<p>University of Örebro</p><p>Department of social Sciences</p><p>Sociology, Contnuation Course, 61-90hp.</p><p>Essay 15hp. Spring 2008</p><p>Title: Who is resbonsible? A soceityscientific discussion about burnout.</p><p>Author: Emilie Fuchs</p><p>Abstract</p><p>The purpose with this essay is to do a critical comparation between two different perspectives, burnout as an individual problem and burnout as a social problem. The first perspective states that the individual itself is responsible for her sickness while the second perspective states that the society and foremost the labour market should work in order to prevent people from beeing burned out. With that purpose in mind I want to enlighten and hopefully bring up the topic for discussion.</p><p>The essay is based upon the following questions:</p><p>• How can you sociologically understand the labour market of today?</p><p>• How can you understand burnout in an individual context?</p><p>• How can you understand burnout in a social context?</p><p>By studying and reading four books, I have presented the two different perspectives of burnout. Two books represents burnout out of a social perspective whereas the individual perspective is advocated in the other two books.</p><p>The results founded shows that the individual perspective means that the individual has to resolve his own problems even though the labour market is the main cause to why people becomes burned out. The social perspective, on the other hand, basically want the labour market to take responsibility and prevent burnouts.</p><p>Through the results, my conclusion is that the individual perspective represents the individualised world we live in. The social perspective of burnout shows the importance of a good solidarity, mainly at work. This point of view could probably lead to a growing safety on the labour market, which presumably results in less burned out people.</p><p>There are, after reading this essay, a few questions the reader may ask herself: Should not the society take responsibility and help those who are burned out? Does the structure of society contribute to the fact that people becomes burned out?</p><p>Keywords: Burnout, Individual, Society, Work, Flexibility</p> / <p>Sammanfattning</p><p>Syftet med uppsatsen är att göra en kritisk jämförelse av två olika perspektiv, utbrändhet som ett individuellt problem och utbrändhet som ett samhälleligt problem. Det första perspektivet menar att individen själv ansvarar för om hon blir sjuk eller inte medan det andra perspektivet är av den åsikten att samhället och främst arbetsmarkanden ska arbeta för att människor inte ska bli utbrända. Med hjälp av detta syfte ska problemet utbrändhet belysas och förhoppningsvis få upp ämnet till diskussion.</p><p>Denna uppsats baseras på följande frågeställningar:</p><p>• Hur kan man sociologiskt förstå dagens arbetsmarknad?</p><p>• Hur går det att förstå utbrändheten i en individuell kontext?</p><p>• Hur kan man förstå utbrändheten i en samhällelig kontext?</p><p>Genom att studera och läsa fyra böcker har jag presenterat de två olika perspektiven av utbrändhet. Två böcker representerar utbrändhet ur ett samhälleligt perspektiv medan det individuella perspektivet förespråkas i de andra två böckerna.</p><p>De resultaten jag har fått fram visar att det individuella perspektivet menar att individen själv ska lösa och ta tag i sina problem trots att arbetsmarknaden är huvudorsaken till att vi människor blir utbrända. Det samhälleliga perspektivet är av den åsikten att arbetsmarkanden, och samhället till viss del, ska ta ansvar och hjälpa individen. Individen ska i viss mån också själv förebygga och komma ur sin utbrändhet.</p><p>Genom resultatet har jag kunnat dra slutsatsen att det individuella perspektivet representerar den individualiserade värld som vi lever i. Det andra synsättet på utbrändhet visar vikten av att vi har en bra sammanhållning i främst arbetet, vilket leder till en trygghet som gör att vi inte kommer att ha lika stor mängd sjuka.</p><p>Efter att ha läst denna uppsats kan exempelvis följande frågor ställas: Borde inte hela samhället ta ett ansvar och hjälpa de som är utbrända? Är det de samhällsstrukturer vi lever i som bidrar till att vi blir utbrända?</p><p>Nyckelord: Utbrändhet, Individ, Samhälle, Arbete, Flexibilitet</p>

