Academic libraries acquire access to many journal titles through “Big Deal” bundles. As serials prices continue to rise at unsustainable rates it will become increasingly necessary to consider breaking-up these packages and just subscribing to the most important titles individually. Recently, it appeared that the University Library, University of Saskatchewan would likely no longer be able to afford the American Chemical Society (ACS) bundle of 40+ titles, and tough decisions would need to be made. Usage data on each title were readily available – but is that enough evidence? Working under the common assumption that the primary users of this package are the Chemistry Department researchers, a citation analysis was conducted on what ACS journals these users recently published in and cited in their articles. In an effort to engage chemistry researchers and offer them a voice in the process, a survey of their opinions on each ACS title was also conducted. It was hoped that combining data from these three discrete sources: usage statistics, citation analyses, and user feedback, would enable us to arrive at the most conscientious, evidence-based decisions possible. This study took the novel approach of applying a citation analysis technique to usage data and survey responses. Although unconventional, this unique methodology proved useful in this situation. This presentation will describe the steps taken and discuss the benefits and challenges of this method so that librarians may consider whether this approach could be adapted to their own collections analysis needs. / Slides from presentation at the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (C-EBLIP) Fall Symposium, October 15, 2014

På senare tid har dagligdeal-företags affärsmodell blivit föremål för en debatt, där det ifrågasätts om partnerföretag går vinnande ur en dagligdeal-kampanj. Detta examensarbete har undersökt hur lokala företag påverkas ekonomiskt av att göra en kampanj med Groupon och hur vinsten av en kampanj kan maximeras. En kombination av kvalitativa fallstudier på partnerföretag till Groupon och kvantitativ analys av Groupon Sveriges försäljningsdata har använts för att undersöka detta. Studien är avgränsad till Groupons lokala erbjudanden i Stockholm, vilka innefattar kategorierna restaurang, skönhet och upplevelse. Fallstudieföretagens ekonomiska påverkan av en kampanj analyserades inom ramen för grundläggande investeringsbedömningsteori. Resultaten visade att samtliga nio fallstudieföretag gick med vinst, men att nivåerna för vinsten varierade kraftigt mellan ca 10 000-150 000 SEK. I restaurangkategorin är merförsäljning den mest vinstdrivande faktorn, i skönhetskategorin är det värdet av återkommande kunder och i upplevelsekategorin är det intäkt på deal efter rörliga kostnader. Grouponkampanjer verkar påverka lokala företags ekonomi positivt, dock måste dessa slutsatser sättas i relation till det begränsade urvalet om endast nio fallstudieföretag. Analys av försäljningsdata gav slutsatserna att företag kan öka vinst genom att ha hög rabatt och högt dealpris i utformningen av priset. I utformningen av produkten är slutsatsen att ett högt originalpris (vilket indikerar ett större erbjudande/sammansatt erbjudande) ger ökad vinst.  Ytterligare slutsatser är att företag med känt varumärke i centrala lägen går med mer vinst än företag med okända varumärken i mindre centrala lägen.  Slutsatser från försäljningsdata gäller i synnerhet kategorierna restaurang och skönhet då sambanden var svagare i upplevelsekategorin. Vidare gäller inte slutsatser vid extrema nivåer av rabatt, dealpris och originalpris. I de fall där resultat per kund efter rörliga kostnader var negativt var optimeringsmöjligheten begränsad. Generellt bör slutsatserna behandlas med försiktighet då försäljningsdata endast innefattar intäkt på dealen, inte det totala utfallet av en kampanj. Dock är intäkt på dealen en stark indikator för det totala utfallet. / The daily deal business model have recently become the subject of a debate in which it is questioned whether merchants benefit from a daily deal promotion. This thesis has studied how local businesses are affected financially by a Groupon promotion and how profits can be maximized. A combination of qualitative case studies on Groupon merchants and a quantitative analysis of Groupon sales data have been used for this purpose. The study is limited to local Groupon deals in Stockholm, which include the categories restaurant, beauty and experience. The financial effects of the case study businesses were analyzed within the scope of basic investment evaluation theory. The results showed that all nine case study businesses were profitable, although the levels of the profits varied widely between about 10 000-150 000 SEK. Upsell is the most important factor to drive profit in the restaurant category and the value of repeat customers is the most important factor in the beauty category.  The profit from the deal after variable costs is the most important factor in the experience category. Groupon promotions seem to affect local business economics positively; however, these conclusions have to be related to the limited sample of only nine case study businesses. The conclusions from the analysis of the sales data were that businesses can increase profits by using a high discount and a high purchase price in the design of the price. Concerning the design of the product it is concluded that a high original price (indicating a larger offer/composed offer) increases the profits. Additional conclusions are that businesses with well-known brands in central locations make more profit than businesses with unknown brands in less central locations. Conclusions of sales data are particularly valid in the restaurant- and beauty category, since the correlations are weaker in the experience category. Furthermore, conclusions are not valid at extreme levels of discount, purchase price and original price. In situations where the result per customer after variable costs was negative, the optimization possibilities were limited. Generally, conclusions should be treated with caution, since sales data only includes the profit of the deal, not the overall outcome of the promotion. However, the profit of the deal is a strong indicator of the overall outcome.

