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The purpose of this paper is to understand the role played by small-size non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in slum upgrading, building and incremental housing processes in Brazil and Guinea-Bissau, focusing, in particular, on actions to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance community resilience.

The research method relied on literature review and fieldwork. It included surveys, activities with the communities, interviews and questionnaires. The data collected were subject to cross-disciplinary and comparative analysis.

The paper analyses the innovative methods and solutions used by NGOs in informal settlement upgrading and housing improvement works related to disaster risk reduction, namely, community mapping and design, and show how they end up building community resilience.

Grasping the impacts of NGOs’ work whether in slums of Brazil or Africa requires staying with communities for a significant amount of time. However, those stays raise many practical problems regarding security, health and related costs.

The existing literature misses to address from a comparative perspective, the methods used by social workers and designers teams in slums. This paper aims at filling this gap in slum studies. Its originality and value rely on the particular experience of the authors, who were personally involved in the NGOs actions and could deepen the connections between vulnerabilities, risk and successful aid-self-help practices.

It is time for some different brand names. Librarians are notorious for unthinkingly ordering books from major publishers. There is an understandable logic at work: these are large and well respected companies and their products must meet rigorous standards in order to be published. A secondary assumption underlies the first; if the book isn't so hot or if it is controversial, the librarian can always make the argument that it is from a usually reliable source. Buying from established sources can also allow the selector to circumvent the rule, sometimes unwritten, that one or two favorable reviews are needed in order to purchase. And there are the added bonuses of CIP data and ease of ordering and handling.

This paper aims to understand and explore the causal relationship of elements responsible for the macro vicious cycle of poverty in Guinea-Bissau, and discuss policies to break it.

The methodology used in this study is based on the system dynamics simulation paradigm.

Breaking the Guinean poverty cycle requires a multifaceted approach involving more resources and the building of several national capabilities. Traditional approaches tend to fail.

Limitations come from the level of abstraction used in the model, which does not detail the processes for building specific capabilities and their interrelationships, and the necessary exclusion of variables that may have an impact in the process. Considering implications, the study models the evolution of human development index (HDI) in Guinea-Bissau, linking it to the economy and political sectors and allowing the simulation of different scenarios.

The study presents a critical stance towards common recommendations from international agencies, and it provides a blueprint for development of more effective public policies.

Overcoming the poverty trap in sub-Saharan countries remains a challenge for the international community. The study aims at helping in the process of integrating different frameworks into a compact and manageable model.

The study contributes to the system dynamics and economic development literatures by presenting an integrative model of human development in Guinea-Bissau. There is no study in the system dynamics literature modelling the relationship of HDI to economy and political sectors while different and contradictory points of view characterize the economics literature, leaving well-meaning public officials in Guinea-Bissau at a loss of mental models to tackle the poverty trap in the country.

The chapter considers the ethical problems engendered by random assignment and privacy concerns in randomised controlled experiments and cluster randomised trials. The particular focus is on procedural, legislative and technical approaches to reducing or avoiding the problems. Examples are given from a variety of disciplines including health and education, though the main emphasis is on research in crime and delinquency.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an investigation into the relationship between bank-specific, macroeconomic factors and bank profitability before (1999-2006), during (2007-2009), and after (2010-2013) the financial crisis.

Using the Economic Community of West African States’ bank panel data from 1999 to 2013, the paper used fixed effect models. The panel model includes bank-specific determinants (size, cost management, and liquidity), industry level, and macroeconomic variables.

Panel data analyses results show that there is a significant relationship between bank-specific determinants (size, cost management, and liquidity) and bank profitability (ROA) before, during, and after the financial crisis. However, the relationships between other bank-specific (capital strength, credit risk, and market power), macroeconomic (gross domestic product and inflation) determinants are sensitive to both periods of analysis (before, during, and after financial crisis) and bank profitability measure used (ROA or NIM).

Overall, these results suggest that the financial crisis did not affect the relationships between some bank-specific determinants and bank profitability.

