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This essay explores the critical vision of Francisco Barrera Lavalle about the Mexico’s Monetary Reform of 1905. In his critique, Barrera inserts an argument about the nature of the balance of payments in the Mexican economy: the disequilibria in Mexico’s trade balance were structurally recurrent given the characteristics of what the country exports: commodities and raw materials. Barrera believed that the authorities made the mistake of overvaluing the peso, assigning it a value higher than what silver currency was worth at the time on international markets. Barrera also dismissed the idea that monetary stability could be achieved by suspending the free coinage of silver currency. Finally, Barrera held that banks should be obligated to pay their banknotes in gold, as they were in Great Britain and in the United States, not in silver coins.

Product design is an essential aspect of the process of new product development and innovation, the efficiency of which depends on the existence of some kind of management. However, there is no generally accepted agreement as to exactly what activities this management involves, nor any analyses of the most suitable context for it to develop in or of the relationships that link these activities with performance. In this paper, we study product design management in depth and examine in what way and in which contexts it contributes to an improvement in performance. In order to do so, we carried out a case study of four companies from the Spanish ceramic tile sector that also revealed the activities of an efficient product design management. These were divided into two phases of the product design process: the analytical‐conceptual and the technical‐creative phases.

Numerous empirical works have found evidence to support a positive relationship between managers' transformational leadership behaviour and employees' individual performance. Studies have also begun to examine the process by which the effects on performance ultimately take place. This research aims to move forward in this direction. The paper aims to analyse the mediating role of a contextual variable (organizational learning capability) and a subordinate characteristic (employability) in the relationship between transformational leadership and individual performance.

The hypothesis was tested through a sample of 795 workers from 75 university departments, using a multilevel path analysis with a two‐level data structure.

Empirical evidence was found to show that: there is a positive relationship between worker‐perceived organizational learning capability in a firm and his/her own employability perception; the worker‐perceived transformational leadership of his/her leader, and his/her own employability perception; the worker‐perceived organizational learning capability of a firm and his/her performance; the worker's perception of his/her own employability, and his/her performance; transformational leadership, OLC, and individual performance have a significant influence on the group, while employability can be considered only as an individual phenomenon; and at group level, the effects of transformational leadership on performance are mediated by organizational learning capability.

As far as is known, there has been no attempt to connect transformational leadership and employability and organizational learning capability and employability theoretically and/or empirically.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between altruistic leader behaviors, organizational learning capability and organizational performance.

The sampling frame consists of several databases or listings of business that consider people as a key element of the organization and are considered by their employees to be good firms to work for or organizational environments where human resources management has high priority (n=251). The authors use structural equation modeling to test if the relationship between altruistic leader behaviors and organizational performance is mediated by organizational learning capability.

Results suggest that organizational learning capability fully mediates between altruistic leader behaviors and organizational performance. Thus, organizational learning capability plays a key role in explaining how altruistic leader behaviors affect organizational performance, essentially because it facilitates the creation of a creative, participatory and dialogue-based environment that promotes organizational learning.

The database used in the study is very heterogeneous. Future research might delimit the database by organization size or sector. Qualitative studies may also improve our understanding of the relationships studied and enable other concepts to be included.

This study provides evidence of the positive relationship between altruistic leaders and performance. However, recruiting and fomenting altruistic leaders is not sufficient on its own to improve performance, and should be accompanied by implementing other facilitating factors of organizational learning such as dialogue or experimentation.

In recent years some studies have linked leadership with organizational learning. However, this is one of the first studies to concentrate on altruistic leader behaviors as such, a concept that has received scant mention in the literature despite its importance in a number of leadership styles, and its relevance today as an alternative to the egotistic leader. The authors offer empirical evidence of the role of altruistic leader behavior as an antecedent of organizational learning capability and subjective measures of performance.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the main methods and themes used on organizational learning (OL) and learning organization (LO) research in Latin American and the Caribbean.

A literature review was conducted by means of a broad and systematic strategy to locating, selecting and analyzing papers on OL/LO, written in different languages (English, Portuguese and Spanish). Systematic searches were carried out at the two databases (Web of Science’s Social Sciences Citation Index and Scopus), and 15 specific Latin American and Caribbean journals were identified as data sources for the review. A thematic analysis was carried out using NVivo and cluster analysis.

