A positive aspect of globalization, from a western viewpoint, is the growing demand of advanced products in China and other developing countries. The construction industry is thriving in China and Swedish companies have taken part in various projects. However the situation have been difficult for some of the companies. The aim of this study is therefore to investigate how strategic and cultural factors affect the potential for Swedish companies to operate on the Chinese construction market. The theoretical framework of the study consists of Porter?s and Kotler?s theories about strategy, and Hofstede?s, Bjerke?s, and Daun?s research about different cultures.

Multi-brand portfolios are characterized by comprising many brands in the same product category. Companies that have chosen to organize their products according to this strategy are facing both possibilities, such as expanding the accessible market size, and challenges such as how to organize the brands, their individual roles and their relation and position to the other brands in the category to maximize revenues. To address these aspects of multi-brand portfolios, I have investigated four product categories where multiple brands are represented at Mölnlycke Health Care, Unilever, Fagerhult and L?Oréal; how the multi-brand portfolios are organized, how the segmentation, positioning and product differentiation are done and what advantages and disadvantages that are associated with this strategy. My conclusions are that multi-brand portfolios can be organized in many different ways and to become successful, they have to be set in relation to the company?s whole brand architecture.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how health information is integrated into knowledge in an everyday health related context on the web. The more specific aim is, from a LIS point of view, to map knowledge related discourses with the focus on pregnancy, in discussion forums on Swedish health related web sites. The following main questions in this paper are: (1) a) What discourses on pregnancy knowledge can be found and b) how are they expressed? (2) What are the functions of the recognised discourses? and (3) what are the relations between the identified discourses? The theoretical and methodological starting-point is discourse theory with the main focus on discursive psychology according to Wetherell?s and Potter?s theoretical and empirical work.

With the technological development of the last decades, an increasing number of genealogists are carrying out their research online. The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine how and why genealogists' information behavior has been influenced by the use of online services for genealogy. Using a conceptual model of genealogists' information behavior as theoretical basis for the study, I examine how the use of online services affect genealogists? search process, what information they are looking for and what information resources they use.

Projects of all kinds generate documentation that needs to be organized and stored for future use. Well adapted tools, together with a unified modus operandi need to be available for both the project members and those having a more organizing role if an organization is to be effective.A study of the tools available to project members at Svenska Kraftnät have been performed along with an analysis of the guidelines for the tools' usage. The study has focused on the needs of the project members, not the organization as a whole, thus providing a bottom-up approach to the problem instead of the more organizational top-down approach. Interviews of around 20 project members, whose roles include project leaders, technical experts and documentation supervisors, have been conducted to get an idea of the practical problems that exists.All systems, except for a local network storage device, were found to at least meet Svenska Kraftnät's current demands. The usage guidelines, however, covers only the general process that a project should follow and lacks detailed information on a per system level in several areas.

The accounting scandals that have attracted attention in recent years have led to internal control becoming a more central part of business activity. Doubts about what firms actually do have increased, all caused by the attention of accounting scandals. To counter this, frameworks and laws evolved and gained a significant role in the organization and its surroundings. The aim of the present study is to find out how four companies in the Kristianstad region are working to ensure its internal control and how they work to minimize risk and reduce uncertainty. We have used a qualitative method and interviewed a person in a senior position in each company.

This study is about the potential advantages as an investment option in a portfolio. The study shows that the incorporation of bitcoins in a portfolio, even to a small degree, gives significant increases of both risk and return. The different studied portfolios sharpe ratio rises, which in turn shows that the risk reducing return increases when bitcoins is used as an investment option.This study is based on Virtual Currency, Tangible Return: Portfolio Diversification with Bitcoins by Brière, Oosterlinck and Szafarz. The authors of this study have compared their own results with the study mentioned and seen its similarities and differences. The study investigated a total of eleven different assets percentage return over 192 weeks ranging from July 2010 to March 2014.

This thesis investigates the Designated Operational Entities (DOEs) under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. The DOEs serves as independent third-party auditors with the task of validating, verifying and certifying projects under the CDM. The majority of the DOEs are private entities. This is in line with the CDM objective of including the private sector in the climate change combat. The introduction of private entities in the role of DOEs can be questioned from a legitimacy point of view, but is corresponding to a development in international environmental governance where private actors are increasingly involved in governance arrangements.The thesis concludes the DOEs to be a form of public-private partnership and investigates the legitimacy of this form.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how teachers work to lead and motivate high-performing students, and how these students were defined. The method used was qualitative, more specifically an interview, which was then analyzed with a thematic analysis. Six teachers participated in the survey, and what emerged was that high-performing students were often ambitious, structured and social students. High performing students were also characterized by the fact that they needed challenges, attention and positive feedback on their performances, otherwise they ran a risk of not performing. Structure was also important for the teachers themselves, that they had a goal when teaching and a way of achieving that goal.

