The Swedish bank Handelsbanken has, according to their own way of measuring, been more successful than a weighted average of their competitors during the last 38 years. They have also handled the recent financial crisis, as well as the one in the 1990´s, better than most other banks. This paper studies their management control system at branch level in order to identify the controls which have been enforced to ensure that a low risk level is retained in the lending. The controls that have been identified are; (1) A decentralized organization with the offices as profit centers where the manager has restrictions regarding risk level and the results are measured as K/I (cost/revenue). (2) The absence of bonuses and individual follow-up regarding performance measurement.

Mergers and acquisitions are common phenomenon in today´s society in order to increase shareholder value. Two years ago a fusion of Sweden´s two largest companies in the industry of real estate took place and even though three out of four mergers and acquisitions financially fail this certain case turned out highly successful. The aim of this thesis is to examine how the organizational structure and the management control have been designed and characterized the organizational performance and furthermore what are the success factors of the integration. By studying an acquisition and its potential effects on organizational structure and management control parallel to a model that describes the best practice guidelines for managers to successfully deliver value from their acquisitions, it can be shown that an acquisition has direct effects both on the acquirer and the acquired company and thus the new organizational structure. The main results, thus, is that through active leadership, increased specialization, and more decentralized and thus efficient management control a new organization has emerged consisting of the best features of two separate worlds..

AbstractThis is the paper you should read if you want to know more about working in team. Teamwork is a way of working and it increases more and more among societies and companies today, but it is not quite clear what the diffrences is from working in groups. We have in this paper tried to clear out the differences between groups and team, and we have also tried to give an oversight of how to work in team in organizations. Cultures of organizations, leadership and power and also development of qualifications are big parts of an organization´s daily work, and we have explained these concepts from a teamperspective.We have, in this paper, done interviews with people that have been in contact with the central consepts that we use. And then we have analyzed their answers with help from litterature, which we have closely studied, thereafter we have presented our results.

Bullying in workplaces has been a growing problem the last ten years. Anyone can be a victim or a bully. Either you are a leader or a worker a bullying situation can be activated. There is no difference between ages, line of business, education or the size of the firm. A person is defined as bullied if he or she is repeatedly subjected to negative acts in the workplace. However, to be a victim of such bullying one must also feel inferiority in defending oneself in the actual situation. Bullying often occurs when situations or conditions at the workplace are unsatisfactory. Employers are always responsible for the working environment at the workplace. Victims of bullying very often develop psychological stress. To prevent bullying you have to accept the fact that bullying exists. If the company has a clear policy against bullying and a plan for action if the problem occurs, it will be easier to handle the situation.

The purpose of this study was to identify the positive and negative aspects of the work and dynamics of a management team and from that recommend how the team can improve. The aim was also to investigate whether there was a gap between how the members of the management team comprehend themselves and how the project, section and team managers comprehend the management team. The management team contains of seven core team members and is the head function of a research and development site in central Sweden. The results are based on interviews with the present members of the management team and three former members, a survey among the project, section and team managers and by participating observation on meetings with the team. The results show that the management team is an overall well-functioning team that with some changes and improvements, especially concerning communication and information, can reach even further.

With this essay, I want to examine the image of Russians in the Swedish rural press during the second half of the 19th century, how rusophobia appeared in Swedish rural press and how the image of Russians changed during this time. To find this out, I set these questions:  ? How was Russians and Russia portrayed in the Swedish rural press? ? Did the view of Russians change during this time?The essay is written so that I have interpreted my empirical material to do a discourse analysis in which I analyse different articles that have been written about Russia and Russians in a stereotypical way. The source material used in the thesis comes from 41 news articles; the bulk of the source material comes from newspapers that were published during the late 19th century.Rural press reporting on Russia and Russians were in the second half of the 19th century mostly negative. Of the 41 articles that were examined it was found that about half were negative, less than one-sixth were positive, while about a third were neutral.The reason that many of the articles were negative has to do with Sweden's shared history with Russia, with many wars and territorial losses.

A qualitative study is presented concerning children?s participation in the local decisionmaking in Swedish municipalities. The study also aims at finding out what are considered to be successful factors and obstacles connected to the implementation of children?s participation in local decision-making. The study contains a summary of the convention on the rights of the child, focusing on article 12, as well as previous research findings concerning children?s participation and factors enabling respectively hindering participation.

