The Swedish Institute is a public agency promoting Swedish interest, national image and confidence around the world. This work attempts to investigate how communication and a process over time influences and effects public diplomacy. The analytic discussion is based on a single case study research of this Institute representing ideas in the international science field of public diplomacy. The theoretical ideas of public diplomacy are placed in a theoretical perspective of social constructivism. The method is qualitative, with excerpts taken from interviews, literature, newspapers, articles, state public reports and social media.

Competence Portals are software tools that are intended to make it easier for persons that have had no previous contact to find and contact each other. The portals can address areas ranging from finding an expert within an organisation to the marketing of the competence of a region or a research centre to other organisations. The purpose of the thesis is to examine the necessity of Competence Portals in research-intensive organisations. Important characteristics of the information in such portals have been identified and used as a basis for recommendations regarding how Competence Portals could be designed. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on the task of finding a source of knowledge within an organisation.

During the last years, the pharmacy market undergone major changes. Re-regulation that has been done in 2009 meant that monopoly was unlocked for competition. In a market where firms offer equivalent products, increases the importance of delivery service as competitive tool to differentiate themselves among the crowd. This also applies to pharmacy market where the supplies of goods in large way consist of equivalent products regardless of the company.This case study observes the importance of delivery service in terms of competitive tool on pharmacy market by focusing on a company?s improvement in delivery service.

This is a study about employment officers at the Swedish public employment service. The aim of this study was to examine how they understand and use their discretion in their daily work. We used a qualitative method and the data was gathered by semi-structured interviews with eight employment officers working at the same office in a small town in Sweden. Lipskys theory about street-level bureaucracy and Lazarus description of coping theory are applied to analyze the empirical data. The work for the Swedish employment officers have changed over the last years with an increasing focus on control and administration.

Graphic design is an integrated part of the public spaces we move through in our daily lives. This thesis explores the emotional aspects of graphic design, with a focus on environmental graphics for the public space. The goal is to find ways in which the emotional aspects of a design solution can be varied without compromising the practical aspects, i.e. affect the conveyance of information. This goal is pursued through an analysis of historical and contemporary literature as well as by design practise.

The purpose of this Master thesis is to compare the perception and significance of reference work in two countries, Sweden and Germany. This will be achieved by means of a literature review of previous research literature and public documents and a content analysis of articles from two library journals.A first step was to examine the historical development of reference work in the selected countries. In connection with this there proved to be distinct phases in the discussion regarding reference work. These phases with their specific discourses, themes and emphases reflected and thus later were confirmed in the second part of the study.The results show that despite some similarities there are also quite a few differences in how reference work is perceived in both countries. For Sweden, the idea of reference work was introduced relatively early.

Denna studie har visat att journalister har en stark yrkesidentitet som är nära sammankopplad med idealen. De har påpekat vikten av ideal som berättande av komplicerade skeenden och granskning, och även problematiserat dem. Respondenterna tenderar även att knyta samman kring idealen vid påfrestningar från PR-kupper. Realtionen mellan journalister och PR-aktörer är komplicerad, vilket även kan utläsas i denna uppsats genom de åsikter journalisterna uttrycker om fenomenet PR-kupp. Respondenterna med flera yrkesverksamma år beskrev sig som trygga i sin situation även om PR-kuppen ifrågasätter en del av idealen medan de med färre år beskrev en större osäkerhet och rent av en rädsla för att misslyckas genom att ha publicerat en osanning.

Företaget Kerfi AB i Norrköping är en leverantör av informationsteknik och har bland annat specialistkompetens inom service management. För detta använder de programvara från företaget CA technologies. CA Service Desk Manager är en så kallad IT Service Management applikation med processer för samordning och styrning av service management. Under inledande diskussioner kom det fram att även om programvaran har varit i bruk under flera år så finns det fortfarande problem med användargränssnittet. Uppgiften består i att analysera användargränssnittet ur ett användbarhetsperspektiv för att kunna ta fram förslag på olika lösningar till programvarans påpekade brister.För insamling av data användes en expertutvärdering vilket omfattade en heuristisk utvärdering och en consistency inspection.

