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Today, many IC approaches and company cases of IC reporting exist, but a common framework is lacking. This article explains policy and business perspectives for IC reporting and analyses the current IC approaches for defining essential drivers and policy strategies for such a framework. Focusing on external reporting and ‘value in use/stakeholder’ criteria is seen as a set of drivers that can combine policy and company perspectives and at the same time ensure involvement of a larger part of the business community and a framework recognisable to users of IC reports.

Abstract

Sustainable city logistics solutions must be considered in accordance to develop lively and accessible city centres where we can all move around safely, and where trade and culture are flourishing. This requires delivery of goods on a daily basis considering these aspects:

• The transport must be geographically concentrated,

• Large amounts of volume of parcels or goods

• High exploitation of capacity

The transport must be geographically concentrated,

Large amounts of volume of parcels or goods

High exploitation of capacity

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on results of recent research about the self‐organisation (SO) of communities that aim to regenerate and/or improve their sustainability, also to reflect upon methodological and epistemological issues related to the application of complexity approaches to support SO in communities and in general, social enterprises.

The paper summarises recent research findings on SO and self‐transformation in communities using a combination of complexity approaches. It describes the methodological framework used to conduct action research about the self‐transformation and learning of a European eco‐community and reflects about the approaches used and lessons learned.

This research confirms the complementarity between two approaches to complexity management: the viable systems model from S. Beer, a pioneering approach to managing complexity in institutions, and complex adaptive systems, a more recent approach to deal with SO in organisations. Mapping the organisational dynamics and the structural changes decided by the community members shows interesting insights about emergence and SO. This is a state‐of‐the‐art research on multi‐methodological approaches to support complexity management in organisations.

As in many action research projects, early findings are limited to one particular organisation. Nevertheless, the theoretical frameworks of the broader research are useful for a wide variety of organisations, both in terms of guiding organisational transformations and supporting networking management of networks collaborating to create more sustainable evolutionary pathways.

The increased acknowledgement of the problems associated with food waste has triggered a number of social and commercial initiatives for the re-distribution of suboptimal foods (SOFs). This paper aims to explore a variety of such initiatives and discuss their prospects, considering the commercial contingencies of the food supply system.

The exploration is based on a multi-country study of cases representing three initiatives related to the reduction of waste from SOFs, i.e. social supermarkets (SSMs), food banks and expiration date-based pricing practices. The collected data comprise expert interviews, store-check observations and secondary material; the data are analyzed from a marketing practice perspective.

The analyses indicate that the distribution and re-distribution of SOFs are moving toward normalization, that the diffusion of expiration date-based pricing through all food retailing formats is likely to continue, that food banks – despite reports of dwindling supplies of SOFs – are likely to increase their expansion and that SSMs face a variety of challenges, e.g. as regards their supply of SOFs and their customers’ preferences for stable assortments.

By synthesizing data from various European implementations of re-distribution practices, this article contributes to the understanding of the viability of such practices. Developing this understanding should benefit social and commercial entrepreneurs, as well as policymakers, when designing and implementing initiatives for the reduction of waste from SOFs.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a new approach for researching public library programs through Facebook events. The term public library programs refers to publicly announced activities and events taking place within or in relation to a public library. In Denmark, programs are an important part of the practices of public libraries and have been growing in both number and variety within recent years.

The data for the study presented in this paper consists of Facebook events announcing public library programs. In the study of this data, grounded theory is used as a research strategy and methods of web archiving are used for collecting both the textual and the visual content of the Facebook events.

The combination of Facebook events as data, grounded theory as a research strategy and web archiving as methods for data collection proves to be useful for researching the format and content of public library programs, which have already taken place.

Only a limited number of Facebook events are examined and the context is restricted to one country.

This paper presents a promising approach for researching public library programs through social media content and provides new insights into both methods and data as well as the phenomenon investigated. Thereby, this paper contributes to a conception of an under-developed researched area as well as a new approach for studying it.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a robot vision system which put rings on hooks that are moving freely on a conveyor belt. The hook can show a significant swinging which can be well approximated by a pendulum movement. The problem is of large relevance for many industrial applications and the challenge is to compute a 3D pose that is sufficiently precise to allow for successful placements of the rings.

This requires a fast and precise tracking and a compensation for latencies connected to the processing of visual information as well as the actual robot action.

The authors achieve this through a precise pose estimation in a high‐resolution stereo setup, as well as a modeling of the hook movement as a combination of a translational and a pendulum movement.

The paper shows that under normal conditions close to 100 percent success can be achieved such that this technology now can be transferred into industrial systems.

Roskilde University was established in Denmark in 1972 as a critical reform university based on the principles of participant directed problem-oriented project learning (PPL). In 2009, the university launched a new master programme in Urban Planning (Planning Studies). This chapter presents experiences from student projects working with action research in facilitating citizen-driven urban development. Firstly, we outline the key theoretical foundations of the Planning Studies programme: planning as social learning, empowerment and social mobilization. Secondly, we describe the principles of the Roskilde University pedagogical model (PPL) rooted in the tradition of experiential and critical pedagogy of Oskar Negt, John Dewey, Paulo Freire and others. Thirdly, we present two cases of problem-oriented projects working with action research in bottom-up urban planning and sustainable transition in Copenhagen. The first case concerns the involvement of local residents in the redesign of a public square through a series of aesthetic experiments. The second case concerns an experiment with alternative transport solutions and sustainable street transition through reduction of private car use and the creation of new public spaces on former parking lots. The article concludes that action research in problem-oriented project work is promising way of involving students in community empowerment processes. Doing action research strengthens the students understanding of ‘the logic of practice’ and their ability to master practical and ethical judgements in complex real-world empowerment and learning processes. This both prepares them for professional practice and provides them with an embodied and pragmatically empowered understanding of how transformations towards a more sustainable and just society can be brought about.

This paper introduces interactive research as an emerging approach within a broad family of collaborative research approaches in management and organization research. Interactive research is a way to contribute to the dual tasks of long-term theory development and innovation and change processes in organizations. One of the distinguishing features of interactive research is a focus on continuous joint learning processes between the researchers and the involved practitioners.

The basic concepts, contributions and challenges of the interactive research approach are presented and illustrated in the present paper through a practical case, the HELIX Centre.

Interactive research is a way to advance scientific knowledge about the development of new types of work organizations and the development of sustainable operations. The multi-disciplinary and interactive research approach at HELIX has made it possible to reach a high degree of both rigour and relevance in research questions and projects. The authors identified five principles from the HELIX case that were instrumental in accomplishing the dual tasks of interactive research.

The interactive research approach is a powerful method of collaboration between different stakeholders throughout the research process. This type of research makes it possible to interact at various levels of research, from the programme level, to research and development projects, to the individual level. The results from interactive research should not only be considered traditionally valid but also valid in relation to organizational and societal needs.