Syfte:Att skildra en arbetsmiljö en ung akademiker kan förvänta sig att möta på en arbetsplats i norra Virginia, USA. Att reda ut vilka arbetsvillkoren är och hur arbetsmiljön ser ut ur perspektiv som genus, kultur och ledarskap.   Metod: Kvalitativ forskningsmetod med en induktiv, tolkande och konstruktionistisk strategi. Fallstudier har använts för att inhämta empirisk information.   Resultat & slutsats: Det finns en paradox kring arbetstid och flexibilitet. Stipulerad arbetstid är långt ifrån verklig arbetstid. Tjänstemän arbetar betydligt mer än vad som ingår i en normal arbetsvecka. Arbetstid är en riktig gråzon. Det finns ett outtalat krav att ju högre upp i organisationen du sitter desto senare förväntas du stanna kvar och arbeta på kvällen. Finansa ger sken av att vara en flexibel och förstående arbetsgivare men endast så länge du själv jobbar igen tid du missat under dagen och lite till. Vidare råder en godtycklig anställningstrygghet. Det finns inga anställningskontrakt och det är helt upp till din chef och/eller arbetsgivaren att avskeda dig utan skäl när de så önskar. Motsvarande kan du själv välja att lämna företaget utan varsel. Slutligen finns det en annan viktig dimension, den kulturella mångfalden som är en demografisk verklighet och en stor utmaning. Den viktigaste lärdomen är att förstå att andra människor inte tänker och agerar som du själv anser är naturligt. I interaktion med människor från andra kulturer är nyckeln till framgång att förstå mångfalden och att kunna hantera den kunskapen. Att förstå hur andra etniska grupper hanterar tid, relationer och omgivning kan vara avgörande faktorer för att lyckas.   Förslag till fortsatt forskning: Att göra en djupare studie avseende arbetstid. Att utreda hur många timmar tjänstemän i USA arbetar utanför stipulerad arbetstid, deltar i frivilligt arbete eller utför obligatorisk samhällsservice. Gråzonen runt arbetstid är stort outrett kapitel.   Uppsatsens bidrag: Att öka förståelsen för de utmaningar en ung svensk akademiker ställs inför vid en anställning utomlands och i synnerhet vid ett företag i norra Virginia, USA. / Aim: Describe a working climate a young professional can expect to face with a company in Northern Virginia, USA. Examine working conditions and the working environment through perspectives such as gender, culture, and leadership.   Method: Qualitative research where one case study has been performed for collecting empirical data. Inductive logic and a constructivist approach have been used as strategy for parsing data.   Result & Conclusions: There is a paradox between working hours and flexibility. Professionals work significantly more hours than stipulated in their job descriptions. The appropriate number of working hours is a gray zone issue and there is unspoken demand to stay and work late, especially at the higher levels within the organization. Finansa appears to be a flexible and understanding employer but only when missed hours are made up and added to with extra hours. The result is a false sense of employment security. There are no written contracts of employment and a manager and/or employer can fire you whenever they want to and without any reason. In addition, employees can leave the company without further notice. Finally, another important dimension to the work environment of the young professional is diversity. This is a demographic reality of professional life in Northern Virginia and it can present a significant challenge. It is extremely important for young professionals to understand that cultural differences influence the work environment; others may not think and act as you do and basic assumptions about conduct may differ greatly across cultures. The key for success in this diverse environment is to understand it exists in the workplace and to take action based on that knowledge. Tolerance of personal differences with co-workers is essential. Understanding how different ethnic groups deal with time, relations and environment could be the decisive key for success in the professional setting.   Suggestions for future research: To perform a deeper study about working hours. To investigate how many hours white-collar workers in the US work outside stipulated working hours and how many hours they spend on volunteer hours. The gray zone of working hours is a large uninvestigated reality.   Contribution of the thesis: Increase the understanding of challenges a young Swedish professional faces when working abroad and in particular with a company in Northern Virginia, USA.

