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Bakgrund Självständigt arbete Datum: 2013-02-22 Hotell- och bokningssidor på internet är två olika branscher, som både är partners och konkurrenter med varandra. Principen för bokningssidorna är att de jämför priser på olika hotell och rumskategorier för att sedan sälja till lägsta pris till den som bokar. En gemensam nämnare för bokningsföretagen är att de inte gör detta gratis, utan erhåller en avgift per förmedlad rum från hotellen. Syfte Denna litteraturstudie syftar till att undersöka om hotell tjänar på ett samarbete med onlineresebyråer. Metod och material Denna litteraturstudie genomfördes med en grund av vetenskapliga artiklar som publicerats på internet och tryckts i vetenskapliga journaler. Resultat Resultatet av artiklarna visar att det hotell eller den bokningssida på internet som har lägst pris, bäst erbjudande och den mest användarvänliga hemsidan, lockar till sig flest bokande gäster. Diskussion Hotellen och bokningssidorna är beroende av varandra. Hotellen blir exponerade vilket kunde leda till att bokningen genomförs genom hotellets egen hemsida, vilket är målet för hotellkedjorna. Alternativt sker bokningarna på bokningssidorna, vid vilket tillfälle OTA:erna erhåller en kommission. Slutsats Hotellen tjänar på att ingå partnerskap med onlineresebyråerna, då dem ökar antalet bokningar till hotellen. Hotellen skall dock fortsätta med att locka gästerna till att boka via hotellens egna hemsidor. / B-uppsatser

Organisational culture is one key phenomenon that was investigated both in comparative ways as well as an influence on various management mechanisms and systems, in academic and practitioner literature. Talent management is one such mechanism that has attracted debate in practitioner domains, although academic research is lacking. This study investigates the effect of organisational culture on employee talent management, taking the case of Malta based ICT companies. It includes a review of literature about organisational culture and structure, agency and talent management, exploring gaps in literature that call for further research. In addressing one such gap, this study reports the findings established in research conducted among identified stakeholders who are related to the Maltese ICT sector. It presents the views discovered through qualitative interviews among senior and middle management in ICT firms. These views are compared and contrasted against the findings made from a quantitative investigation involving a self-completion survey, in which, 79 managers and 128 employees engaged in ICT firms in Malta participated. The main findings suggest that most organisations do not have a culture built around a clear set of values. Secondly, there is no talent structure based on HR practices that feeds into the business strategy. Thirdly, this research found no evidence of measurement of the return on investment of talent among the Maltese ICT firms participating in this study. These findings support some of the theoretical issues presented in the literature review that show the lack of guiding principles around talent and the impact of organisational culture on the management of talents. The recommendations presented in this study show how organisations can embrace a culture focusing on creating a talent “mindset” for effective talent optimisation that enhances performance and productivity.

This dissertation interrogates the nature of composers as aesthetic agents re-orienting from the socio-cultural contexts of the Weimar Republic (1919-1932) to those of the Third Reich in Germany (1933-1945). Work in the sociology of culture, sociology of arts and sociology of music has focused on cultural consumption, including music, as bound up in the reflexive projects by individuals and groups to constitute and reconstitute their social reality. Within my research I focus on the creation of cultural artefacts, in this case ‘works’ in the Western art music tradition, as central to processes of aesthetic agency where composers are engaged in reflexive projects of constituting and reconstituting their social reality and acting within those constructs. To begin the opening historical chaper, ‘Mortification of Modernism’, uses Goffman’s work in Asylums (1968) to contextualize the cultural policies and activities of the Weimar Republic, considered the classical era of modernism, as a home world from which those involved in modernist ventures developed presenting cultures supported by bespoke institutions established in the early post WWI years. During the waning years of the Republic and the rise of National Socialism, these support structures, including the individuals that made up the cooperative networks of modernism, were destroyed removing most connections to the Weimar Republic modernist home world. In the first years of the Third Reich through numerous denunciations, dismissals, policies, etc. the presenting culture of Weimar modernists was mortified through abasements, degradations and humiliations. Having identified – through qualitative mapping of concert programmes, music reviews and festival participation – composers involved in modernist circles in the Weimar Republic, their career paths and compositional outputs were traced throughout the years of the Third Reich to interrogate the aesthetic agency of composers in light of significant situational and perspectival incongruity. The dissertation then considers each of five composers in depth in separate chapters – Paul Hindemith, Rudolf Wagner-Regeny, Ernst Pepping, Heinrich Kaminski and Wolfgang Fortner. The five were selected based on four criteria: a high degree of activity in Weimar modernist circles (festivals, concerts, societies); continued presence in Germany for a significant portion of the Third Reich; continued professional activity as composers during the Third Reich; access to relevant source material both secondary (biographies, reviews, stylistic analyses, etc.) and primary (scores, letters, diaries, authored texts, etc.) from the subjects. The data illumines complex repertoires of adaptive strategies these individuals engaged in – with, through and to musical products – and how music is not only shaped by wider socio-cultural contexts, but how its construction is a primary resource for agents to respond to and structure the socio-cultural contexts around them. Key findings include the constitution of music as resource for showing both complicity with and subversion against the Nazi Kulturpolitik; as a resource for proxy presence in multiple social spaces (private homes, concert halls, opera houses, etc.) affording the construction and dissemination of composer identity and philosophy; as a technology of self for personal therapy; and in total as a resource for weltanschauung - world-building activity where composers construct and re-construct their social realities through musical creation – music as an active tool in and reflexive resource for individual social reality.

