Media and social media have been proved to occupy an increased amount of time in people's everyday lives and affect how individuals interpret reality. This phenomenon is referred to as the medialization and its implications on organizations and their members become important to understand. The purpose of this study was therefore to examine how members of an organization under intense scrutiny from the media are affected by this exposure in their everyday work. To gain knowledge about the area a qualitative case study was performed on the Swedish train operator SJ AB - one of the most media exposed organizations in the country. A theoretical framework is developed for the study and discusses organizational identity, stigmatization and motivation.

Researchers points out that social media has become a powerful venue to spread news, both for the news business and the users. Although the news diffusion has become a phenomenon to be reckoned with, we have found no research in Sweden about what motivate users of social media to share news.This thesis work therefore investigates news sharing on the social network Facebook by examining user motives in the light of the media theory uses and gratifications. A web survey was conducted and distributed to students at a Swedish university. The result showed that expression was the strongest motive to share news on Facebook, and the item that was highly valued by the students was to give other valuable information. The result also showed that other motives for sharing news was socialization, information, status and entertainment. .

Consumer generated advertising is a new phenomenon in the landscape of communication. Tools such as the Internet enable the consumer to create and spread messages for brands without the permission or control of the brand owner. We carried out a quantitative experiment to investigate the effects of how companies choose to handle these activities as well as how expectations of these consumer generated ads differ from traditional advertising. The findings show that strong brands may benefit from these activities if handled the right way and the brand owner adapts it?s reaction to the content of the ad.

Health and fitness are two controversial and not easily defined topics that affect people in our modern society every day. We believe that we can find a link between individualism, globalization and the stress concerning weight and appearance ideals. Our bodies have turned into a popular subject for the media, and there is no indication that the interest will decline. As the world gets more artificial, "natural" ideals are getting more attention, such as the concept of a strong and healthy body. But there is also a downside, for example with health issues such as cardiovascular disease increasing following the birth of high-fat diets.

The purpose of this study has been to examine how collaborations between clothingcompanies and fashion designers can influence their brands. Our ambition has been todescribe this phenomenon by describing how collaborations can affect and influencethe clothing companies? brand identity, image and positioning. Furthermore, we wantto describe how these collaborations have changed the fashion industry and what thefuture holds for it. We find this topic relevant since collaborations are becoming anadvantage for companies in a competitive industry that is constantly in change.

This essay concerns graffiti, and in particular graffiti removal regarded as iconoclasm.Graffiti is described as a visual symbol laden with both negative and positive values, and sometimes as a meaningful expression in the urban public space. One problem with graffiti as a field of study is the diversity of both the meaning of the term as well as the diversity of the phenomenon itself. Therefore I have defined the term graffiti as follows: words and images painted on public walls by a person usually in an unauthorised manner. Specific examples of graffiti and related phenomena are presented. Within the Swedish anti-graffiti discourse the pejorative term klotter (scribbling) is used to describe what I above define as graffiti.

Virtual Communities is an increasingly common phenomenon on the Internet. Most of the Virtual Communities are operated and maintained on a non-profit basis with a direction towards entertainment. However, as more state administrated and commercial services become web-based, we believe that the number of Virtual Communities with a community-based or commercial direction will increase in a near future. In this thesis, we describe our participation in, and studies of, a number of Virtual Communities with focus on the IRC-channel ?3dfxsweden?. On the basis of our experiences, we describe the social elements that form the foundation on which the Virtual Community rely on.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks and fluxes in forest ecosystems are influenced by natural and human disturbances. In the tropical regions the highest impacts on disturbance in forest C cycles are related to human activities such as conversion of natural lands to cropland and pasture areas and to forest plantations. The disturbances in the forest C cycles will release CO2 emissions to the atmosphere triggering global warming. In this study the focus was set in subtropical soils in Brazil, south extreme region of Bahia. The aim of the study was to investigate whether reforestation of Eucalyptus plantations under former pasture areas will help mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration.

