During the last years, the importance of sourcing in firms has increased. Globalization, fierce competition and an increased level of outsourcing are common explanations to why firms have highlighted the potential to realize savings and the value creation that the Purchasing department can generate. One trend that follows in parallel with globalization is an increased pressure from society on firms to take responsibility for the impact that its products and services have on the environment. This responsibility creates even more attention as outsourcing involves trade with suppliers in low wage countries, where the level of environmental and social responsibility is not always satisfying. The Purchasing department, the firm?s interface with suppliers should therefore, together with the firm?s Environmental department, play a key role in the firm?s contribution towards sustainable development.

The European Union is struggling to maintain democracy and tries to increase the participation among the citizens in Europe. The European Citizens? Initiative, ECI, is a platform established by the European Commission to allow citizens to propose new legislation. ?Water and sanitation are a human right! Water is a public good, not a commodity!? is the first ECI that has met the requirements.

Law firms are defined as knowledge-intensive companies. Due to the dependency regarding the resource of knowledge among the firms employees and to the fact that they often are categorised as a type of professional service firm. The purpose of this study is to investigate the different types of profitsharingsystems as a form of reward with focus on the theoretical differences and effects of the True Partnershipmodel and the Stockholmmodel. In addition to these models we will look into the Human Resource processes of; recruiting, integration, retaining and development of employees. The main purpose of the study is to examine the theoretical level on how the profitsharingsystems effect different Human Resource processes and through the knowledge of these connections using this as an analogy when to analyse other law-firms and knowledge?intensive company?s.

Denna studie beskriver innebörden i begreppen användbarhet och Activity Theory, samt hur den senare kan användas för att stärka utvecklingen av användbara webbplatser. Studien är genomförd ur ett utvecklarperspektiv. Resultatet av studien visar att användbarhet är en egenskap som uppstår i användandet av en artefakt, detta pekar både teori och empiri på. Studien visar också att Activity Theory kan användas på flera sätt för att stärka utvecklingen av användbara webbplatser. Vi anser att de resultat vi kommit fram till i vår studie gäller inte bara för utveckling av webbplatser utan de gäller även utvecklingen av informationssystem och informationsteknologi i en vidare utsträckning..

!is began as a product design challenge, which stipulated broadlythat the designer be ?inspired by a subject?, whose ideas would leaddown a path of product idea evolution. From there, the goals forthe end-product would undergo rigorous revisions, re-de#nitionand re#nement. !e end-product itself would be the result of anentire thinking process.!e subject I have chosen is: Time. I want to challenge and evenalter our conventional sense of time, using principles ofdesign.

The market is developing and a growing competition increases pressure on companies to maintain their competitive advantage. Working with cost savings is a way to enhance earnings in a short term but also in a longer perspective. Volvo Powertrain Production Köping has an overall goal; to reduce costs by nine percentages in three years. To achieve the goal, Volvo Powertrain Production Köping works with World Class Manufacturing where the Department of Processing Technology constitutes an important part.Volvo Powertrain Production Köping lacks a standard for how savings within the metal cutting tool area are to be calculated. This makes it difficult to control and monitor their business outcome but it also causes difficulties in controlling the tool suppliers? outcome.

Bakgrunden till studien är mina egna tankar om hur de lönesättande samtalen inom arbetslivet egentligen fungerar nu när de har blivit alltmer vanliga på arbetsplatserna. Syftet med studien är dels att undersöka hur kommunikationen hanteras och upplevs under ett lönesättande samtal av medarbetare respektive ledare dels att utveckla kunskapen om vilken betydelse kommunikationens påverkan har för samspelet under det lönesättande samtalet. Studiens forskningsfråga har varit hur medarbetarna och ledarna upplever samspelet under samtalet, varför den sociokulturella teorin har använts tillsammans med andra kommunikativa begrepp och teorier. Studien har av den anledningen haft en fenomenologisk ansats för att få fram respondenternas subjektiva upplevelser av samspelet under det lönesättande samtalet. Som metod användes en öppen intervju med en frågeguide som innehåll ett antal olika teman som de olika respondenterna själva fick resonera kring.

Background: Enterprises often refer to their employees as ?Our most valuable assets? in annual reports and other written statements. In reality, employees are seen as an expense rather than an asset in annual reports and the voluntary disclosure is often insufficient. Human capital disclosure has been discussed through decades and the latest topic in voluntary disclosure is called integrated reporting. Knowledge firms should disclose more about their employees than industrial companies due to the fact that the employees are a considerably more important asset to these types of enterprises.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to study the disclosure of human capital, compare the disclosures between knowledge firms and industrial companies, and study the development of the human capital disclosures between the years 2003-2013.

