The aim of this study is to look at censorship and attempted censorship of books about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual (GLBT) people in public libraries in the USA. People from the public can submit formal challenges to a book at the library when they find the material offensive which can lead to those books being taken away from the library shelves. The questions asked are why GLBT- literature is being challenged, and sometimes banned, and how do the libraries deal with the challenges to the books.It is nowadays the people from the public, rather than the government or the librarians that are behind many cases of removal of books with homosexual themes. The study presents some of the fictional GLBT- literature that has been cause for much controversy in the USA. All the five examples mentioned are children?s books concerning GLBT- themes and are among the most challenged books in American libraries in the past twenty years.

Today, we live in a consumption society. We buy products to soothe our needs and desires. Thru material things we can express our own personal identity and shopping is seen more as a pleasure than a need to survive. With the background media- and communication studies, the reason of this study was to explore how blogs as a social medium can influence the consumption ideal in society. With dialogical analysis and semiotic analysis we wanted to see if we could find a specific consumption culture in the content of six blogs we did our studies on. We found that the blogs showed us that there is normal to have everyday luxury and spoil oneself with expensive things.

Purpose: To examine how video-game releases affect the share price, and if video-game reviews have any impact on the share price of gaming corporations. Method: A quantitative deductive research approach is applied with event study methodology used as basis. The investigated companies were the five largest gaming companies listed on the U.S. NASDAQ exchange. A total of 29 video-game launches and 85 reviews where examined.  Theory: The study is based on The Efficient Market Hypothesis, Agent Theory, Public Relations Theory, Nextopia and previous research.Results: The result contains 114 observations in five companies.

The thesis was done in collaboration with EAB situated in Smålandsstenar. In the initial discussion faze on doing a thesis with them there was a need to analyze and ensure the strength of an existing product, cantilever racks. This included performing FEM calculations on a model and comparing the results with physical tests.EAB has two models of cantilever racks, a light duty and a heavy duty. Within the heavy duty model series there are five product variants that differ in both size and load capacity. We will be working with the product variant with a load capacity of 1000 kg/arm which is the variant that is in the middle of the series.When we started work on the thesis we did a literature study and couldn?t find any well defined methodology that integrates both product development and computer aided design analysis.

This paper examines family owned tourism businesses with a special focus on succession. In Nordic countries tourism has been widely promoted and used in rural development as a replacement economy for ?traditional? livelihoods based on rural production. Because the tourism and hospitality industry, especially in rural areas, is dominated by family enterprises, the topic of succession is of great relevance for tourism and tourism destinations. This paper looks at family businesses? special characteristics, challenges and advantages in terms of ownership structure, lifestyle, motivations, employees and destination impact.

Background: The development of the IT-industry, where new technologies and new services continually arise, has led to new players with different specializations. The increased degree of specialization means that these players need to cooperate with each other in different types of projects.Problem definition: What factors are important in a project to achieve the objectives as quickly as possible? More players should lead to cooperation difficulties, how can you coordinate in the best possible way? Today, it is desirable for all parties in the project to shorten down the lead time.Purpose: The main purpose is to explore the different factors that affects the project's lead time concerning broadband installation. The part purpose, is to analyze and assess the conditions for cooperation between different players in the project for broadband installation and to provide a recommendation.Method: In order to answer the problem definition, the paper is structured around a qualitative approach with interviews to obtain data. Mostly, the used data comes from primary sources with an extension of secondary sources.Theories: Theories that are used in the paper are: Communication Process, Communication Plan, Project Planning & Project Plan, Efficiency through collaboration, Communication in a network.Empiric: Empirical data consists of primary data collected through interviews.Analysis: The analysis is based on the variables from the theoretical frame of reference; Communications, Planning, Interaction & Information.

During the last 20 years, the Swedish health care system has faced major changes. One of them is the increasing pressure to generate economic profit due to private businesses entering the market. Health care units are forced to make some structural changes in order to become effective and efficient. As a result merger and acquisitions has become a part of the health care sector, and seems to be an increasing phenomenon. Mergers and acquisitions have mainly been studied in the industry.

AbstractThe banking industry has during later years gone through several technological changes (Svenska Bankföreningen 2014). These big changes have led to several advantages seen both from a customer ? and corporate point of view. Advantages in easier usage, increased availability and more competition have made the banks more cost effective at the same time as the customer is being offered better prices. Even though the advantages seem to weigh over the disadvantages there are still those who thinks that things where ?better in the past?.

