Notable in strategic management research is a paradigm shift from industry/market factors as determinants of competitive strategy to a resource-based view. This study focuses on the extent to which firms in the reinsurance industry use resources for strategic positioning and differentiation. A qualitative case study approach has been adopted for this study. On the basis of open-ended questions, interviews were conducted with 6 executives of the 6 chosen non-life reinsurance companies. In addition to interviews, company annual reports were used. Results obtained point to similarities in broader categorisation of resources, namely human capital, financial resources, information systems and organisational culture. Despite similarities in the broader grouping of resources, uniqueness in resources and competitive advantage derived therefrom is in the attributes of each of the resources that a reinsurance firm own. The main driver for basing positioning and differentiation strategies is that resources are controllable and manipulative compared to industry factors. Though the results support the underlying principles of the resource-based view, it is notable that its prescriptive nature with regard to resource characteristics, does not hold for some of the resources such as human resources, which are not perfectly immobile. / Graduate School of Business Leadership / MBL

<p> Barren-ground caribou herds are part of social-ecological systems that are of critical importance to northern Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic, contributing to nutritional, cultural, and spiritual well being that are today undergoing significant changes. This dissertation uses multiple disciplinary lenses to understand the dynamics of these systems and to clarify methods for studying them. Chapter 1 focuses on a prediction of summer (June 1- August 31) mosquito activity and potential insect harassment of caribou in response to a changing climate. The Mosquito Activity Index (MAI) was based on daily ambient temperature and wind velocity obtained from the North American Regional Reanalysis dataset (NARR) from 1979 to 2009 for summer ranges of Alaska&rsquo;s four Arctic herds: Western Arctic Herd (WAH), Teshekpuk Caribou Herd (TCH), Central Arctic Herd (CAH), and Porcupine Caribou Herd (PCH). Mean MAI was lowest for TCH, followed by WAH and PCH and highest for CAH. Over 31 years there was an increasing trend in MAI that affected the summer habitat of TCH and PCH, but a decreasing trend for WAH. Intra-annual patterns in MAI among herds differed in peak MAI. Chapter 2 presents a novel method of participatory videography to document the knowledge and experiences of Caribou People. Ninety-nine interviews were videoed in six arctic communities of North America in the summer of 2008 as part of the International Polar Year. Chapter 3 presents &ldquo;Voices of Caribou People,&rdquo; a composite film of those interviewed, portraying the range of topics reported. Chapter 4 presents the results of an open-coding content analysis of a sample of 34 of the Voices Project interviews. Interviews described people&rsquo;s rich memories of the past, aspects of their traditional knowledge and practices, the changes they have observed, the challenges they face, and what they perceive as their needs to meet present and future challenges. A key finding of the analysis is that while the research community and funding agencies are highly focused on climate change, Caribou People expressed greater concern about their social, economic, and political challenges. Caribou people noted that more studies undertaken in full partnership with caribou user communities along with community authority in decision-making are needed to sustain their human-caribou systems.</p>

Human resource management advocates consider that obtaining employees' affective commitment to the organisation is an important objective. A key part of this concept is concerned with employees' identification with organisational goals and values. Recent research however, indicates that employers want employees to maintain their commitment levels even though organisations are undergoing periods ofextensive change that impact on many aspects of these goals and values. In the literature, employee commitment is regarded as a stable construct that nothing seems to alter. Despite this, there is increasing evidence to suggest that commitment may change if something in the organisation changes. To date, little research has sought to measure the impact of organisational changes on employee commitment. This study seeks to find out if commitment is altered by organisational changes or if commitment remains constant after the implementation of change. It also examines the impact of a range ofvariables on employees' commitment levels not previously addressed in the literature. The study adopted a cross sectional design. Data was collected by use of both quantitative techniques, (incorporating the British Organisational Commitment Scale or BOCS) and qualitative approaches, in three organisations located in the South East of England. An evaluation of the BOCS' reliability and dimensionality was carried out. In contrast to the literature, an eight item scale was shown to be superior, providing the best fit to the data. BOCS was found to comprise two distinct, but related components, hence the measure is considered bi-dimensional. The study makes several contributions to the literature. In particular, the: process of change (i.e. strategy used by each organisation to elicit organisational changes); antecedents to commitment (i.e. personal and work related variables); extent to which changes are experienced and content of change (i.e. the changes themselves) are all shown to affect the outcomes for individuals' commitment after periods of change in the organisation. Of the changes examined, almost all lead to increased levels ofemployees' self reported commitment. This challenges the claims that suggest commitment is stable and unchangeable. The study also revealed a number of factors lead to increased commitment amongst the workforce after change. These represent employee perceptions of change. Researchers and practitioners will need to focus on these issues in the future when considering commitment if they are to safeguard it after changes in the workplace.

Energy consumption has become a major research topic from both environmental and economical perspectives. The telecommunications industry is currently responsible for 0.7% of the total global carbon emissions, a figure which is increasing at rapid rate. By 2020, it is desired that CO2 emissions can be reduced by 50%. Thus, reducing the energy consumption in order to lower carbon emissions and operational expenses has become a major design constraint for future communication systems. Therefore, in this thesis energy efficient resource allocation methods have been studied taking the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard as an example. Firstly, a theoretical analysis, that shows how improvements in energy efficiency can directly be related with improvements in fairness, is provided using a Shannon theory analysis. The traditional uplink power control challenge is re-evaluated and investigated from the view point of interference mitigation rather than power minimization. Thus, a low complexity distributed resource allocation scheme for reducing the uplink co-channel interference (CCI) is presented. Improvements in energy efficiency are obtained by controlling the level of CCI affecting vulnerable mobile stations (MSs). This is done with a combined scheduler and a two layer power allocation scheme, which is based on non-cooperative game theory. Simulation results show that the proposed low complexity method provides similar performance in terms of fairness and energy efficiency when compared to a centralized signal interference noise ratio balancing scheme. Apart from using interference management techniques, by using efficiently the spare resources in the system such as bandwidth and available infrastructure, the energy expenditure in wireless networks can also be reduced. For example, during low network load periods spare resource blocks (RBs) can be allocated to mobile users for transmission in the uplink. Thereby, the user rate demands are split among its allocated RBs in order to transmit in each of them by using a simpler and more energy efficient modulation scheme. In addition, virtual Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) coalitions can be formed by allowing single antenna MSs and available relay stations to cooperate between each other to obtain power savings by implementing the concepts of spatial multiplexing and spatial diversity. Resource block allocation and virtual MIMO coalition formation are modeled by a game theoretic approach derived from two different concepts of stable marriage with incomplete lists (SMI) and the college admission framework (CAF) respectively. These distributed approaches focus on optimizing the overall consumed power of the single antenna devices rather than on the transmitted power. Moreover, it is shown that when overall power consumption is optimized the energy efficiency of the users experiencing good propagation conditions in the uplink is not always improved by transmitting in more than one RB or by forming a virtual MIMO link. Finally, it is shown that the proposed distributed schemes achieve a similar performance in bits per Joule when compared to much more complex centralized resource allocation methods.

Given current environmental crises, many citizens have taken personal concern towards the issues and seek to become involved in the solutions. The integration of democracy and knowledge production plays an important role in this situation, in order to include the values and interests of citizens in the traditionally scientifically driven world of natural resource management. Public participation in natural resource management has manifested in a variety of ways given societal and environmental circumstances, as well as political legislation of nations. Emergent models bear many similarities and difference, which creates the opportunity to understand how models can learn from one another. This research studies two cases of public participation in natural resource management, with two different models of participation: Ontario, Canada with a primarily top-down participation model, and the communities around Lake Tämnaren, Sweden, with their bottom-up model. This research seeks to understand if the models of participation affect the outcomes of the projects and how democracy plays a role in the different models. To compare these two cases, interviews were conducted (12 participants in Canada and 6 participants in Sweden), along with field observations and document analysis. Results of the research indicate the models of participation have different challenges and advantages to once another, but the main obstacle in both scenarios relates to the support in terms of finances and resources available to the projects. The research concludes there is a need for bottom-up approaches to public participation in order to sustain deliberative democracy in the projects, but with top-down support there is much more immediate action taken towards solving issues at hand.

<p>Human Resource Management (HRM) handlar om att leda mänskliga resurser. Det blir det allt vanligare att personalansvaret delegeras till linjecheferna i organisationen eftersom de arbetar närmast de anställda. Syftet med denna studie var att med kvalitativ metod undersöka på vilket sätt chefers arbetssituation skiljer sig åt mellan de som har, respektive inte har, en HR-avdelning att tillgå. Studien baserades på nio enskilda intervjuer vilka tolkades enligt induktiv tematisk analysmetod. Resultatet visade att personalarbetet var mer integrerat i det dagliga chefsarbetet på företag som hade HR-avdelning, och dessa chefer kände sig inte stressade av personalansvaret i sig. Cheferna på företag utan HR-funktion prioriterade verksamhetsfrågor i större utsträckning och upplevde viss mental stress när de kände sig osäkra i sina HR-kunskaper och därmed ibland inte kunde hantera personalfrågor som dök upp.</p>

<p>Sweden is entering a time characterized by a shortfall of qualified labour. Thus companies will have to hold on to, and develop their most valued employees since it is getting harder to find competent replacements. By finding and developing Talents, companies will improve their position in the market and perhaps even create a competitive advantage. The academic discipline concerning locating, assessing, developing and retaining Talents is called Talent Management.</p><p>Purpose</p><p>To identify how the most desirable employers in Sweden work with Talent Management, and implications following its practises.</p><p>Method</p><p>The selection was made based on the response of a pre-study of 30 large Swedish companies recognised for their employment practises. Nine oral interviews, with a number of HR professionals at the corporations, were performed to investigate how they utilise Talent Management to create more value from human resources. The thesis takes a multiple case study approach investigating the utilization of Talent Management practises in Sweden.</p><p>Conclusion</p><p>The Swedish dialect of Talent Management correlates with the frame presented by theory. Swedish firms are mostly locating Talents internally but are willing to use outsourcing for some recruitments. Talents’ competencies are more important than their credentials. Within the frame of their job description, Talents are encouraged to find creative solutions to solve their tasks. Swedish firms are increasingly using assessment and clear feedback as foundation for the individual development plans. Within the individual development plans there is on-the-job training, job rotation and mentors. This is also a part of the retention process which focuses on recognition, relocation and career management. Implications of the work with Talent Management in Sweden are; since the companies investigated employed, or were about to employ, Talent Management processes, it seems that they are well prepared for the future war for Talents and will better cope with the gap occurring when baby boomers retire. Thus, firms adapting to Talent Management, and sees the strategic importance of it, can gain a competitive advantage against others not concerned with these practises.</p>

<p>The trend that more and more recently graduated (business) students are having trouble entering the Swedish labor market, and the fact that many of Sweden’s small firms are perfect absorbers of labor − putting aside the larger firms − how well do these two supply and demand sides match. The recurring theme of this thesis was to analyze the perceptions that small firm managers in Jönköping area, in the business-related sectors, had of business graduates and business graduate skills and competences. It was the skills approach that was the main focus of this thesis. Here we restrict ourselves to the small firms that employ less than fifty people and more than ten.</p><p>To supplement the reflections of small firm managers on graduates, soon-to-become business graduates in Jönköping area (undergraduates or postgraduates) were asked for their own opinion on small firm recruitment possibilities, and which ‘basket of skills’ they acquired and thus found to be important for small business firms. It is because of these two complementing perceptions that the authors had a chance to underline interesting graduate recruitment results, and perception on skills gaps.</p><p>The research design was of mostly qualitative nature coupled with additional integrated quantitative data serving as a supplement to the former. The empirical work was conducted through four interviews with small businesses and three focus groups with graduates.</p><p>Two of the companies had a basic aversion towards employing graduates, while one was indifferent and another welcomed graduates into the company. Graduates were seen as a ‘fresh applicant’, with new ideas and good social competence. However, lack of work experience and practicality, risks of hiring and over qualification brings the employability down.</p><p>The authors cannot identify a clear indication of a skills gap or skills match, but when taking into account the categorization of skills between practical and non-practical ones, there is a very positive skills match between graduates and small firms. In this way recommendation for designing educational business programs on the basis of practical skills seems to be appropriate for having business students well equipped for the small business labor market. In addition to that, other interesting results point out to that the skills preferences/demand by small firms varies when taking into account whether they recruit graduates to specific job posts or just for general work.</p>

