School staff are continuously asked to adapt to changes that are set forth by various governmental and community agencies. These changes are set in motion to improve schools, however, with change brings conflict. Organizational learning has gained attention as a way to adjust to change. Because conflict can be a taxing, disruptive occurrence in organizations, the purpose of this study was to examine how leaders of schools with high teacher empowerment levels use conflict as a positive force to move their schools forward, despite constant change. Research suggests a connection between organizational learning and teacher empowerment. Additional research was necessary to explore this link. This study described and analyzed how school leaders use conflict constructively to promote individual growth and organizational learning. Review of district Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) Kentucky survey data informed the selection of six schools which evidenced high teacher empowerment. Data were collected through individual interviews with principals, an online teacher survey, as well as focus group interviews with teachers to gain their perspectives about how their school leaders manage conflict. Analysis of data identified themes for how teacher empowerment and organizational learning are connected, and perceptions of conflict. The findings suggest that a risk-safe environment is essential for ensuring that conflict can be a constructive force in schools. Conflict is also affected by the level teacher leadership, engagement and decision-making. Constructive conflict is evidenced in school that have high levels of trust among school staff. Schools leaders can use constructive conflict to promote individual growth and organizational learning.

This thesis consists of four papers on type theory and a formalisation of certain results from the two first papers in the Agda language. We cover topics such as models of multisets and sets in Homotopy Type Theory, and explore ideas of using type theory as a language for databases and different ways of expressing dependencies between terms. The two first papers build on work by Aczel 1978. We establish that the underlying type of Aczel’s model of set theory in type theory can be seen as a type of multisets from the perspective of Homotopy Type Theory, and we identify a suitable subtype which becomes a model of set theory in which equality of sets is the identity type. The third paper is joint work with Henrik Forssell and David I .Spivak and explores a certain model of type theory, consisting of simplicial complexes, from the perspective of database theory. In the fourth and final paper, we consider two approaches to unraveling the dependency structures between terms in dependent type theory, and formulate a few conjectures about how these two approaches relate.

Although academic writing skills are central in the core content of the Swedish nationalcurriculum for English, Swedish upper-secondary school pupils struggle withcomposing academic texts. Both international and national research have formulatedseveral models for effectively constructing ESL (English as a second language)academic writing modules. However, these models in the school are often notimplemented or misinterpreted in the Swedish school. Therefore, to find a best practiceexample that can be implemented in the English upper-secondary classroom, this studyinvestigates the research-based design of a beginner ESL academic writing course atMalmö University with focus on constructive alignment and instructor feedback. Thedata included three data sets: i) lectures and other course materials, ii) ten studentpapers across three drafts, 30 draft submissions in total, and iii) instructor feedback onthe first two drafts. All data was subjected to different types of content analysis. Afeedback classification system synthesized from previous research was specificallydeveloped for the data analysis of instructor feedback. The main findings were that theacademic writing course investigated was in-fact constructively aligned providing thestudents with qualitative academic writing instruction; therefore, it may arguably serveas a model for academic writing interventions also in the school. Furthermore, themulti-dimensional feedback classification system developed for this study may guideeducators’ reflection over their feedback practices.

Underground mining is a complex operation that requires careful planning. The short-term scheduling, which is the scheduling of the tasks involved in the excavation process, is an important part of the planning process. In this master thesis we propose a new method for short-term scheduling of a cut-and-fill mine operated by the mining company Boliden AB. We include a new aspect of the problem by incorporating a priority between the excavation locations of the mine. The priority feature allows the user to control the output of the scheduling and to direct resources to the locations where they are most needed according to the long-term plans. Our solution method consists of two components: a constructive heuristic method that construct a complete solution by solving partial scheduling problems containing subsets of tasks, and a logic-based Benders decomposition scheme for solving these partial problems. The computational performance of the proposed method is evaluated on industrially relevant largescale instances generated from data provided by Boliden. Comparisons are made with applying a constraint programming solver on the complete problem and with replacing the logic-based Benders scheme by applying a constraint programming solver on the partial scheduling problems, respectively. Results show that the heuristic method combined with the logic-based Benders decomposition scheme outperforms the other two methods on all instances.