The under-representation of women in higher hierarchical positions and company boards today is a fact that affects not only the women striving for these positions but also the companies that face a loss of competent personnel in their companies. We found it interesting to find out whether or not women are striving for leading positions, in the first place and what factors motivate and discourage them to strive for a career and what incentives companies could offer to increase their motivation. We adopt a company perspective in this thesis since we want to study this matter for the benefit of companies. If they knew more about what women want, they would be able to emphasize these conditions and motivate more women to strive for a career. Motivation theories as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Herzberg’s two-factor theory are used to give us a basic understanding of motivation and they also function as a foundation for our survey. Consequently, we follow a deductive approach. This study is focusing on Swedish female business students and a survey among the female students of the USBE has been carried out to generate emprical data. We defined career in this thesis as: “striving for high hierarchical positions with high responsibility and decisive power”. The majority of respondents stated to be striving for a career but not everyone was striving according to our definition. We found almost half of the respondents to be to some extent striving for a career according to our definition and 42 percent agreed to completely strive for a career. The most important motivating factors were found to be “to have a stimulating job” and “to be financially independent”. The strongest factors that have a negative influence on the respondents’ career motivation were “to have little time for family” and “to have a low salary in relation to work effort”. Furthermore, “equal salary for both men and woman”, “professional training” and “good promotion possibilities” were ranked the highest of the alternatives for incentives that companies could offer. As the data suggested that the vast majority of our respondents can be encouraged in their career striving, companies should consider offering incentives and improving the general job conditions. The most promising strategies are adjusting the women’s salaries to those of their male colleagues, providing full-time day care near the workplace and offering professional training. The Swedish government could contribute in this field by enforcing the law that requires equal salries for both sexes, by stronger controlls and more severe punishments. Suggestions for further research are, for instance, to study what companies actually do today to motivate women in their career striving.

This essay is part of a project between Södertörn University College and Stockholm Academic Forum. The focus of the project is gender equality in small- and medium sized companies. I have worked with a construction company called Activa . The majority of the employees at the company were male and I was interested in the consequences of gender construction in such an environment. I think that the basic condition for equality work is an understanding of gender and the male norm. The purpose was to investigate how these things worked out in the Activa organisation. I wanted to investigate the consequences of gender and illustrate how discrimination can work. The conclusions are supposed to be a base for the company’s future equality opportunities. The methodology for this investigation were interviews. I have interviewed six persons, whom all worked at the company-office. The interviews were informal conversations based on a semi-structured methodology. The information I got was interpret by the hermeneutic tradition and analysed by gender theories. The conclusions of this study are that gender indeed affected the organisation structure. The male and female employees experienced different working conditions. The male norm were in fact setting the agenda in the organisation. The male employees had better possibilities to affect the working conditions compared to the women. Both men and women maintained this structure. They were all acting in order of their expectations. The consequence of these structures, and the behaviour of both men and women at the company, creates an conception of the male norm as natural.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the maritime students' views on and visions for their future career. The results will be used by maritime academies, ship owners and unions to develop their activities in the desired direction and work together for a well-functioning labour market in shipping in the future. To determine the students’ views and visions, interviews were conducted with graduating students at the maritime academies in Sweden. The results show that the reduced Swedish merchant fleet worries students, but that the majority is positive about finding a job after graduation. The students intend to work at sea for at least 8 - 10 years and the salary is not considered to be the most important factor when selecting a workplace, many other factors affect. Today the offshore, tank and Ro-Ro/Ro-Pax market are the most attractive segments and the students feel themselves qualified for the job, but they still believe there are parts of the education that should be developed. Based on the results, recommendations are presented to the maritime academies, ship owners and unions to develop their respective business. Recommendations to officers are also presented.

Recent studies of labour have clearly established that the capitalist state is very involved in the recruitment, relocation and retention of migrant labour forces. Most of the literature tends to analyze migrant labour within the broader social, political and economic context of expanding capitalism. Consequently, studies tend to focus on how the use of migrant labour is profitable to capitalism because it is cheap and easy to exploit. Such studies, however, neglect the ways in which the state actually intervenes in the labour market in order to facilitate the flow of migrant workers to places of employment. Therefore, this thesis explores the relationship between the migration of labour, the state and the reserve army of labour through an analysis of the Native migrant work force in the sugar beet industry in southern Alberta.<p> Through the use of archival material, which includes various federal and provincial documents, annual reports of the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers' Association, newspapers and other materials, the circumstances underlying state intervention in the economy of the southern sugar beet industry became clear. While analyzing the structure of the sugar beet industry in southern Alberta, it was found that throughout much of the history of the sugar beet industry, farmers received low returns for their beet crops. Moreover, farmers also suffered financially from the high cost of machinery and, more recently, from the increased costs for fertilizer and chemical weed controls.<p> An examination of government documents on the FederalProvincial Agricultural Manpower Committee, whose mandate was to recruit workers and move them to areas of need in agricultural sectors throughout Canada, revealed that the federal part of the committee was represented by officials from the Department of Manpower and Immigration and, beginning in the early 1950s, officials from the Department of Indian Affairs, who represented Indians on reserves.<p> When the working conditions in sugar beet industry were examined, it was found that they were very poor for beet workers. In general, the weeding and hoeing of the sugar beets was difficult and the housing accommodations inadequate. Moreover, because of the low return on their beet crops and the high costs of machinery, fertilizer and weed control, the farmers had to keep the cost of labour as low as possible, which, meant paying low wages to beet workers. Moreover, it was found that throughout much the history of the sugar beet industry in southern Alberta, agricultural workers were unprotected by labour laws, which, was very conducive to reproducing conditions for cheap labour. Consequently, few wanted to work in the beet fields of southern Alberta if other employment could be found.<p> Prior to the 1950s the state recruited immigrant workers and even prisoners of war from internment camps to supply farmers with the needed labour for their beet crops. However, in the early 1950s unskilled immigrant labour could no longer be procured for beet work. It was at this time that the sugar beet industry, through the Federal-Provincial Agricultural Manpower Committee, turned to recruiting Natives, particulary northern Alberta and northern Saskatchewan reserve Indians, to perform their labour requirements. In order to maintain this needed work force, the state helped organize Native migratation to southern Alberta at the start of the beet season and also helped ensure that they stayed there for the duration of the needed period.