Groupon is a popular group-buying website where they act as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. The company has grown rapidly and was established in Sweden in the year of 2010. The aim of this study is to investigate if businesses that have been marketed in Stockholm and that have been co-operating with Groupon have been affected in terms of customer loyalty and profitability. Furthermore the study also examines consumer’s opinions, purchase behavior and loyalty against Groupons business partners. The results showed that salon/spa in comparison with other industries received very high added sales (67 %) and had a large number of loyal customers (42 %). For the retail industry, 33 % did not receive additional sales and 67 % have not received customer loyalty. Tourism/travel and other industries believe the campaigns to be very successful and they have received good customer loyalty and sales. The companies who did not consider their campaigns successful had problems with the communication between themselves and Groupon. Finally, 49 % of the consumers turned out to be loyal to the businesses of which they had used daily deals.

Although much is known about employee empowerment and work designs, numerous companies and management practitioners struggle to implement empowerment initiatives effectively because it is not known which approach best facilitates individual levels of psychological empowerment. Traditional job design theory focuses on the role of managers and portrays employees as passive grantees of empowerment. Employees may influence their own empowerment by taking an active role in work design. The primary purpose of this correlational study was to examine whether job crafting or idiosyncratic deals are more or less empowering than job design and how work locus of control influences these relationships. It was hypothesized that job crafting would be the strongest correlate with psychological empowerment. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was designed with measures adapted from existing instruments. A sample of 150 adults, drawn from various industries in the United States, completed a voluntary, online survey. Data analysis, which used Pearson correlations, revealed that job crafting had a stronger relationship with psychological empowerment than did idiosyncratic deals and management-driven job design for employees with high internal work locus of control. Findings from this study may help organizational leaders understand how employees with high internal tendencies are psychologically empowered when actively engaged in designing their own work. Employees may then feel empowered to advance the company's social agenda and make personalized contributions to the greater society, essentially becoming goodwill ambassadors for the organization.

This thesis concerns the relatively recent phenomenon of part-time managers and professionals. The focus is the part-time working arrangement (PTWA) and specifically the process by which it emerges and develops, building on existing literature on working-hours preferences, the role of the organization in part-time working and alternative work organization for temporal flexibility. Two large private-sector organizations, each operating in the UK and the Netherlands, provided four different research sites for narrative interviews with 39 part-time managers and professionals. The key contribution to knowledge is to identify the process of developing a PTWA as a combination of the formal negotiation of a flexibility task i-deal and an informal process of job crafting. In a situation of high constraint – where the individual’s goals conflict with organizational norms and expectations – the tensions between ‘being part-time’ and ‘being professional’ necessitated identity work at each stage, as individuals constructed a ‘provisional self’ which in turn enclosed each stage of the development of the PTWA. The four stages were: first, evaluation of alternative options, including postponing the transition to part- time until more appropriate circumstances arise; secondly, preparation of the individual business case for part-time; thirdly, formal negotiation of a flexibility task i-deal; and finally an informal, unauthorized adaptation of the arrangement over time. Collaborative crafting of working practices (predictability, substitutability, knowledge management) provided greater opportunities for adaptation than individual activities. This study’s contribution to theory in the nascent field of part-time managers and professionals is a process model which suggests how three sets of discourses act as generative mechanisms at each stage of the emergence and development of the PTWA, creating or destroying ‘action spaces’. These discourses are: the perceived ‘nature’ of managerial and professional work, the perception of part-time as a personal lifestyle choice, and the understanding of part-timers as either ‘other’ or the ‘new normal’.

