<p> <p>The purpose of this thesis was to examine what people who had been interviewed and quoted in a local newspaper feel about being interviewed and what they think of the published article. Our aim was also to make a comparison of “known” sources and “unknown” sources.</p><p>The main issues were: How do the sources of a local newspaper perceive that they are being treated in the actual interview? What do the sources think of the published article in which they are quoted? Do they trust media and journalists in general? Do the opinions differ between those who are used to being interviewed and those who are unfamiliar with the situation?</p><p>This study was carried out through qualitative interviews with respondents who have been quoted in a local newspaper in Jönköping, Jönköpings-Posten. Articles were selected from three days in November. The articles should be based on one or more interviews and had to be large. At least one person should be quoted more than once in the selected article. In total 30 interviews were made.</p><p>The study showed that the sources overall were pleased with the article and the way they were being presented. Nor was there anything to complain about when it came to the journalist’s behaviour. But almost everyone expressed certain scepticism when it came to confidence in media in general. However, most of the persons interviewed had an understanding of the ways that journalists work. We were surprised that the result was so positive and also that the people that were not used to being interviewed were more positive than those who often appear in the local press.</p></p>

<p>This study investigates if a divorce affects the attitudes and trust between parents and adolescents. Participants were 986 adolescents and their parents, taken from a Swedish longitudinal study, the “10 to 18” study. This study used 28 measures of parent-adolescent relationships, which created three areas: warmth, closeness and conflicts between parents and adolescents. The adolescents were divided into three groups, and one-way ANOVAs were made to test differences. The results showed that a divorce affects the father-adolescent relationship more than the mother-adolescent relationship. They also showed that the attitudes and the trust between parents and adolescents were affected by a divorce.</p> / <p>Den här studien undersökte om en skilsmässa kan påverka attityderna och tilliten mellan föräldrar och ungdomar. Deltagarna bestod av 986 ungdomar och deras föräldrar, från en svensk longitudinell studie, ”10 till 18” studien. Den här studien använde 28 mått som mätte relationen mellan föräldrarna och ungdomarna, dessa skapade tre områden: värme, närhet och konflikter mellan föräldrarna och ungdomarna. Ungdomarna delades in i tre grupper och envägs ANOVA genomfördes för att testa skillnaderna. Resultaten visade att relationen mellan papporna och ungdomarna påverkades mer än relationen mellan mammorna och ungdomarna. Resultaten visade också att attityderna och tilliten mellan föräldrarna och ungdomarna påverkades av skilsmässan.</p>

In this era emphasizing the knowledge economy, corporate survival has been paid special attention following the financial depression. For the corporate under the era of knowledge economy, competitive advantages are from knowledge sharing and organizational innovation. More recently, literature has emerged that offers findings about social capital as a complete concept to explore its influences and functions. In this study, we seek to address the three dimensions, namely relationship, trust, and norms of the internal social capital in the context of Chinese culture and further explore the interactive relationships and influences among them. Using the structure equation model, we use data collected 385 knowledge workers from the high-tech, financial and medical industries of Taiwan. The findings show that (1) relationship has positive influences on norms and trust; (2) the relationship, norms, and trust have positive influences on knowledge sharing; (3) the internal social capital has positive influences on organizational innovation; (4) knowledge sharing has a positive influence on organizational innovation; (5) knowledge sharing has partial mediating effects on social capital and organizational innovation. Furthermore, we proposed a theoretical model of relationship, norms, and trust for future research. These findings could be useful in academic field and practical applications.

This work is concerned with the study of nonlinear nonconvex stochastic programming, in particular in the context of trust-region approaches. We first explore how to exploit the structure of multistage stochastic nonlinear programs with linear constraints, in the framework of primal-dual interior point methods. We next study consistency of sample average approximations (SAA) for general nonlinear stochastic programs. We also develop a new algorithm to solve the SAA problem, using the statistical inference information to reduce numercial costs, by means of an internal variable sample size strategy. We finally assess the numerical efficiency of the proposed method for the estimation of discrete choice models, more precisely mixed logit models, using our software AMLET, written for this purpose.

Welche Vorraussetzungen sind nötig, um das europäische Einigungsprojekt auf Dauer zu tragen? Erstens bleibt die Herausbildung einer europäischen kollektiven Identität für die Überlebensfähigkeit der Union unverzichtbar. Zweitens bleibt die EU auf demokratische Institutionen angewiesen. Drittens kommt dem Vertrauen der Europäer eine zentrale Rolle im weiteren europäischen Integrationsprozess zu. / The article deals with the fundamental question: What does a European political system need in order to persist? Three claims are justified. First, the emergence of a shared sense of European community is crucial for the Union’s future character as legitimate and democratic. Second, European institutions should correspond to democratic standards in order to facilitate trust among strangers. Third, trust plays an important role for fostering further integration.

