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The raised competitiveness among technology companies, especially for being able to work with markets physically distant from their final consumer, makes it important to know the employee’s perception about the built environment since the physical workspaces influence productivity. This paper aims to analyze the attributes and dimensions of the built environment of a development software company that most impact the employee’s satisfaction through their perception. It allows the company to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the built environment, enhancing the employee’s satisfaction, productivity and, consequently, the company revenues.

This research applied a survey by the drop off method and analyzed data through confirmatory factor analysis and multiple linear regression. Therefore, these methods explain how the attributes behave in each theoretical dimension and evaluate the relation between the dependent and independent dimensions.

The theoretical result of this research concerns the employee’s satisfaction with the built environment of a software development company. Overall, employee satisfaction is related to the dimensions of functionality, appearance and personal relationships, not being significant aspects of configuration. On the other hand, the employee’s overall satisfaction with the built environment is related to the functional dimension.

This research limitation is related to the size of the sample, which is a pre-determined and fixed population: all the company’s employees.

Perceived quality applied to a work environment of a software development company.

The figure of the femme fatale is attached to a range of contested meanings around femininity, sexuality and violence. Despite its ambiguity and its origins in art, myth and fiction, the term has proven popular in giving a name to violent articulations of female power in non-fictional settings by journalists. In this chapter, I outline the figure of the femme fatale as an archetype of women's violence that appears throughout Western popular culture, and provide an overview of the term's definitions and cultural meanings. In doing so, I trace the figure's movement across different forms and genres of popular culture. I identify a number of themes in the existing scholarship around the figure: feminist criticism of the figure; the value that feminist film scholars have found in the figure as a symbol of power and sexual transgression; the relationship between the femme fatale, race and the colonial imagination; and the way the idea of the femme fatale has been used in reporting of real-life women's violence.

This study examines the role of universities in the social entrepreneurship ecosystems (SEEs) in Latin America from the perspective of female academic staff, administrators and outreach workers of universities in the region.

Using a qualitative approach, the study scrutinises in-depth interviews conducted with 24 women from eight Latin American universities.

The findings underscore the pivotal role of universities in promoting social entrepreneurship through knowledge generation, entrepreneur training, network enhancement and the promotion of equity. They also highlight the importance of incorporating a gender perspective into university programmes and practices.

The qualitative nature and small, diverse sample of this research inherently limit its scope. However, these limitations arise from the exploratory approach adopted, which was confined to eight Latin American countries. Further comparative studies in different contexts are needed to deepen the understanding of the dynamics involved.

Universities should offer more tangible support and training in social entrepreneurship with a gender focus. Governments can create incentives for universities to prioritise their contribution in this area.

The study emphasises the potential of women-led social entrepreneurship initiatives to generate positive impact, underscoring the need for inclusive supportive environments.

By providing insights on the role of Latin American universities in SEEs from a gender perspective, this study contributes to limited literature on the intersection of social entrepreneurship, gender, higher education and geographic context in the region. The research underscores the need to further explore how gender and regional dynamics influence social entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This study analyzes the perceptions of export obstacles to the Mercosur by top executives of Brazilian companies located in the state of Riode Janeiro. Differences in perceptions were studied in order to determine to what extent they were associated with industry type, firmsize, export experience and geographic scope of export activities. Self‐administered questionnaires were sent to top executives of Rio de Janeiro companies that had recently exported to Mercosur countries. A total of 69 companies returned the questionnaire, representing a total response rate of 50.36 per cent. Data were analyzed using factor analysis and stepwise linear discriminant analysis. Results confirmed the hypothesized relationships.

This paper aims to determine and evaluate the calibration curve for low-cost electronic sensors in soils from a reclaimed and degraded area in the Brazilian semiarid region.

The probes were made, programmed and inserted in soil previously conditioned in polyethylene cylinders. The sets “cylinder + probe + soil” were subjected to saturation for a period of 24 h and, subsequently, gravitational drainage at room temperature and daily weighings were performed. When the set reached constant weight, the samples were taken to dry in an oven at 105°C to determine the dry mass and later, determine the gravimetric moisture and convert it into volumetric. The volumetric moistures obtained were related to measured frequency variations and the adjustments were analyzed by regression, which was subjected to analysis of variance (p = 0.05), and related by a third-degree polynomial equation whose quality of the fit was verified with coefficient of determination (R²).

The obtained moistures were related to the estimated moistures and evaluated by the root-mean-square error and straight 1:1. The results demonstrate that the sensors are not accurate for moistures in saturation, but representative and statistically acceptable results for moistures up to field capacity.

This paper has not been published before in its current, or similar form.

What insights might attending to the cyclical history of colonially imposed environmental change experienced by Indigenous peoples offer to critical intellectual projects concerned with race? How might our understanding of race shift if we took Indigenous peoples' concerns with the usurpation and transformation of land seriously? Motivated by these broader questions, in this chapter, I deploy an approach to the critical inquiry of race that I have tentatively been calling anticolonial environmental sociology. As a single iteration of the anticolonial environmental sociology of race, this chapter focuses on Native (American) perspectives on land and experiences with colonialism. I argue that thinking with Native conceptualizations of land forces us to confront the ecomateriality of race that so often escapes sight in conventional analyses. The chapter proceeds by first theorizing the ecomateriality of race by thinking with recent critical theorizing on colonial racialization, alongside Native conceptualizations of land. To further explicate this theoretical argument, I then turn to an historical excavation of the relations between settlers, Natives, and the land in Rhode Island that is organized according to spatiotemporal distinctions that punctuate Native land relations in this particular global region: the Reservation, the Plantation, and the Narragansett.

Departing from the contribution of the Social Studies of Childhood, this research aimed to understand children’s relations with school based on their economic, social, and geographical belongings. In order to understand the way children from a big city in Southern Brazil build their relations with school, 36 children between 11 and 13 years old participated. The research was developed in two public schools in two neighbourhoods which are very different in terms of family income, violence taxes, access to cultural equipment, public green spaces, public and social freedoms, among other characteristics. Both contexts have big inequalities, and one of them is a context of high social vulnerability. Through participant observations, focus group discussions, and registers in notebooks, it was intended to comprehend not just what school represents to the children but also which elements structure their childhood experiences. The listening to children’s voices revealed that school is important for both groups. For the children who attend the school in the border of the city, school represents future, learning, the possibility to be together with their friends, and also a leisure space. For the children who attend the school in the city centre, the institution is their main social space where they can be together with their friends. Children from the city center school also acknowledge that the inequality between public and private schools is a social injustice. In a country constituted by strong social inequalities, children’s knowledge contributed to comprehend how territoriality, poverty, and social exclusion are related and how they shape the relations children establish with school. This chapter aims to discuss how social inequalities create different school representations, highlighting the specificities in each context.

This chapter focusses on whether women heads of states and governments use their powers of selection to empower women. Compared to their male counterparts, do they appoint greater quantities of women to cabinet positions and to more prestigious posts? Examining Germany and Brazil, two countries constituting diverse cultural and institutional settings, this chapter provides in-depth analysis of cabinet appointments and regional breadth. It confirms that women executives do indeed promote more women to their cabinets overall and to higher powered portfolios. This stands in contrast with prevailing findings from within the global literature but generally reinforces those derived from single country and regional explorations.