During the last decades, brand equity has been a priority topic for both practitioners and academics. In accordance with the structural changes in the economic settings caused by the so-called "new economy", corporations being confronted with a shift on perceived business value structure from tangible assets to intangibles. On the other hand firms increasingly are adopting more responsible behaviour towards their societies. In this context, one critical question is to understand how corporate conduct may affect brand equity. The purpose of this study was to find how brand equity (BE) measurement methods embrace corporate responsibility (CR), based on a literature review.

Den här uppsatsen behandlar huruvida det går att mäta marknadsföringsaktivitet i sociala medier eller inte. Idag används Return of Investment (ROI) mätningar för att mäta vilken avkastning en marknadsföringssatsning ger. Syftet med uppsatsen är således att klargöra för de begrepp och mätmetoder som används, samt deras tillförlitlighet. För att besvara de framtagna frågeställningarna har omfattande datainsamling gjorts i form av skriven litteratur och intervjuer. Det har även gjorts egna observationer genom mätningen av en marknadsförd kampanj i de sociala medieverktygen Facebook och Twitter.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to adjusting corporate goals so that they are not only based on maximizing corporate profits, but include ethical standards on socially desirable behavior (Boatright, 2008). Even though many companies have integrated CSR into their business operations, there are still many issues that are difficult to tackle. Especially Multinational Corporations (MNCs) in the global business environment face many challenging situations due to the fact that they often have linkages to countries where the local government is either unwilling or unable to take care of its responsibilities. MNCs often find themselves with increased responsibilities when they start solving some of the issues that earlier have been the sole responsibility of states. A specific case situation discussed in this paper is related to ?conflict minerals?.

This essay?s focus lies on the collaboration that takes place in hospitals and called a care-plan (vårdplanering) between the two organisations: Health-care (landsting) and social-care (kommun). According to the Swedish-law are these organizations responsible for the care of elderly individuals in Sweden. The aim of this essay has been to study closely this collaboration in order to see which partner has the most influencing power.This essay is of a qualitative character, which means that the results that are presented are based on six individual interviews with employees from the two organizations. The employees chosen for this essay all have job experiences from the collaboration that takes place during care-plans in hospitals.One of the main results of this essay has been that the two organizations are not equal collaboration-partners.

The Swedish government has set up 16 environmental goals for Sweden to achieve. One ofthem is ?Living forests?, which is the foundation for the ?National strategy for the formalprotection of forests?. The ?National strategy? puts the private forest owner at the centre ofattention in order to achieve the environmental goal ?Living forests?.

The purpose of this study has been to evaluate whether a Low temperature bio-mass dryer could be integrated with the local district heating system in Malå. The aim is to increase the thermal efficiency of the cogeneration plant in Malå, by lowering the temperature of the cooling medium. Another benefit that comes from this is improved combustion efficiency at the power plant, since drying the fuel causes an Increase of the heating value.Simulations has been made in Excel, and with use of linear regression, to find out if it is profitable. Data for this purpose has been supplied by the power company Skellefteåkraft and furthermore SMHI.The result of the Calculations shows that a very efficient bio-mass dryer is needed, if yield of investments should be made possible. An Investment of 4,27 Mkr, in a dryer, could at a such criterium return 60000 kr/year, if the price of the biomass is 190kr/MWh.

Recently there have been a lot of talk a about the financial crisis and recession. This is understandable since the crisis, which initially was limited to the U.S. now has spread its concern globally in form of bankruptcies, less investment and lots of people have lost here jobs. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the financial crisis have affected the construction industry relating to market and personnel, but also examine what measures the construction companies have taken. The examination was carried out by information received from the majority of construction-related websites which then was followed up with interviews in the various construction sectors.

Biogas mainly consists of methane and carbon dioxide, where methane is theenergy-rich gas, and is naturally created when organic matter breaks down in absenceof oxygen, also known as anaerobic digestion. A biogas plant re-creates the anaerobicconditions inside a digester where the organic substrate is fed into and digests toproduce biogas. The gas is then used to produce energy by combustion and can beseen as a completely renewable fuel.Today, energy from biogas is used primarily by major stakeholders such asmunicipalities and thus the plants become very large with high investment- andconstruction costs. There are currently few small plants in Sweden, even though thepotential for agriculture and medium-sized to smaller farms to become self-sufficientin terms of electricity and heat is great. Farms have a natural stock of digestibleorganic material in form of manure or crops for example, which are constantlyavailable.

