This thesis is based on an assignment from a unit within an international group manufacturing industrial products. The purpose of the thesis is to analyze and suggest ways to improve the cost accounting system in use at the unit. The main source of empirical data has been interviews with employees. The theoretical framework is based on a comparison between traditional/standard costing and activity-based costing (ABC). The cost accounting system in use is described in detail and classified as a traditional/standard cost accounting system.

Title: Strategies for competition ? a study of the Swedish contact lenses market.Authors: Pernilla AArskog and Annika Lange.Background: As a market gets more mature and the competition increases, it is more important for a company to apply the right strategic perspective. There are four fundamental strategic perspectives for a service-oriented business: a core product-, a price-, an image- and a service perspective. This study is a about service management and take its point from the theories from the Nordic School about strategies for competition, customer value, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.Purpose: The main purpose with this study is to analyze and evaluate how the actors at the Swedish market of contact lenses should compete to gain further competitive advantages.Method: The study includes four qualitative interviews with two traditional opticians and two Internet based businesses, but also a survey with 106 contact lens users is included.Analysis: In the analyse part of this thesis it was concluded that the traditional opticians conception about their customer not agrees with what the customer evaluate as important. Many of the customers have thought about changing their optician, and besides that do not recommend their optician, and can there for not be categorize as loyal customers.

Financial bubbles are characterized by a large increase in the economic growth on the market as a whole or in specific industries. The change gives rise to an increase in the capital needed to finance this growth. Companies typically have a choice between equity and debt capital to finance its business and the mix of these types of capital is often referred to as the company?s capital structure. There has been a lot of research done in the field of financial bubbles and ofcapital structure, as of yet no studies seem to address these two areas in combination.The aim of this study is to examine if financial bubbles affect a company?s capital structure and through this also examine if the supposed changes in capital structure can be generalized.The study comprise of two identical time-series which examines the changes in leverage and the choice of financing during the Swedish real estate bubble in the early nineties and the IT-crash at the end of the 2000th century.

Financial bubbles are characterized by a large increase in the economic growth on the market as a whole or in specific industries. The change gives rise to an increase in the capital needed to finance this growth. Companies typically have a choice between equity and debt capital to finance its business and the mix of these types of capital is often referred to as the company?s capital structure. There has been a lot of research done in the field of financial bubbles and ofcapital structure, as of yet no studies seem to address these two areas in combination.The aim of this study is to examine if financial bubbles affect a company?s capital structure and through this also examine if the supposed changes in capital structure can be generalized.The study comprise of two identical time-series which examines the changes in leverage and the choice of financing during the Swedish real estate bubble in the early nineties and the IT-crash at the end of the 2000th century.

Uppsats för avläggande av filosofie kandidatexamen Kulturvård, Bygghantverk, 22,5 hp, 2014.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the female experience as it is spoken of in the novel Sindhia written by Rut Hillarp (1954) and how the main character in the book violates the experience from a queer perspective. My aim is to through a close reading highlight a number of discourses that underpin the book's imminent theme of love and submission.According to Norman Faircloughs critical-discourse analysis, the text one reads produces a certain amount of discourses that one consumes. This way there is a dialectical interaction that can be set into a practical analysis together with a suitable academic perspective. This is the method I use in this thesis.The academic perspective I add isJudith Butler's queer theoriessupported by Michel Foucaults social genealogyin order to understand/analyze the woman?s position in relation to a social empirical history.I came to the conclusion that Sindhia produces the woman's discourse from an ancient biblical/ mythological time up to modern time.

Familjestrukturer och föräldraroller är i förändring. Stereotyper av föräldraskap har bidragit till rådande attityder där män och kvinnor i icke traditionella familjestrukturer bedöms mindre fördelaktigt (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2005). Studiens syfte var att se om attityder påverkas av huruvida föräldern är karriärist eller föräldraledig samt man eller kvinna. En pilotstudie genomfördes för att generera egenskaper för föräldraskap och bestod av 30 deltagare. I huvudstudien deltog 115 personer, varav 69 kvinnor och 46 män.

This thesis is a contribution to the discussion on the public library?s institutional identity in late modernity. The aim is to shed light on the public library?s identity as expressed through its public events. The thesis seeks to answer the following questions: What kind of public events are offered at public libraries? What themes distinguish the content of these events? What characterizes the institutional identity expressed through these events? In addition to the concept of institutional identity, a model of four library spaces, developed by Skot-Hansen, Hvenegaard Rasmussen, and Jochumsen, constitutes the theoretical framework of this thesis.