<p>The empirical basis of this thesis is made up of interviews with men and women working at a supermarket, both with and without managerial responsibilities. The supermarket is an example of a working place where they use modern information technologies, and where there have been reorganisations pointing towards more flexibility, lesser hierarchies and higher autonomy for the workers. Such a working place is therefore a good example of an organisation on the new labour market.</p><p>The aim of this thesis is to study how everyday work is affected by the new labour market’s working conditions and to relate these findings to established theories on society’s transformations. Four concepts are in focus; technology,flexibility, hierarchy and control. These are often emphasised as important in the debate on changed work organisations. According to the post industrial and information society perspective, knowledge and technology will play an important role on today’s labour market.</p><p>The development of technology and knowledge at the supermarket points in many different directions at the same time. They use technology on a daily basis. The work rotation has raised the qualification levels for some of the employees, but at the same time others feel that the more qualified parts of their work are moved away from them, into computer systems or to a national level. The development of work rotation and partly self-governing work teams has given the employees more control over their everyday work but at the same time their resources are limited. They can decide when to do a task, but are often understaffed and have too many jobs to do. The work tasks are often heavy; the tempo is high, often with high noise.The work situation appears in many ways more industrial than service oriented. Workers are controlled through hierarchy but also by group norms, information technology, customers and by service-mindedness. The control mechanism has become more diverse, diffuse and harder to recognise. The changed work situation can be seen as two-fold. On the one hand there has been a humanisation of work, more autonomy, more opportunities to develop and many more interesting work tasks but on the other hand work density has risen while personnel resources have stayed the same in spite of increased opening hours and lager turnovers. The supermarket employees identify with their work tasks and take great responsibility for the work, even if their work conditions are hard. The work conditions that are now emphasised as flexible have long been the everyday reality for many employees, above all for many women in retail. Now these flexible work conditions have come to include both men and women in the working classes.</p>

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The behavior of steel plate shear walls under the effects of lateral loads depends on the stiffness of the surrounding frame members. Previous research has quantified the minimum required stiffness of columns in the middle stories of steel plate shear wall systems. As the columns of the steel plate shear wall system are subjected to both large axial forces and bending moments, use of composite columns is a viable option in this system. Among the different types of composite columns, the recently developed partially encased composite columns with built-up steel sections have some advantages over other types of composite columns and thus their performance as columns in steel plate shear wall systems needs to be studied. In the first part of this research, a numerical and analytical study has developed a new design parameter and determined the minimum required stiffness of end beams in end panels of the steel plate shear wall system. The effect of the rigidity of the frame connections on the uniformity of the tension field has also been studied in this part. The second part of this research includes two large scale tests on steel plate shear walls with built-up partially encased composite (PEC) columns. One of the test specimens was modular and the other one used reduced beam sections in the frame. The results of the tests show that the columns were stiff enough to anchor the infill plate. The PEC columns in these tests performed in a ductile manner. The overall system behavior was ductile, stable and the specimens showed good seismic behavior and redundancy. Based on the results and observations of this research, design recommendations for PEC columns used as the vertical boundary members of steel plate shear walls are provided. / Structural Engineering

