Background: As businesses started to recognize the potential of live streaming platforms in reaching and engaging with their target audience, live streaming commerce (LSC) started to gain traction and popularity over the past few years. LSC, with its elements of time pressure, price promotion, and interaction, plays a significant role in influencing consumers’ impulsive buying behaviour. The live nature of these streams create a sense of urgency, making viewers feel like they need to act quickly before the opportunity is gone. Price promotions, such as limited-time discounts or exclusive deals, entice viewers to make impulsive purchases to take advantage of the savings. Moreover, the interactive aspect of live streaming allows viewers to ask questions and receive real-time responses, which enhances the overall shopping experience and can further stimulate impulsive buying. Purpose: The aim of this thesis is to investigate how Gen Z consumers’ impulsive buying behaviour of cosmetics through LSC is influenced by three factors, being; time pressure, price promotion, and interaction. As well as how emotions such as the feeling of urgency, the feeling of excitement, and perceived enjoyment could mediate this relationship. Methodology: A deductive research approach  and a quantitative method was selected and utilised for this research. To gather data, a self-completion questionnaire was developed in Google Forms, taking into consideration ethical and societal factors. A total of 312 valid responses were collected, which were then subjected to descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, reliability analysis, regression analysis, and mediation analysis.  Findings: The results of this research revealed that H2 and H3 were accepted, indicating that price promotion and interaction have a significant positive impact on Gen Z consumers’ impulsive buying behaviour in LSC. In the same vein, H1a, H2a, and H3a, i.e., the feeling of urgency, excitement, and perceived enjoyment were accepted. However, H1, measuring the influence of time pressure, was rejected.  Conclusion: This study concluded that price promotion (H2) and interaction (H3) have a positive influence on the impulsive buying behaviour of Generation Z consumers. However, time pressure (H1) was not found to have a significant impact. Additionally, the results indicate that the feeling of urgency (H1a) mediates the relationship between time pressure and impulsive buying behaviour, the feeling of excitement (H2a) mediates the relationship between price promotion and impulsive buying behaviour, and perceived enjoyment (H3a) mediates the relationship between interaction and impulsive buying behaviour among Gen Z consumers in Sweden. Keywords: “Live Streaming Commerce” “Live Streaming E-commerce” “Time Pressure” “Price Promotion” “Interaction” “Impulsive Buying Behaviour” “Urgency” “Excitement” “Perceived Enjoyment” “Quantitative Research”.

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Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts begann sich der Tanzmusik-Markt zu internationalisieren und die europäischen Staaten orientierten sich zunehmend an Trends, die von den USA ausgingen. Die Übernahme afroamerikanischer Charakteristika in die Interpretation, Instrumentation und Kompositionen europäischer Tanz- und Unterhaltungsmusik (TUM) wurde ab den 1930er Jahren, in der Hochzeit swingender Bigbands, zur Regel. Ich möchte in der vorliegenden kulturwissenschaftlichen Arbeit der Frage nachgehen, inwieweit diese Internationalisierung der TUM im Osten Deutschlands nach 1945 weiterhin Bestand hatte. Dort galt ja die USA und der Westen nun als »Klassenfeind«. Gelang es der staatlichen Kulturpolitik, das sozialistische Musik-Feld in ihrem Sinne zu dominieren? Wurde also in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone (SBZ) und frühen DDR eine andere, »nationalere« und sozialistischere Tanzmusik produziert und rezipiert als in Westdeutschland? Mittels einer hermeneutischen Untersuchung relevanter Musikdiskurse und einer möglichst umfassenden Einbeziehung aller im Musik-Feld tätigen Akteure und ihrer Strategien gelang es mir, ein differenziertes Bild zu zeichnen. Ein Ergebnis ist die Diagnose zweier getrennter Welten: einer Kulturpolitik, welche die öffentliche zensierte Meinung in der DDR bestimmte und westlich beeinflusste Tanzmusik ablehnte. Und andererseits das Musikgeschäft in alltäglichen Tanzabenden, Radioprogrammen und Schallplattenproduktionen, welches gezwungen war, sich an internationalen Trends zu orientieren, wollte es nicht Tänzer brüskieren oder Hörer an die »Westsender« verlieren. Diese Kluft zwischen Intention und Wirklichkeit, unter der vor allem die ausübenden Tanzmusiker zu leiden hatten, konnte zumindest bis zum Mauerbau 1961 nicht überwunden werden. Das lag unter anderem auch an der Uneinigkeit unter den staatlichen Musikexperten, wie genau die Kriterien einer vom Westen unabhängigen Tanzmusik auszusehen haben. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht eingehend das Tanzmusikgeschäft in Dresden, hat aber den Anspruch, auch für andere Städte der DDR in diesem Zeitraum zu gelten. / In the beginning of the 20th century, the market for dance music began to become more international, and also the european states imported more and more trends like the new jazz idiomes from the USA. In the 1930`s, when swing was to become the first worldwide pop music, lots of dance bands also in germany integrated the new stilistics in their everyday music work. In this cultural study i would like to ask, if this internationalism in dance music was lasting through the years of early cold war until 1961. In the eastern part of germany under soviet government structures, the USA was the military and cultural enemy. Western dance music like swing and R`n`B had to be replaced by somewhat socialist and nationalist dance music, so the governmental culture politics. Became their wishes reality? Does exist such genre in popular music? With the help of hermeneutics, analysis of relevant discourses and the strategies of musicians, politicians and writers, it is possible to state two worlds of music life in the young GDR. On the one hand, the censored public opinion, in which all western trends in dance music were damned. On the other side, the socialist music business with live music, radio broadcasting and music production, in which music influenced from afroamerican, latin american, jazz and country genres represented a big part. Because radio listeners for example could easily switch to western stations and so be distant from political propaganda. Or the dance halls, which had to consider the wishes of the mostly young dancers for new genres like rock`n`roll because of financial issues. The gap between this two worlds couldn`t be closed until 1961, and especially the dance musicians had to be creative in this regard. The situation became more complex because of the cluelessness of the music experts, how a genuine socialist dance music had to sound like. This study explores the dance music business and cultural politics in dresden, but it claims to be representative also for other cities in the young GDR.

