s ideas about what conditions it takes to be able to learn in groups. Further on, it studies the importance of group structure when it comes to working with mathematical problem solving in groups from a process focused and/or a product focused learning. Through observations of student groups and interviews with the students and the mathematic teachers, the material has been compiled and analysed under three different headings: conditions for learning in a mathematical problem solving situation, importance of group structure in a mathematical problem solving situation and process versus product.