Introduction . Non-Hispanic blacks (blacks) are more insulin resistant compared to non-Hispanic whites (whites), increasing their risk for Type 2 diabetes. The role played by ethnic/racial disparities in the response to physical activity in mediating those higher rates of insulin resistance in blacks is unknown. Because the beneficial effects of exercise are transient and require subsequent doses of exercise to maintain the effect; the metabolic and psychosocial responses to single exercise bouts have strong implications for both opposing insulin resistance and raising the probability that an individual will continue to exercise. Purpose . To compare the metabolic and psychosocial responses to individual bouts of exercise, at the intensity and duration corresponding to the current Institute of Medicine guidelines, in blacks and age/gender/BMI-matched whites. Methods . Insulin sensitivity (hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp) and metabolic flexibility (suppression of resting fat oxidation) along with exercise task self-efficacy, mood, and state-anxiety were assessed before and after a bout of exercise in black and white men and women (metabolic n = 21; psychosocial n = 31). Participants walked on a treadmill at 75% of maximum heart rate for 75 minutes. Exercise sessions were repeated on three separate occasions to assess the cumulative change in psychosocial responses to exercise. Results . There were no ethnic/racial differences in baseline measures of whole-body insulin sensitivity (p = 0.95). Black participants demonstrated larger improvements in the insulin sensitivity response to individual bouts of exercise compared to their white counterparts (+18% vs. -1.8%), which was primarily the result of enhanced non-oxidative glucose disposal during the clamp. Additionally, blacks demonstrated a greater capacity to switch from primarily fat oxidation at rest to primarily carbohydrate oxidation during the clamp (p <0.003). There were no ethnic/racial differences in the psychosocial response to individual bouts of exercise; individual bouts of exercise improved exercise task self-efficacy and reduced psychological distress in both black and white participants (p = 0.006). Black participants reported higher positive in-task mood during all three bouts of exercise (p = 0.003) and lower RPE scores (p = 0.04) during the third exercise bout compared to white participants, despite similar heart rates in both groups. Conclusions . These data demonstrate that metabolic and psychosocial responses to individual bouts of exercise do not help to explain the increased insulin resistance and lower adherence rates to exercise programs reported in blacks compared to whites. If these results are confirmed in a larger, more diverse, free-living population, future research should focus on social determinants of insulin resistance and physical inactivity to obtain a better understanding of the root causes of increased risk of Type 2 diabetes in black populations.

Since the late 1960’s, the hydromechanical term turbulence has been a part of the business administration vocabulary, but until the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a relatively small amount of research was dedicated to this field. These studies and more contemporary ones conclude that where the business environment is paradoxical and of fast- changing and chaotic nature, successful corporate strategies are shaped by strategic flexibility founded in high innovation rates, networks and alliances, and organisational elasticity and adaptiveness. From this perspective, the purpose of this study was to track and examine the strategy formation processes of a company operating in a turbulent context, and to contribute to an understanding of how these turbulent conditions can be managed. The study was conducted with a hermeneutic, systems- oriented, longitudinal case-study method and with a contextcontent- process perspective in which the process was the key factor. To a large extent, our conclusions coincide with those of other researchers. Forming multidimensional networks and alliances coloured by voluntary initiatives and full attention seem to be an extremely important contribution to survival in turbulent contexts. Nevertheless, it is equally important to break up and build new alliances as the initial objectives of the arrangement have expired or been reached. Furthermore, in contrast to other researchers’ observations, we conclude that high innovation rates do not necessarily lead to a greater potential to be successful in a turbulent context. The issue is instead to present a product offering flexible in itself developed and marketed by a flexible organisation. Innovation rates are decided by self-initiated and unofficial activity on part of the r&amp;d teams and other coworkers, and management’s task is to facilitate for this corporate creativity to develop.

Background: outsourcing is one of the most obvious and continuous trends that has been able to study during the past ten years and also has had a strong development in the industry. What consequences will follow from an extended outsourcing? Purpose: the study’s overall purpose is to investigate what possibilities and risks that can be connected to an outsourcing decision and how the order of the service will handle the risks. The study will also investigate what management philosophy that will be used and regulate the outsourcing relation and how the company’s strategy will affect the decision and how the process of outsourcing will look like. Research Method: we have conducted 17 personal interviews with representatives of companies that order outsourcing solutions and with company’s that deliver the services. Conclusions: The study shows that outsourcing is an extensive subject field that have different signification depending of the company’s situation. We have found that outsourcing not only is a way to reach short-term cost reduction, the ambition and the long term strategy is to form a partnership that generate lower cost in the future. The company should only focus on the activities that create value and in the long term consider if this only include the company’s mission.

No description available.

