This thesis asks the question: how do organisational activities become valuable? This is one of the most central questions in organisational life. Members and students of organisations devote a great deal of time pondering what activities and strategies organisations should pursue. They tackle practical questions such as what performance measures and standards to use in the evaluation of people and activities, which products to bring to market, and how to define a valuable balance sheet. The thesis investigates how organisations deal with such questions, and how organisational activities become valuable in practice. The question of how organisational activities become valuable is addressed using a three-part longitudinal case study in a listed multinational manufacturing company. In particular, the study traces the multiple and changing valuations of three central organisational activities: corporate strategy, product development and production. Drawing on recent work within the technological turn in economic sociology, the analysis uses the concept of framing to explain how calculative agencies emerge and valuations change. It is argued that this conceptualisation of how organisational activities become valuable has implications for established theoretical understandings of the relationship between accounting, control and value in the social studies of accounting. The thesis argues for an alternative understanding of how economic calculations are performed and control is exercised in practice. In particular, it proposes an approach for how to make questions of value the focus of analysis in accounting research, without taking the vantage point of any implied centre. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2015</p>

The Postclassic (pre-conquest) Nahua often performed displays of religious devotion. Usually involving stripping victims of their skin, flesh and internal organs, these public, state-sanctioned rites have been understood as astonishing, even exceptional, for their brutality. As a consequence, scholars have focused on human sacrifice at the steps of the Templo Mayor; ritual away from the imperial capital Tenochtitlan has remained very poorly understood. Where attempts have been made to understand regional practices, scholars have generally assumed binary distinctions between central versus periphery or state versus local. Existing studies fail to appreciate Nahua ritual as fluid and dynamic, instead casting ceremonial behaviour across space as unrelated and fundamentally oppositional. Integrating the ethnohistorical and archaeological records, this thesis takes understandings of Nahua ritual in new directions by examining the relationship between the public arena, the sacred landscape and domestic spheres. Crucially, this thesis argues that rituals were sensitive to circumstantial pressures and personal imperatives, across hierarchies,space and time. In so doing, this study suggests a more fluid model for understanding Nahua ritual than binary distinctions can allow. A lack of appreciation for variation or agency in ritual performance has perpetuated the understanding that the Nahua were trapped in a cycle of ferocious ritualism which left little room for critical thought. Using alphabetic, pictorial and archaeological evidence for a rounded perspective, this thesis examines the intersection between official structures and personal agency to question the notion that all Nahuas unthinkingly repeated human sacrifice and other ritual bloodshed. This study argues that the household was a crucial arena for the normalisation of the blood debt which permitted the acceptance of mass public human sacrifice. This thesis finds that, within the Nahua's symbiotic worldview, activities of the temple, mountain and household rituals were mutually supporting. Moreover, it is shown that the Nahuas chose to adapt their rituals throughout the years, to suit individual preferences and environmental circumstances. Taken as a whole, my findings suggest that the Nahuas sought to control their daily existence by adapting rituals to assuage violent and impulsive supernatural forces.

Our cities have been continually growing at an uncontrolled rate leading to the problem of trafficcongestion, which has discernable effects on all the aspects of sustainability, be it social,environmental or economical. This continual shift of increasing size of centre and decreasingsize of periphery poses huge sustainability challenge of meeting the consumption demands. Wepresently face the most unprecedented times in terms of the pace at which our natural resourcesare getting consumed. It is clear that replenishing some of these resources is totally out ofquestion. On the other side of the coin, the advances of human technology have provided itsgreatest gift of information &amp; communication technology (ICT). Today we have access to datafrom any point of the world to anywhere. There is a growing need to use this data andinformation with a holistic view to build more Intelligent Transport Systems. In our paper wediscuss how the advent of ICT can have an impact on bringing a sustainable transportationsystem. The work is divided in two folds, by first understanding the direct role of ICT intransport sustainability and then observing the direct correlation between usage of ICT andtravel demand. The problems of traffic congestion and its solutions like congestion pricing haveexisted in practice since ages; the perspective which we add to it is the role of ICT in making itbetter. The greater perspective that is being researched here is at an absolute fundamental leveland takes us to the question if and how ICT can work on root level challenges, like findingmethods to have a better traceability without compromising on privacy, changing driverbehaviour patterns and stopping the expansion of centre &amp; contraction of periphery.

Den här studien gäller Romersk järnålder i Sverige och Storbritannien med fokus på den senare. Det är en komparativ analys av utvalda delar av den materiella kulturenfrån ett antal olika lokaler i Sverige och Storbritannien med intentionen att skapa vidare förståelse rörande romersk influens i dessa regioner. Vidare är intentionen att uppsatsen skall undersöka möjliga likheter eller skillnader och därigenom dra slutsatser om romerska influensen var stark eller svag i de utvalda bosättningarna i Storbritannien och Sverige. Var den så kallade Romaniseringen för samtliga invånare eller var den enbart reserverad för eliten? / This is a study of the Roman Iron Age in both Sweden and Britain but with a focus on the latter. The study includes a comparative analysis of selected goods in the material culture at a number of different sites in Sweden and Britain in the aim of understanding the extent of the Roman influence at these sites. The aims of the essay is to investigate if we can notice similarities between the Swedish and British setting and thereby draw conclusions regarding the Roman influence or lack of it in the Rural setting of Britain as well as the chosen settlements in Sweden. Was the Romanization of Britain for everyone or was it reserved for the elite?

Petr Nejedlý: Peripheral Units of the Old Czech Lexical System: Retreating Units (abstract of the thesis) The thesis deals with Old Czech lexical units retreating from the centre to periphery of the lexical system. It examines prerequisites of the process, i.e. loss of systemic relations of the lexical unit, and describes its individual forms (the extinction of a lexical unit in the last resort). The work submits an overview of both (intra)linguistic and extra-linguistic factors which are based on development of the lexical unit and influence its retreat to the periphery. Attention is paid to systemic changes in the language which modify internal relationships within the lexical system and also lead to the loss of central position of some lexical units.

English summary The main objective of this thesis is to present some key issues relevant for postcolonial field of study with respect to two basic areas of interest: concepts of identity and place, respectively displacement in contemporary postcolonial discourse and their reflection in fiction, too. The thesis should provide the potential reader with basic theoretical background based on the most fundamental sources and by means of selected literary works it should support (or disclaim, if necessary) conclusions reached by the most notable theories. This dissertation work consists of three major parts. In the introduction, apart from providing the motivational, theoretical and literary objectives of the thesis, I cover some basic difficulties that may occur when dealing with the postcolonial field of study. The central part of the thesis can be divided into two parts, each of them consisting of two further sections. The first one, "Identity in Postcolonial Discourse", is focused on one of the key terms in all of postcolonial theory: identity and other concepts related with it. I cover the basic development of theoretical reflection concerning this concept, drawing primarily from secondary sources dealing with it. The theoretical part on identity is succeeded by a chapter "Reflections of Identity in the...