AbstractThe customer demand for ecological products has increased in recent years, within the garden industry this mainly concerns herbs and other edible plants. The organic trend is increasing and more people are aware of the environment and want to take responsibility for it through their purchases for their garden as well.In this essay the aim is to investigate customer demand and the possibility of selling organicperennial plants in eight garden centres on the Åland islands and in Gävle/Sandviken. I include two garden centres with an organic profile to get a wider point of view. I investigate the global market for organic perennials and look further into existing certification standards on the Swedish market today.The methods I have been using are interviews and a literature study.The study shows that the experienced demand for organic perennials is small in both of myinvestigated groups. The biggest motivation for starting to sell organic perennials would be to find a supplier of these plants and that more customer would ask for them.

Stock lending is primarily a professional activity. The supply of stocks in the lending market comes mainly from pension funds and insurance companies, while intermediaries provide valuable services by taking positions as borrowers as well as lenders. Borrowers use stock lending for various reasons. For instance, hedge funds usually borrow stocks to cover a short position. There has been a lot of controversy in the stock lending industry and the debate has mainly concerned its effects for the stock markets.

Stock lending is primarily a professional activity. The supply of stocks in the lending market comes mainly from pension funds and insurance companies, while intermediaries provide valuable services by taking positions as borrowers as well as lenders. Borrowers use stock lending for various reasons. For instance, hedge funds usually borrow stocks to cover a short position. There has been a lot of controversy in the stock lending industry and the debate has mainly concerned its effects for the stock markets.

Until recently, the art market has expanded for several consecutive years. The primary art market is characterized by an unclear pricing mechanism and an infinite as well as limited supply. Previous business studies have so far primarily focused either on art as an investment or on the gallery?s activities. This thesis takes an explorative approach and aims to shed a light on the art collector?s behavior on the Swedish market for contemporary art.

A great number of empirical researches show that hedging is associated with higher firm value, particularly hedging interest rate and exchange rate. However, there is no clear support for value-added risk management hypothesis in the case of producers of commodities. Moreover, according to Shrand and Unal (1997), there are two types of risks, core business risks (or core risk) and homogeneous risks (or non core risks), which are based on a firm's comparative advantages with respects to the source of risk. Firm can earn economic profits for bearing core risks in which it has a comparative information advantage. Firm earn a zero economic rents for bearing non-core risks, where it has no advantage information than its competitors.

The energy in laundry rooms, in form heated air, can be utilized with a heat exchanger. A concept and an early prototype of the heat exchanger have already been developed to show that the theory works. This report describes the continued development and construction of the product.A field study was made in order to investigate the environmental usage and establish the product design. The most common washing machine was used as a calculation model, and calculations were also made to estimate the amount of energy in the air. A previous analysis of the existing prototype is also presented in this report, to show the products potential capacity.

The store manager can make great benefits of having an eye on how the staff works towards the customer, because the personnel is an important tool when competing with other stores. This paper is focusing on the part that relates to the staff in the store, which is one of the key tools in the competition for customers after the customer made it to the store. Many stores have guidelines which the staff should follow when they meet with customers. If the staff is too tightly controlled by these guidelines, customers can perceive the first encounter with the staff as artificial and as if the genuine friendliness does not exist. It is important that the staff looks at the individual customer and treat every customer in a personal way and that the staff can see the customer?s needs.

Forest management plans have been sold to private forest owners by wood supplying companies for a long time. These plans are considered to be effi-cient tools to identify measures and wood volumes, and are simply a starting point for discussions between private forest owners and round wood pur-chasers. However, large variations are observed between different purchas-ers, in their usage of the plans. The purpose of this report is to identify to what extent a forest management plan can promote an increase in the amount of wood which a round wood purchaser can obtain and to find differences in the way of using the plans between different wood purchasers. Furthermore, the purpose is also to ana-lyse if varying owner structures can be underlie variations in the selling of forest management plans. Qualitative interviews with nine of Stora Enso?s round wood purchasers were performed.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine a selection of ideological publishing houses in Sweden today. We want to examine where they are situated in the literary society, their terms and prerequisites. This is achieved through interviews with informants from each of the publishing houses, which we analyze with concepts from the culture sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The publishing houses are also put in context through information from other actors in the literary field, together with previous research and other material about the Swedish book market. The main research problem in the thesis is to examine the relations between the selected publishing houses ? which profile themselves as ideological ? and the literary field where they exist.

