Realising Potential: Disability Confidence Builds Better Business

[Excerpt] ‘Realising potential’ sets out the latest thinking on how disabled people contribute to business success and how business, in the UK and globally, benefits from disability confidence. It provides the information senior business decision makers need to manage and profit from the disability dimension to key business trends: including an aging population, increasingly individualised customer relations, changing working patterns and enabling technology. Business must address the disability component of these trends and develop disability confidence if it is to compete in an increasingly complex environment and create value from difference. ‘Realising potential’ highlights the strategic, commercial, legal, societal, ethical, and professional benefits of getting it right on disability – the six building blocks of any business case for disability confidence

Decarbonizing Heavy-Duty Transport: Parameters Influencing The Shift To Zero-Emission Trucks In Logistics

This paper explores the critical factors influencing the adoption of Zero-Emission Heavy-Duty Trucks (ZE-HDT) within the automotive logistics sector in Europe. Employing a systematic literature review (SLR) augmented by forward and backward research (FBR) methodologies, the study identifies key technological, operational, and infrastructural parameters affecting the deployment of Battery Electric Trucks (BET) and Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Electric Trucks (FCET). A refined PESTEL framework, tailored to incorporate operational factors, serves as the basis for a comprehensive descriptive analysis. To ensure a thorough and practical understanding, expert interviews were conducted, involving senior industry managers and stakeholders from truck manufacturing, logistics companies, infrastructure providers, and researchers. These interviews were instrumental in validating and enriching the literature findings, providing real-world insights and assigning an importance scale to each identified parameter. The integration of expert perspectives highlights the complex realities and challenges faced in the adoption of ZE-HDTs, offering valuable qualitative data that complements the systematic review. The insights garnered from these discussions aim to enhance decision-making processes in the transition to ZE-HDTs, ensuring a holistic consideration of critical elements. This research contributes to the existing body of knowledge by offering a detailed state-of-the-art review, thereby aiding stakeholders in exploiting the advantages of ZE-HDTs and guiding future research to optimize their adoption in the logistics industry. The study's findings are poised to influence strategic measures and policy formulations, ultimately fostering the growth of sustainable heavy-duty transportation solutions

Mainstreaming Responsible Investment

The outcome of a Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative's inquiry, namely: why the investment community places only modest emphasis on social, environmental, and ethical issues in investment valuation and asset allocation decisions. The report identifies obstacles and explores possible changes in policies and practices that could serve to integrate non-financial considerations into their investment strategies

The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship

This short publication defines and describes the notions of corporate citizenship and of the New Economy. It explores the social and environmental challenges and opportunities posed by the New Economy, and the approaches to corporate citizenship that are enabled or disabled by its emergence, particularly regarding social partnerships

Development of an ETL-Pipeline for Automatic Sustainability Data Analysis

As the scientific community and organizations increase their investments in sustainable development, the phrase is increasingly being used deceptively. To be sustainable, one must examine all three aspects, namely environmental, social, and economic. The release of sustainability reports has generated a vast amount of data regarding company sustainability practices. This data demands time and effort to evaluate and extract meaningful information. This research aims to create criteria that include a list of keywords for analyzing sustainability reports. Using these criteria, a proposed application based on the concepts of Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) was developed to automatize the process of data analysis. The results generated by the ETL tool can be used to conduct qualitative and quantitative assessments of the organization’s sustainability practices as well as compare the transparency in sustainability reporting across different industries