When it comes to the entertainment industry and the live performers these artists are in need of valuable communication strategies in order for them to reach the consumers they would like to reach and gain the success that they want. Although this is a known fact, it is difficult for the artists to know which marketing communication strategies to use and how to use them.  The purpose is to identify international marketing communication strategies for live performers within the entertainment industry. The objective is to demonstrate how the strategies can be used to reach international success. The focus is to look at marketing communication strategies from an artist/company’s point of view and therefore feedback from the consumers will not be covered in this thesis. We have found two alternative strategies for development of international marketing communication for a live performer in the entertainment industry. In both of these strategies it is important to start with creating a valuable network in order to set up clear goals for the marketing communication. The difference between the two strategies is based on whether the live performer is adapted to the target group or if the target group is adapted to the live performer

Advances in genetics and fluorescent protein chemistry have enabled us to fuse fluorescent probes directly to biomolecules in stably growing organisms; making it easier to image the precise position and movement of cells in three dimensions. Fluorescent stains and dyes can be employed in a similar fashion to visualize nano-scale fluctuations in active cellular structures without fixation. While informative and exciting on a qualitatively level, microscopy truly becomes powerful when we can extract meaningful quantitative information. To accomplish this, custom MATLAB (Mathworks, Natick, MA) image analysis algorithms were developed to specifically measure the biophysical parameters related to pathogenesis and function in microbes and mammalian cells. These parameters can then be exploited in the development of biophysical models to validate current measurements, and make critical predictions about the system's behavior, often addressing quantities inaccessible by experimental methods. The following research chapters of this dissertation thoroughly describe how these techniques were developed and applied to study the biophysical mechanisms of bacterial and cellular invasion.

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Scum is an integral component of solids management in MWWTP and is composed of fats, oils, grease and other entrained floatable materials that are collected during primary clarification. Lab scale BMP tests showed the addition of 14.5 g VS/L of scum exhibited the greatest increase in biogas production of 1.6 times per g VS added compared to the control, while a higher additional scum loading of 33.7 g VS/L reduced the biogas yield to 32% of the control reactor. Lab scale semi-continuous digestion measured the effects of scum loading and temperature of pretreatment in the scum concentrator. At 15 d and 20 d HRTs the greatest observed improvement in biogas was achieved by adding 3% scum by volume and pretreating the scum at 70°C in a scum concentrator with respective improvements of 24% and 16%.

