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Land is a main component of the earth system and one of the ‘goods’ over which humans have waged many wars and conflicts throughout history. In this chapter, I present the empirical and discursive dynamics that lead to ecological discrimination regarding land. I focus on three means by which Southern land is legally grabbed: private armies, discourses and laws. Much land dispossession is illegal, but in this chapter I focus on the legal forms because they are equally harmful and most of the times invisible and thus more difficult to prevent.

By adopting a decolonial critical standpoint, the scope of this paper is to discuss the concept of legitimacy in the international management (IM) field and conduct a critique of its epistemological limitations.

This paper presents the approach to legitimacy most commonly used in the IM field in order to understand its limitations in analyzing the historical development of Brazilian ethanol.

The historical analysis of the Brazilian case shows that the narrow perspective underpinning the concept of legitimacy in the IM literature overlooks broader political and power relations since the focus of analysis is conducted from the standpoint of multinational corporations operating abroad. Thus, coloniality, international impositions of trends and fashions, illegitimacy and delegitimations, and dominant colonial designs are particular examples of forms of power and politics that are not visible in analysis using legitimacy in IM.

IM has rarely used legitimacy in contrast with other areas of knowledge that work with the notion of international content. The paper generates insights that can foster other interpretations and uses for the concept of legitimacy and illegitimacy in IM.

In this chapter we examine how the small scale agro-industries located in Southern Brazil, specifically in the North of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, started to deal with changes in their production processes, how they created and adapted technologies, and devised new products. Among the main outcomes of the study we highlight the novelties observed during the field research, especially regarding the family situation and the agro-manufacturing activities, in which we observed (i) a relative raise in autonomy; (ii) improvement in both the income level and the quality of life of household members; (iii) creation of new nested markets and marketing channels; (iv) development of more environmentally sustainable products; (v) improvement of the value added to food products; and (vi) development of new interfaces between families and other social actors.

This study aims to draw researchers’ attention to the need to differentiate within the emerging market multinational companies (EMNCs) category. This study focuses on international business in Latin America to argue that the region’s specific institutional characteristics have consequences for within-firm decision-making regarding internationalization strategies. Additionally, the study suggests that to develop a more specific understanding of international business in emerging markets, it is important to consider how decision-makers define value and how they can capture such value.

The approach used in this study draws on the bathtub analogy used in micro-foundations research in international business. It proposes a multilevel analysis in which micro-level variation in within-firm decision-making is considered, while accounting for the conditioning effects of macro-level contextual factors.

The study identifies characteristics of the Latin American institutional context that are relevant to international business strategies and that potentially differ from other emerging market contexts. These include the pendular shifts to and from pro-market economic reform, fragmented government intervention in business, underdeveloped capital markets, low competition among firms and polarized labor markets. The study explains how these characteristics shape the definition of value and firm strategies to capture value in international markets, and provides examples from firms in different industries.

This study applies a value creation and capture perspective to international business in Latin America, allowing for the simultaneous consideration of macrolevel institutional characteristics and microlevel variation in decision-making regarding internationalization strategies. This perspective not only helps to distinguish Latin American EMNCs from companies from other emerging market contexts, but also explains the considerable variation in the internationalization strategies of firms within the region.