The purpose of this thesis was to study how internal marketing affects service quality in the tourism industry. It was decided to conduct a case study on two hotels with summer seasonal employees. Pite Havsbad and Strand Hotell Borgholm were chosen as study objects. The case was based on interviews with the hotel manager at Pite Havsbad and the vice president at Strand Hotell Borgholm, who coordinates the internal marketing at the companies. The findings were that seasonal employees do not affect service quality much.

To enable the enhancement of the driver's environment in a forklift, an alternative form of steering has been evaluated. An earlier concept with a combined driving and steering wheel has been exchanged to a concept with two driving wheels. A link wheel has replaced the combined driving and steering wheel. The steering is done through differentiation of the velocities of the two driving wheels. The scope of this master thesis is to create a simulation model, create a control program and to evaluate the concept of two driving wheels.

Automatic trimmerhead is an examination project for making an automatic trimmerhead for grass trimmers with the user and functionality in focus. Our perception is that a happy user is a user who can pick up his or her trimmer, use it and put it back to its place when the job is done. It should not be necessary to interrupt work and perform maintenance on the machine just to make it work as promised.The project has been made in collaboration with the company Husqvarna, which is one of the biggest actors dealing with garden machinery on the market. Together we determined the project goal, ?To invent, construct and test a brand new concept for how an automatic trimmerhead can look and function?.At this day there are several different automatic trimmerheads on the market, both semi and fully automatic.

Sustainable development is a concept that has been interpreted in a multitude of ways in different contexts. This essay argues that the discourse of "ecological modernization" has strongly influenced the way in which the concept of ?sustainability? has been constructed in Swedish environmental policy. This interpretation of the concept of sustainability offers the possibility of combining economic growth with ecological sustainability which stands in contrast to the assumptions of Deep Ecology and Green Theory. The aim of this essay is to explore how the concept of sustainability is being formulated in environmental policy both on a national level and in the city of Malmö.Considering these issues in a specific context, this essay focuses on city planning that is as an important instrument to promote urban sustainability both on national and local levels.

Birch is the dominant deciduous tree species in Sweden but only 16 % is found in pure birch stands. The majority of the birch (51 %) is to be found in conifer dominated stands. Swedish forest land comprises approximately of 23 % mixed stands and one problem is that for mixed stands there are few management recommendations. The underlying aim of this thesis was to study the management of mixed forest stands of spruce and birch to achieve good timber quality of birch. The study was based on a literature study and measurement in a field experiment launched in 1998 by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

This work is a quick look at the overall quality of the teaching program at Växjö University and how the program is viewed by the students, future teachers, who attend it. This work aims to deduce how Växjö University uses it's resources to improve the overall quality of the teaching program..

The purpose of this master's degree thesis was to develop an understanding of how hospital management, in the case studied, worked to achieve changes in an organization influenced by differing professional cultures. To gain insight into the conditions that may have contributed to nurses and physicians developing appropriate attitudes and behaviours, which may have affected the organization's ability to achieve the Swedish Quality Award 2012. A qualitative single case study was conducted at Karlskoga Hospital, with focus groups as well as individual depth interviews. The results of the case study showed the following conditions provided nurses and physicians the potential to develop appropriate attitudes and behaviours, which may have influenced the hospitals ability to achieve the Swedish Quality Award:  Responsibility and influence over the development processes.Participation in management teams and quality development groups as well as individual fields of responsibility.Training programs that have given insights and skills in quality management related to clinical practice.Nurses and physicians as key individuals gave legitimacy to development process, and served as management advisors.Collaboration between all kind of employees and responsibilities.Committed management.    .

The overall aim is to examine how the European Union Water Framework Directive has affected the local water management in the catchment Märstaån situated in the eastern part of the lake Mälaren river basin, Sweden. The first part of the study gives an historical overview of the area with focus on how the old agricultural landscape was handling the nutrient load from farming activities by means of different kinds of wetlands. By using the concept of the procedural landscape, introduced by Torsten Hägerstrand , together with historical maps with dates starting from the 17th century, the pre-modern landscape is analyzed.  The second part is an investigation, based on qualitative data, on how the different actors in the catchment area work together to secure the water quality for the Märstaån river. The analysis shows that the Märstaån catchment river systems are mostly unchanged in the rural areas.  The exception is the mainstream section of the Märstaån river running partly underground today and the Halmsjöbäcken river that is heavily affected by the Arlanda airport situated within the catchment area.