In all 79 papers published between 2000 and 2017 were included in the synthesis and results: 18 are theoretical papers and literature reviews and 61 are empirical papers (30 qualitative, 24 quantitative and 7 multiple methods). These empirical papers revealed the study of the OL/LO concepts in organizations located mainly in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico and Costa Rica. Five topics represent the main themes addressed on OL/LO studies in Latin America and the Caribbean and are avenues for future research in the field: (i) knowledge and KM (i.e. knowledge management), (ii) culture and leadership, (iii) innovation and improvement, (iv) learning (for example, learning process, learning styles), and (v) entrepreneurship and sustainability.

This paper provides a summary of the research methods and themes used in the OL/LO field in Latin America and the Caribbean, suggesting insights for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the circumstances that have conditioned the development of education in Spain from the enlightenment to the present day.

Multidisciplinary scientific approach that combines the interpretation of the legal texts with the revision of the doctrinal and theoretical contributions made on the issue.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the history of education in Spain has been marked by constant fluctuations between the reactionary instincts, principally maintained by the Catholic Church and the conservative social classes, and the progressive experiments, driven by the enlightened and the liberals first, and the republicans and the socialists later. As a consequence of that, the fight for finishing with illiteracy and guaranteeing universal schooling underwent permanent advances and retreats, preventing from an effective modernization of the Spanish educative system. On the one hand, renewal projects promoted by teachers and pedagogues were inevitably criticized by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obsessed with the idea of preserving the influence of religion on the schools. On the other hand, successive governments were weak in implementing an educational policy which could place Spain at the level of the other European and occidental nations.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, although the country has overcome a good part of its centuries-old backwardness, increasing economic difficulties and old ideological splits keep hampering the quality of teaching, gripped by neoliberal policies which undermine the right to education for all. The reading of this paper offers various historical clues to understand this process.

After World War II, an educational modernization process gained ground worldwide. International organizations such as UNESCO began to play a key role in the creation, development and dissemination of a new educational vision in different countries. This article examines the origin and development of this modernization process under the dictatorship of Franco. More specifically, we will show how the adoption of this conception in Spain must be understood from the perspective of the interaction between UNESCO and Franco's regime, and how the policies of the dictatorship converged with the proposals suggested by this international organization. Our principal argument is that the educational policies carried out in Spain throughout the second half of the 20th century can be better understood when inserted into a transnational perspective in education.

This article uses documents from archives that until now were unpublished or scarcely known. We have also analyzed materials published in the preeminent educational journals of the dictatorship, such as the Revista de Educación, Revista Española de Pedagogía, Bordón and Vida escolar, as well as documents published by the Spanish Ministry of National Education.

Franco's dictatorship built an educational narrative closely aligned with proposals put forward by UNESCO on educational planning after World War II. The educational policies created by the dictatorship were related to the new ideas that strove to link the educational system with economic and social development.

This article is inspired by a transnational history of education perspective. On the one hand, it traces the origins of educational modernization under Franco's regime, which represented a technocratic vision of education that is best understood as a result of the impact that international organizations had in the second half of the 20th century. On the other hand, it follows the intensifying relationship between the dictatorship and the educational ideas launched by UNESCO. Both aspects are little known and studied in Spain.

This article focuses on the study of the shaping of pedagogy as a discipline in Spain prior to the Civil War. Its aim is to identify those elements that helped pedagogy become constituted as a distinct field of knowledge that could offer rigorous insight into the world of education.

The article uses the framework proposed by Rita Hofstetter and Bernard Schneuwly for the shaping of a disciplinary field. Finally, it briefly examines the process of professionalization, using the approach advocated by the sociologist Elliott Freidson.

The analysis carried out concludes that at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 the process of professionalization and consolidation of pedagogy as a discipline had been completed in Spain.

The article presents the originality of reinterpreting the elements offered by Spanish history of education in the light of an international theoretical framework. This allows a new understanding of the process of constitution of pedagogy as a disciplinary field while offering the international public a case study according to international standards.