The aim of this thesis is to study Stadshuskällaren?s operational processe flow and identify their operational characteristics. The uniqueness of Stadshuskällaren is that they are breaking the law of trade-offs regarding volume/variety, much like Toyota managed to do ? which spawned the entire field of research of the ?Lean Philosophy?. In the thesis the characteristics we identify through analysis, which enables Stadshuskällaren to break the trade-off, are compared with the principles of Lean service theory, which ultimately stem from Toyota.

The use of insecure networks -such as the Internet- to send and receive information has made the need for preventing unauthorised people reading it yet more important. One of the easiest way to do this is through public key cryptography. However, the problem with this solution is how to tie a specific public key to a certain subject. This is solved by letting a trusted third party issue a certificate that holds, as a minimum, the name of the subject and the subject's public key along with the issuer's digital signature on the information. The rules we make for issuing, revoking and verifying of certificates and the entities that are being used to do so are called PKI - Public Key Infrastructure.

För att dagens system och deras allt mer komplexa applikationer ska kunna integreras medvarandra krävs det att de kommunicerar via tjänster. Denna tjänsteorienterade integrationuppnås genom att man använder sig av Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) som bygger pålöst kopplade tjänster som kommunicerar med varandra på ett standardiserat sätt. En viktigdel i en integrationslösning är Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). I denna rapport kommer viförklara grunderna i tjänsteorienterad integration och sedan fördjupa oss i ESB. Då ESB är ettluddigt begrepp ska vi på ett enkelt och lättbegripligt sätt ge vår syn på begreppet, samt dessfördelar och nackdelar.

Denna uppsats kretsar kring två företags återhämtningsarbete vid uppkomsten av respektive skandal. Vidare skapas en djupare förståelse för teorin Service Recovery's betydelse och användning i praktiken. De två fallen där skandaler inträffat är grundade dels i ICA:s köttfärsskandal och dels i IKEA:s fjäderplockningsskandal. Uppsatsen har en deduktiv ansats vilket innebär att uppsatsen utgår från befintliga teorier som sedan testas med det insamlade empiriska materialet. Den teoretiska referensramen innefattar främst Grönroos teorier kring Service Recovery och kompletteras med teorier så som Service Recovery Paradox, kundförväntningar, sociala medier och immateriell påverkan.Uppsatsens forskningsfrågor besvaras främst med hjälp av en fallstudie med två företagsanalyser samt med en enkätundersökning. Studien är av både kvalitativ och kvantitativ karaktär där kvalitativ data samlats in via en e-mail intervju med Ylva Magnusson vid IKEA, och kvantitativt via en enkätundersökning.Uppsatsen har resulterat i kännedom om hur de två företagen arbetat med att återfå kundförtroende.

This essay intends to provide an understanding of the developments in the right of public access and recreational activities in the forests of Sweden, and which factors and prerequisites that have affected this development. The forest and its history, along with recreational development has in many ways shaped today?s rights of public access, but there is also an age-old tradition of public access that has affected how we have used the forest, and that also has enabled the development of outdoor recreation. Many are unaware of this, which causes misunderstanding to appear around the rights of public access and how it is supposed to be used.The essay opens with historical descriptions of public access, the Swedish forest and outdoor recreation, to thereby provide a picture of how these three fields have influenced each other over the centuries. This is followed by a description of the current access rights and the problems associated with those, and a description of other countries' equivalent of the right of public access.

This is a study on the electronic reference work of some Swedish university and university college libraries. The purpose of the study has been to find out how the service works at the different libraries, to study the electronic reference interview and to find what is important when you start a new electronic reference service in the light of Brenda Dervin's sense-making theory study. Furthermore, we examine the aims of the electronic services offered and the differences between electronic and traditional reference interviews. In the background to the study we place electronic reference services in a context by describing the role of information technology and electronic mail in the libraries. The electronic reference interview is studied with the help of literature on the traditional reference interview.

The aim of this study was to explore and gain understanding of the situation between managers in different forms of human service organizations. I chose to use a qualitative method and conducted semi-structured interviews with five professional middle managers in the public sector. To accomplish my purpose, I worked on the basis of several questions. The questions dealt with the role of middle management and what it involves, how it is perceived and what the middle managers think of the specific requirements for them and their leadership in organizations that provide services relating to people.  As a result of the analysis I have used the theory of social roles that describes the meaning of the different roles and role conflicts that arise in connection with various and conflicting expectations. The review of the results shows that middle managers in human service organizations experience to have to deal with a complex leadership role.