The empirical basis of this thesis is made up of interviews with men and women working at a supermarket, both with and without managerial responsibilities. The supermarket is an example of a working place where they use modern information technologies, and where there have been reorganisations pointing towards more flexibility, lesser hierarchies and higher autonomy for the workers. Such a working place is therefore a good example of an organisation on the new labour market. The aim of this thesis is to study how everyday work is affected by the new labour market’s working conditions and to relate these findings to established theories on society’s transformations. Four concepts are in focus; technology,flexibility, hierarchy and control. These are often emphasised as important in the debate on changed work organisations. According to the post industrial and information society perspective, knowledge and technology will play an important role on today’s labour market. The development of technology and knowledge at the supermarket points in many different directions at the same time. They use technology on a daily basis. The work rotation has raised the qualification levels for some of the employees, but at the same time others feel that the more qualified parts of their work are moved away from them, into computer systems or to a national level. The development of work rotation and partly self-governing work teams has given the employees more control over their everyday work but at the same time their resources are limited. They can decide when to do a task, but are often understaffed and have too many jobs to do. The work tasks are often heavy; the tempo is high, often with high noise.The work situation appears in many ways more industrial than service oriented. Workers are controlled through hierarchy but also by group norms, information technology, customers and by service-mindedness. The control mechanism has become more diverse, diffuse and harder to recognise. The changed work situation can be seen as two-fold. On the one hand there has been a humanisation of work, more autonomy, more opportunities to develop and many more interesting work tasks but on the other hand work density has risen while personnel resources have stayed the same in spite of increased opening hours and lager turnovers. The supermarket employees identify with their work tasks and take great responsibility for the work, even if their work conditions are hard. The work conditions that are now emphasised as flexible have long been the everyday reality for many employees, above all for many women in retail. Now these flexible work conditions have come to include both men and women in the working classes.

Master’s Thesis in Logistics and Supply Chain Management _____________________________________________________ Title:                 Postponement in Retailing Industry- A case study of SIBA Authors:         Ahmed Kemal &amp; Naqvi Syed Mohammad Tutor:               Helgi Valur Fredriksson, Dr. Date:               May, 2010 Key Words:   Speculation, Postponement, Customer Order Decoupling point, Retailing, Supply Chain Flexibility, Agility ______________________________________________________________ Abstract Problem: Today's business environment is characterized by changing customer demands, increasing cost pressures on retailers, shorter product life cycles and products becoming obsolete shortly after their introduction. The above factors make it difficult for electronics retailers to balance the costs of dealing with excessive inventory and not be out of stock. To be competitive, retailers should delay some of their activities until customer demand becomes visible. This brings us to the phenomenon of postponement. Electronics market in Sweden faces continuous growth, although at a declining rate. This is indicative of a saturation that this sector, as a whole, is approaching to. The above problems are due to the speculative approaches and standardized products policies that are in practice. Loss of sales and customers result from these practices. The current study analyses the importance of postponement strategy and the benefits it offers. This study also tries to explore the potential solutions for retailers that postponement may relate to.   Purpose: The scope of this study is to identify possible postponement strategies needed for SIBA. Method: A case study approach has been taken. The choice of the method is qualitative with an inductive approach. This involved personal communications during interviews with the managers of SIBA, using semi structured questions to collect data.   Results: The concepts of postponement, supply chain flexibility, agility and customer order decoupling points (CODP) are closely related to one another and it has been shown that as the depth of postponement increase from right to left in the CODP continuum, the CODP changes its position, moving along the CODP continuum from right to left and towards the upstream. With this movement, the flexibility and agility in the chain increases. Our finds suggest that postponement is rather underutilized and that wastes (by way of lost sales and customers, obsolete inventory costs and storage costs) in the retailing process occur due to speculative approaches in application at the retail level. We have suggested logistics postponement for two out of three product categories and enumerated the ensuing benefits that the retailer can derive by way of enhanced flexibility, agility and reductions in wastages and satisfied customers.