This case study has been conducted within the Swedish fitness chain World Class to explore the opportunities for knowledge development and transfers within franchise networks. We have interviewed the product manager at the World Class headquarter, the owner of a franchise club and a local product manager from the same facility. Our finding indicates that various forms of knowledge transfer occur within the World Class network, particularly in product development and sales. The transfer occurs within the framework set by World Class with regularly scheduled meetings. In addition informal networks provide other means of knowledge exchange between some units.

When discussing local development attention is often given to the problems involved. Factors like decreasing population and inadequate infrastructure are two examples. Local politics has, however, lately been argued to have possibilities to affect its own development and its chances to achieve growth. Some of the most important factors from this debate are to make a community attractive for people and companies, committed leadership, the local business world with entrepreneurialism and a good business climate. These factors serve as a starting point for this discussion where focus is on the possibilities to achieve growth on the local level and the politics that is used for this purpose.To illustrate the chances to affect local growth I apply the theoretical perspective of regime theory and thereby examine the governing coalitions "power to" govern and not "power over" as the earlier theoretical perspectives in the area.

Companies that sell digital products such as software and movies transfer large amounts of data to its customers. In order to send this amount of data using FTP or HTTP and still maintain a high speed transfer rate it is required that the company have a large number of servers and a huge bandwidth. Servers and bandwidth costs money which means they have great costs on the distribution of their products. In order to reduce distribution costs, P2P technology can be used and the most powerful technology to transmit popular files is called BitTorrent.BitTorrent requires users to share their bandwidth. Nowadays, BitTorrent is frequently used to transfer products that are free of charge; one example is the Linux distribution Ubuntu.

The Sweden Democrats achieved great progress in the latest election in the Swedish municipals. The party is now closer than ever concerning reaching the Swedish parliament. This thesis examines the Sweden Democrats in the Swedish municipals with the aim to find out which municipal factors that led to their progress. By looking at the percentage share of unemployment, the percentage share of foreigners, the percentage share of education, average income, traditional political colour, average age, criminality, early representation of a party hostile to foreigners, the municipal type and the sickliness in the municipals I find out which factors explain the progress of the Sweden Democrats. The thesis is an empirical quantitative study build on statistics by the help of regression analysis and diagrams.

The thesis has two purposes. First, to give a practical insight into the challenges that Swedish companies might face, and how these challenges are tackled, when implementing strategy in a local area. Second, to develop a general applicable model as a conceptual contribution to the field of international strategy implementation in local areas. This empirical-driven thesis is written in a qualitative and explorative approach, where abduction is adopted in order to find mysteries and contribute to the forming of new theories. The empirical foundation is twenty-two interviews and observations of three large Swedish companies.

This study represents the different factors that may have an influence on the budgetproposal in the local government for the revision. The revision in the local government is an important part of councillors and public insight into the different activities. The budget for revision decides how much of the activities runned by the local government can be observed by the elected representative accountant. The aim of the study is to see how the following variable affect the dimension of the budget appointed for revision. We have used Institutional theory, theory that contains the role-play between guardians and advocates and Agent theory with help of accountability.The dissertation is written in Swedish..

During the last decades the Swedish local party systems have gone through some considerable changes. The number of parties present in local party systems have increased and in some cases even doubled. This makes coalition building between parties complex and parties will be forced to rethink their coalition strategies and adjust to the new circumstances. Theoretically, coalition building has often been considered and applied to national data and there have been just a few attempts to develop and theoretically explain coalitions on a local level. Thus the aim of this paper is to use different theoretical approaches to local data to test the significance of traditional coalition theories.

This study aims mainly to investigate what kind of role the public library plays in the regional and local development. The aim is also to investigate how the public library can strengthen the role as a factor of regional and local development. To explore the subject, the study is focused on the Swedish region of Västra Götaland. Three officials along with two policy documents, are included in the study as representatives of the region. Four public library managers are also interviewed but as representatives of the local perspective.

