Communication during the process of Environmental Impact Assessment: Interviews concerning three infrastructure projects Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a method to describe the possible impact of a planned project. The aim of such an assessment is to aid a sustainable development, by supplying a comprehensive basis for decision-making. Today there are many people working with EIA in different forms, representing both different interests within the community, as well as having different individual points of view. The proponent is responsible for the EIA, but it is of interest to study the relationship between the different participants who are involved in this process. The aim of this report is to study how the different disciplines involved have communicated with each other and amongst themselves, what characterises good communication, and if anything should be improved.

The population growth and urbanisation in low-income countries bring issues of poor living standards and miserable sanitation conditions onto the agenda. If well-functioning waste management systems were developed, this could master some of the problems. The already existing local informal waste handling system that is common in many low-income countries, needs to be developed with proper sorting and composting solutions to decrease the environmental burden and improve the overall situation in the dense cities. This master?s thesis project is performed with the intention of developing functional decentralised waste management units in the city of Pune, India.

Today, the management concept of lean has stretched far from its origins in the Japanese automobile industry. When reaching the Swedish restaurant industry, the conditions for a successful implementation of lean change as a result of the high employee turnover and the significant amount of part-time employees characteristic for the industry. Combined with a high-end service profile, these workforce characteristics seem inconsistent with some of the basic principles of lean. By conducting a case study, this thesis aims to investigate the effects of a variable workforce on the enablers for a successful implementation of lean in a high-end service industry. Using a theoretical framework consisting of enablers for an implementation of lean in services, the study finds that the variable workforce inhibits an implementation of lean by complicating the effects of traditional training, as well as the possibility of understanding the lean concept at all levels of the organization.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine and analyze the characteristics of the management control system private equity firms use to manage their portfolio companies. The thesis takes a share holder value perspective, and it is assumed that the goal of the management control system is to increase the shareholder value in the portfolio company. In a qualitative study two private equity firms and two portfolio companies, one for each private equity firm, were studied in detail. In total, nine in debt interviews were completed. The results from this study suggest that the characteristics of the control system are dependent on the surrounding context; the focus on shareholder value and the specific characteristics of the private equity industry shape the characteristics of the management control system.

Tillsammans med en muntlig presentation ingår den här rapporten som examination i kursen Examensarbete i ADB, 20p vid Högskolan i Skövde. Kursen är det sista momentet på det dataekonomiska programmet.Syftet med undersökningen, som genomfördes i samarbete med företaget Arthur Andersen i Stockholm, var att utvärdera om Change Management kan användas som stöd vid införandet av informationssäkerhet i olika organisationer. Dessutom skulle undersökningen visa lämpliga mått för att kunna mäta resultatet av införandeprocessen.Med hjälp av besöksintervjuer av personer med erfarenhet av arbete med informationssäkerhet, gjordes en kartläggning över hur införandet av informationssäkerhet går till idag. Kartläggningen låg sedan till grund för en jämförelse med metodstegen i Change Management. Resultatet av arbetet blev en utvärdering av om Change Management är lämpligt som stöd vid införandet av informationssäkerhet..

We have performed a case study on Acne Jeans, a creative Swedish fashion company, which initiated a cooperation with the Swedish venture capital firm Öresund. The aim of our paper was to examine what motivates a venture capital firm to transform the management control system of a creative company, into a more formal system of control. Main results: Öresund did not have an excessive impact on the management control system of Acne Jeans, due to three main reasons. First of all, Acne Jeans had a satisfactory management control system prior to the cooperation. Furthermore, the relationship between the two parties was characterized by mutual trust.

In the growing concern for the state of the environment more tools are being integrated in the decision-making processes. Sweden actively makes use of environmental impact assessment (EIA), which is supposed to minimise negative impacts of a project, policy or plans on the environment. The EIA process in Sweden still requires certain improvements to be more efficient. In this study actor interaction was analysed with trust being the framework for analysis. The aim is to find out whether it is possible to use trust as a framework for analysis since trust research is very discipline dependent.

