The aim of this case study was to investigate the role of leadership and interpersonal relations among staff during implementation of lean at a University Hospital in Sweden. The 15 respondents were leaders and staff members from different wards and clinics, who had started working according to lean principles. One of the methods used was explorative, low structured interviews. Other methods used for gathering information about the case was attending lectures about lean healthcare at the hospital, part-taking in the lean game and reading articles about lean and the implementation in both daily press and on the intranet of the hospital. The results showed that an open and accessible leader that coaches his/her staff and supports their work, helps the staff to develop a lean identity.

This study used a qualitative interview design to explore the experiences of seven Swedish female elite athletes and their career retirement. The athletes were engaged in three different sports; track and field (athletics), handball and golf and five of them are former professional or semi-professional athletes. The process of their athletic role exit was based on the theoretical findings of Ebaugh (1988) and her four phases: First Doubts, Seeking Alternatives, The Turning Point and Creating the Ex-Role. The findings reveal that for these female former elite athletes Seeking Alternatives already starts before the First Doubts and that possibly the athletes at an early stage have insights of the discontinuity of their athletic career. The importance of transferring their role residual to future paths in life was stressed among the female athletes in order to be able to have a smooth transition process.

This study is based on the public eldercare assistances administrators and unit managers perspective. The purpose of this study is to describe and understand how the assistance administrator and unit manager approach elderly needs, who can be harder to accommodate as well as alternative providers that also can meet the needs of the elderly. It is important to gain more knowledge about how assistance administrators and unit managers look at these aspects, what their attitude and approach is towards them. This is important to learn more about because the assistance administrators and unit managers have discretion in their work and the power to change and affect the elderlys situation in a significant way. They decide on actions and design implementation to meet the needs of the elderly and enable them a reasonable standard of living.The choice of method used in this study was qualitative through semi-structured interviews, conducted with assistance officers and unit managers.

This paper examines the function of narrative discourse in television talk shows. Basing our analysis on five episodes of the Swedish talk show Skavlan, we illustrate how narratives are initiated and elaborated by the participants of the show. The analysis shows that the institutional roles are challanged and that the roles vary between the host ant the guests. The analysis also shows that when guests introduce and elaborate stories they use the same discursive actions and resources as the host. When participants enter an actvie role in their storytelling the hos takes a more restrained role in which he lets the the conversation evolve spontaneously.

This essay aims to investigate the perceptions of responsible personnel in a primary school about the use and importance of EQ, emotional intelligence, in the school's early years. With a hermeneutic approach and by qualitative interviews, we have taken note of the respondents perceptions about EQ. The result shows that EQ can be understood in different ways. Instead of having a common understanding of what EQ is the respondents mention that there are different areas associated with EQ.  Two major results are 1.

This thesis examines the approach for implementing strategy that has been applied by the study object, Svenska Spel. The specific approach originates from the theories of Elliot Jaques, whose key proposal is that individuals have different capability of carrying out tasks over different time-spans. The main purpose of the study is to analyze how the approach has influenced the management control systems in use, in order to ensure that the strategy is successfully implemented on corporate as well as operational level. Twenty in debt interviews conducted with employees, representing a vertical cross section throughout the organization, are the main source of the study?s empirical foundation.

The purpose of this essay is to describe how probation service officers regard their professional role and their liberty of action within the motivational treatment program, MIK, and the probation organization. To answer the purpose three questions were formulated: 1) Does the probation service organization affect the individual discretion for the probation service officers, and in that case how? 2) Does the motivational treatment program, MIK, influence the probation officers? professionalism and their professional role? 3) What advantages and disadvantages do the probation service officers consider MIK being related to? The method conducted in the study was interviews with five probation service officers in Stockholm. The interviews were combined with a theoretical framework based on themes as organization, professional role, professionalism and motivation. The result showed that probation officers consider themselves to have a relatively high discretion within their work.

The environment has become an important part in people´s lives, and in today´s society stakeholders demands have increased upon companies when it comes to sustainability reports. How these sustainability reports are designed depends on whom it?s for, laws and regulations, and the companies own norms and values. The purpose of sustainability reports is to measure, monitor and compare a company´s enviromental impact. It?s not only about integrating economics, but also enviromental and social standards together to get both financial and competitive advantages.Sustainable Value method is a new model and is the first real method that can be used to evaluate a company´s resources, both financial, social and enviromental to a sustainable value.This model is used to compare the resource efficiency between companies.In this thesis, a documentary study with an experimental approach has been made.Sustainability reports from six selected companies (in the engineering and forestry sector) have been investigated with respect to their accounting for carbon dioxide, and an experiment using the method ?Sustainable Value Approach? was subsequently performed.

The aim of this study was to understand how social workers perceive and understand violence and threats of violence from clients, and how it effect their working environment. It seems that the respondents understand the violence and threats of violence from clients as a result of the clients background problems, vulnerability, dependency and from ?the reason" that the client is currently in the contact with the organization. How respondents interpret the client´s behaviour based on the above-mentioned factors, seem to determine how the respondents perceive and define the violence and threats of violence by clients directed against them. Interestingly enough, although all respondents in the study experienced violence and threats of violence from clients, none of them perceived themselves as exposed at work. The answer to this is consensual.

Worldwide result over internetusers show that Sweden internet users comes at third place. The technological development has been explosive. Individuals can with the help of technology live some, in other cases all their social lifes through social media. Therefore organizations has a lot to gain by using social media to interact and start up dialogue with their audicence. There are different views whether a civic society has developed on internet or not.

The aim of this study was to acquire knowledge about the working conditions of people's gainful employment. The research was conducted at one of the regional social insurance offices of Malmö with participation of ten of their employees. The research method of choice was a phenomenological approach. One open question about the working situation was answered freely. The results indicate a rather severe discontent about the workplace.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether social counselling via chat conversations could meet the criteria for a professional conversation, and how the six social workers who were interviewed felt that it had affected the profession and the clients who are seeking their help.Communication, professionality, power, roles and regions are the key topics of this study. A hermeneutic approach has not only influenced the interviews but also the content analysis that was used to encode the results.The interviews revealed that the chat conversations was a successful tool but not entirely without difficulties. The initial contact making between the client and the social worker favours the client, since she/he remains anonymous and that was the main advantage of the method. The biggest concern however was that in the anonymity it is not possible to report cases that the social worker are obligated to. The changing of forum does not necessarily affect the professionality but due to the faceless chat conversation an entire dimension of communication disappears because the loss of body language.

This thesis in social anthropology is based on a field study on the Internet exploring Tibetan identity. With a post-modern approach the thesis explores the possibility fora non-tibetan to create a Tibetan Internet identity and become a part of the Tibetan community that exist on the Internet..

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.

AbstractThe aim of this study was to highlight who represents elderly immigrants and apply the theory of social exclusion. We chose channels for representation that we found important in relation to this group. The first part is a study of available litterature of the subject. We found three main arenas: participation in elections, participation in associations and clubs and representation in political institutions. The findings showed a democratic deficit among elderly immigrants, which gave an indication of social exclusion from the political arena and from participation in associations.For the second part we decided to concentrate on the arena of participation in associations and clubs that represent the elderly and/or immigrants.