The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/0969-6474.htm

TLO
18,1 Sustainable learning
organizations
Luis E. Velazquez, Javier Esquer and Nora E. Munguı́a
36 Industrial Engineering Department, University of Sonora, Sonora, Spain, and
Rafael Moure-Eraso
Department of Work Environment, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Lowell,
Massachusetts, USA

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to debate how companies may better become a sustainable
learning organization by offering the most used and insightful concepts of sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach – Through literature review, learning organization and
sustainability perspectives are explored and compared.
Findings – Learning sustainability experiences around the world have provided tools and mechanics
to companies to enhance economic growth without affecting environment and communities.
Originality/value – The paper explains points of convergence and divergence between learning
organization and sustainability approaches and provides insightful remarks from literature.
Keywords Learning organizations, Sustainable development, Economic sustainability, Pollution control
Paper type Conceptual paper

The Learning Organization
Vol. 18 No. 1, 2011
pp. 36-44
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0969-6474
DOI 10.1108/09696471111095984
Introduction
Sustainable development has become popular for potentially integrating economic,
environmental sustainability and social dimensions, which are known as the triple
bottom line, in the performance evaluation of businesses ( Jamali, 2006).
Although it is true that awareness of sustainable development is increasing among
CEOs and managers; organizations are still being blamed for causing environmental
damages to our planet by polluting air, water, and soil.
Despite many efforts at global and local levels, sustainable development has been
reached to only a small degree because learning enough to make this concept
operational has not been possible. Contrarily, sustainability initiatives have flourished
around the world as a way to promote, if not all, at least one dimension of sustainable
development, but expecting to influence the other two.
Learning about sustainable development has been complicated because of a lack of
pragmatism; however, this concept keeps being a matter of debates in journals, books,
and other means of scientific divulgation.
Theoretically, a sustainable learning organization would be an organization with
enough sustainability knowledge, would act according to, and would be considered as
a role model to prevent, eliminate and/or reduce the environmental and occupational
risks associated with its operations while enhancing and strengthening its
profitability; unfortunately in the real world, there is no such kind of organization, yet.
The purpose of this article is to explore how firms may better become a sustainable
learning organization by offering the most used and insightful concepts of
sustainability.
Learning sustainable development Sustainable
Sustainable development is a concept that was primarily learned by educators and learning
practitioners out of the formal education systems, but new generations of students are
now learning in classroom of formal education systems. The concept was coined in organizations
1987 and refers to the development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs (WECD,
1987). 37
Although there is not complete agreement about this idea due to different and,
sometimes, incompatible interpretations (Rosenbaum, 2004 and Esquer et al., 2008); at
least, there is a consensus that this must include economic, social and environmental
dimensions (Byrch et al., 2007).
Literature about sustainable development emphasizes the need for systemic
thinking on preserving natural resources, eliminating poverty, promoting equity, and
reducing population growth as well as increasing quality of life (Seifferta and Loch,
2005). Sustainable development is seen in different ways by diverse stakeholders and
they act towards it depending on their knowledge, background, experience, perception,
values, and context (Prugh and Assadourian, 2003, and Filho, 2000).
For instance, from economic theory, sustainable development involves a radical
shift from a growth economy to a steady-state economy (Daly, 1996). From
environmental perspective, this requires the long-term viability of resource usage and
limits to the human impact that ecosystems can sustain (Edwards, 2005). And from a
socio-biological standpoint, this approach should maintain cultural and social system
of interactions with ecosystems; and respect for nature integrated in culture (Gallopı́n,
2003).
At this point, asking the following question is worthy; who can hold the knowledge
for reaching sustainable development? The answer is quite simple; nobody can hold it
at all. Neither a government nor business organization has proven to have the enough
knowledge and skills for reaching sustainable development.
Given this reality, understanding that organizations of all sizes can contribute to
sustainable development rather than reach that kind of development by themselves is
important.
Today, finding large, midsized, or small organizations of all kinds that have
launched and maintained sustainable initiatives is becoming more common; and, as an
umbrella for such initiatives, identifying policy options leading towards sustainability
and developing proper mechanisms for their implementation require the enhanced
learning of natural and human systems (Clayton and Radcliffe, 1996).

