Product labelling schemes have become one of the most prominently used instruments to facilitate more Sustainable Consumption and Production. But with a plethora of labelling schemes having been implemented, many now accuse them of being confusing rather than facilitating. As a result, governments in France, UK and Germany, as well as businesses, such as Walmart, and non-governmental organisations, like WWF, have begun to consider seriously the implementation of some form of ‘Sustainability Meta Label’ that condenses existing product-labels and other communication measures into a more coherent overarching scheme. Yet so far, in depth studies on the potential institutionalisation of a Sustainability Meta Labelling Scheme are missing.Based on case study research of four existing product labelling schemes (EU eco, EU energy, Fairtrade and MSC label), this study addresses this gap by developing a novel theoretical framework to study the causalities behind product labelling institutionalisation processes. Combining theoretical arguments of constructivist institutionalism and institutional entrepreneurship with concepts of legitimacy from the governance and organisational studies literature, this framework establishes the institutionalisation of product labelling schemes as contingent on an interactive legitimacy construction between actors involved in the initiation and organisational structures of a labelling scheme and other actors within the production and consumption system. This construction tends to cluster around aspects of tradition, regulation, charisma, knowledge, consequences, and procedures.By concretizing this framework in the context of the studied cases, it is shown how legitimacy constructions are highly complex and how in particular procedural and consequential legitimacy can give rise to fundamental conflicts. The potentially large scope, focus and area of application of a Sustainability Meta Label with the need to find agreements in regard to the very contested notion of Sustainable Development, seems to make the task of managing such conflicts even more difficult. While the mobilisation of knowledge, traditional, regulatory and charismatic logics can circumvent some of these conflicts, they have also demonstrated to be anything but a silver bullet. In a sense, this study shows that the very issue that is claimed to drive the establishment of a Sustainability Meta Labelling Scheme-the different interpretations of the Sustainable Development concept through different product labels-might in fact pose one of the main challenges for its institutionalisation and effectiveness in facilitating more Sustainable Consumption and Production.With these findings this study makes important contributions not only to an increasingly prominent policy making discussion but also to the wider product labelling and new institutional literature. After further empirical testing, the developed theoretical framework could guide future research into the institutionalisation of product labelling schemes and potentially also other ordering mechanisms. While the focus of this study is on commonalities across product labelling schemes such further research could especially expand on how micro, meso, and macro level factors can shape institutionalisation processes in diverse ways.

The topic of this thesis is the study of nitrogen functionalities in nitrogen-doped reduced graphene oxide using Raman spectroscopy. Specifically, the project set out to investigate if the Raman active nitrogen-related vibrational modes of graphene can be identified via isotope labelling. Previous studies have used Raman spectroscopy to characterise nitrogen doped graphene, but none has employed the method of isotope labelling to do so. The study was conducted by producing undoped, nitrogen-doped and nitrogen-15-doped reduced graphene oxide and comparing the differences in the first-order Raman spectrum of the samples. Results of this study are inconclusive. However, some indications linking the I band to nitrogen functionalities are found. Also, a hypothetical Raman band denoted I* possibly related to \spt{3} hybridised carbon is introduced in the same spectral area as I. This indication of a separation of the I band into two bands, each dependent on one of these factors could bring clarity to this poorly understood spectral area. As the results of this study are highly speculative, further research is needed to confirm them and the work presented here serves as a preliminary investigation.

