The aim of this study was to examine young people?s experiences of participation within the intervention Contact Person. Three questions were asked concerning young people?s experience of participation, aspects that promoted/limited the young people?s experience and the significance they attached to the intervention. The findings in this study are based on phenomenological interviews with five teenagers within the intervention Contact Person.

In this thesis we examine the relationship between board composition and firm performance in Swedish companies. The selection of companies includes all Swedish limited liability companies, with the exception of micro enterprises, that have been active between the years of 2009-2010. We develop hypotheses based on resource dependence theory, agency theory, and the resource based view, and test these with regression analysis against collected data. Specifically, we examine the effects of board diversity, outside directorships, and CEO duality. Our findings show that none of the theories provide sufficient explanatory power of the relationship between board composition and firm performance, and that further research is required to better understand the role and effects of company boards..

Almost every company sooner or later ends up in a more or less difficult economical situation. The reason for the economical crisis varies for each individual case but common for them all is that it is the management group that has failed in their work to guide the organisation to avoid a negative result. The next common denominator is that it is the management group that has to handle the changes in the company's environment and lead the company out of the crisis. But how can they do this and take decisions in a rational and effective way and is there warnings signals that the management group missed before the crisis was a fact? This is some of the questions that this study is going to discuss and analyze. The aim of the study is from a management perspective chart the strategic work of the company's management work when handling an economical crisis.

The Telecom industry is facing a paradigm shift, where the industry is converging with Internet technologies and the market is becoming more sophisticated. This results in more demanding customers, and the need for offering more content and services with a focus on usability for the end-users. The operators are starting to loose both their strong position and revenue in the Telecom industry, due to new technology and the fact that other actors are starting to enter the market, offering new content and services. In the end, the operators have two choices, to become bit-pipe providers, and only focusing on network management, or keeping the control over their networks. The latter would mean that they block other actors who are taking parts of their revenue, e.g.

AbstractThere is a lot of confusion when it comes to defining Special Education. An example of this appears here by a statement from Assarson (2007) "Special Education initiates a special pedagogy, but contains no innate sense of what is the special component in it" (p. 52, authors? translation). This study is an attempt to clarify the elements of the concept.

Because of the large supply of information is today's leisure travelers very enlightened and have firsthand knowledge of what can be demanded on a hotel stay. Along with business travelers, who are not price sensitive, they place higher demands on the standards and service they require. It has become increasingly important to attract the visitors in a unique way.The purpose of this study is to reveal those aspects which hotels focus on in their business in order to keep their guests, despite the strong competition and the new demands of the changing hotel industry. The study has examined more closely if the hotels have specific concepts in their approach, if their servicescapes (the environment where the service is assembled) are designed in a unique way to attract visitors and if the hotels have special relationships with their guests.The study is qualitative and in order to answer the purpose has observations of the selected hotels and interviews with managers and receptionists been made.One of the conclusions that we reached is that the most important aspect in the hotels business is their relationship to the guests. Each respective hotel strives to have a special and unique relationship with its guests conveyed by its staff.

In the history of scientific visualization techniques there is a lack of social science practices and methodologies. The advent of modern computer graphics brought the use of visualizations into a whole new era, but even though the tools by which such modern visualizations are created become easier to access and use, the lack of social science researchers harvesting the benefits of such tools still remain. This ease of use, increase in power and accessibility plus the ever growing need within the natural sciences to augment the human senses has further complicated the relationship between scientific methodologies, validity, reliability and the use of visualization techniques. This relationship must be explored, demystified and understood in order to fully grasp the impact of visualization practices when incorporated into any given scientific method. Within the social sciences there is one example of a tradition that has since its conception carried within it a graphical notion and a visualization practice.

The new cataloging code Resource Description and Access (RDA) provides a system of instructions for recording relationships between related resources by means of a controlled vocabulary of relationship designators. The purpose of this two years master?s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies is to examine the construction of this system, as well as its theoretical foundation. One theoretical point of departure is the necessity of operational definitions for consistent identification of bibliographic relationships. Another such point of departure is that the theoretical model on which RDA is based (the FRBR model) is not a complete description of the biblio­graphic universe, but merely a limited representation of a set of assumptions about that universe.The thesis first examines Barbara B.

