In the new millennium the ideas of New Public Management (NPM) have become more and more popular within the public sector and its health care. NPM is a management philosophy that, among other things, aims at making public organizations more business like. The study explores the encounter between the organizational practice and an NPM idea, the idea of quality, at Landstinget in Värmland (LiV). More precisely the study aims at contributing to the discourse on effects of institutionalization as well as to knowledge on the process of local institutionalization. Another purpose of the study is to contribute to quality development in organizations. In order to do this, a project of quality (LiV 2002) at LiV is followed in time and space. In the empirical section three actor groups are identified, the new management, the old officials and the health care personnel. Between the old officials and the new management, and between the health care personnel and the new management conflicts burst out. The reason for these conflicts is, among other things, the actor groups’ diverging cultural conceptions. In the conclusion the idea of quality is, to a certain extent, found to be institutionalized in the formal structure of LiV. But the greater part of the actors’ action and thought schemes are unaffected. However, the actors at LiV are not fully unaffected by the idea of quality. It is argued that the cultural conceptions of the old officials and the health care personnel are reproduced during the work on quality. In the discussion concerning contributions, a model for studying local institutionalization from the perspective of sensemaking is put forward. It is argued that the model enables students of local institutionalization to focus on the cognitive micro processes of institutionalization. In the discussion on quality development, the focus is on difficulties and obstacles with quality development. These are found to be cultural conceptions, preservative sensemaking, processes of translation and that most public organizations are arena organizations.

In recent years there have been many corporate scandals from environmental and social aspects. Corporate irresponsible behavior has led to major public discussions on responsibility and these pressures made that many companies wanting to show that they are working for a sustainable development by voluntarily reporting economic, environmental and social and social issues in the financial statement. They hope this will create credibility for the companies. In the current situation, there are a number of guidelines that companies can use to report sustainability. One of these is the GRI guidelines which is an international framework that covers many accounting areas and allows companies to compare their sustainability reports with other companies. The purpose of this study is to determine if all state-owned companies follows the government’s requirement that these companies must form a sustainability report under the GRI guidelines, and the sustainability report must be audited and certified by an outside party. To answer the purpose of our study, we have chosen to investigate all these companies’ sustainability reports which are available in the corporate website for the year 2009 but also 2008 to see if there is any development between these periods. The sustainability reports were examined in three categories that would give the answer to our question and this was shown in a table. The theories that we have used is the intuitional theory and legitimacy theory at finding out if they can explain the empirical results. In our conclusion, it appeared that not all the companies had acted in accordance with the requirement applicable to the three aspects that were investigated in 2008; none of these issues had been fully recognized by the companies. For 2009, it emerged that the companies had become much better at reporting under the guidelines. All companies reported fully under the requirement in two of the three categories.

Why do people invest? People are insecure about their future welfare and aim for future guaranteed cash flows. To give ourselves a more thorough introduction to investments we decided to write our bachelor-thesis within the area of finance. This thesis will combine financial institutions and investments. It is a topic repeatedly discussed in the media and a study carried out in Sweden showed that in 2003, 80% of the population were shareholders. When trading with stocks and shares there is risk involved that can be defined as the volatility in the cash flow of an investment. A portfolio is a collection of securities that an investor has placed capital in. In order to minimise the risk of the portfolio, the investor can diversify his or her portfolio, which involves investing in different securities in order to minimise risk. Institutional Theory will help us to see how these financial institutions interact with each other and what internal and external factors may influence their behaviour. Institutional investors; such as banks, are seen as large actors on the financial markets as they gain more and more control over the management of equities. It is necessary that intermediaries take care of their customers and inform them thoroughly about the rules of the investment game. With this as a background we felt it would be interesting to investigate the following problem. On what basis do financial institutions create their customers’ portfolios and is the process the same across the branch as a whole? In order to find an answer to this question; we have done a qualitative study with an overall positivistic influence. The study is based upon an analysis of the empirical material; collected through interviews with three financial institutions, grounded in theory in order to answer our specific question. From the information gathered we understood that the first information financial institutions gather is personal information about the investors, which is needed to get a picture and an understanding about their client. We have also learned how important it is to understand risk, as it is the risk that will determine the composition of the portfolio for the investor. We could see with the help of the institutional theory that there is little space for differentiation and can therefore say that the financial institutions work in the same way in the advising of their clients and for the composition of their client’s portfolio. Our results show that the basis for the creation of portfolios is more or less the same across the branches as a whole. The service given may differ, due to the competence and knowledge level of employees, between institutions but the end product is similar in all aspects.

