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The purpose of this paper is to characterize the agricultural activities and past experiences in professional training in the context of mobile learning in different countries (Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, Hungary, UK, Italy and Turkey).

For the survey, a questionnaire was prepared in English and Portuguese and then translated into the languages of the participating countries. It was delivered electronically for answering online by adults only. The participation was voluntary and in the end 133 consented valid questionnaires were obtained. For the treatment of the data, SPSS was used and basic descriptive statistics tools were applied, together with tests, namely, crosstabs and χ² tests, considering a level of significance of 5 percent.

The results showed that the majority of the participants presently have some agricultural activity and one-third is thinking about starting one in the future. Most of the participants want to produce food organically, with significant differences among the countries studied in this paper. Most of the participants were enrolled in training activities in agriculture, especially those with higher education. This participation showed significant differences between countries as well as according to the dimension of the farms owned by the participants. A significant association was found between being a teacher in forming activities related to agriculture and being a farmer. When compared to distance learning, the training activities in classroom were the most frequent, with significant differences among the countries.

This study allowed characterizing the learning activities in the field of organic agriculture and established vision for planning of future training programs, in different countries, with maybe different social, educational and cultural realities.

Because the study included the participation of people from several countries all around Europe, the results obtained enrich the scientific area of training in organic farming, in view of distance learning vs classroom learning on a more global basis.

Supply chain relationships have often been analysed from the macro-perspective of the companies involved, but there is less evidence of how relationships relate to the micro-perspective of persons involved. The purpose of this paper is to investigate, in IT outsourcing (ITO), how the buyer–supplier relationship type strengthens buyer performance from the perspective of consultants.

IT consultants were surveyed, and analysis was performed considering the aggregated values of variables that characterise buyer–supplier relationships adjusted to ITO.

The results show that strategic relationships are associated with higher supplier investment in relational management than in transactional ones. Similarly, in this type of relationship, higher levels of trust are linked to the recognition of more activities shared between parties involved than in transactional relationships. The improvement of supplier development by buyers was also found to improve buyers’ performance.

The model proposed here was developed for nonspecific industries but tested in the context of ITO. Further research should be undertaken to broaden generalisability.

The paper provides an understanding of the influence of the buyer–supplier relationship type on buyer performance based both on relational management and, more specifically, how the formal dimension of supplier development can also contribute to performance. ITO is increasing worldwide, and relational management affects outsourcing outcomes in broad supply chain integration. This analysis is usually visited from buyer and supplier perspectives using decision makers. This paper assesses it from the perspective of consultants.

Excessive sodium intake is associated with several diseases. Accordingly, several measures, including microparticulate salt, have been adopted to reduce the salt contents of food products. However, no studies have reported the effectiveness of microparticulate salt in semisolid and liquid products. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the application of microparticulate salt to reduce sodium contents in semisolid products.

The optimal salt content to be added in butter was defined by the just-about-right-scale test. Butter samples were prepared using microparticulate salt to achieve 25, 50 and 75 per cent reductions in conventional salt concentrations. Multiple comparison tests were performed to evaluate sample taste.

The ideal concentration of conventional salt to be added to butter was 2.16 per cent. Discriminative tests showed that samples with 25 and 75 per cent salt reduction showed significant differences (p ⩽ 0.05) compared with butter prepared at the ideal salt content, whereas the sample with 50 per cent salt reduction had no significant difference (p > 0.05). Thus, microparticulate salt showed higher salting power than conventional salt. These results indicated the effectiveness of microparticulate salt in the preparation of semisolid products with sodium reduction.

More detailed studies about the reduced-sodium butter shelf life are necessary to verify the microparticulate salt application in the product preparation. Moreover, microparticulate salt application in semisolid and liquid products elaboration must be more investigated to better elucidate its practicability of reducing sodium content in these kinds of products. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

Microparticulate salt has been successfully applied to reduce sodium in solid products, being added to the finished product surface. However, there are no studies that report its effectiveness in semisolid and liquid products, such as the butter, in which the salt is added during the product preparation. Thus, this research provides new scientific information to the food industry and research fields, to expand the knowledge of reduced-sodium products development using microparticulate salt with sensory quality.

No studies have evaluated the application of microparticulate salt for semisolid product preparation. Therefore, the findings will support the development of healthy products.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the role that leadership plays in the success of Lean management (LM) implementation, by trying to identify what is the impact of the transactional, transformational, directive and empowering leadership styles on the success of such an implementation in Portuguese companies, and what are the most important leaders’ attributes.

An on-line questionnaire was distributed to 65 manufacturing and services Portuguese organizations that have implemented LM.

The results suggest that the empowering leadership style has a positive impact on the success of LM implementation. Even though results do not allow concluding about the impact of the other styles, several leader’s attributes were identified as having influence: individualized consideration, information sharing, skill development, intellectual stimulation, assigned goals and self-directed decision making.

Very few studies have addressed the role of leadership in the success of adopting LM and, to the best knowledge, only one paper studied the critical attributes of leaders in LM implementation. Moreover, the present study focuses in Portugal, country where this topic has rarely been investigated.

The main objective of this work is to show that the traditional specific characteristics of companies as well as cultural and religious dimensions can influence the leverage of companies in different macro-environmental systems.

To achieve this aim, the authors have used data from 1.568 firms from 7 European countries between 2010 and 2016, and the models were estimated by using panel data methodology, specifically the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation method by Arellano and Bover (1995) and Blundell and Bond (1998).

Overall, the empirical results point out that the cultural moderating factors are essential in determining companies' capital structure, regardless of the country's legal origin. The study results also show that traditional variables, intrinsic to management, macroeconomic environment and religion, have a central role in capital structure, namely for the civilian countries.

As far as the authors know, this is the first work that uses, in addition to the traditional specific characteristics of companies, cultural dimensions and religion, as determinants of debt levels, in different legal systems for Europe.

In this paper, the barometer of tourism (BoT), as a new approach to environmental scanning, is presented and discussed. A unique research methodology developed by IPDT, with the aim of analyzing prospectively the tourism and hospitality sectors from the perspective of senior professionals and public and private decision makers, is illustrated in detail.

The paper is based on official tourism information and on-going research by IPDT, in particular, the “Barometer of Tourism”, which results are used to correlate with official statistics, thus demonstrating the Barometer’s value as a scanning tool.

BoT is a simple and low budget tool that can successfully predict the behaviour of tourism demand for Portugal in the short and medium term. After 50 editions, BoT established itself as a recognized and unique trends’ identification tool for the Portuguese hospitality and tourism organizations.

Results provide rich insights on analyzing prospectively the tourism and hospitality sectors from the perspective of senior professionals and public and private decision makers.

This paper seeks to illustrate that BoT can successfully predict the behaviour of tourism demand for Portugal, being a simple, low-budget and recognized tool for trends identification in hospitality, travel and tourism organizations.