This examination work is about implementation of Cisco Systems Network Admission Control (NAC) within a leading IT-company in region of Jönköping. NAC is a technique that is used for securing the internal network from the inside. NAC can verify that the client who connects to the network has the latest antivirus updates and latest operative system hotfixes. Clients who don?t meet the criteria can be placed in quarantine VLAN where they only have access to the update servers.

Arbetsmiljön är en av de viktigaste bestämningsfaktorerna för vår hälsa. Fysiskt ansträngande arbete så som tunga lyft, monotona rörelser samt exponeringar för olika kemiska ämnen kan leda till ökad risk för ohälsa. Brandmän har jämfört med många andra yrkesgrupper annorlunda förutsättningar i sitt arbete, förutom att bekämpa bränder rycker de ut även ut vid exempelvis vid bil- och kemikalieolyckor samt vid djurräddning. I deras arbetsmiljö blir de utsätta för bland annat psykiska, fysiska och kemiska hälsorisker exempelvis genom bränder, bil- och kemikalieolyckor, som kan leda till olika former av cancer och andra fysiska skador/sjukdomar. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur brandmän upplever de hälsorisker som kan förekomma i deras arbetsmiljö.

Uppsatsen kommer att beskriva hur Handelsbanken, Skandiabanken och Swedbank går tillväga när de ska riskklassificera sina fondportföljer. Intervjuer har genomförts med respektive bank för att få en klarare bild på hur dessa använder olika teorier och räknesätt för att fastställa en risknivå på en specifik fond och även material från bankernas hemsidor har använts för att komplettera ämnet. Bankerna använder sig av olika riskskalor vid kategorisering av olika fondportföljer och standardavvikelsen samt value at risk ger svar på den faktorn som dessa tar mest hänsyn till vid kategoriseringen utav aktiefonder, räntefonder, blandfonder samt hedgefonder. Standardavvikelsen som majoriteten av bankerna använde sig som det väsentliga måttet för rikklassificering som beräknas på historiska värden från en tidsperiod på för det mesta 3 år men beräkningar på 5 år kan även förekomma. Detta mått gör det möjligt för investerare att förstå hur hög risk en fond har för desto högre standardavvikelse desto högre risk.

This report gives an overview of applications of the Greenroads rating system whichin turn is an environmental review system for roads. The focus of this report isapplications during the construction phase, ie on solutions which adhere to theentrepreneur's area of responsibility as opposed to the designer's. The study was undertaken in cooperation with Skanska (a global contractor andFortune 500 company) which provided a project suitable for an exemplatory study ofGreenroads. Please note that the project in particular was not specifically designedwith Greenroads in mind. Therefore and because of that the site provided anexcellent opportunity to study effects of application contra non-application. The approach of this study was to first review the system, thereafter to performinterviews with key personel at the site in different roles as to receive different viewsof selected points of application. Selected possibilities of application are cathegorizedand presented with comments and suggestions for adoption. Lastly Greenroads is briefly compared to the rating system which today is the mostwidely used by Skanska, LEED.

Studiens syfte är att ur ett symbolisk interaktionistiskt synsätt försöka förstå vad som motiverar vuxna amatörskådespelare, amatörsångare och amatörmusikalartister att delta i ideella konstnärliga projekt. Något annat som studien tar reda på är om konstutövandet och gruppen de deltar i har någon inverkan på individens identitet och identitetsskapande. Genom nio semistrukturerade intervjuer skapas en förståelse kring motivationen och identitetsskapandet. Detta förklaras sedan genom motivationsteorier samt teorier kring identiteten, där det visar sig att gemenskapen i gruppen, konstnärlig utmaning och utveckling, deltagandet i den konstnärliga processen, känslan av flow, själva utförandet och dess påverkan på välbefinnandet, viljan att uttrycka sig samt personlig utveckling var de huvudsakliga motivationsfaktorerna. Det visar sig även att både det konstnärliga utförandet och gruppen har en inverkan på individens identitet och identitetsskapande..

This is a technical report about cement stabilization in general and the stabilizationprocess during the construction of a warehouse in Halmstad, Sweden in particular and iswritten at the section for economy and technology at Halmstad University incollaboration with NCC Anläggning.NCC encountered variations in compression strength in the stabilized material on the firstwarehouse that they constructed for the company Biltema. In our report we used thestabilization process of the second warehouse for the same company as a reference todetermine what could be done to get a more homogeneous result for future projects.We also looked in to what testing method is the most suitable to determine the result ofthe stabilization.After interviews with people involved in the process and visits on the work site we havecome to the conclusion that the most probable cause to the variations in compressionstrength is segregation in the ballast material. This segregation can occur in severaldifferent occasions in the process such as during the production, transportation andhandling on the work site.Other causes for the variation can be improper compaction, overlapping stabilization insome places and different duration of hardening of the samples that are tested.The best way to do in situ test of the stabilized material is to do seismic investigations asthose are non-destructive tests in comparison to taking core samples and you can discoverany cracks or air bubbles in the material..