Today’s preschool teacher students are described as different compared to previous generations, especially regarding their participation in various components of the preschool teacher education program. To better understand the underlying factors and to support these students more effectively, this study adopts a student perspective on who the preschool teacher student is. Using positioning theory to analyze interviews with both highly motivated and less motivated students from different universities, the study explores the common narratives students use to describe their experiences and actions. The study identifies seven key narratives that highlight the students’ backgrounds, their motivations for becoming preschool teachers, and their roles and engagement as students. The results indicate that preschool teacher students often position themselves as dedicated and active co-creators of their education, while occasionally perceiving their peers as less engaged. The article also discusses how age and life experience influence students’ positioning and participation, and how relationships between students and teachers can foster a greater sense of belonging and purpose in their studies. Lastly, pedagogical implications are outlined to enhance preschool teacher education.

Development and grade dialogues are recurring meetings, central for both educational governing and students’ perceptions of themselves and their abilities. This thesis examines development and grade dialogues with students who receive grades in Years 4–6. The aim is to contribute to knowledge about the actions of students, teachers and parents in these meetings and their implications for students and school. The focus is on how these dialogues shape students within a performativity-driven school system. The research questions address how narratives are formed, how students are positioned, how national assessment policies and local conditions interact, and how notions of students are constructed in relation to broader educational goals. The thesis uses an interaction-oriented narrative approach combined with perspectives on positioning, policy enactment and performativity. The data consists of audio recordings of development and grade dialogues in five schools, analysed through positioning analysis. The included articles show how participants (I) construct narratives about students’ paths, (II) negotiate expectations about students’ verbal participation and (III) construct grades as an emotional concern. The findings are discussed using the concepts of individualisation and temporality, illustrating how the students’ responsibility and progress are negotiated, understood and valued over time. The thesis also introduces the concepts of student performativity and assessment narratives. Student performativity refers to expectations for students to present themselves as responsible and strategic in line with school objectives. Assessment narratives demonstrate how participants, in interaction with assessment policies, form stories about students and their performance. The thesis demonstrates that development and grade dialogues function as mechanisms that can stabilise, challenge or negotiate assessment narratives, shaping how students understand themselves and their abilities in school. 

This article highlights the urgent need to explore how transformative planning can be put into practice and what competencies urban and regional planners need to facilitate this transition. There is a consensusthat traditional planning, with its rigid and structured approaches, isinadequate to address the challenges of climate change. Instead, moreproactive, transformative planning practices are needed. This study presents the results of a questionnaire conducted among planning managers in Swedish municipalities, aiming to deepen the understanding of how municipalities can achieve climate neutrality by identifying the necessary competencies among planners. The results identify five competence categories: technical knowledge (including climate adaptation), broad knowledge in various areas, analytical skills, coordination and cooperation, and communication. Our findings thus suggest that current planning practices in Swedish municipalities are largely traditional rather than transformative, but also that the focus is on adaptation rather than mitigation. We argue that this can partly be explained by the concept of obduracy, and how frames and persistent traditions affect the way planning managers think of the future, making it difficult to envision a future beyond current challenges and demands, but also the importance of thinking more visionary about planning to achieve climate neutrality and transformations.  

This thesis analyzes the design and effects of carbon pricing in the national and international freight transport sector, with a particular focus on maritime shipping. It brings together four papers that examine both short- and long-term behavioural responses and welfare effects of carbon pricing. The responses studied include reductions in sailing speed, changes in freight demand, investments in research and development (R&D) and learning-by-doing to reduce abatement costs through technological development, abatement of carbon emissions (e.g. alternative fuels), modal shifts, and adjustments in shipment sizes. The thesis also investigates the role of international cooperation and the incentives created by unilateral carbon pricing and carbon-intensity limits on marine fuels.

The first paper investigates short-run responses in the shipping sector and shows that ships reduce their sailing speed when fuel costs increase, indicating that carbon pricing can lower emissions even in the short run. The second paper studies carbon pricing in international shipping under the constraint that participating countries should be better off with the policy than without it. The results suggest that bilateral agreements can reduce emissions when countries differ in their willingness to pay, though their effectiveness is limited in static settings with high abatement costs. The third paper extends this analysis by considering the dynamic effects of unilateral carbon pricing. It shows that such policies can foster investments in research and development, thereby lowering future abatement costs and increasing the likelihood that other regions will adopt complementary policies.

The fourth paper broadens the perspective beyond shipping sector. Using a calibrated mode- and route-choice model for domestic freight transport in Sweden, it examines the welfare-optimal internalization of external costs from carbon emissions, air pollution, accidents, noise, and infrastructure. Internalizing external costs increases shipment sizes and shifts freight from waterborne and road transport to rail. However, the effects are modest, implying that the potential for large-scale modal shift from road to rail or waterborne transport is limited.

