The world is changing and the business context is no exception. One of the clearest tendencies is a tougher business climate with harder competition due to increased international trade and the expansion of the e-business. At the same time the customers are becoming more sophisticated and demanding. The last decades have also meant that tougher and more frequent demands are being aimed at the businesses from a wider variety of stakeholders; demands regarding how environmental issues, social responsibilities and business ethics should be dealt with. All of the above have driven companies towards implementation of different management systems to be able to cope with the demands as well as to ensure that these issues are being dealt with in an efficient and effective manner.

The enterprises of today are beginning to realize that environmental issues are a important part of their activity. Companies and organizations are expected to a greater extent communicate their environmental work to the world surrounding them in a trustworthy and structured way. Lack of information or information that is incorrect may bring farreaching consequences. Communication is mentioned in several of the ISO 14001-standards. But what is missing is a guideline how companies should act to create and be sure of the quality of the data that can be used in the environmental communication.

Since the 1980s, companies have taken a larger interest in quality and it´s economic impact within the company. Having the knowledge that it´s not quality that costs money, but it´s rather the lack of quality. The work immerses itself in the field of cost of poor quality and the development of key performance indicators.The thesis is performed at Bufab Holding in Värnamo. Bufab Holding is a trading company which mainly buys and sells C-parts. C-parts include fasteners, other small metal-, rubber- or plastic parts such as wires, springs and electronic fasteners.The aim of this thesis was to make a survey of the cost of poor quality and to find key performance indicators (KPI) for cost of poor quality that can be continuously monitored.

As trucks are getting more and more advanced, information about their weight has become a key factor for controlling them in a more fuel efficient and safe manner. Knowing the mass of a heavy duty vehicle in real time has been a difficult challenge for the truck manufacturers. With the processing power for electronic control units in trucks steadily increasing, more advanced algorithms for calculating the mass has been developed, but at the moment there still is a wish for better performance.Since there is a lack of good information regarding the external forces acting on the vehicle, forces that depends on the slope of the road, foundation of the road and the wind, the methods have to be able to disregard these. Such an approach, based on an indirect least square solution, has been evaluated in this thesis. The results have been promising and based on these a recommendation about further evaluation has been made..

This essay deals with the same task that utilitarians have tried to solve for a long time, what is happiness? In the eighteenth-century utilitarians suggested that happiness should be the base for social political decisions. But the lack of definition disposed so that GDP became the measurement of happiness, which proved to be wrong when the unhappiness continued to increase. More than two hundred years later scientists came up with a new definition of happiness and new ways to measure it. And during the last decade economists have taken the discussion to a higher level.So once again we?re dealing with the same old issue, if happiness ought to be the base of social political decisions.

This paper follows an analytical and critical line of reasoning concerningindexing and retrieval of music in Swedish public libraries. The focus ofthe discussion is based on the terms included in the subject heading list ofthe Swedish Classification System. The empirical study is performed inthe context of online catalogues in the public libraries of Örebro andGävle. The theoretical background relies on the indexing theory ofProfessor Frederick W. Lancaster.

This essay is an analysis of how Swedish sixth form students interpret ?a good society?,an expression which is part of the main content of Religion1, the mandatory course inreligious studies. It is based on a a survey asking 198 students to define and reflect onwhat a good society might look like. A hermeneutic method has been used to analysetheir answers in relation to regulations and research.The conclusion is that although most students show themselves able to reflect on whata good society might be, their ability to use ethical theory and concepts required by thecourse?s grading criteria is limited.

The buying decision process describes how the consumer makes a purchase decision through a rational process (Markin, 1979) and an understanding for how consumers make a purchase decision can according to Sands et al. (2010) be obtained by increased knowledge for the information search process (the second part of the buying decision process) before a purchase. Today?s society offers great opportunity to obtain information (Rahim & Clemens, 2012; Bawden & Robinson, 2009) and by that there are in other words good opportunities for a rational acting by the consumers. However, there are factors working against that consumers act rationally and seek information prior to their purchases primarily in the form of the concept of information overload (Bawden & Robinson, 2009) which claims that consumers are limited in their information search because there is too much information but also other factors such as lack of time (Wood & Neal, 2009) and ability to find information (Slegers et al.