Denna studie tar upp betydelsen av att den empatiserande personen har liknande erfarenheter som målpersonen och även betydelsen av könstillhörighet har för förmågan till empati. Metoden för att undersöka detta bestod av att visa ett filmklipp och efter detta fick deltagarna besvara en fråga utifrån deras upplevelser av filmklippet. Deltagare var psykologistudenter och anställda på en pappersindustri. Studien visade på ett signifikant resultat till att kvinnor utan barn hade högre grad av empati än män utan barn och en tendens till att liknande erfarenheter hos empatisör och målperson ökade empatin för män men inte för kvinnor. Att kvinnor visar mer empati än män finns det tidigare forskning som stödjer.

This is a qualitative study of how some journalists on the Swedish national media are using social media in news work. The study, carried out by using interviews, also covers how these journalists' work is influenced by social media. For the journalists in the study social media has become a tool to do research, get news ideas and find interviewees. At the same time social media affects the work of the journalists, as the social media increases the speed of news and flow of information. Even though they involve some challenges, social media facilitates news work and the journalists in this study have a positive attitude towards the phenomenon.Keywords: Social media, news journalism, the national media..

Mergers and acquisitions are common phenomenon in today´s society in order to increase shareholder value. Two years ago a fusion of Sweden´s two largest companies in the industry of real estate took place and even though three out of four mergers and acquisitions financially fail this certain case turned out highly successful. The aim of this thesis is to examine how the organizational structure and the management control have been designed and characterized the organizational performance and furthermore what are the success factors of the integration. By studying an acquisition and its potential effects on organizational structure and management control parallel to a model that describes the best practice guidelines for managers to successfully deliver value from their acquisitions, it can be shown that an acquisition has direct effects both on the acquirer and the acquired company and thus the new organizational structure. The main results, thus, is that through active leadership, increased specialization, and more decentralized and thus efficient management control a new organization has emerged consisting of the best features of two separate worlds..

We examined why file sharing is such a widespread phenomenon and what drives the persons that using file sharing, and what consequences it has on their consuming and ownership. We reached our goal by interviewing ten people who download files, using a qualitative method. We present the internet community where sharing files, copyright and the IPRED law are important ingredients for how the new generation consumer?s patterns look like. Today you can travel all over the world with a push on a button in just a few seconds.

In this paper, we examine the attitudes of 16- to 19-year olds towards stealth viral marketing in the form of videos posted on websites such as Youtube. Apart from their general attitudes towards the phenomenon, we were also concerned with their views on the ethics involved in this marketing method and how this affects their view on the companies behind the advertising. To accomplish this, we administered a survey to a sample chosen by convenience. Using the Persuasion Knowledge Model and prior research on the subject, we then analyzed the gathered data and reached the conclusion that the respondents in our sample were mainly positive towards stealth viral marketing in this particular form, that they generally did not consider it unethical and that even though most considered the companies to be responsible for such videos, teenagers were not likely to take negative actions against them if they found out that a video that they had seen was in fact a stealth viral video..

This essay is an analysis of mythologies in the Swedish women´s magazine VeckoRevyn. The magazine?s own explicit purpose is to break down the unhealthy opinion of what beauty is in their industry today. By content and linguistic analysis the results of this study are interconnected to the beauty myth as it was established by Naomi Wolf in 1991. The goal is to pinpoint how VeckoRevyn?s question and answer columns construct relationships to their readers, and the mythologies that they maintain.

Online social networks are a natural part of the lives of today?s western youth. Media and information literacy is a central part of research in Library and Information science and until now there has always been more focus on these subjects in a learning context rather than in an every day life context.The aim of this study is to further examine how adolescent boys value and trust the information they receive via Twitter in their personal lives, and how this effects their view of their environment. The study was done with a qualitative method, where we conducted interviews with six boys who were all born in 1997. The results showed that they knew how to react critically to information on Twitter.