There is an increasing interest in sustainability practices for organizations. Organizations act sustainably when they support the three dimensions \of the triple bottom line. Industry 4.0 (I40) promises to afford organizations to act sustainably. However, few empirical pieces of research targeted the impact of I40 on the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability. Our investigation considered the adoption of I40 in a manufacturing company which we analyzed as a single case study. We describe the level of I40 adoption and the process through which the unit has adopted them. Our case confirms that I40 applications support the triple bottom line through the improvement of productivity and product quality (economic), continuous energy consumption monitoring (environmental), and safer work environment and less intense work-load and job enrichment (social). We contribute to the literature by identifying two trajectories of interaction among the three dimensions of the triple bottom line in the shift from a traditional manufacturing company to a knowledge-intense organization. In the trajectories found, the three dimensions of sustainability influence and reinforce each other.Sustainability 2019, 11, 36 2 of 17 investigations of sustainability in I40. Section 3 introduces the research design. Section 4 illustrates the single case study analysis. Section 5 illustrates the results of the case analysis discussing them regarding sustainability and the interaction among the TBL dimensions and I40. The article concludes in Section 6, proposing implications both for research and practice. Related LiteratureOur work is framed within the concept of sustainability and develops on the literature discussing I40 applications, and the sustainability potential of I40 applications. SustainabilityThe United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development first introduced the sustainability concept in 1987. In that year, the commission defined sustainability as an economic development model that allows to "meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future ones to meet their own needs" [11]. Sustainability is a multi-dimensional concept encompassing environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Such dimensions form the TBL view of sustainability (as shown in Figure 1) [2,3].Sustainability 2018, 10, x FOR PEER REVIEW 2 of 17 the single case study analysis. Section 5 illustrates the results of the case analysis discussing them regarding sustainability and the interaction among the TBL dimensions and I40. The article concludes in Section 6, proposing implications both for research and practice. Related LiteratureOur work is framed within the concept of sustainability and develops on the literature discussing I40 applications, and the sustainability potential of I40 applications.

Abstract:The transition to a circular economy bodes well for a future of environmentally sustainable growth and economic development. The implications and advantages of a shift to a circular economy have been extensively demonstrated by the literature on the subject. What has not been sufficiently investigated is how this paradigm can be enabled through the inter-organisational cooperation among different business enterprises. In order to illustrate this point, in this paper we aim to contribute to the circular economy debate by describing and discussing such a meta-model of inter-organisational cooperation. The present study is therefore based on the analysis of three cases from an equal number of industries, from which we identified factors of potential impact for the stimulation of cooperation in a circular economy perspective. Last, but not least, we discuss the relations between the case studies and try to formulate all possible implications for both managers and research.

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In this study, we analyse the value creation of Industry 4.0 (I40) technologies in flexible manufacturing (FM) under a sustainability perspective. I40 is a popular strategy that Western manufacturing organizations adopt to face competition from low-cost producers. Organizations adopting I40 use advanced digital technologies to make production processes more flexible and increasingly automated. Several pieces of evidence confirm how I40 leads to higher productivity and higher-quality products, improving the economic performance of organizations. However, increasing automation may also lead to the reduction of human labour in the production process, which may contribute to the disappearance of jobs, the reduction of expertise and the loss of know-how in manufacturing organizations. While the literature acknowledges the technical and economic advantages of I40, the sustainability of the value created through these technologies deserves further investigation. To address the gap, we complement the IT value theory with the concept of sustainability, including the three dimensions of economic, environmental and social sustainability. We perform a multiple case study analysis of four Italian manufacturing organizations that have successfully implemented I40 technologies in FM. The cases show that I40 technologies support sustainable organizational value when they are deployed with a worker-centric approach. In this condition, the organization leverages workforce activities to continuously fine-tune the technologies and to exploit the adaptive features of the technologies to continuously improve processes.

In the discipline of accounting, the resource-event-agent (REA) ontology is a well accepted conceptual accounting framework to analyze the economic phenomena within and across enterprises. Accordingly, it seems to be appropriate to use REA in the requirements elicitation to develop an information architecture of accounting and enterprise information systems. However, REA has received comparatively less attention in the field of business informatics and computer science. Some of the reasons may be that the REA ontology despite of its well grounded core concepts is (1) sometimes vague in the definition of the relationships between these core concepts, (2) misses a precise language to describe the models, and (3) does not come with an easy to understand graphical notation. Accordingly, we have started developing a domain specific modeling language specifically dedicated to REA models and corresponding tool support to overcome these limitations. In this paper we present our REA DSL which supports the basic set of REA concepts.