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The objective of this chapter is to provide an approach to the farmland abandonment problem in Galicia, the Spain’s north-western region. We describe the land use pattern that characterized the traditional agricultural system, and analyze the process of structural adjustment and changes in land use recorded in the last 50 years. The empirical basis is provided mainly by an original elaboration of agricultural census data for the period 1982–2009. The results show that in the last five decades the area devoted to crops and pastures was constrained to a small portion of the territory (just over 20%), while the agro-livestock uses of hill land which were very important up to the mid-twentieth century disappeared. All this led to a remarkable expansion of abandoned land, which currently occupies at least 20% of the regional area. The drivers of this farmland abandonment are diverse and vary from one zone to another. But among them the conditioners derived from the structure of land ownership must be emphasized, coupled with the poor functioning of the land market and leasing. Land abandonment has had a major impact on the dynamics of the agricultural sector, limiting the size of farms and causing an increasing intensification in a small portion of the territory. This has also led to severe environmental problems, especially forest fires. Consequently, improving mobility and land use should be a priority of agricultural and rural development policies in this region.

The autonomous governments of two regions in Spain established mobile bans in schools as of the year 2015. Exploiting the across-region variation introduced by such a quasi-natural experiment, this study aims to perform a comparative-case analysis to investigate the impact of this non-spending-based policy on regional Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores in maths and sciences and bullying incidence.

The authors apply the synthetic control method and diff-in-diff estimation to compare the treated regions with the rest of regions in Spain before and after the intervention.

The results show noticeable reductions of bullying incidence among teenagers in the two treated regions. The authors also find positive and significant effects of this policy on the PISA scores of the Galicia region that are equivalent to 0.6–0.8 years of learning in maths and around 0.72 to near one year of learning in sciences.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study analysing the impact of mobile phone bans in schools on bullying cases, exploiting variation across regions (or other units), years and age intervals. Besides, the scarce formal evidence that exists on the consequences of the mobile phones use in students’ academic achievement comes from a micro perspective, while the paper serves as one more piece of evidence from a macro perspective.

Analyses the influence of the use of Spanish and of regional languages in consumers and homes of five bilingual regions of Spain: Balearic Islands, Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Valencia. After eliminating the effects of social class and of habitat, a fair number of significant differences have been found between speakers of Castilian (i.e. Spanish), bilinguals and speakers of their own vernacular language, in very varied areas: food, drinks, home cleaning products, financial services, cosmetics and personal hygiene products, shopping stores, reading of newspapers, supplements and magazines, home equipping and makes of car. Language has revealed itself as a good criterion for segmentation in various sectors and regions in order to reach each linguistic group more efficiently.

This study aims to present the digital library Galician virtual library (BVG, for “Biblioteca Virtual Galega”) in Galician.

The paper shows the objectives pursued by the BVG, its development, putting special emphasis on the main technological challenges, and presents some data about its usage.

A digital library can be used to stimulate a lesser‐used language and to promote the culture and tourism of a region.

The paper shows how a digital library can be used to strengthen the Galician language, which is currently categorised as a “Lesser Used Language” in the European Community and to contribute to the preservation and spreading of Galician culture and literary works, either from current authors or from previous documents. It also provides a digital publishing house for new authors and opens a communication channel between current authors and their readers. Finally, it helps to connect a scattered community like the Galician, offering a centralised access point to any information about Galicia. This work also presents some technological innovations included in the BVG, especially from the viewpoint of user interface design and search by content.

Environmental threats of immediate risk in areas such as coastal zones (CZ) have aroused new trends of citizenship and participatory democracy. The purpose of this paper is to analyse elements within those trends, such as environmental culture, socio‐political context, dynamics of social associative movement and integration of local knowledge. It also aims to contribute to an overview of the opportunities and barriers found in considering socio‐cultural and educational challenges in CZ.

In this analysis, case studies of integrated coastal management occurring worldwide were selected and reviewed, considering several nuances of socio‐economic and political contexts of CZ. Experiences of public response to coastal catastrophes such the Prestige oil spill in Spain, are also described.

Whether implementing sustainable coastal management through either balanced systems (between large and small‐scale strategies) or through largely bottom‐up approaches, participation is detected as one of the main factors for a successful integrated approach. Principles such as participatory governance and social justice should be adopted in initial phases of sustainable management processes and preferably involve all of the implied actors of CZ.

The literature reviewed highlighted specific factors that have empirically contributed to participatory sustainability of CZ, integrating three dimensions of citizenship: education, society's dynamics and culture.

The research objective is to analyze the situation and outlook for the future of the measuring and analysis practices used to determine customer satisfaction in 305 ISO 9000‐certified organizations of the Euro‐region Galicia (Spain)‐North of Portugal.

The empirical study was conducted on a random sample of 305 ISO 9000 companies. Data were gathered by personally interviewing those responsible for quality management at the companies.

Certified companies in the Euro‐region Galicia‐North Portugal have a high awareness of the need to measure and analyze the satisfaction of their customers and a predisposition towards it but, when it comes to putting said practice into action, they fall into certain methodological deficiencies that lead to their usefulness being only moderate.

This is a basically descriptive work concerning the practice of measuring and analyzing customer satisfaction in certified companies, within the Galicia (Spain)‐North Portugal Euro‐region. The results obtained are based on evaluations given by the interviewees, so that their reliability depends, to a large extent, on sincerity and good information being provided by the same.

The work is particularly useful for practitioners. The results may act as a guideline for the companies implementing these practices and for those who will do so in the near future. It is also of interest for orientating activities involving evaluation, training and assessment by companies and official bodies related to quality management, such as consultants, certification bodies, universities, business schools, etc.

Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.

While a political activist organising Jewish workers in Galicia, before the First World War and in the Communist Workers' Party of Poland, between 1919 and 1925, Henryk Grossman wrote substantial Marxist works on the economic history of Galicia and Poland. His principal contributions to economic theory, from 1919 and into the 1940s, were the identification of Marx's method and the fundamental structure of Capital; the significance of the distinction between use value and value, at all levels of Marx’s economic analysis; and the elaboration of Marx's account of capitalism's tendency to break down and its consequent, unavoidable proneness to economic crises, grounded in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its counter-tendencies. While the reception of Grossman's analyses was generally hostile, they are of vital importance for those seeking to understand and overturn capitalism today.

The authors want to study the connection between institutional theory and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the set of hotels with three, four and five star situated in Galicia (Spain) and in the Northern region of Portugal. The authors aim to see whether there is a contrast of isomorphic behaviour in the institutional context of both regions.

A quantitative study in which the authors apply the partial least square (PLS) technique, a methodology based on structural equations models using the software Visual-PLS. The authors intend to study the relationships between the pressures of institutional context and CSR practices, together with the relationship between legitimacy and these practices. The focus of the proposed model is based on the system theory.

The main findings of this research clearly show that hotels are incorporated into an institutional context marked by enforced and regulatory pressures.

The proposed research model can be replicated using other units of study, sectors, geographic areas, among others, due to the explanatory capacity of the theoretical framework used.

The originality of this work derives from the main contributions based on the theoretical framework (institutional theory and CSR), the object of study and geographical area (three, four and five star hotels located in Galicia and in the North of Portugal), the context (economic crisis), the field of study (private sphere) and the type of organizations (profit making).