The Swedish cooperative Lantmännen Ekonomiska Förening has initiated a project labelled "Operation Blåljus" that includes an extensive program for closing down elevators. The number of elevators will be reduced from 92 to approximately 15 after harvest of 2007. The objective of Blåljus is to increase the price of grain with 10 öre/kg. A project has been initiated at the Lantmännen Grain division where the purpose is to provide the farmers with support in their decisions and practical advice how they can load a 35 ton grain truck on 30 minutes. The result from the project will serve as a support system to the farmer in his ambition to achieve cost efficient systems to load a truck with grain on the farm.

In Uppsala CHP Plant, there are six pressure reducing valves to reduce the pressure from 15 to 3 bars, before six absorption heat pumps. During the process the energy is conserved but losses occur in form of exergy. The aim of this thesis is to reduce the losses of exergy. This can be done by letting turbines replace the pressure reducing valves.In this thesis an investigation has been done of the conditions today, the conditions after the change from pressure reducing valves to turbines and a comparison of three different types of turbine solutions. The three examined solutions are one turbine, several helical screw expanders and several small turbines in parallel with asynchronous generators.The six absorption heat pumps have been divided into two groups; one group of four and one group of two absorption heat pumps.

2013 a decision was made that all projects at the Swedish Transport Administration shoulduse BIM (Building Information Modeling) to some extent from 2015. BIM is an approachthat allows for streamlining of projects by the use of a 3D-model created in an early stage ofthe project. The 3D-model can carry information about the facility throughout its life cyclefrom planning to management. The use of a 3D-model can help the project to detect errors inearly stages of the project when it is easy and cheap to fix the error instead of finding theerror in the construction phase when it is costly and time consuming to fix it. 3D-models alsolead to improved communication both within the project groups and with the public.

Knowledge is today one of the most important resources for an organization to handle. But knowledge can also be difficult for organizations to manage. The internet is still growing and new tools take form that allows users to effectively share information. The purpose of this report was to describe how organizations can make use out of internal social media to facilitate knowledge management processes. Three issues involving mapping, coding and dissemination of knowledge to were produced to answer the thesis. The study was limited to examining the identification, coding and dissemination of knowledge through the internal social media plattformen, IBM Connections. The theoretical framework emphasizes how social networks can promote knowledge sharing, how a knowledge mapping can promote knowledge dissemination and sharing, how knowledge can be stored in data sources and how important interaction is to spread awareness. The theory has been supplemented by descriptions of how the system IBM Connections works. Surveys were conducted on four companies that use IBM Connections as an internal communication plattformen. The four companies were selected to illustrate how they use the plattformen of knowledge management processes and we chose to interview the people who were responsible for the introduction of the plattformen. The study identified several similarities between the different companies and that although there were some technical and cultural recalcitrant units against this new type of system within the organization so favored IBM Connections knowledge in several ways. The built-in search automatic created a map of knowledge through the plattform's user profiles. Saved files and documents could be found even after the employees left the company, which encodes knowledge into the company knowledge resources. The opportunity to interact with one another, often over great distances, favored the sharing of knowledge. A comparison with the theoretical framework provided us with the conclusion that internal social media can be used in several ways to Knowledge management through automated knowledge maps, the ability to store knowledge within the company and to communicate knowledge across functional and geographical boundaries in interactive discussions..

My big interest in sports was what shaped my choice of subject for the essay. The purpose of this study has been to explore the social meaning of team sports for functionally impaired persons. In order to fulfil the purpose of the essay I formed following questions: How do the actives experience their participation in team sports? And how important is the social intercourse in team sports to the individual welfare? The methods I?ve used have been qualitative with an ethnographic approach. I have used participant observations and field interviews to gather my empirical material.

The Royal Library (KB) of Sweden harbours great collections of different objects through a special law from 1661. This master degree paper is exploring a part of KB?s digitisation of those collections. It deals with the questions about what the KB had chosen for digitisation, why those choices were maid and who is responsible for making these decisions. The paper will also for example seek out different patterns and trends in the information.

This study is intended to identify which factors that influence the success of initiatives in Customer Relationship Management, usually abbreviated as CRM. In the course of this study we have been in contact with forty-two companies operating in Sweden within eleven different sectors in order to find out how they operate regarding CRM initiatives, particularly initiatives within marketing and promotions. Against the data collected during the study it was concluded that the companies working with CRM believed that the CRM initiatives resulted in higher profitability and created more loyal customers. At the same time it was evident that the companies had different views on CRM as a method and its benefits. The majority of the companies could not present any tangible results from CRM-initiatives. It was also revealed that decisions regarding CRM initiatives were based on subjective assessments and without theoretical foundation.