Environmental labels on products and services have been increasingly significant in influencing consumer purchasing and represent a crucial communication of the environmental credentials of products and companies. Yet their importance to industrial designers, who are recognised as having significant influence over the environmental impact of products, is less known. The overall aim of this research project is to investigate factors affecting the implementation of UK environmental labels by in-house industrial designers in UK Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). A review of the literature on industrial designers and environmental labels found that there was a gap in knowledge surrounding the factors affecting how and whether in-house industrial designers implement labels in their work, and what understanding they have. In response to the literature review a number of research questions were generated, which influenced the direction of this emergent, exploratory research. A Preliminary Study was set up to collect qualitative data from practicing industrial designers in UK SMEs on their recognition and use of environmental label schemes. A mock-up Resource was consequently developed that provided the information the Preliminary Study participants claimed to need. During the Main Study the Resource was used as an elicitation tool to further probe designers' understanding and use of labels. Subsequently, three Case Studies were conducted with UK SMEs who have implemented labels on their products, to identify elements of best practice. The in-house SME designers in the study appeared to have knowledge of environmental label types and schemes. Both this and designers' position within their companies especially in terms of their input on design briefs moderates their ability to implement labels. The cooperation and contribution of colleagues is also significant to the effective application including driving their use and being willing to include them in the product development process from early stages to impact on success or effectiveness. It is suggested that a whole company approach is needed. This thesis provides an original contribution to knowledge on in-house designers' capability to implement labels; understanding of designers' current knowledge and use of labels; and the role of designers in all SMEs, not just those engaged in ecodesign or using environmental labels.

The environmental concern has become a well discussed topic within today’s society and as a result awareness of the impact human behaviour has on the environment is continuously increasing. This concern is something companies take advantage of when marketing, as for instance by promoting their products or services as eco-labelled. Eco-labelled products have further shown to involve a lot of consumer opinions, and are thus common to study in relation to consumer attitudes. Theories also show that eco-labelled goods have been idealised in favour of conventional ones, referred to as a marketing placebo effect. In connection to this, companies have started to point interest at eco-labelled technology, which has become a recent phenomenon attracting attention. Nonetheless, the existing theory regarding this phenomenon has been mainly applied on specific areas, such as the food industry. The purpose of this study was therefore to explain the marketing placebo effect on eco-labelled technology. 162 experiments were conducted using one experiment group and one control group, in order to be able to detect an eventual marketing placebo effect when implementing an eco-label, using attitudes as an influencer. Based on the results, it was revealed that attitudes are crucial to take into consideration when applying an eco-label in a technology context. This as it was concluded that attitudes act as a trigger evoking a marketing placebo effect. The findings from this study contradicts current theories on how different factors cooperate in the process of a marketing placebo effect, and advances has thus been made in how the marketing placebo effect works when applied in a technology context.

Gustav Jonson's theory of the social heritage characterized social work in Sweden during the 1960s and onwards. The social policy issues debated then were about class society, labelling and alienation. After thirty years of professional work as a social worker, I find it interesting that the work still focuses on the theory of the social heritage and methods for breaking it. The aim of this study is to examine possible explanations to why this is so. The empirical material is taken from interviews with senior social workers. Issues examined are how they perceive social work and the theory of the social heritage. The results of the interviews have been processed based upon narrative analysis and reported in the form of meta-narratives. The stories provide a historical view of social work, encounters, situations and contexts. The final discussion is about how the social heritage is created, identified and carried forward. The conclusions show that the social heritage is a social construction created by the society and its inhabitants.The issue then, is to understand and to relate to this context, creating security control and balance in it. As a phenomenon, the social heritage can come to act as conservation and thus become a counterforce to change. Based on discussion and conclusions, it appears that efforts to break the social heritage are questionable. The study is a social psychological qualitative study worked with from a social constructionist perspective.

It is known that graph theoretic models have extensive application to real-life discrete optimization problems. Many of these models are NP-hard and, as a result, exact methods may be impractical for large scale problem instances. Consequently, there is a great interest in developing e±cient approximate methods that yield near-optimal solutions in acceptable computational times. A class of such methods, known as metaheuristics, have been proposed with success. This thesis considers some recently proposed NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems formulated on graphs. In particular, the min- imum labelling spanning tree problem, the minimum labelling Steiner tree problem, and the minimum quartet tree cost problem, are inves- tigated. Several metaheuristics are proposed for each problem, from classical approximation algorithms to novel approaches. A compre- hensive computational investigation in which the proposed methods are compared with other algorithms recommended in the literature is reported. The results show that the proposed metaheuristics outper- form the algorithms recommended in the literature, obtaining optimal or near-optimal solutions in short computational running times. In addition, a thorough analysis of the implementation of these methods provide insights for the implementation of metaheuristic strategies for other graph theoretic problems.