The purpose of this study has been to examine different aspects of the professional role of the high school librarian, especially the educational role, and its delimitations to the teacher's role. The methods that were used were studies of literature within the subject area and qualitative interviews with high school librarians and high school teachers of social studies. Andrew Abbot's theory on the system of professions was used in the analysis of the results of the study. The high school librarians who were interviewed enabled access to information, both intellectually and physically. They helped students develop information seeking skills and they functioned as educators and counselors.

This paper examines the non-profit organization Friskis&Svettis in order to gain insight into whether governmentality is used and if it is being used in what way. Furthermore we analyzed the requirements and consequences that that may have developed out of this governance structure. To get answers to the questions asked in this paper, a qualitative approach has been taken by the use of interviews with officials at Friskis&Svettis Uppsala. The conclusions drawn from the survey is that there are factors that indicate that governmentality is used within the organization by way of the use of guidelines which can be seen as a technique to control individuals and point them in the desired direction, and the follow-ups that can verify that the guidelines are being followed by the officials. The guidelines and the follow-up have also been an organizational requirement.

We investigated a retirement home, where we looked at whether there are differences, disagreements or conflicts between teams who work day and night shifts. Our purpose was to examine the Heads of Unit and the employees perspectives on their perceived work situation, cooperation difficulties and why they emerged. We chose the general systems theory as our theoretical basis, which gave us the opportunity to highlight different parts that can affect the working climate and the cooperation of the working groups. The study also highlights the importance of structure, common goals, reporting and dialogue meetings. To understand the perceived work situation, we used methodological triangulation, using quantitative and qualitative methods (surveys, semi-structured interviews).

The aim of this qualitative study is to examine the experience of participation among first line managers within community home care. The study is based on eight interviews with first line managers operating in a metropolitan area in Sweden. A majority of the interviewees worked in private companies.We have used two theories to interpret our empiri: Lean Production and Human Resource Management. The analysis resulted in seven themes: economy, leadership, participation, view on the organization, first line manager, private or municipally operated organization and expectations on the manager. Our results showed that all the interviewees experienced that they were participant in the organization.

Objective: 1.4 million people in Sweden state that they are having problems with hearing and the majority havehad no contact with the hearing rehabilitation services. To have a hearing loss seems to be associated withseveral negative attributes. This could be due to bad attitude and insufficient knowledge on hearing loss intoday?s society.Purpose: The purpose with this study was to map the adult populations attitude towards hearing loss and selfratedknowledge of hearing with a survey.Methods: A web survey was made for this study. An official link to the survey was shared from two Facebookaccounts to a total of 997 contacts and a total of 247 responses were collected.Results: The majority of the respondents have estimated their general knowledge of hearing to fairly extensivefollowed by very small.

Leaders in modern working life are confronted with frequent use of temporary groups. The purpose of this study was to examine possible reasons for swift trust towards leaders in temporary groups. The target group of the study was school employees. An opinion poll was carried out in the occupational group (n = 35) which made it possible to make statistical comparisons. The result showed that the following aspects were important for the development of swift trust in leaders: personal attributes, image related attributes, competence and experience, leadership and also social competence.

Syftet med den här studien var att ur ett lärarperspektiv synliggöra problematiken med att få till stånd ett gemensamt synsätt vad gäller barns utveckling, kunskap och lärande mellan lärare i förskoleklassen och grunskolans år ett. Frågeställningen var: Vilka faktorer anser lärare främjar respektive hindrar utvecklingen av ett gemensamt synsätt?Studien var kvaltitativ och genomfördes med hjälp av inspelade intervjuer av sex lärare varav tre är verksamma i förskoleklass och de andra tre i årskurs ett.I studiens resultat framkom en mängd faktorer som anses utgöra hinder och/eller möjligheter för att främja en gemensam syn. Det mest primära var att lärarna i arbetslaget för en dialog om verksamheten. Andra viktiga faktorer var till exempel arbetslagets sammansättning, samt att tid avsätts för att kunna föra diskussioner kring barnen, deras kunskap och utveckling.

The connection between management control systems for controlling sustainability and a firm's motivation for engaging in sustainability is not completely understood (Arjaliès & Mundy, 2013). The aim of this thesis is to develop a more profound understanding for management control in achieving sustainable companies. To do this, we raise the question: How and to what extent do companies use management control systems to achieve sustainability compliance Simons's Levers of Control (1995) are applied to this question in order to get a consistent and thorough insight of management control systems. Hence, a case study of ABB:s work to achieve material compliance in accordance with EU-regulation was conducted. The findings of the case study reveal that ABB uses the regulations as explicit goals and implement them in sustainability procedures.