The energy Sector of modern time is currently faced with several challenges. These are both production oriented and environmental oriented in nature. The energy of the future is intended to support an increasing demand while at the same time reduce its environmental affection. This stresses a development towards production methods of renewable energy. Among the existing methods, biogas is presented as an attractive alternative.

Efficient energy use in the housing Sector is crucial for achieving a sustainable society. The expansion of this Sector only represents a fraction of the existing houses, hence it?s within the existing houses the potential for energy savings lie. This potential has been analyzed in order to determine if it?s possible to cut the current energy demand in half.

Information technology (IT) with its enormous capacity involves more and more in our daily activities and public Sector is using IT to make their activities more efficient. The government goal with electronic government (e-government) among other things is increasing the availability and service to the public as well as improving the democratic process. Democracy can be strengthened by involving citizens in public decision making process but this goal has not been achieved yet and the development of e-government has mostly been focused on improving efficiency within administration and electronic services (e-services). Promoting the democratic process has been postponed in the development of e-government because of the lack of political commitment and decision. Digital divide is also preventing public Sector to promote democracy with the support of IT.

This study was commissioned by the Västerbotten sports federation, whocalled for an overview of the policies that the municipalities inVästerbotten work after in the field of sport. The study aimed to identifysports policy programs or documents that have been produced by themunicipalities, and how they work with them. Furthermore, the studyhighlights the municipality?s politicians reasoning aboutsport andrecreation-Sector,and how their sport policy-work was practiced. The datacollection was based on seven interviews and document-collections fromthe 15 municipalities.

This thesis studies whether private equity owned firms within the Swedish welfare Sector distinguish themselves in terms of tax planning and short-termism from a control group consisting of other privately owned welfare firms. For the first time, the comparison is made on the entire welfare Sector, between 14 matched pairs within education, health care and elderly care. We use financial metrics associated with tax planning and short-termism in sign tests to examine whether the private equity owned firms differ from our control group. The financial metrics tested are actual and paid tax rates, level of interest, book-tax gap, investments, personnel expenses per employee, and cash earnings. We find that the private equity owned firms in terms of tax planning only differ in the level of interest, while no notable differences are found in terms of short-termism..

Tourism is often being viewed as one of the worlds largest Sectors and a great contribution to growth and development. There is a large motivation amongst developing countries to promote themselves as a tourist destination, since they expect the tourism to generate economic growth. The government of Thailand has been promoting tourism since 1960, and the number of foreign visitors has increased from 100 000 back then to 13.5 million in 2006. The purpose of this paper was to investigate weather the increasing tourism industry in Thailand has pulled resources away from other Sectors of the economy towards the tourism Sector, and in that way harming Thailand?s international competitiveness and causing deindustrialization.

Despite Sweden's ranking as one of the least corrupt countries in the world, recent studies suggest that the prevalence of corruption in the private Sector is growing, now approaching international levels. Over the past couple of years, Sweden has witnessed a growing number of scandals involving unethical behavior on the part of its corporate Sector. Corruption has gained the attention of authorities, legislators and the public - putting the private Sector under pressure to take action to prevent such corporate misconduct. As a result, companies increasingly prioritize strategies and policies aiming to prevent corruption. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of leadership in such preventive work.

Managers operating within the dynamic society of today are said to rely on intuition when effective and quick decisions are to be made. This skill or phenomenon has aroused an interest within the academic world of management whom has explored intuition, its relation to decision making and its influencing factors, especially in the private Sector. Intuitive decision making is however not isolated solely to this Sector but also involved in decision making associated to the public Sector. Therefore, the aim of the thesis is to investigate whether managers at the hospital Akademiska in Uppsala involve intuition in decision making and to what extent the factors time, amount of information, individual experience and decision complexity influence the intuition.The theoretical framework includes academic research regarding how intuition and rationality affect decisions, the concept of intuition and factors influencing the intuitiveness of decision making. Furthermore the theoretical discussion explores intuition connected to leadership, negative aspects of intuitive decisions and a comparison between different factors that separates public and private Sector in terms of decision making.

Outsourcing has grown more so than any other Sector of IT services. According to a research by the analytic company Gartner soon four of ten jobs in the IT Sector will be outsourced. For a nation like Sweden that means about 40,000 jobs going abroad. Business managers look to outsourcing as a means of reducing their operating cost and their need for capital spending. Companies turn to outsourcing to save money and seek expertise outside.

It has become more and more common that companies in the service Sector are beginning to understand their own effect on the environment and thus the need to contribute to a sustainable development through acting in a deliberate way. Serious environmental work can help a company to improve their image and in that way win competitive advantage that leads to improved profitability. In a short time perspective, adjustment to the environment is an opportunity to gain competitive advantage and an opportunity to develop a profile. In a long time perspective it is about survival. The environmental work has become a sequel to the work with quality.

AbstractThe thesis investigates how the European Union promotes stability and security in the Mediterranean region. The aim is to analyse the European Union?s security ambitions with Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the Barcelona Process. An analytical framework with five Sectors (military, political, economic, environmental and societal), based on the Copenhagen School?s theories about security Sectors and securitization, is used for the analysis.

The main purpose of this essay is to investigate the legal position for employers concerning protection against what employees can express about one?s employer in social media.It may regard dissatisfaction concerning employment, tort or so-called whistleblowing. The spread through social media may be comprehensive and thus cause more damage to the employer.Employees within the public Sector as well as in the private are protected by the liberty of speech, which is constitutional, even the protection of sources or the right to criticize can offer some protection. This gives the employees the possibility to widely express themselves in private social media as long as it can?t be classified as a violation, which per se is very rare.However, certain differences between the both Sectors will be pointed out.There are still no constitutional rights regarding social media, but a grey area has emerged concerning the legal position.

In the early 1990?s more and more companies of the Swedish public Sector were exposed to competition, and this started the debate on how such actions might affect the business and even society.The first chapter examines how the public Sector and especially health care, is financed and managed. We also explore what it means to be exposed to competition and find that there are many different ways of exposing the public Sector to competition. The study examines dental care as an example of a market with both publicly and privately owned companies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how publicly and privately owned health care companies view their relationship with their consumers.

This study focuses upon the new societal objects that are termed public privatepartnerships where the public Sector forms strategic alliances with the private Sectorand the civil society to manage the wicked issues of today. An exampel of suchcooperation is Vänerhamn AB where the municipalities around the lake of Vänernand the private shipping companies got togheter to handle an economic crisis of theshipping buisiness. The partnership Vänerhamn has developed from a problematicactivity to a healthy company and the aim of this thesis is to illuminate thisdevelopment through an historical institutional approach, focusing critical junctureto discover if the governance theory can be used to understand the partnershipspositive process. This will be done through research questions about the organisation of thepartnership, about the members interests with the partnership and about eventuallycoordination problems in the partnership. The questions derive from dimensions ingovernance theory, central for the activity of partnerships. Interviews with centralinformants where held and it was complemented through a document analyses inorder to search for indications of the dimensions and that is the methodologicalapproach of the study. The conclusion of this thesis is that the governance theory can be used tounderstand Vänerhamns postive development since the members interest with thepartnership to a begining was not at all conformed and that led to obviouscoordination problems.

The environmental situation is becoming increasingly critical. The energy Sector and other industries have a big impact on our climate and the public is raising their voice for companies to admit their responsibility towards the environment and society. Companies engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and happily disclose their responsible performance in annual reports. But what messages are they conveying in their CSR-reporting, and what attitudes towards CSR can be found underneath the explicit content? The aim of this study is to discover which discourses exist in CSR-reports from Swedish energy companies, and how these discourses operate.