Naturligt grupperat arbete vid Volvo Lastvagnar – Slutrapport

Rapport, 1990

Consumer report for the company in question (the Volvo Truck Company) which is financed by the company and partly also by a research foundation. It is a matter of a work that in this particular case were carried out during nine years in a number of experimental workshops located outside the Chalmers University of Technology.

These workshops were financed by the Volvo Automobile and Truck companies. This achievement, as the final contribution to the Swedish automotive industry after having already treated this research field/problem area for more than two decades before this particular period if time (involving several junior and senior research competencies, as well as industrial and governmental foundings).

A comment: As was the praxis during this (early) period of time at Chalmers University of Technology, as well as probably at some other universities. This means that frequent and vast academic publication by means of e.g. conference papers and refereed contributions to scientific journals was almost unheard of. At least so for some of the applied science disciplines. However, today are the situation indeed very different (i.e. earlier was the publication in many respects focused on trying to satisfy the executive administrator the research foundation in question etc.).

To be more precise, this early praxis was definitively the case for the research and development work carried out at the Department of Transportation (a broadly applied science discipline), which was characterized by more practical strives to e.g. engineer research results. Rather than relying on truer scientific efforts in a narrower sense. Functional satisfaction (i.e. something engineered work as planned instead verification/falsification of a hypothesis) was judged as being a primary aim of this research and development work. 

Therefore are (in the context of the publications registered in Chalmers Public Library CPL) the author making distinctions between consumer reports, on one hand. And, one the other hand, reports and preprints (manuscripts), while instead the academically orientated publications are various sort of scientific contributions presented at conferences or published in scientific journals (actually it is somewhat more complex, but further explanations are omitted here). The consumer reports were aimed at a various external organization with who the authors cooperated, and these are in many cases not available in PDF format to be easily read by logging in at CPL. 

This particular approach has judged as being fair/relevant fair in order to mirror of work conducted by the author or authors during the passing decades. Besides, the competencies at Chalmers Library, who actually have been very helpful, have not managed to provide appropriate answers to the various questions implied being at hand just above (this despite trying to get hold of such answers, hence this very comment).