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This paper aims to attempt to examine pressures, incentives, processes and practices used for sustainable sourcing. Further, it also proposes a framework to provide a composite method for monitoring and controlling the sustainability aspects of supply management. This would enable suppliers to consider buyers’ requirements, translate these into suitable strategies, assess suppliers’ capabilities and also judge the impact of these strategies on suppliers.

This study opts for literature review as a method. In total, 150 research papers in peer-reviewed English language journals were reviewed to examine the pressures, incentives, processes and practices used for sustainable sourcing.

This study attempts to answer the “why”-, “what”- and “how”-related questions about sustainable sourcing. It is observed that research in sustainable sourcing is multileveled and involves various functional departments in a firm. It is diverse and fragmented and is more concentrated on certain geographic areas, industries and methodologies.

This study can be helpful to both researchers and practicing managers. It provides a snapshot of the work done on sustainable sourcing, which can be used as a base for research addressing specific aspects of sustainable sourcing or for building strategies related to sustainable sourcing.

This study takes the present reviews available in the literature forward and provides a generic view of sustainable sourcing and proposes a composite method for monitoring and controlling the sustainability aspects of supply management. It attempts to consolidate the diverse literature presently available on sustainable sourcing.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the dynamics model of a Z-folded PhoneSat considering hinge friction and to investigate the influence of disturbances, such as friction, stiffness asymmetry, deployment asynchronicity and initial disturbance angular velocity, on the attitude of PhoneSat during and after deployment.

For the Z-folded PhoneSat, the dynamics model considering hinge friction is established and the dynamics simulation is carried out. The effects of friction, stiffness asymmetry, deployment asynchronicity and initial disturbance angular velocity on the attitude motion of the PhoneSat are studied and the attitude motion regularities of the PhoneSat considering the disturbance factors mentioned above are discussed.

Friction has a main contribution to reducing the oscillation of attitude motion and damping out the residual oscillation, ultimately decreasing the deployment time. An increasing length of deployment time is required with the increasing stiffness asymmetry and time difference of asynchronous deployment, which also have slight disturbances on the attitude angle and angular velocity of PhoneSat after the deployment. The initial disturbance angular velocity in the direction of deployment would be proportionally weakened after the deployment, whereas initial disturbance angular velocity in other direction induces angular velocities of other axes, which dramatically enhances the complexity of attitude control.

The paper is a useful reference for engineering design of small satellites attitude control system.

Since proposed by Darwin, evolution is considered to be dependent on a source of genetic variability that must be constrained by environmental conditions in order to generate stable (adapted) phenotypes. Several sources and causes of this variability have been proposed so far. This paper aims to posit that ambiguity of fuzzy grammars is the main source of genetic variability on which natural selection operates.

Formal grammars (FG) were proposed as the tool to deal with human and artificial languages. Fuzzy formal grammars (FFGs) are the extension of the formalism in the Theory of Fuzzy Logic and are ambiguous grammars. Here, the ambiguity of the ordered set of chemical interactions – the so‐called signal transduction pathways (stp), linking membranes events to DNA reading and protein synthesis – is assumed as an inner source of variability that must be constrained by environmental conditions. Fuzzy formal languages (FFL) theory is used to mathematically formalize the biology concept of stp.

The genome variability is the result of the constraints imposed by the environment on the grammar intrinsic ambiguity.

The formalism of this model provides a new way to analyze and interpret the findings of the different genome sequencing projects.

The theoretical framework developed here provides a new perspective of understanding the code of life and evolution.

This paper aims at understanding teachers' (the authors refer to “teachers” in higher education as lecturers or senior lecturers) professional autonomy in the context of the current university English teachers in France.

The authors present here the preliminary results of the test-questionnaire the authors have made to gather main tendencies on the topic (the results were presented orally at the SAES national conference held in Paris from 20 to 22 May 2011, http://saes.univ-paris3.fr). This paper is organized in three different themes that correspond to the three main parts of the test-questionnaire.

The authors first show that the current degree of professional autonomy is both satisfying and an essential factor of self-development. The data underline the fact that teachers' professional autonomy is indeed a very important aspect of teaching as a job within the organizational university context. Then, the authors distinguish individualism from autonomy; stressing the fact that team-work does not entail less professional autonomy, contrary to what people may often think. Finally, most colleagues who participated in this first study have expressed concern that organizational constraints, such as the size of the groups, the obligation to conform to an overly constraining curriculum, the obligation to reach some success quotas or employment quotas, etc. could reduce or even threaten their professional autonomy and self-development.

Many books have been written on learners' autonomy and teachers' role on this aspect. Teachers' professional autonomy at university level on the other hand is a much less studied topic. Often taken for granted, this autonomy now appears to be questioned because of the implementation of new organizational systems.

Developing algorithms for automated detection and tracking of multiple objects is one challenge in the field of object tracking. Especially in a traffic video monitoring system, vehicle detection is an essential and challenging task. In the previous studies, many vehicle detection methods have been presented. These proposed approaches mostly used either motion information or characteristic information to detect vehicles. Although these methods are effective in detecting vehicles, their detection accuracy still needs to be improved. Moreover, the headlights and windshields, which are used as the vehicle features for detection in these methods, are easily obscured in some traffic conditions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, each frame will be captured from a video sequence and then the background subtraction is performed by using the Mixture-of-Gaussians background model. Next, the Shi-Tomasi corner detection method is employed to extract the feature points from objects of interest in each foreground scene and the hierarchical clustering approach is then applied to cluster and form them into feature blocks. These feature blocks will be used to track the moving objects frame by frame.