In May 2000 share repurchases were legalized in Sweden, with the purpose to provide companies with an efficient and flexible way to distribute capital. To buy back shares gives companies several benefits which are discussed in our study. The lack of academic research about this topic for Swedish companies gave us an incentive to provide knowledge specifically for this market. When companies announce a share repurchase program they are subject to uncertainty about the society’s reaction and economic consequences. Individuals within a well established organizational field deal rationally with uncertainty by adjusting to their institutional environment. The institutional environment can be defined as an abstract structure of regulations and behavioral norms that guide human’s decisions. This often leads to homogeneity in companies’ culture, structure and output. We ask the question if companies are realizing repurchase programs in a similar way over time, and if share repurchases have been developed as a more common used financial instrument since 2000. Our second question is if companies that decide to buy back shares pursue this under similar economic conditions as a result from becoming homogeneous. The purpose of this study is to describe how institutional pressures in form of coercive, normative and mimetic isomorphism have affected companies’ decision to repurchase shares. We want to explain if there is an upward going trend of share repurchases, a standardized way to repurchase over time and if this decision can be determined by similarities in certain financial indicators of a company’s economic situation. To answer our purpose we used a quantitative research strategy with a deductive approach. The collected data was analyzed in a logistic regression analysis and by interpretations of descriptive statistics. We decided to examine for mimetic isomorphism public companies listed within the industrial sector on Stockholm Stock Exchange from the years 2000-2006. For the test of coercive and normative isomorphism with a logistic regression analysis we had to limit ourselves to investigate the years 2001-2003. In reality the three institutional pressures are working simultaneously and should together lead to a common perception about share repurchases among companies. For our testing we separated institutional isomorphism based on our theoretical preconceptions. This allowed us to analyze each individual institutional pressure and how they interact together. We defined mimetic isomorphism as companies adjusting their repurchase behavior to other companies within the industrial sector. Our result has not shown any indications of such a behavior concerning time, amount or frequency of the buybacks. Testing if certain financial indicators such as excess cash, liquidity, solvency, dividends, volatile operative income, prior year return, growth opportunities, companies’ size, ownership concentration, institutional and individual shareholders could explain stock repurchase activity gave us the possibility to evaluate coercive and normative isomorphism. But the question how institutional isomorphism affects companies’ repurchase decisions still remains unanswered. We have not found any certain financial indicator which motivates companies’ decision to buy back their own shares. The decision might therefore be carried out under very different economic conditions and with different objectives. In the industrial sector and generally in the whole Swedish market only a relatively low proportion of companies buy back shares. The stated findings for the Swedish market imply a need for further investigations over a longer time horizon and for a larger population. Further investigations in this topic which has the potential to provide recent insight into the stock repurchase decision for Swedish companies would enhance and verify our statements.

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Program: MIMA student – International business and Entrepreneurship Course name: Master Thesis (EFO705)Title: Imitation as Organization’s StrategyAuthors: Voravej AssavapisitkulSataporn Bukkavesa Supervisor: Sven-Åke NyströmProblem: Does imitation really benefit organization? Purpose: The authors are writing this topic because the authors feel that this topic is not widely been investigated, moreover, it is a very interesting topic for the authors. According to the course literatures that the authors have read, the authors perceived that most of them focused on innovation and seems like they ignored or mentioned little on the topic of imitation and how can imitation benefits organization. Therefore, the authors are personally interested in the topic. The authors hope that the readers would gain more knowledge on the topic and would be able to apply with their business or study. Method: Interpretivist; Documentary; Interview Summary: In this Master Thesis, the authors have discussed several dimensions of imitation with examples. First, the authors discussed about imitation during the early stage of industrialization with the examples in Korea. This topic discussed of the opportunity provided through imitation process for the new firms to be able to catch up and compete with experienced firms. The next topic is on unique capability. Firms can apply imitation as their own capability that can prevent others’ imitation, moreover, they can become successful in the new market. Then the authors found that there are ways to imitate other firms’ knowledge legally in the form of strategic alliances. In the topic of creation of strategic alliances, the authors suggested four patterns of engagement that firms can select according to their objectives. Under the topic of firms experience, there are some empirical data supported that the degree of imitation has negative relationship with firms’ experience curve. Moreover, the authors discussed about the how competitors’ actions affect the firms to select different strategy of organization management in the topic of the choice of alliances and mergers and acquisitions by competitor’s move. Then the authors discussed about how successful were the imitations by reverse-engineering implemented by Korea’s electronics industry. Furthermore, the authors also provide examples of imitations in other industries. The next topic is limitation and prevention on imitation. Then the authors provided the reasons why do firms imitate. Moreover, the authors discussed about the factors that affect the speed of imitation process and show how the speed of imitation related to benefits and losses of the firms. Next, the authors suggested some successful strategies for product imitation. Then the authors discussed about the drawbacks of imitation with some examples. Finally, the authors provided the results and analysis of the interviews as primary data collection to show the success of firms that implemented imitations, people’s attitudes toward imitation, and the degree that originality and product origin can limit imitation.

