AbstractThis is a qualitative study on what motivates personnel to apply for middle management positions within the Värmland County Police Department. This study also looks at whether or not there are differences in motivation between men and women in regards to applying for middle management positions.The study has been conducted through in-depth interviews with 17 employees of the Police Department. The material collected was analysed using the Empirical Phenomenological Method (EPP). 29 categories were generated which were then divided into four themes.The result showed that motivation can be achieved by having a more structured middle management roll whereby, for example, there are clear guidelines on the responsibility and authority you have. Support and encouragement were also named as motivating factors.

Background: For the knowledge company the employees? competencies and knowledge are important assets. According to this, there has been a lot discussion about how to best take advantage of the employees? knowledge and create organizational learning. This organizational learning can be difficult to create due to the individuals? own goals and the fast changes in today?s society.

Lean has been studied intensely since the 1980s and it has been tested and successfully implemented in a wide variety of businesses. This thesis aims to examine the potential effects of a Lean implementation on meeting efficiency, a topic that has gotten little attention in the research community. First, a number of meeting problems are introduced, as they are perceived from the company that is the subject of the study. Second, the potential of introducing Lean in a meeting process is evaluated using the Lean Thinking principles. Third, the wastes that are generated from the meeting problems are identified.

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this essay is to investigate possible questions generated by theperformance/installation Har hon inget vettigare att göra? Du då. Har du inget annat att hitta på än att ståoch glo på henne? by the artist Elin Wikström. The Constructed Situation invites the spectator to be apart of a continuing process of thought.The subjective feeling makes an important insight to the work through methods of the aestheticsand the performative., mainly from Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf.

Computer based information systems play an important role in modern military combat vehicles. The crew needs to be able to quickly get information about both the vehicle and its outer surroundings in order to quickly make the correct decisions. In this report, we describe the development of a prototype new information system for the BvS10 vehicle, manufactured by BAE System Hägglunds AB in Örnsköldsvik.An important aspect of the system is the time it takes from the point that the information is generated by the vehicle sensors until it is presented to the user. The system must be able to ensure that it never displays information that is out of date. Thus, it is important to create a layer and component based architecture for the solution, making it possible to control, in detail, the information?s age as it moves through the system.

This essay aims to examine Martha Nussbaum's proposal for a classical defense of reform in liberal education and her critique of utility thinking in higher education. I want to explore how Nussbaum uses history to create an ethical alternative that cultivates both moral and intellectual virtues, which she considers to be crucial for the survival of democracy. In examining Nussbaum's use of Aristotle, I focus on her work as a proposal for institutional implementation of an Aristotelian epistemology and the cultivation of the individual as an ethical political subject. This study highlights the epistemological, educational and political ideas that form the basis of Nussbaum's ideals. I intend, however, to go beyond a contextualizing reading and thus establish a dialogue with a radical intersubjectivity to respond to Nussbaum's ambitions to recognize human vulnerabilities as assets for reason.

The main purpose of this study is to show how narrative can be understood as cultural practice, how it can be said to function both internally and externally, and to ask questions about how the narrating subject, through the organizing of narrative, positions it self and mediates between the different discoursive contexts of which it is a part. This is done by an analisys of how six swedish soldiers tells the tale of how they came to choose a military carrer and why they have served or want to serve in peace-keeping missions abroad. The source material is primarily collected through unstructured interviews with theese soldiers, but also through textual analysis of a soldier blog. Theoretically the study draws on a combination of the discourse theory of Michel Foucault, narrative theory, Richard Jenkins theory of the internal-external dialectic of identifikation and intersectionality to construct a framework that allows the narratives to be deconstructed and understood as discoursive products of both the military contexts as such and the larger cultrual context that surrounds it. The conclusions of this study suggests that the organizing of soldier narratives are a complex and multifaceted process, in which the soliders must balance between the ideals, values and norms of the military context while also taking into account how society at large views and interprets the practices and forms of military life.

During the past year it has been made possible to buy back a company?s outstanding stock. This is done in order to change the capital structure towards a situation with less equity. A change in capital structure means a change in the cost of capital for a company and by that a change in the value for the stockholder. This Master Thesis studies the relation between capital structure and business risk.

This thesis analyzes the media debates generated by the election of Omar Mustafa to the board of the social democratic party, and the appointment of the conservative Minister of Labour, Elisabeth Svantesson. More specifically, the aim is to analyze newspaper material through a discourse analyze, to see if and how religious affiliation effects the possibilities to act as a political representative. Theories of othering and intersectionality serve as theoretical points of departure. Further, chains of equivalence from Laclau and Mouffe?s discourse theory are used to study how categories as ?us? and ?the other? are constructed in the material, and how these processes of categorization relate to the intersection of religion, gender and ethnicity.

Today, companies can take advantage of mass intelligence by making use out ofcrowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a business model that uses the power of the collective bythe offer of a problem by means of competitions in various social media. The benefit ofcrowdsourcing is that the company gets more creative and creative solutions to the sameproblem, which would not have been possible if the company solved the problem internally.The larger mass gains an insight into the company, which in return also releases power tothe company's development. The study aims to examine the way in which citizens can beattracted to participate in the development of public transport using crowdsourcing. The studyis based on both qualitative and quantitative approach since the study has a qualitative pilotstudy.

Background: To maintain or increase the trust in the market, companies can disclose more voluntary information in the annual reports. According to prior research the annual report is the primary source of information for small shareholders and investors. Thus, it is of interest to investigate why companies chose to report the voluntary information inquired by this group. Purpose: We investigate some company-specific factors to decide whether these determine the extent of voluntary information, particularly inquired by small shareholders and investors, in the annual reports of listed Swedish companies. We also aim to discuss underlying causes for our result.

The presence of nostalgic emotions during consumption is often seen as something purely positive to a product. To evoke these emotions has become a very common tool in marketing and advertising. Paradoxically very few studies have focused on the effects of nostalgia. The purpose of the thesis has been to understand how the presence of nostalgic emotions during consumption effect consumers. The research model used is a quantitative study with testing of hypotheses generated from theory.

The aim of this thesis is to describe the development of profitability and capital structure in Swedish quoted companies during the period of 1990 to 2004. Further, the aim is to determine the relationship between profitability and leverage in order to conclude whether the choice of capital structure supports the pecking order theory or the trade-off theory of capital structure. The findings show that return on assets fluctuates between 3 and 11 percent and that return on equity fluctuates between 3 and 22 percent during the period. Further, the leverage and the cost of debt have decreased. This indicates lowered financial risk in Swedish quoted companies in the period between 1990 and 2004.

Intranets can streamline workflow processes, improve communication and add value to the employees of an organization. Companies that don?t take advantage of the potential in their intranet is a common phenomenon. In connection with a migration project dealing with a switch of content management system it turned out that SAS Technical Services lacked clear objectives and strategies for the use of their intranet. Thereby they didn?t make the most of the possibilities an intranet brings.The work with this thesis began with collecting the experiences the company could take with them from the migration project.

Social intranets are based on the Enterprise 2.0 expression and create a new way for organizations to communicate and work. It brings possibilities to leverage user generated content and engage in cooperation across organizational borders where users can get to know each other and share knowledge.This thesis aims to explore what expectations motivate decision makers in implementing social intranets. It is interesting to discover what is expected to happen in an organization that implements a social intranet and chiefly what the actual effects are. Through interviews of both management executives and intranet users at a consulting company called Ninetech, we have plotted out managers? expectations and effects experienced by users.We have categorized managements? expected effects in two themes; expected effects on corporate culture and expected effects on informational work.