Background: Sweden is a country with 30 million memberships in different non- profit organizations. In total these organizations employees about 400 000 people, through employment and voluntary work. The complete turnover for non- profit organizations is 100 billion Swedish crowns per year. It has only since 2001 been compulsory to follow the Swedish account rules BFL and ÅRL. Trade unions are one type of non-profit organizations with the main purpose to care for the interest of its members concerning their working condition.

Presently environmental and ethical matters are in the centre of attention and companies producing sustainability reports have become more common. It has also started to become more and more ordinary to assure these sustainability reports by an external part. However, the amount of assured sustainability reports differs a lot between different countries.There can be several reasons for why the companies chose to get the sustainability report assured. Previous studies state that the choice to produce sustainability reports can be re-lated to theories like the legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory and the agent theory. Other aspects that can affect the decision to construct a sustainability report can according to prior studies be different company characteristics and the national culture in the country in which the company is operating.

Annual reports are by many considered to be companies primary way to inform their world where the CEO's words are read most carefully by shareholders. The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of the CEO's words in annual reports in light of the financial crisis in 2008. The study seeking explanations for change, similarities and differences in the various texts based on three themes which are results, future and confidence. In this qualitative study five CEO's words are explored by means of a discourse analysis, all from large Swedish industrial companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Some of the results shown is that the CEO tends to talk about the company's results in a self-serving manner and CEO speaks more aboutm the results before than after the crisis.

This study investigates Swedish and Finnish official perception of Russia following the Cold War. This is aimed at categorizing changes in perception of Russia over time and assessing the impact of perception on defense policy. The study uses a comparative method where the contents of three foreign policy reports of Sweden and Finland respectively are analyzed according to dimensions based in image theory. Results show that Swedish and Finnish perceptions of Russia are overall similar between the reports being compared, except for Finnish perception of Russian relative power being significantly greater. Changes in Swedish and Finnish official perception do not clearly correlate with changes in defense policy.

The purpose of this study are to investigate and describe if companies? sustainability reports differ in substance and quantity between public and Large Cap companies? and if there are any differences between industries. This study will also analyze if companies? size, stakeholder group or profitability have some impact on the companies? sustainability report. The study includes all Swedish public companies and the Large Cap companies.To investigate in line of the purpose this study will measure both the substance and quantity.

There are none known Bronze Age settlement on Gotland, although there are severalexcavation reports that mention that they have found a probable Bronze Age settlement. In the excavation that have been done in the study areas, there are Bronze Age dated hearths, cooking pits and post holes. These study areas have been investigated if they might be possible Bronze Age settlements. This paper discusses about the criteria of settlements and also investigate if the study areas meet those criterias. There are many different criteria for settlement but only the criteria of FMIS are used in the study.

Since the nineties the words customer, effectiveness and quality have become part of everyday school life. Municipalities? makes regular customer surveys to measure both independent schools as municipal schools ' quality. A common method for customer research and background studies is that parents and students are asked to respond to simple Web-based surveys. Customer satisfaction and/or customer dissatisfaction options are presented in tabular form, based on the percentage that expresses a particular position within a query.

This study examines differences between private and state-owned companies' sustainability reports for the year 2010. Three state-owned companies and three private companies in three different industries have been examined. An effort has been put to explaining if differences are related to the owner or to the industry. The basis for this is that the state owned companies are required to present a sustainability report according to shareholder demands, while the private owned aren?t obligated to present their sustainability efforts.The study has a qualitative basis, and empirical data have been collected by the authors.

SVT is Sweden?s largest TV-network and broadcasts more then 22 000 hours of TV each year. SVT is a public service company where the basic idea is to reflect the world from different perspectives and news is very important for providing neutral and versatile information in a variety of areas. An important part of the flow of information is to continuously receive reports from all corners of the world around the clock. This places very high demands on the technology used and it is important that it function and develops to meet current and future growing needs.

Annual reports are by many considered to be companies primary way to inform their world where the CEO's words are read most carefully by shareholders. The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of the CEO's words in annual reports in light of the financial crisis in 2008. The study seeking explanations for change, similarities and differences in the various texts based on three themes which are results, future and confidence. In this qualitative study five CEO's words are explored by means of a discourse analysis, all from large Swedish industrial companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Some of the results shown is that the CEO tends to talk about the company's results in a self-serving manner and CEO speaks more aboutm the results before than after the crisis.

Annual reports are by many considered to be companies primary way to inform their world where the CEO's words are read most carefully by shareholders. The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of the CEO's words in annual reports in light of the financial crisis in 2008. The study seeking explanations for change, similarities and differences in the various texts based on three themes which are results, future and confidence. In this qualitative study five CEO's words are explored by means of a discourse analysis, all from large Swedish industrial companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Some of the results shown is that the CEO tends to talk about the company's results in a self-serving manner and CEO speaks more aboutm the results before than after the crisis.

Today?s political debate on environmental issues and environmental thinking, alongside the Swedish presidency of the EU and Climate Conferences shows that the environment is an important topic. Environment is important, not only in politics, but also for companies and the demand of environmental strategies and environmental reports has increased. This leads to an increased pressure on firms to begin to report on environmental concerns and to create active systems for environmental thinking.The aim of the present study is to examine why firms in the transport sector, mainly lorry transports, reports environmental aspects and what drives these companies to create these reports.Based on stakeholder and institutional theory we aim to examine to which extent stakeholders affects the environmental accounting and reporting. We also aim to explain how the organization is influenced to incorporate external and societal environmental procedures.

This thesis examines the establishment of auditors as third party assurers of sustainability reports in Sweden. This is done through a qualitative case study that examines the subject from both a preparer?s and an assurer?s perspective. Empirical data was analyzed using a combination of agency- and legitimacy theory. The study reaches the conclusion that sustainability reporting companies in the study demand a verification service for reported sustainability data in order to increase creditability, meet increased stakeholder demand and increased accounting complexity.

Background: The last few years a globalization of the capital market has occurred. This have led to that it is more important for the companies that their financial information can be compared with other companies in order to compete on same grounds. In order to fa-cilitate for the companies within EU to compete with other companies and in order to strive for an internal market EU decided that IFRS should be used by all listed companies within the union.Problem: In 2006 the first financial reports according to IFRS will be published, and then it will be interesting to investigate how the companies have chosen to communicate the transition to its stakeholders. According to IFRS some information is compulsive but the companies have chosen to disclose voluntary information to a different degree.Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe to what extent the Swedish listed com-panies have reported the transition to IFRS in their consolidated financial statements.Method: In this essay a quantitative method have been chosen in order to find general re-lations. The data collection is done with help of an evaluation model that have been devel-oped for this study.

Since 2005 all companies listed on a regulated stock exchange within the European Union are required to present their financial reports in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Accounting Standards (IAS). The purposes of these standards are to accomplish international harmonization of accounting rules to make financial reports more comparable. However, recent research has shown that some firms tend to use goodwill strategically in a business combination by manipulating the acquired assets and consciously allocate the intangible assets to goodwill to reduce the depreciation in the income and decrease costs. This phenomenon may reduce the comparability between financial reports and thus has an opposite effect on the purpose of IFRS and IAS.The aim of this study is to show how the companies involved in this study allocate goodwill strategically. Furthermore, the introduction of the new standards has contributed to that goodwill now is a subject for impairment test, therefore we want to show whether this affected the comparability of the companies in this study.An empirical study was conducted, based on interviews with four Swedish managers.