This essay describes and compares the extensive reindeer management to the more intensive, but grazing based, sheep management system in Sweden. Differences and similarities between the two production systems will be investigated by elucidating the economy, land use and possibilities to influence production and economy through breeding, feeding and product development. The reindeer management area covers the northern part of Sweden whilst the sheep management is dispersed over the country. Both reindeer and sheep are ruminants and have relatively high demands on the quality and digestibility of the feed however reindeers graze on mountain-and forest lands whilst sheep often graze inaccessible areas or cultivated grasslands. Selection intensity is generally lower in the reindeer management compared to the intensity in sheep breeding.

Environmental chemicals are transported to the Arctic through the air and oceans, once within the Arctic they spread through rivers, lakes and other watercourses. Polar bears and sledge dogs in-gest high concentrations of environmental chemicals since many of the chemicals are fat-soluble and their diet mainly consists of marine mammals. The aim of this study is to describe how environmental chemicals spread in nature, how they reach the polar bears, and finally how they affect the animals reproduction, with reproductive hormones and genitals in focus. The animals are exposed to a cocktail effect which complicates the assessment of the chemicals impact on the reproduction. Studies show that the genitals can decrease in size or become malformed, sexual maturation can be affected and the reproductive hormones can be disturbed.

Management of large carnivores involves more than just the management of animals, people also have a large influence. The Swedish parliament decided in 2009 that the county boards should use co-management to a greater extent in management. This shows how important human dimensions are.We know from previous research that the majority of people in Västerbotten are positive toward large carnivores and the management done by the state, however there is a negative minority which should not be neglected. This paper contributes with an examination of attitudes toward large carnivores, wolf, bear, lynx and wolverine, in Västerbotten County. The data for this study were derived from a survey that was sent out to 150 randomly selected persons in every commune in following counties: Norrbotten, Västerbotten, Jämtland, Västernorrland, Dalarna, Gävleborg and Stockholm.

A well-planned grave with a sustainable selection of plants facilitates easy maintenance for both staff and the holder of the right of burial. It also helps reduce the negative impact on the environment.As in many other areas, the environment is high on the agenda within the cemetery administration. One of the major concerns is the impact of the choice of plants for the grave. Within the industry there is a great motivation and willingness to adapt to a sustainable work mode and this has spawned a number of project works. In autumn 2009 the partnership project, ?Environmental aspects of planning and maintaining graves?, was started in Movium (at The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences).

Background: Inter-organisational ways of working have become more and more common during the last decades. In order to attain efficiency and productivity, such inter-organisational relationships need to be governed and controlled. However, studies have shown that inadequate control is one of the main reasons for why inter-organisational relationships fail. One of the means that can be used for governing and controlling a business is management control. The use of management control in inter-organisational contexts is a quite unexplored area of research at the present time, which might seem somewhat surprising considering the fact that inadequate control is a common explanation for why inter-organisational relationships fail.

To implement an ERP-system is not an easy process. The success of the implementation depend on many different variables. The most important one is perhaps the requirement process, to define what the organization wants and expects from the system. In this study, the advantages of a process mapping are examined, in relation to the phase where the requirements are expressed in an ERP-implementation. The conclusion is that a process mapping generates an increased communication with the supplier of the ERP-system, hence the business knows their processes and thereby what they want from the system.

The aim of this study was to investigate how the process of implementing a quality management system for food safety was handled in four different food producing companies in Sweden. The aim was also to analyze what difficulties the companies face and the possibilities that arise when certified. Furthermore, the reason for implementation was discussed as well as the main expectations on the certificate. Implementing a quality management system is a good way of ensuring the quality and hygiene of the food production and it also increases the traceability of food products through the whole food chain. A food safety standard provides a method of preventing problems and crisis and it can also help to handle requirements from authorities, the market and others.

This document is a summary of my work to create a project management system for a small firm working with computer graphics. The intention is to manage customers, projects, images and invoices in the easiest possible way. To make the system as flexible as possible a web-interface was chosen which makes it possible to access the system from any computer, making it independent of any particular operating system. The only requirement on the user environment is that the computer must have a connection to the Internet to be able to access the system. The different techniques that have been used to develop the project management system is primarily Ruby on Rails and a MySQL database.