The purpose of this thesis is to examine and analyze the characteristics of the management control system private equity firms use to manage their portfolio companies. The thesis takes a share holder value perspective, and it is assumed that the goal of the management control system is to increase the shareholder value in the portfolio company. In a qualitative study two private equity firms and two portfolio companies, one for each private equity firm, were studied in detail. In total, nine in debt interviews were completed. The results from this study suggest that the characteristics of the control system are dependent on the surrounding context; the focus on shareholder value and the specific characteristics of the private equity industry shape the characteristics of the management control system.

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.

There is an awareness of the importance of gender equality in most western societies, both at the political level and in everyday life. In academia, for instance, gender is nowadays a scientific field which indicates that there is a lot of knowledge about the subject. What we do not have much knowledge about is whether gender knowledge leads to changes in gender relations in practice. The aim of this study is to explore how gender scholars relate to using ? practicing ? gender knowledge.

In our study the purpose was to examine the influence of Continuing Professional Education on small and medium sized auditing- and accounting practices. The study also aims to analyze possible similarities and differences in how small and medium sized auditing and accounting practices are affected of the requirements regarding Continuing Professional Education. In order to fulfill our purpose in the study we conducted interviews with auditors and accounting consultants on small and medium sized auditing- and accounting practices. Totally did we conduct seven interviews with four auditors and three accounting consultants. The majority of auditors and accounting consultants we interviewed are satisfied with the current requirements on Continuing Professional Education and think they contribute to the increase of quality and status of the work tasks performed by auditors and accounting consultants.

The aim of this essay is to get knowledge and to evaluate if the media student has equal or evenbetter knowledge of information technology (IT) than his/her teacher. Today the student of IToften has knowledge of hard ware and soft ware sometimes even unknown to the teacher. Themain reason for this might be that IT hitherto has played no prominent part at the institutes ofteacher education. Continuing further education of IT for teachers is also eligible as IT still is arather new subject on the time table.To adopt an empiric approach to the problem I have used trough interviewing and questions bothteachers and students at two upper secondary schools in the province of Värmland. The schoolsare called ?A? and ?B? in my investigation.Does the teacher have enough knowledge to give the student relevant knowledge concerninghard ware as well as soft ware to handle the computer and to utilize its possibilities? How can theteacher act to comply with the students? claims and demands?IT-knowledge can be expressed in a complicated way but I have limited my investigation to therole of the teacher and how he/she manages to teach and instruct concerning a selected numberof soft ware and how the students evaluate their own knowledge compared to that of the teacher.My investigation shows that the teachers consider their knowledge relevant for their task asinstructors and teachers.

The aim of this study was to examine what knowledge social workers express about home visits in child welfare investigations and how they know what to do. Sixteen social workers who work with social investigations concerning children were asked to discuss the topic home visit in three focus group interviews in three different municipalities in southern Sweden. The social workers in our focus group interviews mainly discussed the purpose of the home visit, what social workers do during home visits and furthermore their opinions about guidelines and policy documents regarding the home visit.  To get an understanding of what type of knowledge is the basis for social workers use of the home visit, we used Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing' as well as the Aristotelian theory of knowledge containing three forms of knowledge, that is, episteme, techne and fronesis. We found that the displaying of ?tacit knowing? was a consistent feature in all groups, as they had difficulty expressing their knowledge use.

The report is a result of a bachelor thesis at the department of business administration, School of Business, Economics and Law, Gothenburg University, spring term 2008. The study examines the potential return of Swedish Venture Capital firms? Cleantech investments, carried out in 2006 and 2007, compared to the return on their other investments.The study has identified a number of factors affecting the return. These have been classified within three areas: the characteristics of the Venture Capital investment, the characteristics of the Venture Capital firm and the market potential for Cleantech. The impacts on potential return for these factors are investigated by means of an interview survey with 18 Swedish Venture Capital firm covering 45 investments in Cleantech.Our research indicates a worse potential return on Cleantech investments compared to other investments.

National libraries hold large, valuable repositories of often unique materials. How can we ensure that the knowledge is accessible without endangering the materials that hold the knowledge? Digital preservation is meant to solve this problem. With more and more material being accessible digitally, users are expected to do more and more of the finding on their own, instead of being guided by librarians. What kind of knowledge do the librarians have, that cannot be mediated through a system? How is the knowledge of experienced librarians passed on to new librarians? What is the difference between physical and digital materials? I have interviewed senior and junior librarians of Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen, Nasjonalbiblioteket in Oslo, the National Library in Helsinki, and Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm to learn about their journey to knowledge of their collections.