Fenomenet ledarskap har sedan länge intresserat forskare från en mängd olika discipliner. Främst har fokus varit på att finna ett allmängiltigt normerande grundrecept utifrån rationella ansatser. Trots en stor mängd vetenskapliga studier, främst baserade på kvantitativt underlag, återstår frågor av mellanmänsklig natur. I sökandet efter det goda och konstruktiva ledarskapet har forskningen den senaste tiden allt mer intresserat sig för fenomenet tillit. Den här studien syftar till att skapa en djupare förståelse för faktorer som bidrar med tillit i ledarskaps sammanhang. I synnerhet berör frågeställningarna vilka faktorer som påverkar tillit i ledarskapet och i organisationer. Främst används beteendeperspektiv som förklaringsmodell. Som underlag för vidare antaganden tolkas empiri från intervjuer. Studien påvisar flera samband mellan redovisade teorier och empiri. Men det finns också flera diskrepanser. Resultatet anger att ett antal faktorer främjar tillit mellan chef och medarbetare. Dialog och återkoppling framträder exempelvis som två viktiga faktorer. Omvänt påverkar s.k. låt-gå ledarskap eller icke-ledarskap medarbetarna och effekten destruktivt. Det framhålls också betydelsen av att organisationen signalerar en tillåtande kultur, att det är tillåtet att göra misstag. Samt att den enskilda chefen har förmåga att skydda medarbetaren från negativ respons. Vidare konstateras också att de vedertagna normativa och rationellt välregisserade teorierna ofta skiljer sig från de tillfrågades mer turbulenta realitet. I intervjuerna framkommer ett samstämmigt behov av att chefer skall tillföra struktur och spelregler. Den kontext som presenteras i studien antas begränsa chefers handlingsförmåga att praktisera de välbeforskade kvantitativa teorierna. Studien påvisar också att konsekvensbedömningar av förväntad respons påverkar medarbetares initiativ. Det är i överenstämmelse med teorin, men där är perspektivet ofta inriktat på relationen chef och medarbetare. Studien indikerar istället att det framförallt är konsekvensbedömningar gentemot kollegor som styr medarbetarnas beteende. Sammantaget påvisar studien att tillit ären viktig faktor i det goda ledarskapet, om än inte den allena saliggörande. Snarare än att vara en enskild agens är tillit en del av en syntes. Utifrån studiens utfall rekommenderas att ytterligare underlag samlas in kring chefers verklighet, för att närmare förstå hur de vedertagnateorierna kan användas praktiskt. Vidare förordas ytterligare undersökningar gällande kollegors inverkan på tillit och beteende. / The phenomenon “leadership” has interested researchers from a variety of disciplines for a long time. The main focus has been on finding a normative and universal formula based on rational approaches. Despite a large number of scientific studies, mainly based on quantitative data, questions about the impact of interpersonal relations remain. In the search for the good and constructive leadership, research has recently become increasingly interested in the phenomenon “trust”. This study aims to create a deeper understanding of factors that contribute to trust in a leadership context. In particular issues concerning which factors that affect trust in organizations and in leadership. Behavioral perspectives are mainly used as the explanatory model. As a basis for further assumptions empirical data from interviews are interpreted. The study demonstrates several connections between theories and empirical data. But there are also several discrepancies. The results indicate that a number of factors promote trust between manager and employees, e.g. dialogue and feedback appear to be important. Conversely, “laissez-faire” or “non-leadership” impact employees and organizational effect in a destructive way. The importance of the organization signaling a tolerant culture is also emphasized, that it is permissible to make mistakes. It’s also vital that managers have the ability to protect the employee from negative feedback. Furthermore, it is also stated that the most common normative and rational theories often differ from the more turbulent reality of the respondents. The results also show that there is a need from managers to add structure and rules within the organizations. The context presented in the study is assumed to affect managers' ability to practice the well-researched quantitative theories. The study also shows that consequence assessments of expected response affects initiatives. This is in line with theory, but the perspective is usually focused on the relationship between manager and employee. Instead, the study indicates that it is primarily impact assessments between colleagues that govern employees' behavior. In summary, the study shows that trust is an important factor in constructive leadership, although not the only prevailing one. Rather than being a single agent, trust is a part of a synthesis. Based on the results of the study, it is recommended that further data is collected regarding managers' reality, in order to better understand how the well researched quantitative theories can be used in practice. Furthermore, more studies of how colleagues impact trust and behavior are advocated, in order to verify the interpretations.

Legal rules regarding unaccompanied refugee children in the European Union (EU) are closely related to the refugee crisis and the community’s asylum policy. This study aims to investigate how the best interests of the unaccompanied refugee child is being ensured under EU law. Dworkin’s theory and various methods are used to answer the research question. Firstly, the focus is, with the use of the chosen theoretical framework and international legal method, on the interpretation of the principle of “the best interests of the child”. Secondly, the thesis studies how this principle is reflected in the EU law in relation to unaccompanied refugee children, by applying EU legal method. This study shows, on the one hand, that there are a few anomalies in the EU legislation in the area of asylum that arise with regard to the best interests of the unaccompanied refugee child. It is argued that the European Union’s restrictive asylum legislation leads to conflicts between the international law and the EU law. On the other hand, the thesis demonstrates that the EU law has continuously improved, and the international child rights principle was adopted in it. It will be shown in this study that despite the common asylum policy and the community acquis, the EU Member States’ domestic law enables different assessments of the best interests of the unaccompanied child. The solution of normative conflicts is also in the hands of the EU countries, since the status determination of refugees and the assessment of the child’s best interests are carried out by the EU Member States. This will be confirmed by analysing the most important applicable EU laws, particularly the Proposal for a Regulation establishing a Union Resettlement Framework. The Proposal is chosen for discussion, because this is an essential part of the Common European Asylum System and is consistent with two packages of legislative proposals to reform it. The conclusion of this thesis is that the best interests principle is guaranteed in the EU law, but it is not guaranteed in the spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and further improvements are needed in the EU legal framework.