The purpose of this study was investigating the means which rule the social worker?s choice of institution placing youths and how they match the youth?s individual need compared with the type of home. The questions were: Which significance has the characteristics of the youth and their family for the placing? Which significance has the characteristics of the institution? Which significance has the social workers? way of working, investigation, theories, economy etc.? A qualitative way of interviewing has been used. Eight interviews were done; six with social welfare secretaries who place youths and two social workers who work with coun­selling and placement.

The aim of this study is to examine possibilities and barriers for an introduction of electric vehicles in Sweden. The study has an interdisciplinary approach and thoroughly examines the essential topics which influence the future of the electric vehicle. The study reaches from answering the question on why electric vehicles lost the game to petrol cars in the early 20th century, to sketch how the difference in total cost of ownership will be between electric vehicles and petrol cars for the coming 20 years. Apart from these subjects the main topics of the study are today?s and tomorrow?s situation regarding technology, charging, fuel, market and economic incentives from an electric vehicle perspective.

There is a new beverage container on the market, a bottle made out of pure aluminum as a replacement for the traditional container made out of glass. This new container has the potential to reduce both cost and pollution during transportation, the lighter and stronger construction has every advantage compared to the old one in glass. The new container has every possibility to make it on the market. Some of the biggest brands within the soft drink market already use these bottles in countries without any recycling demands like: Coca-Cola, Heineken and Pepsi. The only thing stopping these brands from the Swedish market is the lack of a functional return system, there is only one company that uses the bottle in Sweden today and they take care of their own used bottles.

Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) is a quality control system created by the European Union (EU) to protect integrity of certain food and drinks that are produced in a specific area in a unique way. By protecting these products, the EU can certify that the traditional region-specific methods of food and drink production are preserved. The EU countries that follow such a system are mostly from Southern Europe. For instance in France, the PDO system has helped improve the income for farmers, boosted the rural development and assured protection for farmers against the abuse of their brand and the selling of their products by outsiders. In Sweden, there are no PDO products yet, instead there is Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) and Traditional Speciality Guarantee (TSG) that are not as protective as PDO.

In this paper I have focused on the underlying reasons for people and piracy. The paper starts with a presentation of the Swedish laws of copyright as they are constituted today and the new law that is supposedly being ordained the 1st of July, 2005, a brief summary of what its effects will be for the people, according to the authorities and the critisism that has developed around it from the net-pirats. Then follows a definition of the expression "norms" and what it means here in my paper.Now comes a presentation of the research I have been doing, in the form of a survey concerning why and how often people download copyrighted material from the net, and if they have ever sold any pirated copies to more than selfprice and, if so, to whom. The presentations shows that the majority of the people that are downloading copyrighted material from the Internet is doing it for the own personal use and not to make any money out of selling the material on, since most people consider it unfair to charge for something that they have got for free.The survey also shows that many of those who download copyrighted material also upload it because it gives them a satisfactory feeling of giving something in order to get something. The survey also shows that although most of the people taking the survey knows what the new law means it has not affected them in anyway.

The interest for children´s clothing has increased in society. More and more children are born and parents are older when they have children. Education has become a natural feature in most people´s life, just as both parents often work today. The households have therefore better economy and thus greater consumption opportunities. Parents are, in greater extent, looking for personal and different clothing with focus on quality and, to some extent, exclusivity rather than just a cheap and functional garment.