Background To succeed all companies need to formulate practical guidelines for why, how and where they are doing business. Examples of these guidelines include the stated mission, vision, the identity, and overall goals. Companies formulate the mission, vision, goals and strategies in line with their organizational culture. Therefore successfully managing culture and its underlying assumptions, morals and beliefs, is the basis for the prosperity of a company. The organizational culture can be summarized and communicated through core value statements. At its best these can be communicated to employees and serve as a constant reminder, a reinforcement of the most important aspects of the company´s culture. Purpose This thesis analyzes how the company Fagerhult Group implements and communicates their organizational culture and how their written core values represent the way the company do business. The Case The authors have investigated the company Fagerhult Group and their process of implementing and communicating their culture and stated core values. The authors have specifically focused on how this was carried out in the Polish office. The company entered Poland in 2007 as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), hence it provides a clear and practical example on how the company´s implementation process looks like. Method The authors have conducted a single case study, using a qualitative research method approach, where mainly semi-structured telephone interviews have been used for collecting information. Conclusion Fagerhult Group has successfully implemented the true culture, characterized by customer focus, quality, respect and empowerment, into the Polish office. This was done through face-to-face communication and situation-based training. These methods have proven to be highly effective when implementing culture, values and other important messages, since it provides the employees with a practical example on how to act and behave according to the Fagerhult way. However, the written core values; respect, responsibility and enterprise, mainly communicated through annual reports and company web page are found to not be entirely cohesive with the true organizational culture. Therefore these have not had any practical penetrating power and have been poorly communicated to the employees.

This study re-examines whether a new instrument, Child Problematic Traits Inventory, can assess core traits of psychopathy in children. A sample of 309, 3-5 year olds, (mean age 4 ), were recruited from 3 medium sized Swedish communities. Results show that items from the test load in three dimensions: Grandiose/Deceitful, Callous/Unemotional and Impulsivity, Need for stimulation. They are related to symptoms of Conduct- and Oppositional Defiant Disorder, fearlessness, proactive- and relational aggression. The study presents evidence that psychopathic like traits can be meaningfully studied in young children and that the Child Problematic Traits Inventory is a valid instrument for assessing these traits. Future longitudinal research is needed to see whether this construct is stable and predictive for future psychopathic disorder. / Studien replikerar om ett nytt instrument, Child Problematic Traits Inventory, kan mäta grundläggande psykopatiska personlighetsdrag hos barn, 3-5 år. Försökspersonerna bestod av 309, 3-5 åringar (medelålder 4) från tre medelstora svenska kommuner. Resultat visar att frågor från Child Problematic Traits Inventory laddar och formar tre dimensioner, en Grandiose/Decieteful en Callous/Unemotional och en Impulsivity/Need for Stimulation. Dessa tre dimensioner är relaterade till symptom av trotssyndrom, uppförandestörning, oräddhet samt proaktiv och relationell aggression. Studien visar att psykopatiliknande drag kan bli meningsfullt studerande i barn och att Child Problematic Traits Inventory är ett bra instrument för att mäta detta. Framtida longitudinell forskning är nödvändig för att undersöka om psykopati liknande personlighetsdrag är stabila över tid samt predicerar psykopati.

Metallic nanoparticles (NPs) with various elemental composition, size, shape and physical or chemical properties has become active field of research. Among all the metal NPs noble metal ones are receiving much attention due to their special optical properties which make them useful for different applications. Noble metal NPs have bright colors resulting from strong surface plasmon resonance absorption usually in the visible region. The colors are size and shape dependent and provide the tuning of optical properties. The optical properties of NPs are also strongly depending on the nature of the NPs surface which plays a crucial role on chemical sensing. Therefore, surface modification of NPs has become increasingly important. In this study, gold NPs were prepared in aqueous phase by seed-mediated growth method. To enhance the optical properties, surface functionalization was performed by coating NPs with silver. The coating process was achieved by chemical reduction of silver ions on NPs surface. Thickness of silver layer on the NPs were attempted to be controlled by the amount of silver salt added into NPs solution. Coating process of different types of gold NPs (rod, octahedral, star) was done by the same procedure. Moreover, this attempt yielded control over silver layer thickness on sphere, rod and octahedral shaped gold NPs, but not on branched NPs. The structure, composition and spectroscopic properties of Au-Ag core shell NPs were characterized by UV-Vis spectroscopy, Field Emission Transmission Electron Microscope (FE-TEM) and Energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) studies, Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), and X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS). The analysis showed that all NPs studied were successfully coated with silver and promising for further explorations in sensing and imaging applications.

