The use of balanced scorecards have spread explosively throughout the world during the last decade. This management tool have become very common in a vide spread variety of organisations on all continents. Many balanced scorecard fails though and scorecard theorists often blame the identification- and implementation process as they claim that these lay the foundation for the use of the tool. As my literature study shows, academic research on the area is rare. Particularly the effect on the implementation process from organisational dynamics and organisational structures needs further research.

Title:Product abandonment ? A comparative study of five ABB-units Level:Master thesis in Business administration, spring 2011.Purpose:The purpose of this paper is to through a comparative analysis examine how different companies, within the same group, works with product abandonment and what factors influence the process.Problem:How important is situational and product specific factors in a product abandonment process in which the organizational factors are constant?Method:This study is based on primary as well as secondary data where interviews represent the primary data. Interviews, following the same interview guide, were made with five companies within the same group.Result:The results from the empirical studies presented in the text below recurring themes derived from the framework.Conclusions:Our conclusions are that the importance of product specific factors is of significant matters in a product abandonment process, even when organizational factors are constant. We base that on that although the companies are within the same group, under the same strategic direction and constructed according to the same organizational structure the product abandonment process is different for the respective companies.Keywords:Product abandonment, product deletion, product elimination, weak products, ABB .

The goal of this project was to together with Cochlear Bone Anchored Solutions AB develop a new cleaning tool for their Baha?systems. Cochlear BAS AB is a daughter company to Cochlear Limited based in Sydney, Australia. Cochlear BAS AB is situated in Gothenburg and with its 150 employees develop and manufacture the Baha?system.

The aim of the study was to investigate the performance of postlingually deaf adults on parts of the swedish dysarthria test Dysartribedömningen, and to compare these results with a matched group consisting of normal hearing speakers without any known speech disorder. The group consisted of 17 participants ranging between 42-86 years of age. Participants were assessed focusing on articulation, prosody, intelligibility and through a self-assessment of communicative participation. There was a statistically significant difference between groups on prosody that manifested primarily as a slower speaking rate in the cochlear implant users. No significant differences between groups as to articulation, intelligibility or communicative participation could be found.

Research about social support and social networks has mostly concerned the impact on a person?s wellbeing and health. However an aspect largely neglected is how social support within the social networks can affect the process of giving up a drug abuse. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of what role the social support within different relationships can have on the process of giving up drug abuse. Furthermore the aim is to examine how a self-help group can provide social support in the transitional period after leaving a drug abuse.

This thesis has been done at the Unversity of Örebro for Örebro University Hospital (USÖ). In our work we have developed a product for hearing tests to determine hearing thresholds of small children. Our product contains software and a control surface for controlling two separate screens. One of the demands was that our software could handle big file libraries. Reliability and simplicity were essential for the user.In our work we have utilized programming of both microcontrollers and Windows software.

This thesis investigates and emphasises on the way students at Växjö police academy describe their socialization into their profession as police officers and the creation of profession identity. The scientist?s main questions are: In what way do the students at Växjö police academy describe their socialization process into the police profession? What role does the organisation play in the socialization process of the police students? How do the students develop their police identity? Which qualities are encouraged? The study is based on qualitative interviews with nine police students, performed in groups of three. Group theory, role theory, and organization theory are applied to the material to provide an understanding through which it is possible to understand the process of socialization. The study shows that there seems to be patterns in the description of a professional identity.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the attitudes of deaf and hear-impaired people towards libraries, information, and culture. The issues are: What are the attitudes of the informants towards libraries and culture? What do reference group theory and the theory of information access-/avoidance implicate concerning the information behaviour of the informants? In-depth interviews with five deaf and hear-impaired university students have been carried out in this qualitative study. The world of deaf and hear-impaired people is presented as well as a survey of political guidelines to make, for example, libraries and theatres more available to disabled people. The research overview analyses scholarly studies on deaf and hear-impaired people.

BackgroundThe opportunity for cochlear implantation has now extended beyond children who are only deaf or hard of hearing. Children who are deaf blind from birth or early in life are receiving implants, but very limited research has been done for this population, and this raises important issues. AimThe aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of hearing and vision impairment or deaf blindness in children with Cochlear Implants in Sweden and to investigate the diagnoses issues among these groups of subjects. Material and MethodSubjects with an age between 1-18 years were ascertained through multiple sources and almost complete ascertainment was achieved.ResultsA total of 77 subjects with a referring diagnosis of combined hearing and vision disorder or deaf blindness were ascertained. Out of those, 30 subjects were excluded.

During the last year in the Innovation Engineering Program, at Halmstad University, a degree project was performed that was carried out during Fall semester in 2006 and Spring semester 2007. The project was performed by two students in corporation with LIC Audio AB, a company in Stockholm. The degree project was meant to result in a communication aid for people with a cognitive handicap. The project focused on people suffering from dementia because of the expressed need within this group. This aid should first and foremost help in a conversation between a person with dementia and another person, like a relative or nursing home staff.

Our essay is about the grammar structure that the participants in A- and B- level of a school in the middle of Sweden, in the subject, Swedish as a second language, process. We have collected written productions from an A-level group and a B-level group and made a comparison between them morphologically and syntactically according to the processability theory by Pienemann.Processability theory was applied to Swedish by Pienemann & Håkansson (1999), with five steps in syntax and four steps in morphology. It turned out that the B-level group had much higher processing level of grammar than the A level group and one of the reasons for this can be that grammar is explicitly taught during the first year of studying Swedish as a second language in the school we have chosen to study..

This study investigates the relationship strategies the group Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification holder has with the forest owners. The (FSC) standard enables an organization to manage a group of forest management units under a single certificate, a process referred to as group certification. Some certificate holders want a close relationship with the forest owner before they are offered to become part of their certificate. Other certificate holders have less strict demands on a close relationship with the forest owner before they are offered to become part of their certificate. The study shows that it is in many ways desirable to have a close relationship between forest owner and group certification holder..

This thesis deals with an iterative user-centered IT-development project in a bank setting. The aim is to present a solution for deployment of future Internet banking for small businesses. The project features a design of IT-related concepts and ideas with a strong emphasis on scenario-based design and the usage of patterns as a documentation tool.The project plan featured an iterative framework and was carried out by a group of designers in collaboration with a reference group representing the future users of the system. This group consisted of company managers and bank employees, all from the small town of Åtvidaberg in Sweden.The method used in the development process was Scrum. A total of three sprints were completed with user meetings at the end of every sprint.

The purpose of this study is to see how preschool teachers are working with supportive signs and if it is a working tool for children's language development. Is the supportive signing just for kids with special need for support or can it be good for all children?I've done the study by interviewing preschool teachers that is working with supportive signs in preschool. I also had a questionnaire for parents that yielded less fruitful results. I have chosen to use children's language and constructivist and socio-cultural theories.What I came up with is that the supportive signs are very helpful in preschools, but it requires a lot from the one doing it.

This study is about relocated students in the school. Research in this area is limited and the aim is to illuminate the area by listening to different people's voices that have been close to or involved in relocations. The study was made of a qualitative method and the collection of data was through interviews. A total of eight people were included in the study. The selected municipality is located in Sweden.