This study examines how management consulting firms work with business- and functional strategy and how these strategies are interrelated. More specifically we focus on business strategy (business unit level) and knowledge strategy (functional level) and whether these are aligned or not, i.e. whether strategic congruence exists.A number of recent studies have examined the importance of business strategy and knowledge strategy in management consulting firms separately, but few have pointed out the importance of the alignment between them. With this study we contribute to the strategic field of research with a model that describes how management consulting firms should work with their knowledge strategy given their business strategy. The model is developed through a synthesis between theories in the field of strategic congruence, business- and functional strategies and thereafter tested by an empirical case study of six management consulting firms.

In this paper we examine what security is to the individual and how the individual creates and maintains security in their work. The purpose of this paper is to study how the creating of security in working life is performed. We conduct six semi-structured qualitative interviews with permanent employees in the private sector and we encode our material using thematic analysis. We analyze our material and illustrate our problem area on the basis of Anthony Giddens's theory of ontological security and give examples of how security and creating of security is performed at the empirical field with previous studies in the research area. Our survey shows that security for the individual at work seems to be about having continuity in everyday life, financial stability, a permanent employment, a challenging and fun job and a family in good health and good living.

There are several factors influencing the profitability of production with sheep. Two of the most important factors are ewe fertility and lamb survival. Also growth capacity of the lambs is important. This paper aims to review correlations between the ewe?s fertility and maternal behavior and lamb survival.

I want to investigate different preschool teachers' views of their daily work in terms of the diversity of children and learning, and the methods and strategies of preschool teachers use in their everyday lives, to meet every child's individual needs. I also want to investigate preschool teacher?s perceptions of children's social skills as this is included in the pre-school assignments relating to a favorable social environment for all children.To find this out, I have compiled three issues.What are the views interviewed preschool teachers to learning and different lustful methods that make the educational activities meaningful for all children?? What pedagogical strategies do preschool teachers to respond to the diversity of children?? What opinions have interviewed preschool teachers about children's social interaction with other children in preschool?The conclusion is:all children are different and learn in different ways. Teachers have the responsibility to ensure every child's development and adapt the business to the children's level and needs in a way that could inspire children to learn new skills. It is teachers' responsibility to provide children with good opportunities to express their views and feelings.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare five different ranking algorithms for query expansion. The algorithms compared are f4, f4mod, porter, wpq, and emim. This is done using a TREC collection, a selection of topics, and relevance judgements. Relative recall is measured before and after the expansion of the query. The study shows that all of the algorithms manage to increase the relative recall, f4 being the one most successful..

This report is a documentation of a Master?s thesis of 20 credits performed at the educational program of Technical Product- and Production Development with Design at Halmstad University. The project is carried out in cooperation with Hafa AB in Halmstad.The purpose of this project was to bring forth a concept of a bathroom cabinet for Hafa?s new selection Young through creative design methods. The selection is supposed to attract the younger purchaser but also a target group that dare to experiment with home furnishing and appreciates new design.

The purpose of our essay is to investigate the trust in accountants. The method we used to investigate the trust was a survey and a questionnaire was used to collect the data. The data was gathered from three different groups, shareholders, lenders and tax authority. When we analysed the data we found out that the groups trust in accountants were neither strong nor weak. The results can be generalized on all the three groups because the observations were scattered around the means and we used random selection to collect the data.

This thesis will explore how swedish Talang 2010 used their strategic communication in Kalmar and Stockholm and how the effect of this work was shown in the two cities. With a focus on how the sender was working with the external communication in the two cities, the heart of the research was studying Talang 2010?s communication strategy in these two contexts. The research was made with surveys during two audition days in Kalmar and two days in Stockholm. The competitors, the audience and the general public were answering different surveys but with the same base to study the effect.

This is a study on how a group of ten pupils choose their upper secondary schools (gymnasium). All pupils are ninth graders in a middle school in Husby which is a suburb of Stockholm. Like the big majority of Husby citizens, they all have immigrant backgrounds and their time in Sweden varies; some are born here while others are born abroad and migrated later with their parents. My aim was to understand their upper secondary school choices through own and their parents? "cultural capital".

Sweden is described as one of the most forward-thinking countries in the world when it comes to equal opportunities, yet still management is being dominated by men. Looking at entrepreneurship and gender, the author has written four herstories about female entrepreneurs working, through enterprise, to bring about change to the male domination of top level management. The primary purpose of this master's thesis has been to look at theories on entrepreneurship/ management and gender to analyse how the entrepreneurs relate to their roles as [i] entrepreneurs, [ii] agents of change, and [iii] women. The findings show that they attach particular emphasis to their roles as entrepreneurs. As regards the work for change, being female is described as both advantageous and irrelevant, or insufficient.

Climate change and the sea level rise that it contributes to is an ever more pressing issue for costal municipalities around the world. Today there is a great deal of scientific reports and projections on what these changes could entail. However, resent studies on south Swedish costal municipalities have shown great discrepancies when it comes to how these scientific projections are implemented in the municipal planning and adaptation strategies. In an effort to understand the underlying reasons for this lack of concurrence, this paper has applied Rolf Lidskogs theory of the hetrogenity of science. The theory gives an explanation to the complications in the science-policy interface, by describing complicating factors in the communication between these actors.

Background: Patients with borderline personality disorder represent a large group in healthcare who are struggling with painful emotions in life. Caring should be based on strengthening health processes by focusing on the patients, but research made by the patient's perspective has shown that this population rather felt that their health processes was counteracted, than promoted. The patients felt that the nurses displayed a negative attitude towards them. Attitudes are defined as a system of values, emotions and actions towards others. Aim: the purpose of this study was to highlight the attitudes and experiences of nurses towards caring for people with borderline personality disorder  Methods: A study on the literature based on nine scientific papers was performed. The articles have been analyzed, systematically coded and compiled into a new unit. Results: This study shows that nurses have an overall negative attitude towards patients with borderline personality disorder.

Background and problem: In the last few years the threat against the environment and especially the emissions of carbon dioxide has become increasingly debated. The government have set up a goal to lower the emissions of carbon dioxide with 40 percent until 2020 compared to the level in 1990. The emissions in the transportation sector have, in contrast to the total emissions, increased since 1990 and will continue to increase unless powerful control measures are implemented. The lorry centres have to use strategies to answer to these external threats which lead us to the two questions of this thesis: - What methods do the lorry centres use actively and which do they consider as the most important methods for fuel saving? - Are there any differences which methods small, medium and large centres considers as important? Purpose: The main purpose of this thesis is to examine which methods lorry centres use actively and which they consider as important for fuel saving.

We acknowledge the lack of empirical studies of the performance of analyst target prices in the Swedish stock market by examining the profitability of target prices for stocks publicly traded on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. We use consensus target prices issued between 2006-2010 and create two different strategies to observe the abnormal returns generated during this period. Going long in the top decile stocks with the best target prices and going short in the bottom decile stocks with the worst target prices generates a statistically significant abnormal buy-and-hold return of 8.9%. An active strategy with daily portfolio rebalancing and a timely response to target price changes generates a less significant monthly alpha of 1.4% against CAPM. The results show to be robust against the size effect discovered by Fama and French.

ABSTRACT. Introduction: In the Swedish government?s public health policy the municipalities are emphasized as one of the most important actors. Based on their broad range of operations the municipalities have good opportunities to influence the health situation of its citizens. Aim: The purpose of this study is to investigate how the local public health coordinators in Region Västra Götaland are working and what barriers they experience in their work.