The Swedish photographer and artist Eva Klasson, based in Paris in the 1970s, gained attention for her series of black-and-white photography of her own naked body, which opened up for an international artistic career in the late 1970s. Despite a promising career she however abandoned photography and disappeared from the artistic sphere only a few years after her debut. There has been a renewed interest in Klasson?s work in Sweden the last decade where she has been exhibited at museums and galleries. Today she is represented at art museums and institutions including Moderna Museet, The Modern Museum of Art, in Stockholm.

Aim: Based on portfolio theory, which highlights diversification, and CSR, which describes the value of social and ethical responsibility of corporations, this study examines whether there is a difference in risk-adjusted performance between ethical and traditional mutual funds. Ethical funds are limited in their opportunities of diversification and should therefore be limited in their potential perfomance. On the other hand, a focus on social and ethical responsibility can be profitable.Method: The study uses a quantitative approach where we used 25 mutual fund in each category, ethical and conventional mutual funds. The mutual funds and their data has been obtained from www.morningstar.se and www.pensionmyndigheten.se. Historical performance between 2009-2013 were processed to obtain the Sharpe ratio and M2.

How do you build cities that are exciting and nice to live in? What factors in the physical environment is it that make you feel comfortable in some of the places in the city, but in other places not comfortable at all? Why do some cities have a rich public life in their public realm, while the public realm in other cities is abandoned and empty? How do you plan environments that support people?s physical and mental health? These are questions that I put to myself, and that people who are interested in or working with physical planning should ask themselves. That is why I have been studying an authority on the subject, the Danish Professor Jan Gehl, who has been researching and working with peoplefriendly public realms for 50 years. He is best known for his book Life between buildings that has been a text-book in the education of architects for more than 30 years, and to have initiated Copenhagens most famous pedestrian street, Strøget, to show his theory of how people will use the public realm, if it?s only got the right qualities.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to investigate how the image of the Public library is described in the Swedish national library politics, and compare it with the image given of the public library in the Danish national library politics. The method used for this analysis is a comparative discourse analysis of the homepages produced by the Swedish central government Regeringen and Kulturrådet and its Danish counterpart Kulturministeriet and Biblioteksstyrelsen. Theories on postmodernity have been used to analyze how the Swedish and the Danish central governments image of the Public library corresponds with a changing society and the changing behaviour of the public library users. Our analysis concludes that the traditional view of the Public library as an institution mainly concerned with literature and reading still is of great significance in the discourse of the Swedish central government. In contrast, the Danish central government presents a more postmodern view of the public library as an institution that is part of the Information- and the Knowledge society.

This study is about Wikipedia which defines itself as a free online encyclopaedia. Our chief interest lies in the debate and the controversy which has arisen around Wikipedia. After reading critical articles concerning Wikipedia we found that the debate for most parts had one identifiable theme namely the question whether Wikipedia is an encyclo-paedia or not.Encyclopaedia as a term and a phenomenon has a long tradition. Wikipedia, despite calling itself an encyclopaedia, functions differently in comparison to more traditional encyclopaedias. These traditional views involve encyclopaedic structure, its organiza-tion and its functions.

The aim of this thesis is to map the intellectual base, and identify the general research interests, of Cultural Policy studies. In addition to this the thesis also aims to trace the uses of theoretical and conceptual approaches within the identified research interests. This is done by analysing citations from 130 articles published in the leading scientific journal International Journal of Cultural Policy between the years 2002-2007 using the bibliometric method author cocitation analysis (ACA). The results of the ACA confirm the overall notion that the research field of cultural policy studies is an ambiguous one, even when it?s studied with a quantitative method specialised in uncovering hidden structures within a given field as ACA.

The aim of this study is to analyze the discourses of activists who work against female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in Tanzania. The study focus on the discourses that arise during interviews about FGM/C with five activists. To examine this we asked the following questions: What discourses are presented in the interviews? How do these discourses interact together ? are there any discourse conflicts? How do the activists talk about FGM/C in comparison to our western view? The study is based on discourse theory. We also use feminism and postcolonialism as theories in our analyze.