The purpose of this paper is to examine teachers' approach to popular culture in preschool. The questions we want answered are: What approach do educators have to popular culture in preschool and what underlies that approach? Is there a high - and low culture in preschool? If educators bring popular culture into the preschool, how then is it used? Do children?s culture influence everyday life in preschool? We have employed qualitative methods to seek answers to our questions. We conducted seven interviews with educators from four different preschools. The starting point for our study was the socio-cultural perspective because we examined people's cultures and how the meeting between them unfolds. We concluded that educators have a very ambivalent attitude towards popular culture in preschool.

The purpose of this study is to examine what creates motivation in the workplace of a small company with a high employee satisfaction index. The case study consists of qualitative interviews that help explain what the most important motivational factors are for the experienced IT consultants in a company that was founded by a circle of friends. The study concludes that the unique and equal pay model implicates an economic risk to the individual consultant but results in liberties, synergies and benefits. These appeal more than either self-employment or work at a larger IT consultancy that several consultants have backgrounds in. An expansion is ongoing since two years back, which threatened the culture but implicated opportunities for the individual consultants.

The increased interest in relationship marketing and the potential of the Internet as a platform for relationship building activities have given rise to new ways for companies to interact with their customers, such as services based on a freemium pricing model. Based on the premise that relationships are processes consisting of interactive moments of value-creating activities, value is considered subjective, relative and dependent on the context in which the activity takes place. Value is therefore variable given its context and cannot be pre-defined without nuances being lost. Despite the Internet's given role in societal development, our understanding of what contributes to customers' intentions to build relationships with online services is yet to mature.As the music industry is well established on the Internet, alongside the change in how music is consumed, it is thus appropriate to examine activities in accordance with a freemium based service that distributes music online, since it still lacks in academic understanding.This study aims to provide insights about virtual relations and how online services that provide cultural content should relate to there users as well as contributing to the ongoing academic discussion regarding value and how it is manifested by highlighting contextual impact on relational activities. For a rapprochement of relations to online services in cultural industries, this study assumed a practice perspective.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the procurement of maintenance at SvK. Byunderstanding the process that has led to the current procurement strategy; providesuggestions to how the procurement of maintenance can be improved to ensure thequality of future maintenance of the national grid.A god client can be associated with a number of qualities, ?acquisition competence?.Vinnova describes acquisition competence as the ability to plan, formulate,communicate and monitor. Different businesses and industries have different needsand opportunities and operate in different economic structures which requireadjustments in their acquisition competence. A number of areas have been identified,called areas of focus, where clients can adjust their competences to their markets.The areas of focus are competition, competence/quality, control and communication.By defining the need of acquisition competence for SvK and identifying problems, anumber of suggested strategies have been proposed.

The authors study the effects of brand salience on how consumers form brand attitudes and how consumers value the importance of various brand attributes. The study was conducted through two separate tests, the one focusing on the link between brand salience and brand attitudes and the other focusing on the link between brand salience and evaluations of attribute importance. Both tests measured brand salience as the ease with which brands are recalled by respondents who have been cued with a specific product category. The results show that brand salience has direct effects on both brand attitudes and the evaluation of attribute importance. As brands are recalled, high brand salience for a brand creates a more positive attitude towards that brand in the mind of the consumer.

The choice of harvest date for leys is one of the most important factors affecting the size and quality of the harvest. An early harvest gives a high nutritive value while a late harvest gives larger quantity. Today?s aim to produce high nutritive leys gives early harvest dates both in primary growth and regrowth in northern part of Sweden. The consequence is a growth in the autumn, a "third harvest".The aim of this master thesis was to study the effects of different harvesting systems and their effect on size, feed quality, wintering and economy for conditions in the northern part of Sweden.

At Volvo Construction Equipment outside Eskilstuna a wide range of heavy equipment machines are developed that are used by a variety of industries worldwide. For the handling and maintenance of these machines a deep knowledge is often required. Volvo CE and their dealer Swecon offer courses for both drivers and technicians that last for 1-2 weeks. Out on the workplaces however, the knowledge from these courses need to be supplemented with information from the machine?s operator and repair manuals.

From a management point of view, enabling organizational creativity is often referred to as reducing immediate control, increasing autonomy and enhancing the access to slack resources. At the same time, the business environment of today is fiercer than it was only a decade ago, and this renders a quest for more efficient approaches to competitively run a business. This paper aims to examine creative industries and more specifically try to identify a set of elements that are common for successful companies. As this industry has not been subject to any considerable array of studies, this thesis seeks to establish a structure for how to take both organizational models and leadership theories into account when developing an understanding for the process, organization and leadership of the creative business. By studying six separate creative companies, our findings suggest that conventional theories on organizational creativity do not adequately account for all factors that contribute to these companies' creative success.