The Scottish salmon industry is facing challenges in the control of aquatic infectious disease, as is the case in other countries such as Chile and Norway. Disease outbreaks can have an enormous economic impact and possibly affect wild fish populations. Disease transmission in an aquatic environment is complex and there are several transmission routes (vertical transmission, natural reservoirs, hydrodynamic transmission and long-distance movements). Effective control methods such as vaccines are not available in all cases and therefore disease prevention remains a priority. In livestock, epidemiological network models have been proven to be a highly useful tool to investigate the role of different transmission routes on the course of epidemics and have the potential to provide the same utility for aquatic networks. Understanding the complex contact network will result in more effective disease prevention, surveillance systems and control strategies. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the Scottish live fish movement network and its consequences for pathogen transmission between farms in order to develop and optimize control strategies for epidemics. The main objective of chapter 3 was to investigate the effect of different fallowing strategies on the spread of diseases with different transmission properties. A network model was constructed that included both local transmission and long-distance transmission. The basic structure of this network was a ring model where neighbours within a management area could infect each other and non-local transmission occurred at random. The results showed that when long-distance transmission was under reasonable control in comparison with local transmission risk, synchronized fallowing at the management area level was potentially a highly effective tool in the control of infectious diseases. Chapter 4 presents a detailed description of the number of live fish movements and their timing for Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in Scottish aquaculture. For this, movement records from 2002 to 2004 were provided by Marine Scotland, Aberdeen. Salmon are anadromous and have a freshwater (FW) and seawater phase (SW). Scottish live fish movements can be divided in FW-FW, FW-SW, SW-SW, SW-FW and “other” movements. The latter are mainly movements from and to research sites. This study showed that the contact structure and timing of live fish movements are seasonal and differ largely between production phases. Disease control measures should take these differences into account to optimize their strategies. In chapter 4, live fish movements were shown to be seasonal; therefore in chapter 5 the main aim was to quantify the effects of seasonality of live fish movements on the course of epidemics. The results showed that the sequence of salmon movements is important for the course of an epidemic. Seasonality is important when local transmission is higher than 0.05 per contact per week and when the movements are not clustered and when movements do not occur in a specific order based on the specific assumptions made in this model. In conclusion, this thesis described the complex live fish movement structure of salmon in Scotland and showed that biosecurity in SW farms is good but could be further improved if all management areas apply synchronized fallowing. The results of this study suggest that biosecurity between freshwater sites could be improved by the application of a system similar to management areas in SW farms.

Purpose: Previous research has highlighted that dysfunctional customer behaviour is commonplace in service exchange interactions. However, most research has focused on what forms of dysfunctional behaviours that are prevalent in a face-to-face context. Instead of focusing on traditional face-to-face interactions, this thesis will address and consider dysfunctional customer behaviour in a live chat support context. Moreover, the reason why certain behaviours are perceived as dysfunctional in an online context will also be discussed from a role discrepancy perspective. Methodology: The methodological approach relies on a qualitative case study of the online casino company LeoVegas. The research is carried out by conducting ten semi-structured interviews with the firm's live chat customer-contact employees. The interviews were conducted via the video chat application Skype. Findings: The findings highlight five customer behaviour categories that the respondents perceived as dysfunctional. The employees thought these behaviours violated the rules and norms of the service script. However, the data implied role discrepancies between the employees and customers, where the customers and the employees had different views of the service script. The reason for these discrepancies were due to customer ignorance of reading the terms and conditions, which the employees and LeoVegas recognized as the service script. This resulted in customer violations of the service scripts which the employees perceived as dysfunctional customer behaviour. Originality/Contribution:The thesis contributes with five employee perceived categories of dysfunctional customer behaviour in a relative unstudied online support context. A theoretical contribution of the study is the introduction of a new perception of dysfunctional customer behaviour, with the researchers arguing that dysfunctional customer behaviour is not about customers violating the service script but rather that there is a role discrepancy between the customers and the employees. This leads to an important managerial implication, that managers need to ensure role congruence between employees and customers so that role discrepancy may be avoided.

Heroes Are Born Then Made is a theatre piece involving live actors on stage, and live music originating from an orchestra pit. The script and music is original. The music is meant to literally depict actions and emotions on stage whether the actors are present or not. The duration of the entire production is about two and one-half hours long. Six main actors are used with additional walk-ons. Sixteen musicians are required to make up the orchestra which is organized into a woodwind quartet, a brass trio, a string quartet, a piano, and a percussion quartet. The play is based on the author's conception of how people tend to treat each other when someone is caught at a disadvantage. Specifically it is a depiction of the conflict involved when the minor characters discover that the main character is trying to do something quite different from their definition of "normal."