The characteristic of services as an effort carried out in a "moment of truth" implies a risk for failures. This study sheds new light on how alternative offerings that customers are initially exposed to can affect satisfaction and loyalty in the service failure and recovery context. More specifically, two aspects of the initial offering are studied: promised general service quality and the presence of a promise about a specific product attribute. Based on a presentation of the main theoretical perspectives, hypotheses are formulated and a scenario-based experiment in a hotel setting is designed to explore these. The results indicate that a higher level of promised service quality can result in more positive evaluations of satisfaction and stronger word-of-mouth intentions than for a lower level of promised service quality.

This paper examines the relationship between the experienced quality in the offering of a brand, emotional attachment and consumer commitment. The study aim to explore several dimensions of the experienced quality in the offering of a brand. Further we examine two conceptualizations of emotional attachment - Brand Attachment and Brand Love - and intend to declare the two of being two separate phenomena. We then conduct a relationship-based analysis wherein the mediating ability of Brand Attachment and Brand Love, between the experienced quality in the offering of a brand and consumer commitment, is examined. Therefore we conduct a focused quantitative study, wherein 171 customers of the fashion retailer H&M have responded to a comprehensive survey both online and in-store, to examine this fun-damental relationship and its components.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a highly used concept in contemporary organizations, especially in the recruitment process or education of employees and managers. The aim of this study was to examine the discursive production of the concept emotional intelligence and how it, linked to an organizational context, is expressed in web-based articles and course homepages. In total 11 texts related to emotional intelligence and organizational contexts were used as the object of study. A three-stage model was used as a method for analysis. The model included a content analysis, argument analysis and a deconstruction analysis in order to expose what was said about emotional intelligence and how it was said.

The purpose behind this study is to explore and explain the role of fear arousal when combined with the concept of customer satisfaction and retention in one marketing strategy. The major theories applied are the concept of fear appeals and the concept of customer satisfaction & customer retention. We chose to conduct our research through an ethnographic case study of KM. We did a qualitative study where we collected 10 interviews and we conducted observations. Our empirical data consists of academic articles from scientific journals, interviews andobservations.

An Internet application, VEDAIR, for estimation of air quality in regions with small-scale combustion of bio fuel has been developed by Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute with financing from Swedish Energy Agency and Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The model contains user interface and a coupled model concept where concentrations of atmospheric pollutions are calculated for regional, urban and local contributions. In this report the model is described and a first study of air quality considering PM10 (particles with a diameter less than 10 µm) in two Swedish municipalities, Vänersborg and Gnosjö, is introduced.According to the result, there are areas with poor air quality even in smaller Swedish municipalities, mostly due to high emission from buildings with older wood heating furnace without hydraulic accumulator.In Vänersborg three areas were analysed in VEDAIR for the year 2003: Vargön, Mariedal and the downtown district. In the whole municipality the upper evaluation threshold for PM10, which is defined as 14 µg/m3 for annual average, was exceeded due to background contribution of particles. In all areas, however, the concentrations of PM10 were less than the environmental quality norms.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the concept multiculture has been defined and used in selected articles, which were published during the year 2006 and the following month. The study is based on five Swedish newspapers, from which 57 single articles were chosen and divided into total seven categories and dimensions which were partly developed from the theoretical base and partly from the chosen material itself. By using a qualitative analysis I have found following: In most articles the concept multiculture is used in an anthropological sense, meaning that the presence of several anthropological cultures is claimed before the concept multiculture can be real. An anthropological culture is of varying size and contents, in the majority of the articles an anthropological culture consists of a non-western and foreign country but can also represent a region or a continent. Aesthetic culture is, for the most part, used primary as an aid to define the current anthropological culture and not to stand for its own belonging to a specific genre..

In order to attract talented consultants, Sigma, a consultant company, wanted an online game for recruitment. In the game, potential employees? skills could be tested to determine whether they are qualified for the job. This paper presents a general technique for creating such a recruitment game. The report generalizes the recruitment game to a level-based game for the web, where a player should be able to progress from one level to the next by solving a given problem.