The concept of sustainable development is a challenge that demands cooperation from all levels of society for it to be successful. The focus for this thesis is how politicians within the local councils understand the concept of sustainable development and how they implement it in political decision-making.The basis for the study is a questionnaire that was distributed to 303 local politicians in three municipalities of varying size in Southern Sweden. The study concentrates on departments within the local councils that are directly connected to the Swedish environmental law and the Swedish planning and construction law. One of the primary goals with the aforementioned laws is the achievement of sustainable development within one generation.The outcome of the study was that over half of the local politicians could correctly define sustainable development according to the World Commission on Environment and Development?s (WCED) definition.

The means to political participation at the local level in Sweden are changing and this change is analyzed through a case study. The first aim is to explore the forms of public political participation in Swedish municipal Älvkarleby, namely public question time in local government, citizen motions and open meetings. A part of this is also to analyze he every day contact between citizens and representatives. The second aim concerns the reasons why politicians decide to support these means to participationThe empirical material consists mainly of semi structured interviews with local politicians, civil servants, participating citizens and local press. Official documents such as public minutes are also used in the process of creating an image of local participation.Local political participation is found to be limited but yet having the potential to strengthen democracy, provided that public decision-makers are open to a dialogue with the participants.Using Kjell Arne Røvik's theories of organisational change, the changes in local democracy can be explained as being partly rational, partly symbolic and partly identity shaping political decisions..

In the light of the problems the media industry are struggling with, local news reporting is only one of the challenges the news organizations are facing. When local editors is being moved to the cities the tie with the local community is being severed.The aim of this study has been to analyze how the inhabitants of Vilhelmina municipality talks about their experiences of local journalism. With methodological inspiration from the Critical discourse analysis (CDA) this study examined the discourses of local journalism, social media, journalism's role and municipal policy. The theorectical framework consisted theories of media and democracy, convergence culture and discourse theory.The survey was conducted with four focus groups interviews. The focus groups were divided in different cathegories based on the participants experiences, ages and employment.

The purpose of this report is to find a model of statistics for construction and demolition waste, which makes it useful for the local manager at the building site. The intention with the model is that it will be used as a support of the local manager, to direct his project towards reduced strain of the environment. The model will also be used to make it easier to control that the claims from authority and aims for the environment are achieved. To familiarise with the subject waste handling within the building and construction sectorI have done a literature search. I have also been studying rules and regulations regarding the waste handling.

This essay is how companies are using Facebook to appear. The two companies in this study, Fritz Olsson AB Kalix and Promentum AB shows how Like, share and comment-contest communicates via Facebook. The purpose of this essay is to examine how Facebook users attitude and perception is to Like, share and comment- contest.The thesis was conducted in two parts, first a qualitative interview with the two companies that stand as examples in the paper and a quantitative online survey. The online survey was sent out to the 256 Media and Communication students at Umea? University, who read or has read the program from 2010 to 2016, via Facebook.

The aim with this Master's thesis is to study the debate that takes place in the local community when a public library branch is threatened by closedown through the local newspapers. Through this it is our aim to understand why the debate takes place, and why so many people gets concerned with it. By relating this debate to contemporary research of library- and information science, and the discussion in three major Swedish library journals, we have found the answers to these questions. By studying the debate, we found six subjects that where essential for this study. These were Politics and economics, Urban and rural districts, Democracy and accessibility, The service of the library, The meeting place and To replace a closed down library.

The municipality of Olofström is intensifying the co-operation with Sölvesborg and Karlshamn, the two other municipalities in the west of Blekinge. They co-operate in two local federations and for the moment negotiations are going on about a third local federation in continuation school, but the municipalities do not agree. The aim of this thesis is to examine why Olofström co-operate with Sölvesborg and Karlshamn, if there are any problems and where the limit of this co-operation is. The method in the thesis is qualitative interviews with local politicians and officials and an actor-structure-perspective is used. The result shows that Olofström is a municipality where the population is decreasing, and it has lost state subsidy during the last decade.