This thesis sets out to investigate three questions, first, how the Belarusian democratization process has progressed since the country?s independence in 1991 to the year of 2006. Second, how the relationship between Russia and Belarus has progressed during this time and third, if and how Russia has affected the democratization process. The study has been conducted through qualitative method, mainly using books and articles as sources of information. It has been found that the democratization process in Belarus has evolved in a negative direction ever since the presidential election of 1994.

AbstractIn the fall of 2003 a project was started in the Swedish building sector that is called BASTA (the building sectors’ termination of especially harmful substances). The project is operated by the building companies NCC, Skanska, PEAB and JM, the Swedish Building Industry and the Swedish Environmental Institute IVL. The purpose of the project is to create a common environmental assessment system for the entire building industry and with the help of this system phase out the use of especially harmful properties from building products.In a large sense BASTA works like this; On the BASTA web site there is a database, to which a supplier can register the company and the company’s products. Only those products with a substance content that fulfil the demands of the BASTA system, is to be registered. As it is the supplier himself that carries out the registration of the company and the company’s products to the system, the BASTA-organisation annually controls that the companies that are registered in the database, fulfils BASTA’s demands.Since NCC is one of the companies that operates BASTA, BASTA is probably going to be the environmental assessment system that is recommended for the company in the future.

This study is about how a swedish brand within the food industry that experiences a crisis following a product failure. It focuses on three areas following the crisis and these are crisis management, recovery strategies and brand management. This study seeks to explain how these areas interact in relation to massive exposure to mass media and how they interact restore the brand's potential loss of reputation. This study was conducted as a case study with a deductive and qualitative approach. The data gathered to this study was mainly based on newspaper articles and complemented with semi-structured interviews with twelve local retailers of the brand..

AbstractThere is a lot of confusion when it comes to defining Special Education. An example of this appears here by a statement from Assarson (2007) "Special Education initiates a special pedagogy, but contains no innate sense of what is the special component in it" (p. 52, authors? translation). This study is an attempt to clarify the elements of the concept.

Sportindustrin blir alltmer marknadsdriven. För att kunna bedriva effektiv marknadsföring blir det allt vanligare att strategiskt arbeta med att utveckla varumärken, brand management, som man använder sig av för att genom olika kommunikationskanaler attrahera konsumenter. Många av Sveriges specialförbund arbetar idag konkret med sport brand management. Svenska Ridsportförbundet (SvRF) har inte tidigare arbetat med sport brand management varav syftet med denna uppsats därför är att påbörja en varumärkesutveckling genom att identifiera och beskriva SvRF:s varumärke från ett internt perspektiv samt undersöka hur förbundet genom sport brand management kan utveckla verksamheten.  Uppsatsen bygger på en fallstudie med en kvalitativ innehållsanalys som inkluderar semistrukturerade intervjuer med anställda på förbundet. I empirin presenteras SvRF:s erbjudande, varumärke och verksamhetsmål samt några av de viktigaste faktorer som påverkar ridsportens utveckling.

The purpose of this study is to examine young people?s opinions about libraries using social media for communicative and marketing purposes. There are three research questions: What do young people think about libraries using social media for communicative and marketing purposes? Do they want to interact with libraries in social media and, if so, in what way? Are their opinions and their will to interact influenced by what kind of relationship they have with libraries, their reading habits, and whether or not they use libraries? digital services? Prior research is divided into three themes: library development, marketing, and young people. The theoretical framework is made up of a combination of relationship marketing, using Evert Gummesson?s three catchwords relationships, networks, and interaction, and the engagement pyramid, as depicted by Brit Stakston.

Management control systems are a popular area of research and a lot of new research has been done over the past years. This development has been looking into new situations and circumstances, and interdisciplinary studies are being made to further understand the connection between different fields of study. A new field of study that has grown significantly over the past few years is the connection between management control systems and entrepreneurship. Leading researchers have proposed a number of questions for further research and one of them is the board of directors? use of management control systems in entrepreneurial firms.The purpose of this study was to examine the differences and similarities in the board of directors? use of management control systems between entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial firms.The study was conducted as a deductive qualitative study through interviews with respondents from entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial firms.