The aim: was to describe and compare a group of experts and critical care nurses' agreement in detecting delirium in intubated, ventilator treated patients with sedation / analgesia, before and after an in house training intervention with the instrument Confusion Assessment Method for the Intensive Care Unit (CAM-ICU).Method: A quasi-experimental study, one group pretest - posttest design. A convenience sample of 17 critical care nurses in a general intensive care unit included. To detect delirium the instrument CAM-ICU was used, 21 paired tests before and 22 after an educational intervention.Main Results: The results showed that after an in house training intervention sensitivity and kappa coefficient improved of the characteristic 1 "acute onset and fluctuating course," an improvement that was significant. In other features, and overall values were signs of numerical improvement and deterioration in sensitivity, specificity and kappa coefficient but no significant change.Conclusion: Implementing a new instrument for detecting delirium in clinical practice requires education and follow-up. A small sample of critical care nurses with varying ability to use the new instrument and the fact that patients' status may change rapidly making it difficult to draw any conclusions from this study.

The aim of this thesis is to accomplish an understanding on how librarians experience their professional role at private companies. The study is based on qualitative interviews with persons who have a degree in Library and Information science, but does not work as an ordinary librarian. To answer why the respondents work at private companies, this thesis dwells on how the education in library and information science prepares their students to face an alternative career; why the respondents wants to work at private firms instead of a library; if the salary is a key factor in order to choose a career; if the respondents think the companies appreciate their qualifications, and finally, if the respondents think they intrude on other professions' territory? Working at a private company, with a degree in library- and information science, is not, according to the respondents, easy. Although appreciated by their knowledge in the field of information, the interviewees think that the title librarian is hard to cope with.

A research review shedding light over organizational cultureand its affect on knowledge sharing. The purpose of thereview was to give an overview of the current researchmeanwhile answering the research questions how and whyorganizational culture influences knowledge sharing.Through careful selection of articles, from Journal ofKnowledge Management, a review of the material led toareas of emphasis being identified: motivation, trust,organizational structure, management, communication andrewards. For each area of emphasis the results from thechosen articles were presented and analyzed, leading toconclusions that the how and why of organizational culture?sinfluence is due to mainly individual motivational factorsamongst staff. This implies that organizations need to keepfocus on the psychological factors affected by organizationalculture when looking to make knowledge sharing moreefficient.

This thesis presents the implementation of a knowledge base system for rough sets [Paw92]within the logic programming framework. The combination of rough set theory with logic programming is a novel approach. The presented implementation serves as a prototype system for the ideas presented in [VDM03a, VDM03b]. The system is available at "http://www.ida.liu.se/rkbs". The presented language for describing knowledge in the rough knowledge base caters for implicit definition of rough sets by combining different regions (e.g.

The aim of this study is to investigate how new knowledge, discovered and translated by the archaeologist, is transferred to the public by examining the question posed to the archaeologist by ?la?nsstyrelsen,? the county administration office.Since there can be no mediation of knowledge without an understanding of its perception, I pay a visit to the cognitive sciences in order to answer what knowledge is and how it functions in regards to contract archaeological results.I argue that the current structure of mediation, in regards to archaeological knowledge, is in need of the same quality control that is demanded by the contractors in regards to standard archaeological procedures. When presenting archaeology to the public, consideration needs to be paid to the different targets groups of society. The importance of national directions rather than regional translations for mediation of archaeology is stressed by the author. This needs to be carried out through a change of the questions posed to the contracted archaeologists by the county administration in their ?fo?rfra?gningsunderlag,? the order specification for archaeological investigations. .

Title:Knowledge system - a new way of observe the company Authors:Malin Pärmborn och Susanne Gidlöf Tutor:Anders Nilsson Department:Department of Business and Management Blekinge Institute of Technology Problem:How can processes of problem solving in a project contribute to generation of organizational knowledge in a knowledge company? Course:Master thesis in Business Economy Purpose:By describe the processes of problem solving in two different projects of our two chosen knowledge companies, we will clarify whether problem solving contributes to the generation of organizational knowledge. The purpose of this research is to increase the management consciousness concerning everyday processes that will contribute to the creation and transfer of knowledge. This is a condition to transfer human capital to structure capital and thereby decrease the company?s vulnerability. Approach:We gathered the data we needed through conversations and interviews with people on the two knowledge companies.

Sweden has a growing proportion of children living in a multilingual environment. It is thus highly important that caretakers as well as professionals who meet these children have knowledge of multilingualism and its impact on language development. Also, an increase of referrals of multilingual children with suspected language impairment to speech and language pathology clinics is seen.The objective of this study was to investigate the linguistic ability in both Swedish and Arabic in a four year old child with suspected language impairment. A further aim was to implement an intensive intervention and evaluate the efficacy of it. Language testing in both languages showed that the boy?s greatest need was in the lexical domain.