In summary, the thesis shows that reducing carbon emissions in the shipping sector is challenging for two main reasons: abatement is very costly, and reductions in freight volumes entail welfare losses. Moreover, shipping is an inherently international sector, where efficient carbon pricing would need to be globally coordinated, but this is hampered by large differences in the willingness to price carbon emissions across countries.

Overcoming these difficulties, the thesis underlines the importance of accounting for both short- and long-term behavioral responses, the role of international cooperation, and the dynamic incentives created by unilateral policies. The thesis is relevant for policymakers seeking to align maritime and freight transport policy with broader climate and welfare objectives.

Smart electricity meters are widely promoted as enablers of efficient, flexible, and sustainable energy systems, yet their real-world outcomes often diverge from these ambitions. This thesis examines smart meters through a socio-technical perspective, showing that smartness is not an inherent technical feature but an effect emerging from interactions among technology, governance, institutions, and everyday practice. 

The thesis, guided by Socio-Technical Systems theory, brings together five studies that were conducted separately and later analysed together. Each addresses a different layer of the socio-technical system, moving from conceptualisation to practice and governance. The first and third papers establish the theoretical foundation by examining how smart meters and the idea of “smartness” are represented in research and by developing a multidimensional framework for evaluating smartness as a relational and evolving quality. The second paper explores how Swedish households understand and experience smart meters introduced through a nationwide rollout, revealing limited engagement and the normalisation of the technology as background infrastructure. The fourth paper critiques Information Systems research, showing how smart meters are often “black-boxed” and detached from their institutional and infrastructural contexts. The fifth paper examines Sri Lanka’s emerging smart grid, demonstrating how infrastructural fragility and fragmented governance create socio-technical misalignments that constrain functionality and legitimacy. 

Together, the studies show that smartness is relational, situated, and continuously negotiated. Misalignments appear at informational, institutional, infrastructural, and discursive levels, revealing the gap between policy ambitions and lived experience. Achieving alignment requires governance reflexivity - the capacity to iteratively adjust technical systems, policy frameworks, and social practices over time. 

Conceptually, the thesis reframes smartness as a socio-technical effect that arises from alignment across multiple layers of practice. Empirically, it demonstrates how different contexts shape the enactment and consequences of smart meter adoption. Practically, it highlights the importance of reflexive and context-sensitive governance that anticipates misalignments, fosters interpretive engagement, and aligns technological ambition with institutional capacity and infrastructural realities.  

Edge detection is a fundamental task in computer vision, crucial for object recognition, segmentation, and scene understanding. Traditional methods often fail to capture complex edge structures due to their inability to model intricate relationships between pixels. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Attention Networks (GATs), have shown promise in addressing these limitations by leveraging graph structures to model pixel relationships. This paper explores the applicability of Graph Attention Networks in edge detection, highlighting their advantages over ordinary Graph convolutional Networks (GCNs) through rigorous mathematical reasoning. We integrate GATs into an edge detection framework based on an encoder-decoder structure with U-Net architecture and provide detailed theoretical and implementation insights. Furthermore, we discuss the hardware acceleration of GCNs and GATs with a reconfigurable dataflow architecture integrated in the Pytorch framework. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of GAT-based edge detection and the potential acceleration possible on reconfigurable edge platforms with limited resources. The key advantage of our proposed method is its hardware-friendly design, making it highly suitable for FPGA acceleration while also enabling efficient optimization through pruning of the network. 

This study explores organizational work environment issues related to the dynamics of client-consultant teams in complex automation projects. Focusing on a Swedish industrial company’s long-term collaboration with a consultancy firm to implement HR process automation, the study highlights how the interplay between knowledge and power shape the collaboration, stakeholder salience, and project success. Grounded in Nordic traditions of user-participation and democracy, it draws attention to how automation initiatives affect structural working conditions, job demands, and resources. This qualitative, single-case study, featuring participatory observations and semi-structured interviews, reveals the importance of addressing work environment issues at an organizational level and underscores the challenges of ensuring knowledge transfer, balancing stakeholder interests, and maintaining agile, collaborative prac-tices. The findings contribute to current Nordic and global discourses by demonstrating how client–consultant relationships and dependency can transform an organization’s conditions and requirements for work, emphasizing the need for a strategic approach to project management.