This study is to explore the future development of Bank of Kaohsiung (BOK), the only Kaohsiung based medium-size banking institute. Due to the close relationship between banking and economic development, banking institutes with headquarter at Kaohsiung serving the local enterprises in this region play a significant role. While¡Amost of the local banking institutions in Kaohsiung area moved their headquarters to Taipei or have been merged by Finance holding companies owing to their poor performance. BOK is the only one left. Nevertheless, BOK should not be satisfied with the advantage of being the only medium-size local bank, but has to seek the way to withhold the advantage from the market and survive even better when facing the severe competition from giant Finance holding companies. This research adopts the questionnaire research method of case study and carries on the research by exploring: 1.the viewpoint of the middle-ranked clerks of BOK for the value of the Bank¡¦s operation core resources. 2.the viewpoint of the bank clerks of BOK for their intention and cooperative willingness in the bank development, including bank organizational change and economies of scope. The conclusions of this study are presented as follows: 1.Most of the middle-ranked clerks of BOK agree to the view points of resource-based view that ability is more important than resources , intangible resources is more important than physical resources and finance resources. 2.42.5% of bank clerks agree that it is a major defect of BOK with most of their branch office located at the southern part of Taiwan. Over 70% of bank clerks agree to move of the poor performance branch office to other volatile city. However, 84.5% of the questionnaires insist that any assignment to serve in other area shall be volunteered. 3.Developing the wealth management business is mild positive to bank clerks of BOK, and young, new coming, high educated bank clerks are more optimism. Over 80% of bank clerks recognize that solid customer support is the great asset of their Bank. 4.Expanding the loaning business among the medium and small enterprises is mild positive to bank clerks of BOK, especially high educated young bank clerks. 5.Nearly half of bank clerks believe that there is a little chance that BOK will not become a financial holding company. Also, 42% of the employee reject or highly reject the Bank to carry out actively to merge with other financial holding company. This research attempts to make some contributions on this subject. We start from the viewpoint of the middle-ranked clerks and bank clerks of BOK, through the empirical questionnaire research. We hope this can provides an objective discussion platform for people who concern the future development of BOK in the relevant issues.

Kärnkompetens kan ses som en av de mest centrala delarna av ett företag och insikt i detta är vad som bidrar till tillväxt, dominans och mästerskap. Vi likställer i denna uppsats kärnkompetens med överlägsen förmåga eller överlägset kunnande. I detta arbete försöker vi utreda vad som är Apotekets kärnkompetens. Med hänsyn till vad som definieras som Apotekets kärnkompetenser undersöker vi dessa närmare för att kunna prognostisera effekterna av den stundande omregleringen.Vi har genom att granska Apoteket och genomfört intervjuer på ledningsnivå identifierat tre möjliga kärnkompetenser: •    Den farmaceutiska kompetensen i kundmötet •    Kompetensen bakom kvalitetssäkringen av Apotekets egna varumärken •    Apotekets varumärke Slutligen diskuterar vi vilka effekter omregleringen kommer att ha på de tre kärnkompetenserna som vi identifierat. Vi kan konstatera att den farmaceutiska kompetensen i kundmötet troligtvis inte kommer att uppfylla de kriterier som våra valda teorier ställer på begreppet kärnkompetens. Kompetensen bakom kvalitetssäkringen av Apotekets egna varumärken samt Apotekets varumärke kommer förmodligen även efter omregleringen att kunna klassas som kärnkompetenser.

Current task-centric many-core schedulers share a “naive” view of processor architecture; a view that does not care about its thermal, architectural or power consuming properties. Future processor will be more heterogeneous than what we see today, and following Moore’s law of transistor doubling, we foresee an increase in power consumption and thus temperature. Thermal stress can induce errors in processors, and so a common way to counter this is by slowing the processor down; something task-centric schedulers should strive to avoid. The Thermal-Task-Interleaving scheduling algorithm proposed in this paper takes both the application temperature behavior and architecture into account when making decisions. We show that for a mixed workload, our scheduler outperforms some of the standard, architecture-unaware scheduling solutions existing today. / QC 20120215

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what cultural changes can be observed in an acquired company’s corporate culture in one unit that is integrated in the acquiring company’s routines - but not physically integrated. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of post-acquisition situations in the long-term. To fulfill this purpose, the following questions were to be answered: how do the employees at the acquired (but not physically integrated) company unit experience the corporate culture seven years after the acquisition, and how do they feel knowing their unit will be transferred to the same location as the acquirer company? Answering these questions, an exploratory qualitative case study of GEHC in Uppsala was implemented with fourteen employees interviewed at GEHC Boländerna and the unit in Fyrislund. The results revealed that the culture at the acquired unit today is partly changed and the core values are no longer prominent to the same extent, despite being deliberately maintained by the employees. There is also a partly negative attitude towards the physical integration, as the last parts of the acquired company´s culture will entirely disappear as the employees will be divided into different departments once they move to Boländerna.

Denna studie undersöker hur samförstånd skapas genom kommunikation i en organisationsförändring. Detta är intressant då tidigare studier visat på att kommunikation är en avgörande faktor för att en organisationsförändring ska bli lyckad. Det är också intressant då forskning kring den interna kommunikationen vid organisationsförändringar är sparsam. Speciellt då vi även valt att se kommunikationen utifrån en mottagares perspektiv, ett område som var särskilt outforskat. Vi har hämtat vårt empiriska material från en organisation som stod inför en organisationsförändring. Denna förändring grundade sig i två underliggande problem; organisationen behövde omstruktureras för att kunna växa, organisationen ville bli oberoende av en annan organisation som varit en långvarig samarbetspartner.Syftet med studien var att ur ett kommunikationsperspektiv undersöka huruvida samförstånd skapas mellan ledningen och de anställda i en organisationsförändring. Det teoretiska ramverket bestod huvudsakligen av teorier om framing och dess tre ”Core framing tasks”, samt teorin om Sensegiving/Sensemaking. Studien beskriver hur ledningen i förberedelsefasen kommunicerade information om förändringen till de anställda. Dessutom undersöks personalens uppfattning av denna kommunikation. Studien bygger på intervjuer med ledningen och de anställda samt deltagande observationer av ett informationsmöte och ett nyhetsbrev. Resultatet av studien tydde på att ledningen har varit bristfällig i delar av sin kommunikation, men de anställda uppvisade trots detta en vilja att genomföra förändringen på grund av ett starkt förtroende för ledningen.

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