Toward sustainability approaches

With the goal of contributing to sustainable development and overcoming obstacles to
prevent, eliminate and/or reduce the environmental and occupational risks associated
to the production of goods and services; firms should create, operate and maintain
sustainability initiatives.
Fundamentally, there have been two approaches for coping with unsustainability
problems: the preventive and control approaches.
The preventive approach calls for reduction and eliminations of risks at the source;
this means that efforts are addressed to identify operations and tasks that potentially
could pollute the environment, could injury to workers or could affect communities.
TLO On the contrary, the control approach is aimed at isolating the risks already created
18,1 from the environment, workers or community and by this mean avoids the damage
that the risks generated can cause.
Traditionally, the control approach has led the businesses’ efforts to minimize,
rather than prevent, negative impacts to environment, and workers perhaps inspired at
the litany that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but this mentality is changing among
38 entrepreneurs where almost nobody argues anymore that prevention is better than
fixing; yet in many cases, putting into practice control approach initiatives is still
necessary.
In other words, the prevention approach is expected to be better than control, since
the former involves taking actions on deterring potential causes of adverse effects and
the latter requires actions taken in response to the effects once the fact happened
(Hirschhorn et al., 1993).
The waste management hierarchy prioritizes prevention over control efforts, the
following tools are the preferred environmental management practices recommended
by the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA (US EPA, 2005; Mulholland and
Dyer, 1999; and Bishop, 2000):
(1) Source reduction. These are practices that examine the life cycle of products
from the extraction or acquisition of raw materials through the process, use and
the final disposal of the product to look for preventing, reducing or eliminating
risks at the source.
(2) Reuse and recycling. When preventing is not possible, firms still can close the
loop of materials by reusing and recycling instead of discarding them in a
landfill. Reusing is a technique that extends the use materials by using them for
different purposes. The generation and use of energy is not required; therefore,
it is preferred over recycling. Firms accomplish reuse by designing products
can be repaired and disabled for easy reuse or by renting products instead of
selling such as copier machines, cars, or furniture. On the other hand, recycling
reprocesses material into new materials for being manufactured in another
product. The use of energy is necessary and in most of the causes, generation of
electricity generates pollution. For this reason, recycling is not considered a
prevention technique.
(3) Treatment. This is a control technique that is performed by chemical or
physical methods before toxic materials are released into the environment or
they can be reused. Treatment focuses on avoiding that wastes, emissions or
effluents affecting the environment and it is recommended only when any of the
techniques above cannot be used.
(4) Disposal. Sooner or later, remaining materials also lose quality and keep some
level of toxicity, therefore need to be responsibly discarded through either safe
chemical landfill or directly to the environment at levels that can be safely
assimilated by nature.

