Executive SummaryThis final thesis has examined the effects of an increased centralization and better coord­in­ation of the distribution logistics at ABB in Västerås. The company is today strongly decent­ralized and there is a minimum of collaboration between the 20 business units. This is why the questions were raised; how could the business units coordinate outbound logistic activities and what effects would that provide. The obj­ect­ive of this final thesis is to provide basic data for a future decision-making which desc­r­ibe these effects.The report has mapped out the factors that are important to ABB in an evaluation of their logistic activities and how the outbound logistics work today. The four factors are cost efficiency, delivery service, environmental impact and logistics capability.

The Swedish welfare organisation is built on the fact that the legislation gives the municipalities and social workers guidance and direction how to assess cases. Through out this the clients have right to be assessed both equally and individually. How is this done? The purpose of this paper was to examine the effect of the organisation referred to the social workers ability to discretion and the evaluation of the assessment in first time applications of social assistant cases. The purpose was also to look for variations in decisions and if these could be explained out of organisational and assessment effects.

The purpose of this paper was to examine how youths, age 18-20, experience the verdict to the probation service and how it affects their lives. We have examined the relation between youths and the probation service from a youth perspective, what kind of support and intervention they receive and how their surroundings react and respond on the verdict. Our research was based on a qualitative method consisting of individual interviews with eight youths and one interview with a social worker from the probation service. We have used Urie Bronfenbrenner's "the Ecology of Human Development" as our main theory and the conceptions labeling, participation and the key terms adversity and protective environment to analyse and comprehend the material. We found that all eight youths were satisfied with the probation service and the help they had received.

This thesis examines the emissions costs of Swedish aviation and their degree of internalisation under current economic instruments. The results show that the degree of internalisation spans from practically zero for a long-haul flight to 6 per cent for a typical domestic flight, where the climate cost, including high-altitude impact, makes up the main part of the cost. To inform evaluation of the consequences of this underinternalisation, or attempts to correct for it using price instruments, the price and income elasticities of international leisure air travel from Sweden are estimated using household expenditure data and two different price measures. The resulting elasticities are very high ? 2.03 or 2.04 for the income elasticity and -2.53 or -1.88 for the price elasticity ? and should be interpreted cautiously due to data limitations, especially for the price elasticities.

Investment in hedge funds is a relatively new phenomenon for investors compared with other forms of savings. In recent years, the interest has increased among investors in investing their money in hedge funds, given the protection against declines in the market they are aiming for. Their main purpose is to generate a high return at a low risk regardless of market trends. This they can achieve by having fewer restrictions that offer more flexible investment strategies and freer investment opportunities.The purpose of this paper is to identify how the selected hedge fund strategies have performed during the recent economic downturn. We also want to clarify the claim that hedge funds exhibit a positive absolute return regardless of what the market is performing.In order to answer the purpose of the essay and its problems, we have used a quantitative method with a deductive approach in the processing of data.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the implementation process of the International Baccalaureate?s Diploma Programme in four of the approximately 30 schools currently offering the IB at upper secondary level in Sweden. The starting point is a comparison between definitions in fundamental documents in the national programmes for Natural Science (NV) and Social Science (SP) on the one hand, and the IBDP on the other. The evaluation, based on Program theory, focuses in particular on the consistencies in the Organizational plans of each system.  The basic assumption is that the IB due to a deviating organizational system, different structures, aims and objectives makes a challenge for the dominating educational discourse, to use a concept by Michel Foucault, and that resistance against the IB therefore is to be expected.As a second part of the evaluation five people who either play, or have played the role of coordinators of the IB, and who thereby are responsible for the implementation, have been interviewed. The questions have been focused around in what sense the informants can confirm resistance in their implementation work due to the differences found in the first part of the evaluation, and in what ways it manifests itself.Finally, Michel Foucault?s power structures in connection to discourse analysis have been applied on the results of the two previous parts of the essay.

The 22q11.2 deletion syndrome is a common genetic disorder that affects for example the heart, palate, immune system and hearing and therefore affects a child?s development. The purpose of this study was to investigate the proportion of children (0-18 years) with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome who have a hearing loss. A retrospective study of 103 children diagnosed with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome was conducted by medical records. Of the 103 children, 51 were boys and 52 were girls.

BackgroundResearch shows that the majority of patients feel anxiety before and during anesthesia. It has been shown in several studies that preoperative anxiety may cause adverse effects in the postoperative course. Nurse anesthetists have a key role in creating a safe environment and the opportunity to use different interventions to reduce the degree of anxiety.AimThe aim of the study was to examine which interventions may reduce anxiety in adult patients before and during both general, local and regional anesthesia.DesignSystematic literature review with a quantitative approach.ResultsSeveral studies indicate that gabapentin and pregabalin can reduce anxiety before and during anesthesia. The anxiety reducing effect appeared to be dose dependent. The naturopathic drugs Citrus aurantium blossom and Passiflora incarnata Linneaus were found to reduce anxiety before anesthesia.