The purpose of this study was to examine experienced family counselors view regarding the concept of conflict avoidance in couple relationships. Twelve family counselors working in different parts of Sweden was interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide. They were asked to reflect on the following: their description of the concept of conflict avoidance, the consequences of conflict avoidance in couple relationship, gender differences and their own view on how to create conditions for constructive, therapeutic work in this respect.The result shows that the fear of conflicts, difficulty in expressing needs, different perceptions and expectations together with a difficulty to negotiate about differences, creates a lack of emotional and physical contact together with an absence of dialogue. The consequences of this in the long-term, a majority of the respondents perceived, are feelings of anger, resignation, powerlessness and unhappiness..

This diploma work handles how some parishes of the Swedish Church administrate their building properties.The report also includes how some external property managers in Sweden work with maintenance plans and other maintenance issues. Further, a number of deficiencies have been identified and suggestions to workarounds are treated. The conclusions drawn in this thesis are based on the author´s experience in the field, performed interviews, and literature studies. The result of the work shows a general lack of knowledge in many parishes what concerns regulatory requirements, properties with no maintenance plan and substandard supervision resulting in unnecessary and expensive repairs. Based on these results, different plans for the maintenance of the building properties of the Swedish Church has been proposed..

Safety and risk management currently have a starting point based on the negative outcome of safety, thus the lack of safety. The starting point for the thesis is to find a way to measure the positive outcome of safety through ergonomic aspects regarding chemical plants that are covered of the Seveso II Directive.Through a literature study of safety and ergonomics fourteen key aspects of safety were found. Safety Performance Indicators (SPI's) are used to assess the fourteen identified proactive indicators of safety. An analysis in three steps - called risk status assessment - is design to give an SPI its value. A pilot study of the risk status assessment was performed at the ethanol producer Lantmännen Agroetanol in Norrköping, Sweden..

The Purpose of this paper is to illustrate how schoollibrarians work with integration. The study is based on thefollowing questions:1. How does the school library personal look on integration?2. What does the school library personal approach say abouttheir work with integration of persons with a differentbackground then Swedish?The method I chose to study this through is severalqualitative interviews with school library personal as well asearlier related research.The theory I chose to use for this study is Hans Ingvar Rothsmodel of the integration process.The results show that the school library personal does defineintegration even if they do not work with integration rightnow.My study also shows that there are some obstacles to thiswork, which is related to the lack of funds and other issues.And that the school library personal has different view ofwhat integration is..

The purpose of this master thesis is to evaluate how the current share price and market consensus affect security analysts target price and if an investor should pay any attention to it. Empirical data is primarily collected from qualitative interviews with ten security analysts but also from a quantitative e-mail survey. Our main finding is that security analysts are indeed affected by each others earnings forecasts as well as the current share price. This is not strange, it is in several aspects rational. Security analysts has often nothing to gain by standing out too much and not either by spending too much time trying to create their own opinions due to lack of time or the complexity of what is analyzed.

Previous research in the area of leadership and stress has shown that the leader plays an important role but in what way is still an issue to explore. A qualitative approach was used in this study to develop an increased understanding of the leader's experience of stress using four themes; leadership, stress, control and organizational factors. A total of 12 semi-structured and un-structured interviews were carried out with 6 leaders, three females and three males. The data was transcribed and thematic as well as narrative analysis was conducted.The results indicates that leadership stress is caused by a lack of control and that factors intrinsic to the role as a leader both facilitates and complicates the leaders situation when facing stress..

Texture is an important soil property and accurate particle size analysis of soil texture is therefore crucial. There are a number of well-established and newly developed methods available for determining soil texture. In order to compare the results of these methods, the differences between them must be determined. The difficulties, problems and differences regarding texture class determination were examined through a study performed on forest soil samples. The study compared different methods (pipette, hydrometer and field methods) and two types of dispersing agents (sodium pyrophosphate and sodium hexametaphosphate (calgon)) commonly used for particle size analysis.