Maintaining the current course of the global society is threatening the human civilization. The urgency of the situation, understood from empirical research, has caused many researchers to call for more prescriptive research as a necessary supplement, to better support decision making for sustainability. While policymakers need to direct and stimulate sustainable production and consumption through, e.g., legislation and market phenomena such as eco-labelling, business represents a significant proportion of the necessary resources, capabilities and mechanisms for the innovation needed for a transition towards sustainability. However, while businesses more and more realize the self-interest in working proactively with sustainability, there is a desire for better support for how to do this also from this end. Such support needs to consider a significant shift going on in business; that individual businesses tend to no longer compete as autonomous entities, but rather as supply chains. Thus, no company is more sustainable than its supply chain partners. Therefore, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) as a business function, and sustainable procurement as a subset thereof, plays an increasingly pivotal role for sustainable development. The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to sustainable development by studying how three phenomena; eco-labelling, procurement and supply chain management are related to each other and to a strategic sustainability perspective, and to suggest how these phenomena can be integrated with such a perspective to provide better support for decision making and innovation for sustainability. For this purpose, a framework for strategic sustainable development, including a definition of sustainability and generic guidelines to inform stepwise strategic plans towards sustainability, is used as a foundational methodology. The development of new approaches is also based on case studies with eco-labelling and sustainable public procurement bodies, businesses and public institutions. Information is collected by shadowing of criteria development and collaboration processes, interviews and literature studies. While the findings point to a clear rational for all of the phenomena and several strengths in existing schemes and practices, the findings also point to several shortcomings. Sustainability is not defined, and as a result, there is no foundation for strategic and proactive approaches. Furthermore, decisions are not based on considerations of all dimensions of sustainability, the whole life cycle of products, all relevant stakeholders and a long-term perspective. As a result, the full potential of these phenomena for contributing to sustainable development is not utilized. This thesis prescribes enhanced processes for eco-labelling, sustainable procurement and SSCM, and shows how these can support organisations in developing from reacting individually on known sustainability-related problems to acting proactively and collaboratively in supply chains, in a coordinated and economically viable way, on society’s remaining gap to the full scope of ecological and social sustainability.

樹是一個沒有迴路的連接圖。而4-caterpillar是一種樹，它擁有單一路徑連接到數個長度為3的路徑的端點。一個有n個邊的無向圖G的優美標法是一個從G的點到{0,1,2,...,n}的一對一函數，使得每一個邊的標號都不一樣，其中，邊的標號是兩個相鄰的點的編號差的絕對值。在這篇論文當中，我們最主要的目的是使用一個演算法來完成4-caterpillars的優美標法。 / A tree is connected acyclic graph. A 4-caterpillar is a tree with a single path only incident to the end-vertices of paths of length 3. A graceful labelling of an undirected graph G with n edges is a one-to-one function from the set of vertices of G to the set {0,1,2,...,n} such that the induced edge labels are all distinct, where the edge label is the difference between two endvertex labels. In this thesis, our main purpose is to use an algorithm to yield graceful labellings of 4-caterpillars.

