The aim of this study is to examine the conditions for participation in women's networks for the members of the Geek Girl Meetup network, to expose the members' perceptions of the IT industry and to highlight the network's impact on women's situation in the IT industry. The empirical material consists of interviews and a survey. The interviews were carried out with the network leaders for a better understanding of the network structure and why it exists. The survey completed by the members illuminates how the members perceive the networks function in the IT industry and what kind of an impact the network has on the members and if it has any at all. The result of the study shows that participation in networks like Geek Girl Meetup can be a model for promoting gender equality and improving conditions for women in the IT industry.

The behaviour of consumers has changed rapidly during the last decade, and a healthy lifestyle and an environmental mindset has become part of everyday life. This is also something that has become prominent in the supermarkets, where the organic products are increasingly winning shelf space. Several consumer behaviour studies have shown that the attitudes towards organic products and labels are predominantly positive. According to traditional marketing theory, these kind of attitudes should affect consumers? purchase intentions in a positive manner, as well as the actual purchase behavior.

Secondary deciduous forests, which have their origin in earlier pasture- and meadow-land in slopes along the lower reaches of the Ume river, are thought to contain high nature conservation values, in spite of a relatively low age. The aim of this study was to clarify how factors as historical use, exposition, disturbance dynamics and successional age influences the conservation values in these types of riparian forests and how this can be implicated in the practical work with conservation and management at Umeå municipality. Sample plots were placed in seven stands with a variation of their historical use, exposition, disturbance dynamics and age of succession. Conservation values as structure, tree-regeneration, abundance and composition of vascular plants, amount of dead wood and the abundance of signal-species were measured and registered. The species composition and especially the composition of tree species, differed between forests with different exposition and different historical use.

Background: As Porter?s diamond (1990) suggested, the business environment highly influences firms? strategies. Today, most of the companies have to decide their strategy depending from a worldwide business environment. Yet, strategy researches and the growing importance of marketing for business success also show that customer dimension must be taken into consideration. On some markets and in certain industries, the offer is much higher than the demand and then, companies need to attract customers.

How can we plan so that smallscale industry and businesses can become an integrated part of the city? The densifying process in search of new housing areas that is going on in most swedish cities threatens to undermine the diversity and complex make up of central parts of many cities. To sustain industrial activities in central locations is critical to this diversity. This thesis discusses how to reach a sustainable city planning with Bellevue, a small industry and business area in central Gothenburg, as an example..

This thesis reports on a case study of two different organisational forms in the Swedish forest industry; the geographic and the functional organisation. The work in the geographic organisation is carried out within districts under the supervision of an overall responible district manager, where as in the functional organisation the work has been divided into functions headed by function managers. Forest magement, logging and wood purchases are examples of such functions. The general idea of the functional organisation is having the functions working over a larger geographic unit, without subdividing district boundaries of the region. Also a third organisational form of current interest for the forest industry; the process orientated organisation, is analyzed in the case study. Here, a company outside the forest industry has been analyzed, since no forest company was considered to have made as much progress of changing organisation to process orientation. In the report I present the results from qualitative interviews, where I give the reader a picture of the motives behind each organisational form, what the form implies for some of the company?s interested parties and the organisations? views on future organisational development.

The construction industry accounted for 19 % of all work-related fatalities in Sweden between 2010 and 2013. The exam report has been done to find out what underlying causes there are to the high number of fatalities and to the occupational statistics of the construction industry. Moreover it has been reviewed what improvements can be done to reduce accidents and fatalities in the construction industry. The report consists of a survey of statistics, laws and regulations affecting the work environment and of literature concerning the subject. It has been conducted an interview and a questionnaire survey at the construction company Asplunds Bygg and an interview with an inspector from the Work Environment Authority.

The hotel industry in Stockholm is characterized by intense competition, and within the next couple of years the construction of a number new hotels is planed. As the number of hotels in Stockholm increase, the competition will increase and the importance of having well functioning strategies will become vital. The purpose of this essay is to examine how two hotels within the hotel industry in Stockholm experience and handle the competition. The two hotels that are included in the study are Clarion Hotel Stockholm and Scandic Continental. The essay derives from models and theories that are related to marketing and competition.