This master thesis was done for a company called BRUKS which is active in woodprocessing,bio-energy and bulk material handling industry. The idea for the master thesis wasto develop a new reclaiming method for silos where wood chips are being stored. A mediumsegment of between 1000 ? 5000 m3was defined as the segment with the most sales potential.Two different concepts were produced, one for new constructions and one for rebuildingalready existing silos.In the beginning of the master thesis a lot of time was spent on visiting different BRUKSoffices and customers to get an overview of the industry and the product. This informationwas the basis when the idea generating phase began.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how masculinity and femininity are constructed in the magazine Veckorevyn, through a critical discourse analysis of 18 articles from six issues in 2011. This is done by using a variety of theories and previous research results, which is gender theory, the theory of late-modern society and media theory. The analysis shows that Veckorevyn depicts virility and feminine differently. Furthermore, pointing the results from the analysis that a change of manhood and womanhood takes place in the social practice. The selection of articles from the magazine also shows that Veckorevyn seems to promote gender equality. .

Sweden's contribution to the world today is not labor-intensive industry, it is high technology and know-how. Many of the rules concerning employment security for the workers derived from the industrial era and have been to some extent modified by hand. This paper focuses on the discrepancy between the purpose of the priority rules in Swedish law and how it works in the reality. My opinion is that due to the development of the labor market, a powerful revision of priority rules is needed. In addition to today's job market is knowledge-intensive I point in the paper at a number of factors that contributed to the loosening of the priority rules. Examples of these are the increased incidence of temporary staffing, more open markets and more multinational companies, political will to disadvantaged groups in the labor market should be prepared job and gender issues.

Companies within the e-commerce industry currently try to overcome the disadvantages of not being able to provide a physical inspection of products, and this is especially an issue for the apparel industry. One way of trying to overcome this issue is by presenting apparel with a short video of a model wearing the garment. The aim in this thesis is to investigate how these video presentations affect consumers' emotions, cognitions and intentions. Since previous studies have found that different shopping scenarios can moderate the effect of stimuli in the atmosphere on the consumers' emotions, we also aim to see if a video presentation, depending on the shopping scenario, could have a negative impact on site visitors. Moreover this thesis investigates the moderating effects of involvement on consumers' cognitions.

Purpose: Our purpose is to describe and understand how a project-based, knowledge-intensive firm in the high-technology industry creates and transfers knowledge, seen from two perspectives.Methodology: Our qualitative case study has an explorative approach since earlier studies within our positioning are absent, thus we look at KM abductively. To gain more depth to our study, we mirror our findings from our case company with data collected from three additional organisations.Theoretical perspectives: We see a clear distinction between researchers, either seeing knowledge as an object or a process. Thus, we review theories from both sides, either focusing on the creation or transferring of knowledge. In addition, theories on KM in project organisations areaccounted for.Empirical foundation: The study is based on the empirical foundation which consists of the data received through six interviews with employees at our main case company and, additionally, two interviews at each of our three mirrorcompanies.Conclusion: The study found KM being seen from both perspectives in all four firms. Through this, we found implications for how our case company could proceed in the future..

In the last decade, member states of the European Union have adopted a range of measures to decrease the dependency on fossil fuels. This has led to an increased use of biomass in heat and power production. In some countries, the lack of forest resource has led to large scale power producers importing their biomass needs. Due to high energy content and homogeneity, wood pellets have become an internationally traded commodity used for large scale power production. The Baltic States have emerged as one of the largest wood pellet exporting regions in Europe.

Constantly growing demands from the costumers in the Automotive industry forces the subcontractors to seek alternative ways to compete. One parameter of quality is the components tolerance against NVH(Noise, Vibraion & Harshness) aspects. Kongsbergs Automotive has developed a new gear shifter platform (Shift-by-Wire) that is sold to Alfa Romeo and used in of their car models. However, the company is not pleased with the components sound quality, therefore the main purpose of this thesis is to develope a number of concepts that is supposed to enhance these NVH-aspects.To get an understanding of the problem an analysis of the causes of the emitted sound has been done parallell to a product decomposition, function decomposition and a Ishikawa-diagram. Together with these methods has a litterature study been performed to get familiar with the physics of an impact and especially the emittment of noise.