This thesis deals with students’ views on respect as an element in their relationships with teachers and peers. The purpose of the thesis is to gain further knowledge of relationships in school by applying concepts of the theory of ethical demand in the analysis of students’ descriptions of respect in their relationships with their teachers and peers. The theoretical basis of the study is the theory of the ethical demand (Løgstrup, 1997) which is supplemented with Thomas Ziehe’s (1986/2003, 1993) theoretical concepts of proximity and distance in relationships. An important point of departure for the study is the meaning of relationships in education. According to Løgstrup, interrelationship is seen as a characteristic feature of human existence, and respect and trust as the natural basis in human relationships. The empirical material consists of 21 group interviews with 69 students aged 14 attending two Swedish schools. The interviews were conducted as semi-structured qualitative interviews aiming to understand the students’ perspective on respect in relationships in school. The results show that respect is described as a reciprocal phenomenon in the students’ relationships. The students’ starting-point was in experiences of disrespect, which indicates that it is difficult to describe respect. The students picture respectful relationships to teachers with a wish of being seen for who they are, e.g. by equal treatment, being listened to and existentially confirmed. The students’ disrespectful relationships to teachers deal with descriptions of teachers’ inability to listen, abuse of power, and teachers’ inability to teach with structure and planning. Respect in peer relations is described as allowing a person to be the way she or he is. Honesty is important in peer relations due to the students’ need to see the other person’s true self in order to get to know him or her, which is their starting point for respectful peer relations. The theoretical interpretation of these results gives an understanding of respect as an essentially human need to reciprocally affirming the life of one another. The overall conclusion is that respect is given a deeper understanding as a human phenomenon in relationships, something that goes beyond the students’ volition. Disrespectful relationships force the students to harbour mistrust and insecurity when interacting with peers and teachers. Respectful relationships in school are seen as necessary for the students’ possibilities to enjoy life.

No description available.

It has been difficult lately, in the wake of the global financial crisis, to open any given newspaper without finding proof of organizational decline – companies laying off personnel or closing down. The reasons for this action are of course many but the fact that it is never going to be easy to notice an individual and co-worker remains.   The purpose for this research was to; “explore how organisational downsize has been communicated, how the situation is perceived and how the change has affected subjective work motivation among employees and managers”, something which we approached by utilizing a qualitative case study through interviews and an abductive research approach.   The result indicates incongruent opinions between managers and workers as to what had been communicated as well as the extent to which sufficient information about the impending RIF had been provided. There was no sign of general attitude deterioration as a result of the reorganization but there was evidence of a slight decline in motivation for one of the respondents. As to the communication climate there was consensus that vertical communication could easily be undertaken, in either direction.       Keywords: notice, communication, downsize, management, RIF, motivation, trust.

Title: Investigating factors that can have an impact on customer loyalty -an empirical study of IKEA     Level: thesis for Bachelor Degree in Business Administration   Author: Nana Wei 8502202-T141   Supervisor: Dr. Aihie Osarenkhoe   Date: 2010 – May   Aim: The aim of this thesis is to investigate which factors will have impact on customer’ loyalty strategy. And in this study, both markets of China and Sweden will be discussed. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is on the international companies.   Method: As the purposes of this thesis are descriptive and explanatory, the method used in this thesis is the qualitative method. Interview method is used in the thesis to collect data and information. Besides that, case study method is used in the thesis to analyze the data and information.   Findings: when considering how to retain customer loyalty, service quality, communication, advertisements is important for companies. Moreover, trust and commitment are also important for companies. Besides that, there are some differences between Chinese and Swedish markets, such as different attitude towards customer classifying method, and the different reasons of implementing customer loyalty strategy. Finally, some problems of customer loyalty strategy are studied.   Contribution: This research is about customer loyalty strategy and the focus of it is the comparison of Chinese and Swedish markets. Therefore, this thesis helps to better understand customer loyalty strategy in different markets.    Key words: customer loyalty, customer classifying, trust, commitment, communication

A social network represents the interconnected relations among people. In a knowledge-intensive era as of now, people have less capability to resolve more ill-defined and complicated problems. Several researches indicate that under such a circumstance people are more likely to turn to other people through their social networks than to consult sources like databases and documents. Searching in social networks is therefore an essential issue. In addition, typical social networks are neither regular nor completely random ones, but instead, they are mixtures between these two, which are referred to as small worlds. Consequently, such an issue is also called the small world search. Search mechanism in the small world can be classified into single-attribute approach (e.g. best connected) and multiple-attribute approach (e.g. social distance). Relevant research works, however, are mostly based on acquaintance networks. And one of the problems to search in acquaintance networks is its high attrition rate that hinders further search and results in low success rate. On the other hand, in recent years several researchers focus on the constitution and propagation of trust networks that represent the trustworthy relations among people. Since trust implies much closer to what we mean friends rather than acquaintance, we believe that the attrition rate in trust networks should be lower than in acquaintance networks. Based on this belief, we propose to search in trust networks rather than acquaintance networks to enhance the quality of the search process. We design three experiments to compare the search performance in the trust networks and in the acquaintance networks. Experiment I is to examine the ¡§social-distance¡¨ search strategy we adopt in the search. The second experiment evaluates the performance comparison without considering attrition. Finally, we consider the attrition rate and attrition rate difference for the comparison. The results show that as long as the attrition rate difference is beyond 10%, search in trust networks performs better than in acquaintance networks. It therefore justifies the feasibility of our proposed approach in gaining good search performance.