Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) issues have been received much attention in businessand management practises globally. Jensen & Yeh (2009, 3) state that ?The agenda ofCorporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged as a factor in the process of globalization,and Chinese companies may sometimes feel pushed into this agenda without a clearunderstanding of the rationale behind it?. China?s textile and apparel industry, amanufacturing-based economy with its products bounding up with the consumers worldwide,has been facing enormous pressure to take CSR initiatives, particularly in relation toenvironmental issues and labor standards.

This qualitative study involves the implementation of Lean and Kaizen methods in a Swedish service industry. Lean philosophy is based on a method to achieve more with less. In practical terms this means that the use of an organization's resources is improved. The origin of Lean is the Toyota Production System. Now, Kaizen methods give managers and employees a better more efficient system to reach their goals within the organization or company.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to find out what support students of Swedish for Immigrants (sfi) think they get from the public library during their study of the Swedish language. One important aspect in this essay is to examine whether the library can meet the need of Swedish-speaking meeting places where the sfi-students can practise their new language. The method used in this study is qualitative interviews. Nine sfi-students, one sfiteacher and one librarian have been interviewed. A sociocultural perspective on learning has served as a theoretical starting point.

Title:        PR-industry: The industry that cannot promote themselves?                ? A thesis of how PR-agencies use relationship marketing to                promote themselves.Authors:    Julia Edvardsson & Jennie JonassonAdvisor:     Navid GhannadLevel:         Bachelor thesis in Marketing, (15 ECTS), Spring 2012Keywords:   Public Relations, Relationship Marketing, Relation, Interaction and NetworkPurpose:    The purpose of this thesis is to bring a better understanding for Public  Relations and for how the PR-agencies promote themselves. The thesis will explore the following questions:? How do the PR-agencies uses relationship marketing to reach out with their knowledge to their potential customers?? Are the any differences between their promotions when it comes to the agencies orientation?Theoretical framework: The chapter begins with a definition of Public Relations. After that a framework of Relationship Marketing theory is made with headlines as relations, interaction and networking.Method:      A qualitative research method, with a deductive approach, has been implemented.

This essay is a qualitative study about Swedish fire-fighters´ ideas of women and people from other ethnic backgrounds than Swedish. The problem in focus is why there are difficulties for those groups of people to be employed in the Swedish fire service. Can there be ideas of these groups which are not favourable for them? And if this is the case, can those ideas be explained by gender theory about construction of masculinity? The purpose is to investigate whether the absence of women and people from other ethnic backgrounds can be explained by the fire-fighters´ ideas of those groups. The study consisted of a one day observation and four one hour long interviews with fire-fighters from different positions within the Swedish fire service.

Competition of spruce fiber raw materials has increased dramatically in the last few years, leading to the fact that transportation costs in the current situation represents a much larger share of the total raw material cost. The Holmen-owned pulp industry Hallsta Paper Mill's location on the coast also constitutes a problem, because of the lack of raw material, which is much larger there, than for a pulp mill located in the hinterland. For a coastal industry it?s therefore natural to import much of the raw material by boat or to buy it from the timber terminals, in order to maintain good profitability. The purpose of this study was to analyze how the size of Hallsta Paper Mill timber supply area, without competition, with competition and with terminal use, affects the company ?s transport costs.

The production costs have steadily increased within the construction industry during the 21st century. Voices are raised meaning that the construction industry is too unsuccessful in making the production more efficient and to develop it?s way of working. One way to deal with the production costs is to minimise the waste, with waste meaning activities that doesn?t add value to the finished product.

Invandrade kvinnor i Handels. Föreställningar om arbetskraftsinvandrade kvinnor i Handelsnytt 1961-1976. (Immigrant women in Handels. Conceptions of labour immigrated women in Handelsnytt 1961-1976).The primary purpose of this thesis is to analyze the written conceptions of labour immigrated women in Handelsnytt, a Swedish Trade Union magazine. The analyses of the conceptions are based on theoretical categories of class, gender and ethnicity.

Today's consumer society has led to never-ending choices in terms of brands, products and prices in an endless variety of shops. The retail industry is a very complex industry that includes many different types of sales channels and many different types of products. A consequence of this trend is that brand owners today face difficulties in understanding how their products are being evaluated and difficulties in knowing which final cause that make a consumer willing to by their product is hard to figure out. The industry is very diversified, which means that for a company to really understand their position and their role on the market it requires that the company put a lot of effort and also a lot of money in the process of trying to figure it out. We will with this paper try to explain a small piece of that understanding and we hope to get results, which contribute to the further research in this area.

With the starting point in UN peacekeeping operations, this essay investigates the participation of the Swedish armed forces and how the Swedish soldiers perceive their role in those operations. The aim of the study was to explore different perceptions about the Swedish soldiers in international operations. Partly from the Swedish soldiers perspective and how they perceived their own role as soldiers. Partly from the perspective of civilians, like Swedish aid workers, and how they perceive the Swedish soldiers. The third perspective was from a person with mixed experiences from both the military and the civilian work.

The digitization of patient data and medical records used by the healthcare-industry in Sweden is rapidly developing. However; developing and changing things in this field is not an easy task because of the circumstances surrounding it. Digital systems intended to process, and hold, sensitive personal data, such as medical journals, must be developed with laws, confidentiality, integrity and availability in mind to secure that none of this data gets compromised.A complicating factor in regards to this is the fast rate of development within IT in contrast to the much slower bureaucratic process of the justice system. This means that laws and regulations oftentimes aren?t up to date with the newest available technology.With the purpose of establishing set regulations on how patient data should be properly handled the Swedish government enacted the Patient Data Act (sv.

Active sensors are used a lot in the society and industry, for example to gain better control over processes or to get proximity sensing features in different products. Within industry there is great interest in developing safe automation products that can be controlled with high accuracy but still at a low cost.The goal of this project is to develop a prototype of a non-contact rangefinder that measures distance using infrared light. The sensor is to be used for various applications in industries with relatively high accuracy and be compact, but at a low cost. By implementing a rangefinder into a product, more accurate detections of an object?s presence can be done.In this project a new distance sensor, EPC600 from ESPROS, was used.

This report is the result of a thesis work carried out on the Risifrutti production at the company Procordia Food AB. The thesis is at a master level and is the final work for the author to receive a Master of Science in Innovative production at Mälardalen University. The thesis comprises 30 credits and has lasted for 18 weeks. The thesis is mainly a research on whether it is possible to perform an Environmental Value Stream Map (E-VSM) in a food processing industry and an evaluation if the tools E-VSM and Green Performance Map (GPM) are useful in this type of industry. An extra part to this research is to use the results from the E-VSM and give Procordia Food AB information on improvement potentials in the Risifrutti production. The author has found it difficult to collect some of the quantitative data to the E-VSM, mainly regarding energy, but by using the Value Stream Mapping (VSM) tool and other Lean tools the author was able to identify and quantify several wastes in the Risifrutti production. Recommendations for improvements based on these wastes have been given to the company. In the research part of this report the utility of the Value Stream Map, Environmental Value Stream Map and Green Performance Map in a food processing industry have been analyzed. The author has found that the Value Stream Map has been a useful tool since waste and unevenness in the tact of the production has been identified. The Environmental Value Stream Map and the Green Performance Map are also great tools when a company wants to analyze their environmental impact and then invest in environmental improvements. However, no profound energy analyzes has been done in the Risifrutti production because of the lack of energy meters for steam, electricity and compressed air in the production lines..

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine the Swedish industry- and craftmanship trade, specifically the relationship between effort and reward and how it affects the meaningfulness during labour hours. Also, what are the possible effects on production efficiency as a whole? Discussed and analyzed through empirics and previous research.38 workers filled out a survey and two interviews were conducted to get a more analytic depth to the data.The results showed that there is little to no reward for high effort during labour hours on the evaluated workplaces, combined with low commitment and meaningfullness. My conclusions are that more ways of effort-based rewards would likely have a positive effect on meaningfulness and thereby the production as a whole. I also show that the theses of Karl Marx are still plausible and relevant in modern day industrial- and craftsmanship trades in capitalist countries..

[Abstract: This study examines the observed difference between Swedish and foreign owners when it comes to nominating committee participation. The background to the study is that foreign owners seem to participate in Swedish nominating committees to a lesser extent than their Swedish counterparts. The focus is on institutional owners and the companies studied are all listed companies who follow the Swedish code of corporate governance. Particular attention is paid to perceived differences in behavior that can be explained using the common corporate governance related theories of Exit, Voice and Loyalty as well as Agency Theory. These explanations are chiefly related to differences in attitudes regarding insider information, different knowledge levels regarding the purpose and workings of nominating committees of the Swedish kind as well as differences due to home market biases.].