Problem: Despite the tightening of legislation, an increase in reportingfrom other sectors, and repeated warnings and reprimands, thereporting rate among auditors has not increased.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to enhance the understanding ofwhy the expansion of anti-money laundering legislation has notresulted in a corresponding increase in the reporting rate ofmoney laundering offenses within the auditing profession,based on auditors’ own perceptions. Furthermore, the studyseeks to explore the types of measures that auditors themselvesbelieve could contribute to increasing their willingness toreport such offenses.

Method: This study adopts a qualitative methodology, primarily guidedby an inductive approach with elements of deduction. Toaddress the research aim, semi-structured interviews wereconducted with authorized auditors as respondents.

Conclusion: A key observation is that although awareness of moneylaundering issues has increased significantly in recent years,the level of engagement in relevant training remains unevenlydistributed across the auditing profession. Client relationships,in terms of the proportion of revenue generated from individualclients, appear to have a greater influence than personal orlong-standing business relationships. Audit firms haveimplemented stricter risk thresholds in their client acceptanceprocesses, resulting in client portfolios that predominantlyconsist of low-risk clients. There is also a degree of uncertaintyand concern regarding confidentiality obligations andanonymity in the reporting process. In an effort to increase thenumber of suspicious activity reports, more comprehensiveAML controls have been introduced, although these processesare still under development in many firms. Proposed measuresto improve reporting rates include the introduction of auditorrotation requirements for smaller companies, also a greatercompliance responsibility placed on accounting consultants.

The dim²ension project aims to integrate digital tools into mathematical modelling to address real-world problems, particularly those related to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The project’s overarching objective is twofold: firstly, to enhance students' mathematical modelling competencies, and secondly, to foster awareness of global sustainability issues in schools. The present introductory chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the project, while also delineating the structure of the theoretical white paper.

This thesis investigates how collective opinions evolve in social networks, focusing on two crucial, real-world factors: individual stubbornness and antagonistic inter-actions. Classical models of opinion dynamics typically assume a cooperative environment, where all individuals collaborate to reach an agreement, causing opinions to naturally draw closer to each other. However, many real-world scenarios—from political debates to online discussions—are defined by stubbornness, where individuals resist changing their stance, and by rivalry or distrust, which can actively push opinions apart.

We address these phenomena through the framework of signed networks, which explicitly encodes antagonistic relationships. Unlike models that rely on structural balance—a clean division into two opposing camps—we adopt a repelling interaction mechanism, treating negative ties as additive repulsive forces. This approach offers a more flexible and realistic representation of complex, unbalanced social structures.

The first contribution is a thorough analysis of the signed Friedkin–Johnsen (SFJ) model, which combines stubborn attachment to initial opinions with antagonistic interactions. This combination fundamentally changes system behavior: while the classical FJ model is always stable, the SFJ model can diverge. Therefore, we establish sufficient stability conditions and show that even when the model is stable, antagonism allows opinions to escape the the convex hull of the initial opinions, meaning that agents can adopt positions more extreme than anyone held at the start.

The thesis then examines repeated discussions through a concatenated SFJ model, reflecting scenarios such as a series of negotiations. Here, stability in an individual discussion does not imply stability for the repeated process. Two distinct behaviors emerge when the individual discussion rounds are stable: opinions may temporarily move apart before reconverging to consensus inside the convex hull, or they may drift farther apart with each round, leading to divergence. The first case corresponds to a transient amplification, which is a known consequence of non-normal matrices and is often referred to as reactivity. Given these possibilities, we provide sufficient stability conditions for the concatenated SFJ model. This analysis is extended to explore the dynamics in more complex scenarios, including time-varying interaction structures and bipartite (two-camp) networks.

Next, we address multidimensional opinion dynamics models, where agents debate several interdependent topics (for example, climate policy is inherently linked to economic policy). We show that a set of topics that would be stable if discussed independently can become unstable and diverge when discussed together. The analysis of repeated (concatenated) multidimensional interactions reveal diverse outcomes, from full or partial or bipartite consensus to divergence.

Finally, we shift the focus from opinion convergence to the quality of resulting collective judgement and study the wisdom of crowds problem, i.e., analyze the conditions under which a group’s aggregated opinion becomes more accurate due to collective interactions. The improvement of wisdom depends entirely on the allocation of the social power vector—the centrality measure that each individual has in the group. In classical cooperative systems, the social power vector is positive, which confines the concentration region (the set of allocations that improve wisdom) to a simplex. In contrast, signed networks allow for negative social powers, which expands the concentration region beyond the simplex, to a hyperplane. The analysis on signed networks also leads to a critical insight: agreement does not imply accuracy. The group can become confidently wrong—converging with high certainty to a false truth. We also analyze the case where the agents’ initial opinions are correlated, and characterize the new concentration regions and their properties under these conditions.