Whatever pollution management techniques are chosen by organizations, obstacles

will emerge and correcting measures will be necessary. In many organizations,
managers find enormous conformity by adopting control approaches because this has
been the usual way to fight against pollution. To overcome this resistance, the United
Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) encourages the Sustainable
implementation of Cleaner Pollution and Pollution Prevention strategies as a way to learning
better contributing to sustainable development.
organizations
Learning cleaner production and pollution prevention
The pollution prevention term was originally introduced and promoted in 1975 by the
3M Company when launching the Pollution Prevention Pays Program (Bishop, 2000). 39
Afterward, The Environmental Protection Agency in the Unites States (US EPA, 2010)
defined pollution prevention as:
Reducing or eliminating waste at the source by modifying production processes, promoting
the use of non-toxic or less-toxic substances, implementing conservation techniques, and
re-using materials rather than putting them into the waste stream.
According to Baas (2005), the Pollution Prevention concept was transferred from North
America to Europe in the second half of the decade of the 1980s; when the United
Nation Environment Program (UNEP) defined Cleaner Production as:
The continuous application of an integrated environmental strategy to processes, products
and services to increase efficiency and reduce risks to humans and the environment
(UNEP, n.d.).
In spite of their origins, the terms “pollution prevention” and “cleaner production” can
be found in the literature interchangeably because both are grounded on aiming efforts
at the source of the problem; in fact, finding the terms together such as “cleaner
production and pollution prevention” is very common; however because of the word
“production”, the terminology of cleaner production fits more for industrial settings
than the terminology of pollution prevention that can fit either industrial firms or
companies that offer services such as hotels, commerce, schools, etc.
In the transition towards sustainable development, proponents of the prevention
approach argue that Environmental Management Systems (EMS) can be used
complementarily providing an effective operational structure to analyze energy and
materials flows, and also to identify and address environmental impacts, including
waste discharges and emissions (Fresner, 1998 and Robèrt et al., 2002).
An Environmental Management System is an orderly set of components that serves
organizations to accomplish one or more environmental goals (Stapleton et al., 2001)
and improve their environmental performance (Perotto et al., 2008). Among others, the
Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) (EU, 2010) and the ISO 14000 (ISO, 2010)
are frameworks that assist to organizations in managing environmental requirements.
An effective EMS will help organizations to reveal ways to minimize their
environmental impacts at the same time as reducing costs or increasing productivity,
along with coordinating the environmental activities to reach better organizational
efficiency (Bansal and Bogner, 2002); and it will also assist companies in their transition
to sustainable development by focusing their attention on environmental issues, and
bringing them into the main stream of corporate decision-making (IISD, 1996).

Sustainable learning organizations

Learning organization refers to an ideal form of organization where several processes
take place for learning (Örtenblad, 2001). This concept has been challenged by Grieves
TLO (2008) who suggested the idea of abandoning the learning organization concept. The
18,1 sustainable development concept has also faced a lot of critiques because of its vague
meaning ie. it can mean all or nothing at the same time (Kliucininkas, 2001). This has
become an intuitive concept that could be mentioned as a goal in any organization
almost regardless of what they are doing. “Nobody really knows what sustainability’s
minimum technical requirements are” (Prugh et al., 2000). On the other hand, an
40 imprecise definition of the term sustainable development has allowed a considerable
consensus to evolve in support of the main idea that it is both morally and
economically wrong treat the world as a business in liquidation (Daly, 1991).
Should it then be valid to refer to firms as sustainable learning organizations? In the
above paragraph it has been stated that a sustainable learning organization would be
an organization that has enough sustainability knowledge and acts accordingly, and
that may be considered as a role model to prevent, eliminate and/or reduce the
environmental and occupational risks associated to their operations while enhancing
and strengthening its profitability.
A decade ago, Allenby (1999) claimed that there was not an organization that could
call itself a sustainable organization because it is immersed in an unsustainable global
economy. However, Nattrass and Altmore (1999) and Frankel (1998) suggests an
industry’s sustainability learning timeline in which sustainability knowledge can be
developed to realize that they are part of nature and consciously integrate their vision
and operations with natural cycle processes.
Kjaerheim (2005) remarks the importance of pursuit of a prevention approach to
contribute to sustainable development by claiming that although CP probably does not
create a sustainable society, “but it is an important step in the right direction because it
produces quantifiable results, raises awareness and changes attitudes”.
Learning organizations can have the capability to respond to the changing
environment by developing corporate values aligned with human resources values and
also by using tools and disciplines to integrate in a practical way natural environment
into business framework (Nattrass and Altmore, 1999).
Establishing indicators to evaluate progress toward sustainability is important; the
UNEP (2003, p. 5) states that it is necessary to center the cleaner production programs
on imparting learning to achieve long-term change by, for example, training CP
trainers on communication and relational skills. Roberts (1999) states three factors that
would assist the wider and more successful uptake of CP and other proactive
environmental approaches:
(1) understanding why – companies’ ability to clearly understand why
environmental issues are important and the strategic importance to their
business of working towards sustainability;
(2) a clear goal and common language – the ability of all staff within the
organization to clearly understand what sustainability means and from this
shared mental model develop a shared vision of where they are trying to go with
their program and why it is important; and
(3) the extent to which the companies have the internal resources/skills/culture to
be able to effectively implement the major changes which moving to
sustainability requires.
Maintaining efforts over time to become a sustainable learning organization must be Sustainable
an ultimate goal in all kind of organization, but most importantly is to learn about learning
sustainability over the process.
The sustainability learning process has been a kind of trial and error method that organizations
has required to be reviewed and analyzed constantly (Asian Development Bank, 2002);
however, the experimental learning has provided numerous opportunities to obtain
valuable insights in the learning process to understand sustainability (Dieleman and 41
Huisingh, 2006). In this sense, the identification of policy options for adopting
sustainability has required the learning of natural and human systems (Clayton and
Radcliffe, 1996).
In the early 1990s, sustainability was seen predominantly as an icon of
environmental concern (Dragun and Jakobsson, 1997); by today, firms have learned to
conceive sustainability as a broad structural approach that takes into account
economic, social, and environment aspects.