This study aims to investigate how small scale manufacturing companies reason around an implementation of a PLM-system, as well as the suitability of these systems compared to larger companies. The study is built on a qualitative method. Initially, secondary data was gathered through books, articles and reports. Primary data was gathered through four interviews. Two interviews were performed with PLM resellers, one interview was performed with a PLM developer, and one interview was performed with a small scale manufacturing company that opted to not implement a PLM-system.The results imply that overall differences between larger and smaller companies exist in regard to the need of PLM systems.

The purpose of this report is to find out which crops, that are good for strawfuel, and can be grown i the area around the city of Lund. The background of this report it that Lunds energy is planning to bild a biofuelheated thermal power station in Örtofta outside of Lund. I have in the report limited me to the crops hemp, whole crop (triticale), reed canary grass, elephant grass and jerusalem artichoke. I have through a documentary research checked the crops, cultivabillity in the south of Sweden, and how they should fit, in the Scanian crop sequence. Hemp is an annual crop which probably could manage in the Scanian crop sequence. Whole crop often triticale because of it´s high yield and low rate of shed seed. Could also fit into the crop sequence of crop in Scanian. Triticale is annual, and could be grown at the same kind of fields as used to wheat, whith is why it would be possible to grow it in Scania. Reed canary grass is a reedlike grass that is easy grown at most soils.

This essay is about the principles and rules that control persuasive computer games. The term persuasive games mean computer games, video games and other similar artifacts that are produced to shape opinion. The rhetorical scholar Ian Bogost at Georgia Tech claims that this kind of games mainly get their persuasive power by using procedural rhetoric and that games as a medium gives special conditions for procedurality.  By procedural rhetoric Bogost means an argumentation that is based on rules and choices, as opposed to texts, movies and images. (Bogost 2007). Bogost describes these procedures as quite specific for games and claims that they differ qualitatively from ?ordinary? rhetorical arguments even if they just as other arguments work by establishing enthymems.

Title: ?...baby, I´m the worrying kind.? - A quantitative analysis of the relation between TV news consumption and worry of crime.Authors: Maria Askerfjord Sundeby and Jennifer RochetteYear: Autumn 2014Level: Bachelor degreeDepartment: Department of Journalism, Media and Communication, Göteborgs universitet.Supervisor: Adam ShehataSummary: The aim of this thesis is to analyze the relations between worry of crime, both societal and personal, and consumption of news from the Swedish TV-channels SVT (public service) and TV4 (commercial). The cultivation theory claims that it is just the amount of TV that shows an effect on consumers and their perception of reality, like for example the mean world syndrome. But the theory has been criticized for not considering the possible effects that are actually related to other variables. These variables have weakened or totally eliminated the effects, previously explainedby TV, in later control studies of the cultivation theory.

What affects Hiv in South Africa's different provinces? This thesis examines if education, unemployment rate, GDP per capita, and the literacy rate has any relationship with the Hiv prevalence. This is analyzed using theory and data in the form of a simple microeconomic model and an econometric regression analysis based on cross sectional data of the provinces of South Africa. The regression analysis shows that unemployment rate and education have significant effects of the Hiv prevalence in South Africa. The microeconomic model in the thesis indicates that when education is higher, individuals are more aware that the probability of being infected by Hiv is higher when the Hiv prevalence is high.

Background: The situation for Swedish agricultural production today is characterized by an increased competition, particularly after the country joined the European Union. Swedish agricultural production laws guarantee safe, high quality foodstuffs. However, due to these strict laws, Swedish farmers face higher production costs than their competitors. Meanwhile, cheaper imported goods compete freely on the Swedish market. Swedish agricultural production must find new ways to survive in the increasing competition.

The district heating load is seasonally dependent, with a low load during periods of high ambient temperature. Thermal energy storage (TES) has the potential to shift heating loads from winter to summer, thus reducing cost and environmental impact of District Heat production. In this study, a concept of high temperature borehole thermal energy storage (HT-BTES) together with a pellet heating plant for temperature boost, is presented and evaluated by its technical limitations, its ability to supply heat, its function within the district heating system, as well as its environmental impact and economic viability in Gothenburg, Sweden, a city with access to high quantities of waste heat.The concept has proven potentially environmentally friendly and potentially profitable if its design is balanced to achieve a good enough supply temperature from the HT-BTES. The size of the heat storage, the distance between boreholes and low borehole thermal resistance are key parameters to achieve high temperature. Profitability increases if a location with lower temperature demand, as well as risk of future shortage of supply, can be met.