This master thesis was carried out at ELFA, one of the largest catalogue distributors of electronics in northern Europe. ELFA offers a wide selection of products such as measuring instruments, fuses and screwdrivers. The master thesis handles the possibilities of an increase in the internal flow of products. The background to this problem is ELFA?s acquisition of two new companies, which brought the product range in the warehouse from 55 000 to 80 000 products.

Background and problemThe Swedish mobile market is highly competitive despite the oligopoly that currently exists. A short product life cycle together with fads and new innovations puts pressure on the operators to respond to the ever changing environment and to develop and adapt their strategies after it.As a previous study regarding a specific operator?s strategy was cancelled due to the extensive confidentiality surrounding it, an interest was sparked to perform an industry analysis as this is clearly something the actors spend a great deal of time on developing. The launch of the 4G network will offer new opportunities for the operators regarding products services. It may also impact the competition on the overall market.PurposeThe purpose of this thesis is to present a deep analysis of the industry and give the reader a comprehensive picture of existing conditions.

Purpose: To explore the purchasing function, mainly the supplier selection activities, in the fast fashion apparel industry. The purpose is 1) to explore the criteria associated with supplier selection for fashion products, and 2) to analyze the purchasing activities in order to find characteristics and trends which are considered to be strategic for the buying company. Method: The empirics consist of qualitative interviews with employees with responsibility for the companies' purchasing activities, as well as information gathered from articles, annual reports, and company websites. Result: The study indicates that qualitative criterias have increased in importance, and have become an important part of supplier selection for fashion goods. A number of characteristics where identified as important for purchasing fashion goods, which can affect choice of supplier; examples are increased collaboration, increased re-buys and increased use of logistics services.

To build high-rise buildings made of timber has for long been limited by national laws, due to the lack of knowledge in engineering solutions. Frame structures made of wood has for a long time been associated with major fire hazards and consequently lower safety and this connection is still being made today. The increased environmental awareness in recent years has contributed to the exploitation of indigenous building materials, including wood from our own Swedish forests and has become increasingly common. Increased knowledge about how structures behave in fire and how they can be protected in order to achieve safe timber structures has resulted in a growing interest in these structures in the construction industry. Research in the area is constantly updated and new laws allow any number of storeys in wooden buildings in Sweden as long as the performance requirements are fulfilled.The main part of this work has involved calculations of the fire resistance and load bearing capacity of floor and wall constructions.

At the beginning of the 1970´s forestry feared an imbalance in the future wood supply. Because of this anticipated "timber slump" forest companies undertook a variety of measures to counter this. One of these measures was the introduction of exotic tree species. The choice finally ended up with lodgepole pines which were considered a fast growing tree species compared to our native tree species. Theambition for the new lodgepole pine stands were to run these with rotation periods of between 40-60 years, thus smoothing out the ?timber slump? that was anticipated.

The music industry has been subject to great changes during the last ten years. The most significant factor contributing to this change is the increasing usage of broadband and thereby the increasing frequency of downloading music illegally. Music piracy and file sharing have caused record sales to plummet. Consumers have now moved on to consuming music in a digital format, not only through downloading but also from streaming music online, an activity partly made possible by social media channels such as YouTube. As the consumption patterns have changed companies within the music industry have been forced to find other sources of income than record sales and they have also needed to find alternate ways to market their artists.

In this report hardware based alternatives to password authentication in a Windows domain are evaluated for the needs of a certain company. In order to investigate the demands on such alternatives interviews with people concerned have been carried out. The demands which resulted from the interviews have been used to select types of hardware tokens for evaluation. Two products which offer authentication with smart cards and USB tokens have been selected and closer evaluated. These are RSA Passage which offers both hardware options and Rainbow iKey which uses USB tokens.