Conclusion
It is clear that sustainability efforts at a particular firm are not enough for reaching
sustainable development; however, progress in sustainability through cleaner
production and pollution prevention initiatives cannot be denied (JCP, 2006 and
Miller et al., 2008). Sustainability is a process to transit to sustainable development; it is
a learning process that must be measure in a continuous scale where the stock of
knowledge is increased along the time. Taking into consideration this perspective, it is
inadequate to consider sustainable development as discrete data where there are only
two possible scores “sustainable or unsustainable”.
In sum, the existing knowledge about learning organization and sustainable
development does not give a clear direction to firms’ managers about how to become a
sustainable learning organization; however, the learning sustainability experiences
around the world have provided tools and mechanics to companies to enhance its
economic profits without affecting environment and communities.
The insistence on pursuit of the adoption of sustainable development by all
members of society has been perhaps the major reason to perceiving this a failure
rather than an ultimate goal for society. The world is what it is; there are organizations
not interested in contributing to sustainable development; but at the same time, there
are also thousands of businesses’ sustainability initiatives taking places daily around
the world. The performance of those sustainability initiatives represents a paradigm
shift which is necessary to contribute to sustainable development.
In order to contribute to increasing the stock of sustainability learning, educators
must perceive the need for an interdisciplinary education that that goes beyond
traditional teaching. Learning and applying the prevention approach allows the
integration of environmental, occupational, and public health issues because one
solution at the source can avoid several effects over time; yet, what it has been learned
from the control approach cannot be discarded because it can be useful when
prevention is not feasible.
The sustainability learning process is not going to be stopped by semantic
discussions about what is a sustainable learning organization; sustainability leaders in
organizations are clear about where to go and they are learning about the best way to
go under particular conditions. Certainly there is not a 100 percent sustainable learning
TLO organization; however, if organizations have the honest commitment to contribute to
18,1 sustainable development and if this managerial commitment leads their initiatives;
then, they can be called sustainable learning organizations.