Syfte: Uppsatsens syfte är att klargöra skillnaden mellan olika sorters rabatterade erbjudanden som kampanj och rea i Ur&Penns butiker. Syftet är även att se hur konsumenter ser på rabatterade erbjudanden och hur deras lojalitet kan påverkas av detta. Metod: En kombination av kvalitativa och kvantitativa metoder har använts med en abduktiv ansats. Insamling av data har skett via enkäter, intervju och observation. Uppsatsen riktar sig in på att undersöka Ur&Penns marknad. Teori: Teorier som använts i uppsatsen beskriver prisstrategier, rabatterade erbjudanden, lojalitet ur konsumentperspektiv samt tar upp utsnitt ur marknadsföringslagen. Empiri: Empirin består av tre delar: webbenkät, intervju och en observation. Webbenkäten är skapad ur ett konsumentperspektiv medan intervjun är ur ett företagsperspektiv. En direkt observation har utförts av författarna. Slutsats: Det finns både negativa och positiva aspekter för både konsumenter och företag när det gäller rabatterade erbjudanden. Skillnaden mellan kampanj och rea är uppenbart i fakta men inte lika tydlig när det kommer till att se skillnaden i butik. Rabattaktiviteter används i butiker för att locka kunder till att handla. En stor del av våra respondenter uppfattar nedsatta priser som någonting positivt.

This thesis concerns the relatively recent phenomenon of part-time managers and professionals. The focus is the part-time working arrangement (PTWA) and specifically the process by which it emerges and develops, building on existing literature on working-hours preferences, the role of the organization in part-time working and alternative work organization for temporal flexibility. Two large private-sector organizations, each operating in the UK and the Netherlands, provided four different research sites for narrative interviews with 39 part-time managers and professionals. The key contribution to knowledge is to identify the process of developing a PTWA as a combination of the formal negotiation of a flexibility task i-deal and an informal process of job crafting. In a situation of high constraint – where the individual’s goals conflict with organizational norms and expectations – the tensions between ‘being part-time’ and ‘being professional’ necessitated identity work at each stage, as individuals constructed a ‘provisional self’ which in turn enclosed each stage of the development of the PTWA. The four stages were: first, evaluation of alternative options, including postponing the transition to part- time until more appropriate circumstances arise; secondly, preparation of the individual business case for part-time; thirdly, formal negotiation of a flexibility task i-deal; and finally an informal, unauthorized adaptation of the arrangement over time. Collaborative crafting of working practices (predictability, substitutability, knowledge management) provided greater opportunities for adaptation than individual activities. This study’s contribution to theory in the nascent field of part-time managers and professionals is a process model which suggests how three sets of discourses act as generative mechanisms at each stage of the emergence and development of the PTWA, creating or destroying ‘action spaces’. These discourses are: the perceived ‘nature’ of managerial and professional work, the perception of part-time as a personal lifestyle choice, and the understanding of part-timers as either ‘other’ or the ‘new normal’.

The project described in this thesis implements a position based offer system that allows the user to receive offers when they enter zonesspecified in a database. The goals associated with this project were: to find and evaluate products with similar functionalities and to design and implement a working prototype. The system consists of four main parts, a smartphone, a server, a website, and a billing system. The smartphone is based upon the Android operating system and uses the global positioning system (GPS) to track its position. The server is the brain of the system and all the other devices communicate through it.The server runs JBoss and has a connection to an Oracle database through hibernate. JavaServer Pages (JSP) is used by the server to generate the website and to connect the Java methods with the HTML-forms at the website. User privacy is one aspect that has been investigated in relation to this project. The user should have options to choose the information that is to be shared and stored. When storing private information it is important to secure the information, preferably by encryption and a log in system. A small program was developed to test the scalability of the server and the result showed that the server could cope with 1000 simultaneous users polling the server with a 5 second interval.This will, however, increase several times when a dedicated server machine is used. Today there is no other product at the market that has a connection to the billing system; this means that this product will have a huge advantage and market potential compared to similar products.

This thesis specializes in the concept of daily deals on the Internet, therefore in relatively new form of sales promotion. Thesis is charting the market on which portals of daily deals operate; to find reasons for quick expansion of this marketing tool in the Czech Republic. The goal of the thesis is to introduce the concept of daily deals through the Internet, to chart the market of daily deals in the Czech Republic and in the whole world and, above all, to create recommendations for people, who are interested in this type of e-commerce. The part of the thesis is research of customers' perception of such portals. The research is the base for examination of the defined hypothesis and simultaneously is the base for identification of the main risks while selling through the portals for daily deals. Findings from the research are used for processing recommendations for companies or entrepreneurs, who are interested in using this marketing tool.

The diploma thesis aims to establish the basic principles in the field of motivaion of distribution subjects to buy the products from manufaturer. In the first part there are the principles and ways of motivation described. The thesis is focused on economic and non-economic bonuses. It sets the basic principles in manufacturer -- customer realtionships. In the application part of the thesis we suggest the scheme of customer trade bonuses of imaginary manufacturer and its distributor. There is a framework purchase contract between a manufacturer and distributor suggested.