Der Palatin in den Publikationen Hieronymus Cocks

Der Maler Hieronymus Cock gründete zwischen 1548 und 1550 den Verlag Aux Quatre Vents in Antwerpen und leitete damit eine neue Ära für die Herstellung und den Vertrieb von Kunstdrucken außerhalb von Italien ein. In der Magisterarbeit wird anhand der Darstellungen der Ruinen auf dem Palatin untersucht, welche zeichnerischen Vorlagen Hieronymus Cock für seine drei europaweit erfolgreich verkauften Ruinenserien verwendet haben kann und ob eine vorherige Romreise des Verlegers vorausgesetzt werden muss. Die Untersuchung zeigt, dass der zu identifizierende Teil der zeichnerischen Vorlagen von Maarten van Heemskerck bzw. aus dessen künstlerischem Umfeld stammt. Obwohl weitere Vorlagen nicht eindeutig zu identifizieren sind, kann eine eigenhändige Anfertigung durch Hieronymus Cock in Rom ausgeschlossen werden. Die zahlreichen offensichtlichen Ungenauigkeiten und Verwechslungen bei den Darstellungen des Palatins sowie bei der Beschriftung auch der weiteren Monumentansichten zeugen von einem eher geringen Kenntnisstand der antiken römischen Ruinen. Mehr als um dokumentarische Genauigkeit geht es Cock bei der Wiedergabe der antiken Monumente um die Vermittlung eines ästhetischen Konzepts: Ruinen werden bei ihm meist nur ausschnitthaft wiedergegeben, sie sind dennoch von überragender Größe, häufig fast bis zur Unkenntlichkeit verfallen und von Pflanzen bewachsen.Between 1548 and 1550 the publishing house Aux Quatre Vents was established by the painter Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp. Within a few years it became the market leader in northern European art print production. Instancing Cocks Palatine views, this MA thesis investigates on which master drawings Cock could have based his three Europe-wide successfully sold print series, containing views of Roman ruins, and if it’s durable to suppose that Cock himself draw up these views in Rome. The analysis demonstrates that the larger part of the clearly identifiable drawings has been prepared by Maarten van Heemskerck and his copyists. Although there are no other drafts to be known, it''s very unlikely that Cock ever saw the Roman ruins on site. The numerous mistakes concerning the monument identifications and the sometimes inaccurate representations attest to a minor knowledge of the displayed antique Roman monuments. Cock is obviously less interested in an exact representation of the antique vestiges, than in an aesthetic idea: though Cocks ruins are parts of whole monuments, they are extraordinarily tall, extremely damaged and overgrown with plants

Struggling with the Praxis of Social Accounting: Stakeholders, Accountability, Audits and Procedures

Addresses three related, though not entirely congruent, aims. Seeks, first, to initiate moves towards a "normative theory" - a conceptual framework - for the developing of social accounting by organizations. Second, aims inductively to draw out best practice from a range of social accounting experiments, illustrated, in particular, by reference to two short cases from Traidcraft plc and Traidcraft Exchange. Third, draws from the conclusions reached in the exploration of the first two aims and attempts to identify any clear "social accounting standards" or "generally acceptable social accounting principles" which can be used to guide the new and emerging social accounting practice. Presents a number of subtexts which attempt to link back to the accounting literature's more trenchant critiques of social accounting; to address the tension between academic theorizing and engaging with practice; to synthesize different approaches to social accounting practice; and to respond to the urgency that the recent upsurge in interest in social accounting places on the newly formed Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability. An ambitious paper which means that coverage of issues must be thinner than might typically be expected - exploratory, rather than providing answer, offers a collective view from experience and encourage engagement with the rapidly evolving social accounting agenda

A Framework for Applying Reinforcement Learning to Deadlock Handling in Intralogistics

Intralogistics systems, while complex, are crucial for a range of industries. One of their challenges is deadlock situations that can disrupt operations and decrease efficiency. This paper presents a four-stage framework for applying reinforcement learning algorithms to manage deadlocks in such systems. The stages include Problem Formulation, Model Selection, Algorithm Selection, and System Deployment. We carefully identify the problem, select an appropriate model to represent the system, choose a suitable reinforcement learning algorithm, and finally deploy the solution. Our approach provides a structured method to tackle deadlocks, improving system resilience and responsiveness. This comprehensive guide can serve researchers and practitioners alike, offering a new avenue for enhancing intralogistics performance. Future research can explore the framework’s effectiveness and applicability across different systems