Promoting constructiveness in online comment sections is an essential step to make the internet a more productive place. On online marketplaces, customers often have the opportunity to voice their opinion and relate their experience with a given product. In this thesis, we investigate the possibility to model constructiveness in product review in order to promote the most informative and argumentative customer feedback. We develop a new constructiveness 4-class scale taxonomy based on heuristics and specific categorical criteria. We use this taxonomy to annotate 4000 Amazon customer reviews as our training set, referred to as the Corpus for Review Constructiveness (CRC). In addition to the 4-class constructiveness tag, we include a binary tag to compare modeling performance with previous work. We train and test several computational models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a Stacked Bidirectional LSTM and a Gradient Boosting Machine. We demonstrate our annotation scheme’s reliability with a set of inter-annotator agreement experiments, and show that good levels of performance can be reached in both multiclass setting (0.69 F1 and 57% error reduction over the baseline) and binary setting (0.85 F1 and 71% error reduction). Different features are evaluated individually and in combination. Moreover, we compare the advantages, downsides and performance of both feature-based and neural network models. Finally, these models trained on CRC are tested on out-of-domain data (news article comments) and shown to be nearly as proficient as on in-domain data. This work allows the extension of constuctiveness modeling to a new type of data and provides a new non-binary taxonomy for data labeling.

In this work, new definitions of hypergraph products are presented. The main focus is on the generalization of the commutative standard graph products: the Cartesian, the direct and the strong graph product. We will generalize these well-known graph products to products of hypergraphs and show several properties like associativity, commutativity and distributivity w.r.t. the disjoint union of hypergraphs. Moreover, we show that all defined products of simple (hyper)graphs result in a simple (hyper)graph. We will see, for what kind of product the projections into the factors are (at least weak) homomorphisms and for which products there are similar connections between the hypergraph products as there are for graphs. Last, we give a new and more constructive proof for the uniqueness of prime factorization w.r.t. the Cartesian product than in [Studia Sci. Math. Hungar. 2: 285–290 (1967)] and moreover, a product relation according to such a decomposition. That might help to find efficient algorithms for the decomposition of hypergraphs w.r.t. the Cartesian product.

Since Buchberger intrduced the theory of Gröbner bases in 1965 it has become one of the most important tools in constructive algebra and, nowadays, it is the kernel of many algorithms in the theory of polynomial ideals and algebraic geometry. Motivated by the results in polynomial rings there have been investigeated al lot of possibilities to generalise Buchberger's ideas to other types of rings. The perhaps most general concept, though it does not cover all extensions reported in the literature, is the extension to graded structures due to Robbiano and Mora. But in order to obtain algorithmic solutions for the compution of Gröbner bases it needs additional computability assumptions. The subject of this paper is the presentation of some classes of effective graded structures.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis with every country being affected. It is one of the widely reported crisis over the past few months. Crisis of such degree and range of influence demands a well-informed reporting with an understanding of the possible impact. As the media coverage is largely influenced by journalistic frames and their interpretations, it is highly important and relevant to study this crisis from a framing perspective. Therefore, this research aims to explore the construction of frames, to what extent they exist in the text in comparison to each other, and how they appear across different time periods by studying the online editorial coverage of the COVID-19 crisis published by New York Times. Eight constructive and seven negative frames have been deductively coded to conduct the research through qualitative content analysis with quantitative elements of the editorials published during three specific periods in January, February, and March of 2020. Constructive frames have been coded with the help of constructive journalism which is used as an analytical concept in this research, while negative frames have been retrieved from literature on the framing of previous crises. The analysis suggests that the editorial coverage of the COVID-19 crisis by New York Times is overall constructive but with focus on few dominant constructive and negative frames. Among constructive frames the most dominant frames are ‘solution-oriented’ and ‘mathematical’. Among negative frames the most dominant frames are ‘blame attribution’, frame of ‘consequences’ and ‘conflict’. Findings revealed that blame attribution is dominant as compared to the frame of solidarity and denial is dominant as compared to the frame of concern. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that the construction and appearance of frames change over different time periods with changed intensity level of crisis. This change requires versatile coverage and shift in attention towards newly emerging challenges.