References
42 Allenby, B.R. (1999), Industrial Ecology: Policy Framework and Implementation, Prentice-Hall,
Upper Saddle River, NJ, p. 18.
Asian Development Bank (2002), Guidelines for Policy Integration and Strategic and Action
Planning for the Achievement of Cleaner Production, Asian Development Bank, Manila.
Baas, L. (2005), Cleaner Production and Industrial Ecology: Dynamic Aspects of the Introduction
and Dissemination of New Concepts in Industrial Practice, Eburon Academic Publishers,
Delft.
Bansal, P. and Bogner, W. (2002), “Deciding on ISO 14001: economics, institutions, and context”,
Long Range Planning, Vol. 35, pp. 269-90.
Bishop, P. (2000), Pollution Prevention: Fundamentals and Practice, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
Byrch, C., Kearins, K., Milne, M. and Morgan, R. (2007), “Sustainable what? A cognitive approach
to understanding sustainable development”, Qualitative Research in Accounting &
Management, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 26-52.
Clayton, A.M.H. and Radcliffe, N.J. (1996), Sustainability: A Systems Approach, Earthscan Ltd,
London.
Daly, H.E. (1991), Steady-State Economics, Island Press, Washington, DC, p. 248.
Daly, H.E. (1996), Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Beacon Press,
Boston, MA, p. 31.
Dieleman, H. and Huisingh, D. (2006), “Games by which to learn and teach about sustainable
development: exploring the relevance of games and experiential learning for
sustainability”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 14, pp. 837-47.
Dragun, A.K. and Jakobsson, K.M. (1997), Sustainability and Global Environmental Policy: New
Perspectives, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, Lyme, CT, p. 310.
Edwards, A.R. (2005), The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, New Society
Publishers, Gabriola Island, p. 21.
Esquer, J., Velazquez, L. and Munguia, N. (2008), “Perceptions of core elements for sustainability
management systems (SMS)”, Management Decision, Vol. 46 No. 7, pp. 1027-38.
EU (2010), “The EU Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS)”, available at: http://ec.europa.
eu/environment/emas/index_en.htm (accessed 27 May 2010).
Filho, W.L. (2000), “Dealing with misconceptions on the concept of sustainability”, International
Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 9-19.
Frankel, C. (1998), In Earth’s Company: Business Environment and the Challenge of
Sustainability, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island.
Fresner, J. (1998), “Cleaner production as a means for effective environmental management”,
Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 6, pp. 171-9.
Gallopı́n, G. (2003), “A systems approach to sustainability and sustainable development”, Serie
medio ambiente y desarrollo, No. 64, Sustainable Development and Human Settlements
Division of ECLAC.
Grieves, J. (2008), “Why we should abandon the idea of the learning organization”, The Learning
Organization, Vol. 15 No. 6, pp. 463-73.
Hirschhorn, J., Jackson, T. and Baas, L. (1993), “Towards prevention – the emerging Sustainable
environmental management paradigm”, in Jackson, T. (Ed.), Clean Production Strategies:
Developing Preventive Environmental Management in the Industrial Economy, Stockholm learning
Environment Institute, Lewis Publishers, Stockholm and Boca Raton, FL, pp. 125-42. organizations
IISD (1996), Global Green standards: ISO 14000 and Sustainable Development, Vol. 14000, The
International Institute for Sustainable Development, Winnipeg.
ISO (2010), “ISO 14000 essentials”, available at: www.iso.org/iso/iso_14000_essentials (accessed 43
27 May 2010).
Jamali, D. (2006), “Insights into triple bottom line integration from a learning organization
perspective”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 809-21.
JCP (2006), “Advancing pollution prevention and cleaner production – Canada’s contribution”,
Editorial, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 14, pp. 539-41.
Kjaerheim, G. (2005), “Cleaner production and sustainability”, Journal of Cleaner Production,
Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 329-39.
Kliucininkas, L. (2001), “Assessment of sustainability: studies at universities and colleges in
Lithuania”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 2 No. 3, p. 252.
Miller, G., Burke, J., McComas, C. and Dick, K. (2008), “Advancing pollution prevention and cleaner
production – USA’s contribution”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 16, pp. 665-72.
Mulholland, K.L. and Dyer, J.A. (1999), Pollution Prevention: Methodology, Technologies and
Practices, American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Nattrass, B. and Altmore, M. (1999), The Natural Step for Business: Wealth, Ecology, and the
Evolutionary Corporation, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island.
Örtenblad, A. (2001), “On differences between organizational learning and learning
organization”, The Learning Organization, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 125-33.
Perotto, E., Canziani, R., Marchesi, R. and Butelli, P. (2008), “Environmental performance,
indicators and measurement uncertainty in EMS context: a case study”, Journal of Cleaner
Production, Vol. 16, pp. 517-30.
Prugh, T. and Assadourian, E. (2003), “What is sustainability, anyway?”, World Watch
Magazine, September/October.
Prugh, T., Costanza, R. and Daly, H.E. (2000), The Local Politics of Global Sustainability, Island
Press, Washington, DC, p. 15.
Robèrt, K.-H., Schmidt-Bleek, B., Aloisi de Larderel, J., Basile, G., Jansen, J.L., Kuehr, R., Price
Thomas, P., Suzuki, M., Hawken, P. and Wackernagel, M. (2002), “Strategic sustainable
development – selection, design and synergies of applied tools”, Journal of Cleaner
Production, Vol. 10, pp. 197-214.
Roberts, L. (1999), “The natural step, cleaner production and learning organisations: why, where to,
and how”, in Scott, J.A. and Pagan, R.J. (Eds), Proceedings of the 2nd Asia Pacific Cleaner
Production Roundtable, Brisbane, Australia, 21-23 April 1999, Vol. 1999, pp. 203-11.
Rosenbaum, W.A. (2004), Environmental Politics and Policy, CQ Press, Washington, DC.
Seifferta, M.E.B. and Loch, C. (2005), “Systemic thinking in environmental management: support
for sustainable development”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 13 No. 12, pp. 1197-202.
Stapleton, P.J., Glover, M.A. and Davis, S.P. (2001), Environmental Management Systems:
An Implementation Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Organizations, 2nd ed., NSF
International, Ann Arbor, MI.
UNEP (2003), Cleaning Up: Experience and Knowledge to Finance Investments in Cleaner
Production, Division of Technology, Industry and Economics, UNEP, Paris.
TLO UNEP (n.d.), “Resource efficiency and cleaner production”, available at: www.unep.fr/scp/cp/
(accessed 27 May 2010).
18,1 US EPA (2005), Pollution Prevention Framework (P2), EPA-748-B-04-001.
US EPA (2010), “Pollution Prevention (P2)”, available at: www.epa.gov/p2/index.htm (accessed
27 May 2010).
WCED (1987), Our Common Future. World Commission on Environment and. Development,
44 Oxford University Press, New York, NY.