Spitz nevus was first described by Sophie Spitz in 1948 as juvenile melanoma. The lesion is a benign melanocytic tumor, which consists of epiteloid- and spindelshaped cells. Histological is spitz nevus difficult to distinguish from malign melanomas and spitzoid melanomas. Loss of symmetry, loss of maturation in the deep component, nuclear polymorphism and hyper chromatic nucleus are features which can be found in melanomas. Some of these features are often seen in spitz nevus.

This is an ethnographically inspired study focusing on multilingualism in a Swedish preschool setting. The purpose of the study was to find out how the children perceived their multilingualism and how it was expressed by the children in the interaction with teachers and peers. The research questions were as follows: How is the multilingualism expressed in the day to day interaction in preschool? What significance does the daily interaction with peers and educators have for the children?s perceptions of their multilingualism? How do the children perceive their multilingualism and the value in their multilingual abilities?  To answer these question methods inspired by ethnographical studies were used, namely participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the children.   Theory was used from two areas; childhood sociology as theorized by Corsaro with the ideas of peer cultures and interpretive reproduction, and the sociology of language with the theory of collaborative empowerment as introduced and developed by Cummins. The children in the study were seen as social actors who are important here and now and who contribute to the development of society.   The study showed that the multiple languages were visible in the preschool, but that the Swedish language was upheld as the norm and the language of communication; no children were recorded playing in their ?home language? during interaction with other children.

This paper is about the facades and the streets impact on theexperience of the city and how architects can create cities forthe human kind with simple tools that makes a hugh difference forthe experience of urban space.As the cities are growing in a faster rate and as more people moveto the cities, they will also affect more people. The differentstructures that can be found in the cities therefore gets moreimportant and giving design to city structures also gets morecomplex because of our higher demands on urban functions andcontent. It?s difficult to evaluate the ultimate city structuresince all people experience their city in different ways, butarchitects still should be able to create urban spaces thatis suited for the human kind, just as we can create differentbiotopes for flora and fauna. Therefore there must be generalideas of what the human being experience as good or bad and theseshould be guidelines when designing urban space.Since urban space is something that most people experience everyday it doesn´t always have a clear impact on them.

It was the purpose of the present study to explore thoughts and lines of reasonings concerning body perspectives in school. Based on students at a secondary school and on analyses of the curricula of the school, I reason about how we see the human being and the importance of it in school. In the introduction I start out from observations and highlight the body as a communicative channel leading up to the issue of students? basic view of man as integrated or devided in body and soul. A study of twelve interviews of students shows that thoughts about the two perspectives had not been identified until now but that a great deal of interest existed for discussion on this subject.

The aim of this study is to find out in which way the education about climate in school is taught and how the students experience the world situation today. There are various theories about the greenhouse effect and its origin and these theories should be addressed to ensure that students get a broader understanding of how climate change occurs. This includes the natural phenomena and also the human impact on climate change. Students in school are a source of concern that only human are the cause of global warming, and know little or almost nothing about the natural phenomena of global warming.  I will mention what has emphasized in the national steering documents in the case of environmental education at school.I have used a qualitative method, where interviews and document analysis were used as techniques. The interviews took place with five students in ninth grade and with three science teachers in the same school..

This paper reports a study in how interaction design and graphic design is affected in the process of developing an mobile application to complement the use of an existing webbsite. The paper also ask how developers are affected in this process by the use of designpatterns. The purpous of the report was to see how designpatterns affects the development of mobile applications and how the interaction and graphic design differs between various company webbsites and their related application. A study was conducted by comparing three diffrent webbsites with three related applications to find material for our thesis. Interviews were conducted on three diffrent companys that work professionaly with creating mobile applications.

In this Bachelor thesis I explore sound and room as elements in design of user interfaces, both theoretical and practical in a specific application domain, to identify some of the advantages and disadvantage associated with these elements. As application domain I studied email clients and their usage at home amongst students at Blekinge Institute of Technology. In the study I found an activity, which seems to be highly distributed in the physical room where the user is located. The activity was notification of email and could take place in an arbitrary location of the home. I then augmented this activity with ideas from my theoretical assumption about room and sound. The result was a rule-based agent for notification of email, which primarily uses sound as interaction style..