According to the Employment Protection Act, the permanent employment is the main condition of employment in Sweden. Nevertheless, nowadays a large number of employers choose to apply other conditions of employment than the permanent employment in their businesses. The rapid technical development and the demands for shorter perspective investment in companies on the Swedish labour market have started the requirement for a more flexible workforce. On-call employment is one of the conditions of employment that is increasing the most. This condition of employment is adjusted by the parties on the labour market.

Extended Producer Responsibility (ERP) is a form of product take-back regulation that requires the producers to manage their products at the end of life. By internalising the products? entire life cycle costs into the market price the ultimate objective of such regulations is to reduce the environmental burden from the products. This Master´s thesis seeks to examine if the total life cycle cost of a product actually is borne by the producer, and if not, predict who will then take this cost. This is done by analysing the market for take-back activities in three different categories of products; electrical and electronic equipment, cars and wind power stations.

Almost every day newspapers cover companies and brands in crisis. This should worry companies as negative publicity has been shown to have a great influence on consumer perceptions on brands. In addition, brand crises have been shown to be contagious, meaning that they also affect consumers? views on other similar brands. This study aims to investigate spill-over effects of one brand crisis to another within a product category.

The thesis concerns itself with studying the effects private brands has on the consumer?s impulse buying in the grocery industry, as in degree of unplanned spending and the selection process between manufacturer brands and private brands when such a purchase is performed. The study?s methodology is characterised by a qualitative approach, whereby the study acknowledges the inductive approach towards the empirical setting even though the Mehrabian-Russell model along with motivational theories serve as highlighters of relevant aspects in the empirical field. The study concludes that both the utilitarian and the hedonic consumer decide what to buy before entering the store, whereby a low degree of needs arise in the store.

Product development cycles become shorter and shorter. The time from idea to market has become an important competitive factor. Despite this, methods used for making the product development process faster are surrounded with uncertainty about their efficiency. The purpose of the thesis is to describe the pros and cons of ?best practice? methods for shortening lead times and how these methods effect the lead times in research and development.

AbstractMotor sports have been around as long as motor vehicles have been. Sports are often seen as costly polluter but in the same time the motor sports have encourages a large part of development, both for vehicles and other industries. Inventions like rear mirror and ABS brakes come from motor sports. One way to once again drive development forward while making motor sports carbon-neutral is to run the race cars on hydrogen. In this thesis, the goal is to convert a spark ignition engine for hydrogen operation.

This study aims to investigate how consumers perceive variety in grocery stores and further how private brands have affected consumers? perceptions of variety in grocery stores.The study focuses on the perceptions and attitudes towards variety and the impact of private brands on perceived variety. Hence, a qualitative rather than quantitative study has been used. Photo elicitation has been used in both focus groups and in-depth interviews, which have been the empirical data collection of the study. Scientific articles and books have also been used in the process.

This is a degree project performed at Halmstad University in Sweden on the subject carpet ofreinforcement. This project is developed in association with Celsa Steel Service in Halmstad.The purpose of this report is to investigate how much time that can be saved if carpet ofreinforcement is used instead of the traditional way to work with reinforcement and seewhat kind of parameters that is important between the choices. We are also going to seehow this product affects the situation for reinforcement workers from an ergonomic point ofview.Carpet of reinforcement is made by straight reinforcement?s bars that are welded togetherwith steel bands. These rolls are made at a factory with a machine that welds together thebars in determined centre distance, with desired dimensions after the constructionengineers? blueprints.

This thesis describes the work process and the results for the development of a newkind of ergonomic cleaning mop, ranging from basic concept to a virtually productionready digital prototype. The project was made in cooperation with, Ömer Altun, whowas also the project supervisor, and whose plan it is to launch this new product onthe market in a foreseeable future. The mop is meant to be used by both professionalcleaning staff and ordinary home users. What makes this product unique is that it hasa movable center piece that simplifies the cleaning under low furniture.The work began with the establishment of a product requirements specification andlater a study of similar products and existing functional models was conducted. Afterthese surveys the work began with refining the existing concepts in order to makethem more complete.

Academic research concerning how to determine the power situation in a supply chain where an investment product supplier is involved did not exist. Therefore new models has been developed that analyses the power relations and maps out the power situation in a supply chain. In the future these models can be applied on similar cases by modifying the included parameters. The new models show that case company FAS should focus on the big producers of garbage bag which are Trioplast, Rullpack and Miljösäck. By strengthen the brand FAS can make more money in these relations.

The purpose of this article is to examine how social workers may experience fear in their profession, how they and their organizations handle the fear and how the fear may affect their practice. To obtain the purpose, in-depth interviews were carried out with seven social workers from the southeastern part of Sweden. The experiences of fear were many and are summarized in four categories. Fear of treats and violence, fear of the responsibility in complicated situations and without optimal solution, fear of being regarded and judged as worthless and fear of being scrutinized with the risk of being stigmatized. Five strategies were identified to handle the fear: Safety strategies (e.g.

During the last years, producers and consumers have become increasingly aware of food safety. Foodborne illness and foodborne injury are in best case unpleasant but they can also be fatal. HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) is a preventative food safety system which is aimed to guarantee production of safe food free from pathogens, foreign materials and substances with potential to cause adverse health effect. In order to succeed in developing, installing, monitoring and verifying a HACCP system, there is a mix of hurdles for the company to overcome. While larger food companies meet a difficult challenge, small and medium size enterprises often feel that the hurdles are almost impossible to manage.

The Swedish consumer electronic industry has recently experienced an increasingly intensive price war. The price war has forced some operators in the business to declare bankruptcy, as the only way to compete has been by driving down prices. A challenge that retail chains in the consumer electronics industry is facing is to increase their margins. If store personnel can success with upselling, the companies will increase their profits. The purpose of this paper is to examine if the sales people in the consumer electronic industry can influence the customer to buy a more expensive product and what the effects the upselling has on the customers' attitudes.

AbstractTitle: To Market a Company with the Help of Nationality ? A study in how marketing and branding works and is being perceived when it focuses on nationalityAuthor: Frida HanssonSubject: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Fall semester 2010Length: 38 pagesTutor: Else NygrenAim: Companies and various corporations are always on the hunt for the next big thing in marketing. One idea to market themselves and give them a chance to separate themselves from the cluster of companies aspiring to take your costumers away could be to market themselves with nationality. To investigate why and how some company?s chose to market themselves with nationality, and also study how this kind of marketing is being perceived by customers and non ?costumers.

The union organization rate has continuously diminished since the mid 90's. The aim of this essay is to investigate non-members approach to the union. Central questions are what personal experiences the respondents have of the union and how they view the union as a phenomenon. According to previous research the main cause of the great decline in membership to LO are the increased membership fees to the union and the unemployment insurance funds (UIF) in 2007. The increased fee led to a greater accumulated cost for those who were both union- and UIF -members, which had a negative effect on the membership numbers for the union.