About the authors

Luis E. Velazquez holds a doctoral degree in Engineering Science with major in Cleaner
Production from University of Massachusetts Lowell and postgraduate studies at Erasmus
University in Holland and at the University of Applied Sciences Zittau-Gorlitz in Germany. He is
also adjunct faculty in the Work Environment Department of the University of Massachusetts
Lowell. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to science in the field of
sustainability in institutions of higher education, cleaner production, and studies on corporate
social responsibility and to disseminate the concept of sustainable communities. He is the author
of interesting articles in international journals and has lectured in more than 15 countries in
Europe and the USA. Currently, he is a member of the National System of Researchers with Level
1 and serves as graduate coordinator of the Sustainable Development Certificate and academic
leader of the academic group of Sustainable Engineering. Luis E. Velazquez is the corresponding
author and can be contacted at: luis_velazquez@industrial.uson.mx
Javier Esquer is an Industrial and Systems Engineer with a Doctor of Sciences degree in Cleaner
Production by the University of Massachusetts-Lowell as well as a Sustainable Development
Certificate by the University of Sonora (UNISON). He has been an enthusiastic promoter of
sustainable development in his community and has participated in several initiatives and
programs on environmental protection through UNISON. He has also been a speaker at events of
several kinds, locally, regionally and internationally. His areas of interest include Sustainable
Development, Pollution Prevention, Occupational Safety and Industrial Hygiene, Cleaner
Production, Sustainability Management Systems, and Education for Sustainable Development.
Nora E. Munguı́a is an alumna of the doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts
Lowell in Engineering Science with a major in Cleaner Production. She is a full-time professor in
the Department of Industrial Engineering and also serves as a researcher in the Sustainable
Development Graduate Program in the University of Sonora in Mexico. She is a member of the
National System of Researchers and her most recent works are focused on promoting strategies
to prevent, eliminate and reduce occupational hazards in the Mexican industry. She is the
president of the Sustainable Engineering Academy.
Rafael Moure-Eraso is an Industrial Hygienist with an interest in work environment policy.
His research interests include the application of next generation environmental technologies to
occupational health management; the development of sustainable models of industrial
production to replace market model, exploring sustainability unexpected outcomes of public
health improvements. He is especially interested in the international aspects of sustainable
development and the participation of workers in these activities. He has also studied the factors
influencing the occupational health of Latino populations in the USA. His research has included
collaboration with colleagues of the social and health sciences at UML and the Swedish National
Institute for Working Life. He also had joint projects with industrial engineers at the University
of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico.

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com

Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints