AbstractPurpose ? The purpose of this study is to investigate possible reasons for long lead-time in a customer driven production, and how the lead-time can be reduced. To fulfil the purpose the study has been broken down into two questions.1. Whichfactorsaffectthelead-timeinacustomer-drivenproduction?2.

The aim of this study was to investigate emotions and emotion regulation of a downsizing in an industrial company. The sample consisted of persons who had experienced a downsizing but have kept the employment, within a same position or being transferred to another one. Data consisted of two focus group interviews, analysed by an inductive thematic analysis. The results have indicated that emotional reactions changed over time as well the emotional regulation did during the different phases. The groups differed in emotional reaction related to the time of decision regarding the retention of employment.

Earlier the regional social insurance office was exposed to critisism because of bad administration and a lack of providing public service. Among other things the regional social insurance office was attacked because of long investigation hours and indinstinct working methods and was blamed for not being able to solve the unhealth in the society. This lead to the reformation of the previous regional social insurance office into a government authority agency on the first of Januari, 2005. Extensive organizational changes were made so that regional social insurance office could handle the demands and become a uniform public administration. I have made a qualitative study where the purpose was to se how the changes affected the public administrators and I focused on their participation and willingness to change.

Personal assistants ' descriptions of their own professional role are usually removed for the benefit of users ' description of the profession. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the assistants perceive their profession by providing assistants a possibility to talk about their experiences of the profession. Data has been collected by twelve interviews with active working personal assistants aged 22-57 years. Assistants interviewed have different experiences and working with people with various disabilities. The method used is a qualitative method with a narrative analysis method, where the twelve interviews have been merged into four fictional stories.

This essay is part of a project between Södertörn University College and Stockholm Academic Forum. The focus of the project is gender equality in small- and medium sized companies. I have worked with a construction company called Activa . The majority of the employees at the company were male and I was interested in the consequences of gender construction in such an environment. I think that the basic condition for equality work is an understanding of gender and the male norm.

The purpose with this essay is to analyze Adlerz writing within the context of the fiery debate in the 1880?s between the liberal so called ?cultural radical? members of the student organization called Verdandi, and the conservative, uniform oskarian culture named after the Swedish king of the period. I have applied a version of Quentin Skinner?s method, which focuses on the context of a specific writing in order to find out the authors intention, the effect the author hoped to achieve. My questions regard certain themes I discovered in the text and, more importantly, the relationship between these themes and the surrounding debate.

Sweden will, in accordance with the EU-directive 2003/54/EC, move from post-regulating the electricity power grid-tariffs by using a fictitious grid, to a regulation in advance which uses the actual power grid as a starting point. For this purpose a component breakdown of the grid needs to be made to determine the value of the network and by that the tariff price that is reasonable for the network business in question to charge.The primary breakdown criteria is the voltage-level and type of region. Voltage-level is crucial for the cost and complexity of a grid-part, because the higher the voltagelevel is, there are more and stricter laws and rules to follow. This work is limited to the distributionpart of the grid, in other words voltage levels from 20 kV and below.The type of region is crucial to the type of components you can and want to use. In city environments both overhead-wires and independent substations are undesirable for both practical, safety and aesthetic reasons.

The use of spread spectrum signals has increased dramatically in military applications. Finding methods for detecting and positioning of these signals have become interesting research areas for signal intelligence purposes. One method is to measure the time difference of arrival (TDOA) that occurs when two receivers are synchronous and spatially separated. Based on the TDOA-technique an audio-demonstrator has been developed and implemented. This report describes the theory for how sound received in microphones can be used to extract information about the transmitter?s position from the measured time difference.

In an international perspective the Russian children s library is a unique institution, being solely committed to children up to 14 years of age. In Russia of today it is, however, being exposed to hard pressure as the economical and social conditions have changed dramatically since the collapse of the USSR. My interest lies in examining this change of living conditions for the children s libraries and how this in turn affect their work and role in the present state. In order to view this change in a longer perspective, I compare the situation for children s libraries during the time of communist regime with that of today using documents about and from children s libraries. I have studied its legal position and conditions, financial and political state, and how the modern society affects children and youth, especially their daily cultural life.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore whether male kindergarten teachers perceive additional expectations from their surroundings (such as co-workers and parents). Furthermore, we aim to understand and explain how these expectations are related to gender norms and hierarchies in society, that is social constructions concerning what men and women should do and be like. In addition, the thesis aspire to understand and explain how these constructions relate to more specific social constructions about sexual molestations in kindergarten contexts and explore how these discourses influence male kindergarten teachers in their work including which strategies they use in order to cope with them.How do male kindergarten teachers perceive additional expectations from their surroundings?How do male kindergarten teachers perceive the effects and consequences of the social constructions about sexual molestations in kindergarten contexts? Do they use coping strategies in order to attend to the expectations projected on them, and if so, what kind of strategies? The thesis is based on a phenomenological approach and conducted through interviews with six male kindergarten teachers. The interviews were directed with an interview guide in hand while allowing for spontaneous input from the interviewee.

The aim of this study is to look at the environmental effect on toddlers? social interactions during free play in two older and two newer preschools. Furthermore, we would like to investigate four preschool teachers? thoughts about the indoor environment when it comes to toddlers? interaction during free play.Qualitative methods containing interviews of the preschool teachers and observations of the children during their free playtime have been used to help us reach our conclusions. In addition, our theoretical conclusions have been derived from both the sociocultural perspective and the environmental psychology perspective.Our results have shown that variations in the preschool environment are of importance in the outcome of toddlers? different social interactions.

In todays society IT in general and the Internet in particular are given elements in people´s everyday lives, and smartphones has come to be a big part of those elements. This study focuses on how the use of Smartphones in particular influences the individuals in their working environment, and how this use influence the efficiency and the well-being of said individuals.  To answer our research question regarding how said use comes to effect the efficiency and the well-being for proffesionals in their working environment we have used data from qualitative interviews who is enriched by a short initial diary study. This data has then been analyzed using the Affinity Diagrams Technique, leading to four central themes emerging from the data. The results show that smartphone use at work comes with both positive and negative effects; efficiency increased through the use of smartphones due to the great versatility that comes with the technology, while in terms of well-being issues of stress emerged.

The purpose of this study was to examine and illustrate whether employed social workers, working with supplementary benefits at a social service office, felt stressed. If so was the case, we wanted to investigate if this stress that they felt had any effect on their clients. This study was based on eight qualitative interviews, of which four was with social workers and four was with clients. For a better understanding of our results we used Karasek & Theorells demand-control-support model.The study reveals that the social workers do feel stressed, but they only do so in periods. They declare that they would like to have more time for their work assignments, the meetings with the clients in particulate.

This project aims to explore how to create a working concept-based flower shop visual identity, with focus on brandig, eco-branding and visual communication. My main question is: How do I create effective visual communication for an ecological flower shop? The results of this thesis are that there are things to consider when creating a visual identity with an ecological concept. The most important question is if there is any benefit for your company to go green, otherwise positioning of your company will be hard. What I realized during the design part of my project was that if I use the methods described in this thesis and consequently applying my choices after the flower shops identifying words, a working concept-based visual identity will be possible to create..

The project objective was to make parts of our cultural heritage available as a resource for learning, by developing the pedagogical activities on a medieval castle, that today functions as a museum. I also wanted to explore the role of a designer in a process that aims to develop the interaction between schools and cultural institutions.By a selection of objects and locations in the castle, illustrations with accompanying texts were made, which through the children?s imaginative ability may bring them to a historical scenario. This resulted in a working material that supports the children?s activities and reflections during their visit to the castle.