This survey is a qualitative study about how teachers see on the concept student leverage and what they say about how they in practice work with it. We have chosen to examine the subject from a teacher?s perspective, because almost all investigations and literature, that we have found, discuss student influence from a student?s perspective. That?s why we are interested to examine what teachers think of the subject.

Världen har förändrats från Kalla krigets stormaktsspel till dagens globaliserade värld, där internationella organisationer spelar en allt större roll i politiken. NATO som bildades i Kalla krigets motsättningar har ändrat fokus från att innan bara ha riktat sin blick mot öst till att idag verka som en global interventionsmakt.Vi har i vår normativa uppsats, med utgångspunkt i deontologin, analyserat NATO:s interventioner i Kosovo och Afghanistan efter Jus ad bellum-kriterierna som återfinns i Just War-teorins första del. Syftet med detta är att kunna ta ställning till huruvida NATO kan anses vara en legitim aktör i interventionssammanhang. För att kunna presentera ett bredare resonemang har vi även valt att kritiskt granska vårt teorival ur ett konstruktivistiskt synsätt. Det vi således har kommit fram till är att NATO:s interventioner varit legitima, men att organisationen i sig inte kan räknas som legitim i detta sammanhang på grund av dess tvivelaktigt demokratiska karaktär..

This master thesis examines the copyright law with the purpose of sorting out the consequences and the effects of the law impacted on libraries. The theories used are mainly discourse analysis and public domain theory. At the centre of the examination is the effects that copyright law bring to libraries and their ability to perform their work. A major part of this thesis is gathered around the analysis of the presumptive key words that give the structures of copyright law the possibility to claim rightfulness. This is an outspoken strategy to illustrate the discourse of copyright law.

The matter of CSR and sustainable products has gained an increased amount of interest in recent years as "green products" are becoming a trend with more "eco"-alternatives in the assortment of many retailers. However, among the increasing number of socially oriented customers, it seems that although they claim an increased demand for these kind of products, its easier to "talk the talk" that to actually "walk the walk". This is due to a discrepancy between attitude and behavior, called the attitude-behavior gap. The purpose of this paper is to examine how to overcome this gap by using three different studies to get a nuanced and reality-based view of the problem. The focus within these different studies is on the potential effects inside the store and how information provided has an effect on perceived credibility and purchase intention.

The purpose with this report is to highlight the value which Enterprise Architecture (EA) can bring,including the effects that can emerge, for a business. In the report we also study how Enterprise Architecturemay serve as basis for generating even more business value. The study is based on a theoretical frameworkwhich covers the following perspectives; architecture design, strategy development, management of changeand evaluation of IT-investments. Gathering and analysis of empirical data has been performed using acustom-developed model which is based on a model from Sogeti called Dynamic Architecture (van DenBerg and van Steenbergen, 2006) and Innovation Value Institute?s maturity curve (Innovation ValueInstitute, 2008) for Enterprise Architecture management.Explaining the value of Enterprise Architecture is invariably an important topic since many organizationsexpect to be able to generate quick value of the investments made in Enterprise Architecture.

This paper is the result of a study of competition and cooperation in regard to tourism between the five largest municipalities in Norrland in northern Sweden. The municipalities are Luleå, Skellefteå, Umeå, Sundsvall and Gävle. The aim was to study the relation between competition and cooperation between these municipalities. An important theoretical aspect in this study is coopetition, where competition and cooperation occur at the same time. The studies on coopetition in the Nordic kontext is limited and the main literature on coopetition study the relationship between firms. This study however takes a geographical standpoint and aims to fill the gap in the literature on how competition and cooperation are connected to each other between chosen municipalities. To do this the tourism strategies of the municipalities were studied thoroughly. These written strategies provided information about how the municipalities view their competitive advantages and disadvantages and some general information about how they cooperate with the nearest regions. To find out how the municipalities think about competition and cooperation with the other four specific municipalities interviews were made with experts on the tourism field in each municipality. The results show that the municipalities do not have established strategies for how they are to be competitive compared with other specific municipalities. They do not see it as profitable to compete, instead they should complement each other. At the same time however, most of the municipalities mostly cooperate with municipalities in a short distance from them, and due to lack of resources only briefly or not at all with the municipalities studied here..

Background: It has been shown that companies that lived under protected conditions for a long time have had difficulties to adapt to major changes. With that in mind an even more extensive low-cost competition in the Swedish grocery market will make a threat for the traditional grocery stores' long-term survival. The question then becomes, which strategies will be successful and lead to higher customer loyalty.Problem: Are the traditional grocery stores using strategies that can compete in addition to pricing and will those strategies lead to long-term survival?Objective: Is to analyse and evaluate two traditional grocery stores' strategies and to examine whether these are consistent with customer demand.Approach: First we have created a more fundamental understanding of the situation in the Swedish grocery market. Then we have implemented two interviews in each grocery store.