<p>Organizational Loyalty is a concept which is becoming increasingly important to discuss in today‘s society; employment agencies and consulting companies are losing staff by the hour however if that is a consequence of not being loyal to the employer, implies that people know what the term Organizational Loyalty actually means. Or not. This thesis‘s purpose was to investigate what Organizational Loyalty is within the consulting trade, to sensitize for the consulting business‘s the different factors that seem to influence loyalty and to give recommendations as to what might be done in order to make employees who work as consultants within the consulting trade experience more loyal to the organization which they are employed at. The analyzed material managed to reveal that loyalty is more than just a word within the consulting trade; it is an important mean of delivering high quality services to a company‘s customers and the only way for employers to attempt making employees more loyal to the organization is by respecting different factors that seem to influence loyalty to the organization and reinforcing these when they are in contact with the employees. By and large, the results suggest that there is a significance of defining Organizational Loyalty as something more than just a term within the consulting business; it is the underlying dimensions that together create the actual meaning of what it is and by knowing what the significance of Organizational Loyalty is, employers might be able to work better for reinforcing loyalty among their employees.</p>

Organizational Loyalty is a concept which is becoming increasingly important to discuss in today‘s society; employment agencies and consulting companies are losing staff by the hour however if that is a consequence of not being loyal to the employer, implies that people know what the term Organizational Loyalty actually means. Or not. This thesis‘s purpose was to investigate what Organizational Loyalty is within the consulting trade, to sensitize for the consulting business‘s the different factors that seem to influence loyalty and to give recommendations as to what might be done in order to make employees who work as consultants within the consulting trade experience more loyal to the organization which they are employed at. The analyzed material managed to reveal that loyalty is more than just a word within the consulting trade; it is an important mean of delivering high quality services to a company‘s customers and the only way for employers to attempt making employees more loyal to the organization is by respecting different factors that seem to influence loyalty to the organization and reinforcing these when they are in contact with the employees. By and large, the results suggest that there is a significance of defining Organizational Loyalty as something more than just a term within the consulting business; it is the underlying dimensions that together create the actual meaning of what it is and by knowing what the significance of Organizational Loyalty is, employers might be able to work better for reinforcing loyalty among their employees.

The prominent shifts towards greater flexibility in work arrangements as well as in organizational forms have had profound effects on the labor market for engineers, and given rise to the technical consulting industry. The technical consulting firm is becoming increasingly important in many technology-based industries, as a growing number of technology-based firms rely on technical consulting firms to produce their outputs. In that respect, the technical consulting firm is an important actor for the organization and development of engineering knowledge, as well as for the transfer of knowledge to and among technology-based firms. However, despite its growing importance, the technical consulting firm has received scant scholarly attention. Hence, the purpose of this thesis is to enhance the understanding of the roles of the technical consulting firm and the technical consultants for the transfer of knowledge among problem-solving contexts and client organizations. This thesis is comprised of a compilation of three papers and an extended summary. It draws upon a qualitative single-case study in one of Scandinavia’s leading technical consulting firms. This thesis takes a multilevel perspective, and utilizes an embedded case study design to study both the organizational and the individual level of analysis. In total, it builds on 54 interviews with managers and consultants, 14 observations of a competence development program for engineers who are in the beginning of their careers as technical consultants, and 2 workshops with managers. This thesis identifies two primary capabilities, developed through the interaction between the firm and the individual level: swift transition and knowledge cycling. The findings indicate that the link between the respective capabilities creates the foundation for the successful organization of engineering knowledge. Hence, these capabilities illustrate that the technical consulting firm has other roles to play than merely solving the problem of numerical and functional flexibility. Moreover, this thesis develops the process of knowledge cycling. The knowledge cycling process addresses the role of the individual consultant in the transfer of knowledge within and among problem-solving contexts, and consists of three distinct knowledge processes found prominent during the different phases of a consulting assignment: (1) knowledge acquisition, (2) knowledge integration, and (3) knowledge transfer. Furthermore, this thesis provides insight into how formal training affects the technical consultants’ ability to transfer knowledge. The findings suggest that this ability is developed through a three-stage process: (1) identifying the core of an assignment, (2) broadening the scope of action, and (3) becoming more self-confident in the role of consultant.

Question Answering systems are greatly sought after in many areas of industry. Unfortunately, as most research in Natural Language Processing is conducted in English, the applicability of such systems to other languages is limited. Moreover, these systems often struggle in dealing with long text sequences. This thesis explores the possibility of applying existing models to the Swedish language, in a domain where the syntax and semantics differ greatly from typical Swedish texts. Additionally, the text length may vary arbitrarily. To solve these problems, transfer learning techniques and state-of-the-art Question Answering models are investigated. Furthermore, a novel, divide-and-conquer based technique for processing long texts is developed. Results show that the transfer learning is partly unsuccessful, but the system is capable of perform reasonably well in the new domain regardless. Furthermore, the system shows great performance improvement on longer text sequences with the use of the new technique. / System som givet en text besvarar frågor är högt eftertraktade inom många arbetsområden. Eftersom majoriteten av all forskning inom naturligtspråkbehandling behandlar engelsk text är de flesta system inte direkt applicerbara på andra språk. Utöver detta har systemen ofta svårt att hantera långa textsekvenser. Denna rapport utforskar möjligheten att applicera existerande modeller på det svenska språket, i en domän där syntaxen och semantiken i språket skiljer sig starkt från typiska svenska texter. Dessutom kan längden på texterna variera godtyckligt. För att lösa dessa problem undersöks flera tekniker inom transferinlärning och frågebesvarande modeller i forskningsfronten. En ny metod för att behandla långa texter utvecklas, baserad på en dekompositionsalgoritm. Resultaten visar på att transfer learning delvis misslyckas givet domänen och modellerna, men att systemet ändå presterar relativt väl i den nya domänen. Utöver detta visas att systemet presterar väl på långa texter med hjälp av den nya metoden.