This study explores the development plan-making process in two local authorities, and focuses on the role different groups, including 'the public', play in this. This research aims to uncover the ways in which the practices of plan making are constructed through the work of actors and texts, and to trace how these actions reflect and constitute relations of power. Plans have been viewed as modernist tools. However this conception has been criticised in work drawing on the writings of Habermas and Foucault, which will be critically assessed. Problems associated with these theories and a need to trace how actions and structures might be constituted led to adopting a theoretical framework drawing on actor-network theory. This theory has a radical view of structure, agency and power and forces attention onto how stabilities are constructed. The theoretical framework adopted draws on these concerns to trace how actors, entities and networks emerge through social actions. The research questions focus these concerns onto understanding how plans are written, who is important in this and how entities such as 'local authorities' and 'the public' are constructed. Qualitative research was carried out in two cases, examining how the plans were written and focusing on how techniques of involving 'the public' were constructed. Case study descriptions trace how networks were built and how were important in mediating actions. In particular, the ways in which 'councils' 'officers', 'members', 'the public' and 'central government' are defined, form a focus. Analysis of the two cases revealed significant similarities attributed to a 'central government' network. Differences arose in the ways in which 'council' networks composed different practices of plan-writing and how officers and members were defined. This study shows how texts and actors shape plan-making, and how certain practices of governance are constructed.

The purpose of the study is to examine the relationship between an organization's identity and its corporate reputation. The organization in focus is a Swedish travel agency. Although identity and reputation has been studied separately before, they are closely connected and have synergistic effects, in that they affect each other. Connecting the two fields can benefit both the profession and research. Not only that, it is also expected to occur as a result of the development of technology, where the internet has made it possible for organizations to communicate through their own channels and describe how they think about themselves, and thus affect the way they want to be perceived. To analyze the organization's identity and corporate reputation, and the relationship between them, the study uses a model developed by Huang-Horowitz and Freberg. To achieve the purpose, data is collected by two methods, qualitative text analysis and semi-structured interviews. The result shows that the organization's identity and reputation interact in a succesful way in two of three categories. A challenge for the object of study is to distinguish itself from its competitors, as the results shows.

To provide a better understanding of civil government as taught in the public senior high schools of Texas, this study investigates the scope of subject matter now included in the course, the method of presentation of the students, and suggests possible improvement toward solution.

This study measures the extent to which the Texas Education Agency's 1963 monograph on drafting, Drafting, Grades 7-12, A Tentative Bulletin, is used in the state's secondary schools and its effects upon classroom activities. Information for the study comes from a questionnaire completed by a random selection of seventy-eight drafting instructors.

This project analyzes a database of 118 ceramic sherds that were excavated from the Late Intermediate Period site of Yanaorco, located in the Cajamarca region of the north highlands in present-day Peru, for vessel form, style, and imagery. Through the placement of these sherds within the context of inter-community feasting events that took place at Yanaorco, fineware ceramic vessels are interpreted as prestige items that were utilized by the elite to further differentiate themselves from other community citizens. By examining key examples of representational and non-representational imagery depicted on the sherds, an understanding of the social agency of the vessel and the esoteric knowledge that the imagery communicated to feasting participants is explored. The use of fineware ceramic vessels during feasting events at the site of Yanaorco served to ideologically reinforce or manipulate social, political, and economic stratification.

This dissertation analyses resistance to a regional development programme, which centred on the construction of a dam at Cerro de Oro, Ojitlan, Oaxaca, Mexico and the resettlement of the affected Chinantec population into an area of Uxpanapa, Veracruz. The resistance of the people of Ojitlan took various forms over a seven year period (1972-9), including political action, a syncretic millenarian movement, a reassertion of traditional forms of community fiestas and passive resistance to resettlement. Ojitlan has been affected by national economic and political changes since before the Spanish Conquest. Large plantations established in the tropical lowland areas in the 19th century ceded place to small "ejido" communities, set up under land reform in the 1930s. Control of land and the economic relationships of production are seen as factors affecting the patterns of resistance in Ojitlan. The dissertation reviews the anthropological literature on resistance and on ethnicity. The series of forms of resistance studied can be seen as multiple cultural articulations - attempts to "bridge the gap" between the established Ojitec life and the "modern" systems of work and life introduced by the development project of the Papaloapan River Commission. The Ojitec struggle with modernity involved dealing not just with the question of resettlement in the collective ejidos of Uxpanapa, but also with the reforms promoted in the Oaxacan Catholic Church. The traditional ritual of indigenous Catholicism offered a sphere of legitimate agency and autonomy for the Ojitec in the face of new models of agency and power. The dissertation suggests the usefulness of the concept of resistance, tempered with an analysis of accompanying processes of accommodation to change. Evidence from the 1990s indicates that ethnic identity continues to be important in political resistance to the state in Uxpanapa, a sign of the resilience of forms of Ojitec culture.