Title:                 Talent Management   Author:             Simon Kjellman Level:               Master Thesis 30, hp Keywords: Talent management, Organizational Performance, Employee engagement, Human resource management Background: Today business is pressured to provide result and profit, but at the same time provide health and stimulate work environment for the employees. Human resource is rising to be the organizations new winner to get a competitive advantage. In order to be successful and continue to grow, companies need to attract and maintain their talent. Research question: Which tensions between organizational performance and employee engagement can arise when using talent management?  Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to develop an understanding of which tensions    between organizational performance and employee engagement that can arise when using talent management. By focusing on employee engagement and organizational performance, I put the emphasis on the approaches used when using talent management and therefore I also developing what characterizes the used approach. Method: A qualitative research approach was applied, which included a case study design consisting of multiple cases. Unstructured interviews and observations were the methods used for collecting the empirical data. The seven respondents were selected from two Swedish companies, based on a theoretical sampling method. The data analysis method included a cross-case analysis. Theoretical framework: Based on the purpose, the concepts that I find most relevant and coherent with Talent Management, Employee engagement and Organizational performance will be introduced and explained in the following sections. At first, Talent Management is defined and explained and then the employee engagement and organizational performance come as following. The theories will provide the basis for a detailed investigation and analysis over Talent Management. Findings: Swedish companies uses a collective approach to talent management. What characterizes the work with talent management in a collective culture are inclusion, democracy, soft culture and communication. They are using democratic and human ways of treating their employees. This causes the tension to be low in overall because usually the desires are met on both sides. Signs of separation in developments plans between different professionals can start a tension. The communication is important when using talent management to get a stable work environment.

Sediment accumulated on a lakebed archives information about past climate and changes in the regional environment. Previous studies (Burgess, 2007; Koff, 2011; Palmer, 2012) in the Northeast Arm of Lake Champlain, specifically Missisquoi Bay and Saint Albans Bay, showed a period (~9,400 - 8,600 yBP) of elevated organic matter deposition in both bays, indicating a productive event that pre-dated any possible anthropogenic influence. However, the record was abruptly cut off and any documentation representing the span of time leading up to this event was not found. The elevated organic matter levels were explained as being the result of a warm, dry environment that reduced lake level and promoted productivity within the bay. A new goal was formulated to lengthen the Holocene record for Missisquoi Bay (MSB) and Saint Albans Bay (SAB) in order to compare paleorecords and capture the span of time leading up to this highly productive event, possibly related to the Champlain Sea/Lake Champlain Transition (~10,000 yBP). One sediment core was taken from each bay as close to the original coordinates as the sediment cores obtained in previous studies (Koff, 2011; Palmer, 2012). The sediment cores were processed in the lab and sediment samples were tested for water content (WC), %C, %N, C:N, and diatom content. Each bay's sediment record consisted of a distinct marker representing lowest water level, separating a Champlain Sea unit at the bottom and an overlying Lake Champlain unit. A warming climate coupled with low lake level during this time may be the cause of the increase of productivity (%C) associated with the markers in both bays. Between ~8,600 - 9,400 yBP, a distinct marker represented evidence of a wetland in Saint Albans Bay before the onset of Lake Champlain. Diatom content in the wetland sediments indicated a generally shallow oligotrophic and alkaline body of water that shifted back and forth from brackish to freshwater. The record shows the wetland was eventually drowned as water level continued to rise, slowly transitioning into the Lake Champlain unit. Proxy results showed that internal processes within the lake continued to change in response to climatic and environmental drivers until present day conditions were reached. At ~9,400 yBP in Missisquoi Bay, there is an erosional unconformity between the Champlain Sea and Lake Champlain units, which corresponds to the low water levels also inferred from the SAB record during that time. After this unconformity, %C results show production within MSB fluctuated, similar to SAB, in response to changing climate and water levels until the present-day conditions of Lake Champlain were established. In sum, MSB and SAB each contain evidence of an ancient shoreline marker in different forms. Both markers indicate that lowest water levels occurred ~9,400 yBP and that lake level has risen ~7 - 8.5 meters since that time. The rise in lake level is associated with the transition into Lake Champlain. This Champlain Sea/Lake Champlain Transition lasted from ~9,400 yBP until ~8,600 yBP. Therefore, the oldest Lake sediment in the Northeast Arm of Lake Champlain is only 8,600 yBP.