Syftet med föreliggande studie var att undersöka samband mellan de arbetsvillkor som berör gränslöst arbete och mental samt fysisk hälsa. Även att undersöka skillnader mellan olika anställningsförhållanden så som fastanställning och ej fastanställning och om de skiljer sig åt beroende på arbetsvillkor och hälsa. Deltagarna var 69 personer varav 42 stycken var kvinnor och 27 stycken var män. Resultaten visade att det fanns starka samband mellan de olika arbetsvillkoren och mental samt fysisk hälsa. Det visade sig även att det fanns ett flertal signifikanta skillnader mellan fastanställda och ej fastanställda. Vidare visade resultaten att fastanställda rapporterar att de har bättre arbetsvillkor och hälsa än de med ej fastanställning. Av resultaten kunde slutsatsen dras att arbetsvillkor som berör gränslöst arbete har starka samband med mental och fysisk hälsa.

Resandet i världen ökar och detta leder till både positiva och negativa konsekvenser. Hur miljö och människor påverkas av turismindustrin är högst aktuellt och genom detta har studiens syfte utformats. Syftet är att undersöka studenters värderingar samt medvetenhet kring arbetsvillkor och miljö inom turismnäringen. Ett kvantitativt tillvägagångsätt har används för att få ett representativt urval. Enkätformulär har skickats ut till studenter på Högskolan i Halmstad och 414 studenter har deltagit. Genom analys av resultatet har många signifikanta skillnader hittats. Kortfattat visar studien att studenter anser sig vara medvetna om miljö men inte lika medvetna om arbetsvillkorsfrågor inom turismen. Gällande fokusområdena arbetsvillkor och miljö hade studenterna höga värderingar. Faktorerna kön, ålder, utbildningsområde, akademisk nivå samt hur ofta man reser påverkar studenternas medvetenhet och värderingar på olika sätt. / Tourism and travelling are increasing around the world and this leads to positive and negative impacts. How the environment and people are affected by the tourism industry is an up to date question. This is one of the reasons that the purpose of the study have been chosen. The purpose is to investigate students' values and awareness of working conditions and environment in the tourism industry. A quantitative approach has been used to obtain a representative sample. Questionnaires were distributed to students at Halmstad University and 414 students participated. Many significant differences have been found while analysing the data. To summarise the study, students consider themselves to be aware of the environment but are not as aware of the consequences of the working conditions within the tourism sector. The students had high values of the study’s focus areas: working conditions and environment. The factors of gender, age, field of study, academic level, and how often the students travel affects students' awareness and values in different ways.