The West African Republic of Guinea-Bissau has been unstable since gaining its independence in 1974. The 2014 presidential and parliamentary elections are being closely analyzed to study how the United Nations and the Guinean people have reacted to the outcomes of these elections. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Sociological methodologies and a comparative approach have been used in this paper to understand why the elections in 2014 were so important in this country.

The author finds that stability is possible in Guinea-Bissau after years of political uncertainties.

Particular focus has been paid to studying the responses of specific aspects of society, including the youth population, the political elite, the main political party, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, the opposition parties and the army and whether these different groups will be able to cooperate after electing a sustainable and relatively wide-ranging government.

Keeping Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a subaltern momentum unveiling how ICT informs subaltern ways of being and thus, potentially, the research lens for qualitative approaches. In this context, the paper examines how curriculum as an ideological devise produces an epistemicide – the killing of knowledge – an epistemological havoc cooked up daily in the process of qualitative studies promoting and legitimizing a specific modern western Eurocentric episteme.

The paper dissects modernity as a colonial zone, creating “abyssal thinking,” a eugenic system of visible and invisible distinctions that legitimizes the visible, i.e. “this side of the line” and produces “the other side of the line” as “non-existent.”

The paper urges the need to decolonize leading modern western Eurocentric counter-hegemonic traditions such as Marxism.

The paper analyzes ICT’s contribution to subaltern struggles, asserts ICT’s commitment against any form of canon, grabs the educational matrix of qualitative research as an eugenic beast from its very own ideological horns, alerting the need to examine any study of education and society within the ideological eugenic political economy and modes of production of systems pillared by poverty, exploitation, segregation, and intellectual rape.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the idea of the immobile immigrant worker, trapped in the bottom segments of the labour market, by exploring how immigrants and their descendants (sometimes designated second generation immigrants) develop re‐emigration strategies in their first country of settlement in Europe when faced with structural or conjunctural barriers to the advancement of their socio‐economic situation.

Empirical evidence was collected through structured interviews aimed at capturing labour market and residential trajectories of workers of African origin and their descendants in Portugal, with a particular emphasis on the period between 1998 and 2006.

Findings suggest that in some cases, immigrants draw on social networks available to them to engage in processes of continued intra‐European mobility. International re‐emigration emerges as a work‐space mobility strategy for migrant workers and their descendants when there was no significant social mobility in the first destination. Similarly, international geographical mobility may constitute a self‐perpetuating strategy across generations to escape structural immobility faced by certain immigrant groups in destination contexts.

Experiences reported are situated, so cannot be taken to represent those of all workers of African origin in Portugal.

Findings presented in the paper highlight potential consequences of perpetuating geographical mobility throughout time, namely in terms of labour market conditions and family dynamics. They also highlight the need to look at socio‐economic mobility trajectories within Europe as integrated space and not just within national borders.

The paper proposes an encompassing view of migrants’ (im)mobilities over time, to include the conditions of their labour market incorporation and its links to further spatial, international, mobility.

This study investigates how employees' experience of suffering from insomnia might reduce the likelihood that they perform creative activities, as well as how this negative relationship might be buffered by employees' access to resources at three levels: an individual resource (affective commitment), a relational resource (knowledge sharing with peers) and an organizational resource (climate of organizational forgiveness).

Quantitative data came from a survey of employees in the banking sector.

Insomnia reduces creativity, but this effect is weaker when employees feel a strong emotional bond to their organization, openly share knowledge with colleagues and believe that their organization forgives errors.

The limitations of this research include its relatively narrow scope by focusing on one personal stressor only, its cross-sectional design, its reliance on subjective measures of insomnia and creativity and its single-industry, single-country design.

The findings indicate different, specific ways in which human resource managers can overcome the challenges associated with sleep-deprived employees who avoid productive work behaviors, including creativity.

This study adds to extant scholarship by specifying how employees' persistent sleep deprivation might steer them away from undertaking creative behaviors, with a particular focus on how several pertinent resources buffer this process.