<p>Uppsatsen har till syfte att titta på hur verksamma inom stödorganisationer ser på sina klienter, samt vad de har för attityder till prostitution. Genom en diskursanalys lyfts diskursen om prostitution utifrån det nederländska och svenska samhället fram. Frågeställningar i uppsatsen är: Vilket syfte har organisationerna i arbetet med prostitution? Vilken syn på prostitution har de anställda på stödorganisationerna? Vad har organisationerna att erbjuda och hur arbetar de? Går det att finna skillnader eller likheter mellan synen på prostitution i de olika länderna? Uppsatsen har en beskrivande och tolkande design med ett kvalitativt diskursanalytiskt förhållningssätt. Frågeställningar rörande de anställdas värdegrund och förhållningssätt till sina klienter utgjorde grunden i uppsatsen. Intervjuer med sammanlagt tolv personer utfördes, sex stycken i Sverige och sex stycken i Nederländerna varav samtliga arbetar inom stödorganisationer för prostituerade. Textmaterial från organisationerna samlades även in vid intervjuerna. De två ländernas intervjuer och textmaterial bearbetades separat och jämfördes sedan. Resultatet visade på en rad olika subjektpositioner som karaktäriserar diskursen om prostitution. Den svenska diskursen präglas av radikalfeministiska värderingar, och den nederländska diskursen av liberalfeministiska värderingar. Mikroperspektivet, eller individperspektivet finns hos den svenska diskursen om prostitution, då det fokuseras mycket på den prostituerade individen. I det nederländska samhället ligger fokuset på makro eller samhällsnivå, där prostitutionsfrågan är en samhällsfråga och har mindre att göra med individen som prostituerar sig.</p> / <p>The<strong> </strong>aim of the essay<strong> </strong>is to look at how support organizations are working and dealing with prostitution clients and the attitude the employees of these organizations have toward their clients. Discourse analysis is used in the interpretation of the data collected.</p><p>The questions of the study were: What is the purpose of the organizations, which work with prostitution? What are the views of the employees of these organizations towards prostitution? What do the organizations have to offer their clients? Are there differences or similarities in the Swedish and Dutch discourse on prostitution?</p><p>Interviews with a total of twelve respondents were performed, six in Sweden and six in the. Text material from the organizations was also collected and used in the study.</p><p>The interview results and the text material collected from the two countries were analyzed separately and then compared. The result showed<strong> </strong>different<strong> </strong>subject positions. The Swedish discourse showed influences from radical feministic values, and the Dutch discourse from liberal feministic values. A micro- or individual understanding of the question is reflected in the Swedish discourse of prostitution. In the Dutch material, the focus is on the macro- or the society understanding, where prostitution is a question of society and has less to do with the prostitutes as individuals.</p>

A highly diastereoselective nickel-catalysed reductive aldol cyclisation is described. Using Ni(acac)2 as a precatalyst and diethylzinc as a stoichiometric reductant, various α,β-unsaturated carbonyl compounds tethered through an amide or ester linkage to a ketone electrophile underwent efficient cyclisation to afford β-hydroxylactams and β-hydroxylactones respectively. The scope of this process is broad with variation in the α,β-unsaturated carbonyl component, ketone and, where applicable, the nitrogen protecting group all tolerated. A series of experiments, including deuterium-labelling studies, were carried out in an attempt to gain insight into the possible reaction mechanisms that might be operative. II. Development of Novel Methodologies for the Silylation and Stannylation of Base-Sensitive Cyclopropenes Two distinct approaches to the synthesis of silyl- and stannylcyclopropenes are described. Using substoichiometric quantities of Cu(acac)2 and 1,2-bis(diphenylphosphino)ethane in combination with (trifluoromethyl)trimethylsilane, a diverse range of 1,3,3-trisubstituted cyclopropenes underwent direct silylation to afford the corresponding 1-silylcyclopropenes in good to excellent yield. Attempts to adapt these conditions to synthesise the corresponding stannylcyclopropenes proved unsuccessful. However, by employing (pentafluoroethyl)tributylstannane and stoichiometric potassium fluoride, it was possible to access 1-stannylcyclopropenes in comparable yields. It was also demonstrated that both the stannyl- and silylcyclopropene derivatives synthesised using these methodologies were able to serve as precursors for a variety of novel molecules that might otherwise be difficult to access using alternative methods.