När kraven från omvärlden ökar hittar organisationer nya sätt att vara såväl det mest effektiva som det mest legitima företaget. Detta gäller gentemot kunder, anställda, konkurrenter och samhället i stort. Syftet med denna kandidatuppsats är att med hjälp av nyinstitutionell teori undersöka hur ett kommunalt bostadsbolag jobbar med arbetsmiljö. Fokus ligger på att belysa hur arbetsmiljöarbetet samverkar med legitimitetsskapande faktorer, exempelvis standardisering av arbetsmiljöarbetet. Kandidatuppsatsen är en kvalitativ studie och utgörs av dokumentstudier samt intervjuer. Genom att koda materialet kunde våra frågeställningar besvaras. Våra slutsatser är att bostadsbolaget har ett antal rutiner som pekar på att ett systematiskt arbetsmiljöarbete bedrivs. Vidare utför bostadsbolaget enligt oss en stor del av sitt arbetsmiljöarbete för att upprätthålla sin legitimitet, även om en viss del även utförs av effektivitetsskäl. Införandet av en standard skulle inte nödvändigtvis förändra det praktiska arbetet i någon större grad, men ge ett ökat fokus på arbetsmiljöarbete vilket i sin tur skulle kunna förbättra arbetsmiljöarbetet i organisationen, möjligtvis till priset av ökad administration. / When demands of the surrounding world increase organizations find new ways to be the most effective and legitimate. This applies to customers, employees, competitors and society as a whole. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to investigate how a public housing company1 handle issues concerning the work environment. The focus of this paper is to illustrate how the occupational safety and health work interacts with legitimacy-building factors, for example standardization. To explain this, we use neoinstitutional theory with its concepts we find relevant. This bachelor thesis is a qualitative study, consisting of document studies and interviews. By encoding the material our three initial questions were answered. The conclusions suggest the public housing company retain systematic routines when working with occupational safety and health. Further, according to us, the company executes a large part of their occupational safety and health work in order to maintain its legitimacy, although some is also carried out for reasons of efficiency. The introduction of a occupational health standard would not necessarily cause significant change in the organization's daily work routine, but give an increased focus on occupational health and safety work, which in turn could improve the work environment of the organization. 1 Note that "public housing" in Sweden (allmännyttiga bostadsbolag)not is reserved for people under a certain income level. This form of housing tenure makes up 20% of all homes in Sweden.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to investigate how the BSC is used to measure performance by the provider and the users in a municipality. Furthermore, the purpose is also to examine the different views of providers and users of BSC in different departments. Design/methodology/approach – The research on the use of the BSC is based on a single case study in Kristianstad municipality. The case study was performed on three different administrations, culture and recreation, children and education, and care which are representing users of the BSC. The case study was also performed in the city management which presented the provider of the scorecard. Afterwards, the results of the case study have been analyzed from an institutional perspective. Findings - In this case study, it is concluded that the BSC is a useful tool for performance measurement in the municipality of Kristianstad. The providers and users of the scorecard are viewed differently as a performance tool. Research limitations – Due to a small sample size, it is difficult to generalize the results of this single case study. Future research could expand this study by a quantitative study based on a survey including all Swedish municipalities. Another proposal can be comparative case studies of different municipalities. Practical implications – This thesis shows how the BSC is used for performance measurement and how it is viewed from the providers and users. Using the results of this study, managers can use the scorecard in a more efficient way. Originality/value – This single case study examines the use of BSC in Krisitanstad municipality as there have been relatively few studies in this area. With the collection of the empirical evidence we have contributed with literature in this area.

Waste-to-energy is currently at the forefront of clean technologies. It consists of the burning of different types of wastes (solid, liquid, gaseous) that provide heat and electricity. With high efficiency levels in energy production (80-90%) and low flue gas emissions, this type of energy production has quickly spread throughout Europe. In addition, laws created by both the EU and national governments have created new agendas regarding landfill and waste disposal.   Problem: We have identified three different problems that currently exist: (1) the lack of academic literature which explores specifically business models within the renewable energy industry and the potential that business models possess in exploiting the opportunity within the market place; (2) which methods are effective within a business model in achieving the value that a firm wishes to create, capture, and deliver; (3) current academic literature does not provide enough understanding of the influences and pressures that stakeholders place upon shaping a firm’s current/potential business model.   Purpose: The purpose of this investigation is to examine the business models used by three different waste-to-energy firms in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden and to identify the methods used to create, capture and deliver value. Moreover, we aim to identify and investigate the stakeholders within the waste-to-energy industry of these three companies with the goal of explaining the influence and pressures they place upon the firm’s business model through the use of institutional theory.

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