Using the proposed method, it is possible to detect the vehicles in both day-time and night-time scenarios with a 95 percent accuracy rate and can cope with irrelevant movement (waving trees), which has to be deemed as background. In addition, the proposed method is able to deal with different vehicle shapes such as cars, vans, and motorcycles.

This paper presents a hierarchical clustering of features approach for multiple vehicles tracking in traffic environments to improve the capability of detection and tracking in case that the vehicle features are obscured in some traffic conditions.

This study attempts to evaluate the effect of the corpus-based inductive teaching approach with multiple academic corpora (PICA, CAEC and Oxford Corpus of Academic English) and conventional deductive teaching approach (i.e., multiple-choice items, filling the gap, matching and underlining) on learning academic collocations by Iranian advanced EFL learners (students learning English as a foreign language).

This is a quasi-experimental, quantitative and qualitative study.

The result showed the experimental group outperformed significantly compared with the control group. The experimental group also shared their perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the corpus-assisted language teaching approach.

Despite growing progress in language pedagogy, methodologies and language curriculum design, there are still many teachers who experience poor performance in their students' vocabulary, whether in comprehension or production. In Iran, for example, even though mandatory English education begins at the age of 13, which is junior and senior high school, students still have serious problems in language production and comprehension when they reach university levels.

In this paper, the authors describe the step-by-step approach used to develop a trust-repair construct and a valid measurement scale for assessing employee perceptions of the most effective employee trust-repair practices.

The initial employee trust-repair scale (ETRS) was completed by 282 employees of a non-profit organization and validated by 101 employees of the administrative unit of the Finnish Army.

The 14-item seven-factor model was found to be reliable, valid and stable across the samples.

This study contributes to the current literature on trust repair by presenting the first validated measure for employee trust repair.

The findings provide a valuable instrument for practitioners to assess the state of employee trust-repair practices.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in an organizational context demonstrating an operationally valid and comprehensive measure for employee trust-repair practices.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a framework for assessing the level of localisation on web sites.

This paper identifies the key forms of localisation that may be evident on a web site. A two‐by‐two matrix is presented which incorporates language in one dimension and non‐language criteria in the other. Web sites are then evaluated against these criteria and mapped onto the matrix to assess the relative level of localisation between web sites. The criteria and matrix have been tested against web sites operating in the Greek exporting sector.

The framework was found to be easy to use in practice. While a large set of potential localisation criteria were identified, only a subgroup of these criteria are likely to be relevant for any target group of web sites and the framework should therefore be scoped to match the characteristics of the survey group. The issue of localisation was not found to have been addressed to any great extent amongst the sample of Greek exporting companies.

The sample used was small as the prime purpose was to test the usability of the framework, and further evaluations will be needed to confirm these initial findings.

Given the relative poor performance of the Greek exporting sector, localisation is an aspect that should be given higher priority. The framework represents a cost‐effective method for self‐assessment and benchmarking against competitors.

The framework is novel and should be usable by both web designers and users.

Collaborative recommender systems play a crucial role in providing personalized services to online consumers. Most online shopping sites and many other applications now use the collaborative recommender systems. The measurement of the similarity plays a fundamental role in collaborative recommender systems. Some of the most well-known similarity measures are: Pearson’s correlation coefficient, cosine similarity and mean squared differences. However, due to data sparsity, accuracy of the above similarity measures decreases, which makes the formation of inaccurate neighborhood, thereby resulting in poor recommendations. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel similarity measure based on potential field.

The proposed approach constructs a dense matrix: user-user potential matrix, and uses this matrix to compute potential similarities between users. Then the potential similarities are modified based on users’ preliminary neighborhoods, and k users with the highest modified similarity values are selected as the active user’s nearest neighbors. Compared to the rating matrix, the potential matrix is much denser. Thus, the sparsity problem can be efficiently alleviated. The similarity modification scheme considers the number of common neighbors of two users, which can further improve the accuracy of similarity computation.

Experimental results show that the proposed approach is superior to the traditional similarity measures.

The research highlights of this paper are as follows: the authors construct a dense matrix: user-user potential matrix, and use this matrix to compute potential similarities between users; the potential similarities are modified based on users’ preliminary neighborhoods, and k users with the highest modified similarity values are selected as the active user’s nearest neighbors; and the proposed approach performs better than the traditional similarity measures. The manuscript will be of particular interests to the scientists interested in recommender systems research as well as to readers interested in solution of related complex practical engineering problems.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale and use of subjective personal introspection (SPI) as a methodological approach.

SPI was utilised to develop a “narrative” of the author's own “action‐oriented” research experience within a multisector collaborative venture established by 13 partner organisations representing the academic, pharmaceutical industry and government sectors. The “confessional” stance that the study assumes describes some of the perceived tensions enacted during field work. The SPI approach is theoretical and reflective, as well as descriptive and analytical, in reporting the antecedents, actions, and outcomes in action‐oriented research.

Because the focus of the paper is subjective, personal, and introspective, it does not illustrate “findings” about multisector collaboration, but rather reflections and insights about the way the research was conducted.

The paper widens the forum for incorporating SPI beyond the consumer behaviour context to the context in which action‐oriented researchers incorporate introspection in their study of organisations.

The paper goes some way to bridging the gap between SPI and reflexivity (if there is indeed a gap) and it causes qualitative, action‐oriented organisational researchers to contemplate a number of questions: what is the role of the researcher; what is the source of their authority to narrate and what are they authorised to recount; and what are the consequences of this?