Recent studies of labour have clearly established that the capitalist state is very involved in the recruitment, relocation and retention of migrant labour forces. Most of the literature tends to analyze migrant labour within the broader social, political and economic context of expanding capitalism. Consequently, studies tend to focus on how the use of migrant labour is profitable to capitalism because it is cheap and easy to exploit. Such studies, however, neglect the ways in which the state actually intervenes in the labour market in order to facilitate the flow of migrant workers to places of employment. Therefore, this thesis explores the relationship between the migration of labour, the state and the reserve army of labour through an analysis of the Native migrant work force in the sugar beet industry in southern Alberta.<p> Through the use of archival material, which includes various federal and provincial documents, annual reports of the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers' Association, newspapers and other materials, the circumstances underlying state intervention in the economy of the southern sugar beet industry became clear. While analyzing the structure of the sugar beet industry in southern Alberta, it was found that throughout much of the history of the sugar beet industry, farmers received low returns for their beet crops. Moreover, farmers also suffered financially from the high cost of machinery and, more recently, from the increased costs for fertilizer and chemical weed controls.<p> An examination of government documents on the FederalProvincial Agricultural Manpower Committee, whose mandate was to recruit workers and move them to areas of need in agricultural sectors throughout Canada, revealed that the federal part of the committee was represented by officials from the Department of Manpower and Immigration and, beginning in the early 1950s, officials from the Department of Indian Affairs, who represented Indians on reserves.<p> When the working conditions in sugar beet industry were examined, it was found that they were very poor for beet workers. In general, the weeding and hoeing of the sugar beets was difficult and the housing accommodations inadequate. Moreover, because of the low return on their beet crops and the high costs of machinery, fertilizer and weed control, the farmers had to keep the cost of labour as low as possible, which, meant paying low wages to beet workers. Moreover, it was found that throughout much the history of the sugar beet industry in southern Alberta, agricultural workers were unprotected by labour laws, which, was very conducive to reproducing conditions for cheap labour. Consequently, few wanted to work in the beet fields of southern Alberta if other employment could be found.<p> Prior to the 1950s the state recruited immigrant workers and even prisoners of war from internment camps to supply farmers with the needed labour for their beet crops. However, in the early 1950s unskilled immigrant labour could no longer be procured for beet work. It was at this time that the sugar beet industry, through the Federal-Provincial Agricultural Manpower Committee, turned to recruiting Natives, particulary northern Alberta and northern Saskatchewan reserve Indians, to perform their labour requirements. In order to maintain this needed work force, the state helped organize Native migratation to southern Alberta at the start of the beet season and also helped ensure that they stayed there for the duration of the needed period.

The objective of this study is to examine lean production and its effects on general working conditions and occupational health and safety. Lean production is considered either as a humane way of production with positive effects on workers or to have negative consequences for workers&#039 / and their job quality. This study investigates the increasing workload of the workers as a result of the unlimited performance demands of lean production as the first hypothesis. Secondly, there is the question of whether lean production provides a reduction in the number of occupational accidents because of the fact that occupational accidents are seen as waste, thus eliminated at all costs. The last hypothesis which will be assessed is that the number of occupational diseases increases after the implementation of lean production. To that end, a case study was carried out in an automotive plant by a qualitative research method using tools of observation, document analysis, in depth interview and structured interview. As a conclusion, the implementation of lean production in a plant in automotive industry has resulted in the reduction of the occupational accidents and improvement of ergonomic conditions even though the main incentive for these improvements is to reduce the wastes and costs and to increase the profitability and competitiveness. Based on the interviews, workers do not consider that their workload is increased after the implementation of lean production. Besides, workers feel work autonomy and job satisfaction. They also claim that they do not feel job stress in contrast to the literature.

Studiens syfte är att undersöka arbetsmotivation och motivationsfaktorer hos anställda med korttidskontrakt på ett företag som arbetar med sådana praktiker. De formulerade frågeställningarna är: Hur anser anställda med korttidskontrakt att deras arbetsmotivation påverkas av de osäkra arbetsförhållandena? Vilka motivationsfaktorer är viktiga för dem? Vilka strategier har de för att motivera sig? Empirin bygger på intervjuer genomförda med 6 respondenter på ett företag som utgör typfallet för studien. Den teoretiska referensramen består av Deci och Ryans definition av inre och yttre motivation och Herzbergs tvåfaktorsteori. Tidigare framforskade resultat med koppling till nämnda teorier har legat till grund för databearbetningen. Ur resultatet kan utläsas att anställda med osäkra arbetsvillkor motiveras av givande arbetsuppgifter, att genom sitt jobb ha möjlighet att hjälpa andra människor. Känslan av social meningsfullhet är vidare en central motivationsfaktor, och där spelar även relationer till kollegor en viktig roll. Ytterligare är känslan av kompetens för utförda handlingar samt tillgången till feedback i sitt arbete viktiga för arbetsmotivationen. Den osäkra arbetssituationen har försämrat viktiga motivationsfaktorer på arbetsplatsen och otryggheten har hämnat de anställdas motivation att prestera. / The aim of this study is to investigate workmotivation and motivation factors of employees with short-term contracts at a company working with those practices. The question formulations are: How do employees with short-term contracts consider that they are affected by the insecure employment? Which motivation factors are important for them? What strategies do they have to motivate themselves? The empirics are based on interviews performed with 6 respondents at a company that is the typical case for the study.  The theoretical framework consists of Deci and Ryan’s definition of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and Herzberg’s two-factor theory.  Earlier recognized results connected to those theories have been the basis in interaction with the data. The result shows that employees with insecure employments are motivated by rewarding job assignments, to have the possibility of helping other people through their profession. The feeling of social meaningfulness is furthermore a central motivation factor, where the relations to colleagues play an important role. Further, the feeling of competence for done activities and the access to feedback in their work is important for the workmotivation.  The insecure work situation has impaired essential motivation factors on the job and the insecurity has reduced the employee’s motivation to perform.