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As of 2020, London's Financial Times had ranked Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC) as one of the world's leading executive education institutions and the top such institution in Latin America for 15 consecutive years. In 2011, FDC was also ranked fifth on the Financial Times' list of the 40 most respected business schools in the world. For FDC itself and for its co-founder, Emerson de Almeida, this recognition was a wonderful way of celebrating the 35th anniversary of an institution that has become a leader in applied management education in Brazil.

How did this young Brazilian institution achieve this? As is the case for any great undertaking, many people played crucial roles in its creation and consolidation. However, its history is closely tied to the life of its co-founder, Emerson de Almeida.

Emerson was FDC's Chief Executive from its foundation in 1976 until 2012, when he became President of its Board of Governance. ¹ He is primarily an innovator and drew his inspiration from visits to world-renowned business schools. Once he understood the needs arising from executive thinking processes, he was able to adapt these schools' best practices to suit the Brazilian culture and context.

‘You must always try the impossible’, he says. This case study presents the story of an exceptional institutional intrapreneur who championed and led the transformation of executive education in Brazil.

The main goal of this paper is better understand the risk/return trade-off of investing in socially responsible investment funds (SRIF) and green investment funds (GIF).

To achieve our aim a green investment fund portfolio, a socially responsible investment portfolio and a conventional fund (CF) portfolio from the United States of America (USA) were selected to compare the efficiency of these three different portfolios, by using Value-Based Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology.

The results point out that SRIF and GIF are more efficient than CF. For five years, the CFs have not outperformed the GIF.

The results suggest that there is a growing awareness on the part of investors that sustainable companies are the companies that will allow a better quality of life and a more sustainable environment. It seems that somehow managers and investors are aware that the market will compensate them for thinking about a cleaner and more equitable world.

The article aims at analyzing the social representations of retirement in two different groups of professors – pre-retired and retired – from a public higher education institution. The goal is to explore the experiences, reflections, beliefs, and attitudes originated from the transition to retirement.

The research, of exploratory and descriptive nature, was guided by the Social Representation Theory (SRT) and took a qualitative approach. 16 professors were interviewed, 8 in each group (pre-retired and retired professors), using semi-structured interviews that followed a script designed to discover the main aspects of the transition to retirement.

Three figurative cores were raised – the financial aspect, the centrality of work, and the will to continue contributing, and the unpreparedness for retirement – and testimonies have shown heterogeneous representations. The study observed that although relevant, the bonus for continued services is not the main determinant for professors to continue working in the university.

The results of this study indicate the need to treat retirement as a complex and multidimensional process, offering a fresh perspective on the social representations of retirement in the academic context. The use of the Social Representation Theory to explore these perspectives adds to the originality of the approach, highlighting the multifaceted nature of the retirement process in this specific professional group.

The paper aims to present a literary itinerary inspired in Julio Dinis’ novel An English Family (Uma Família Inglesa) through a comparative analysis of the places identified in the novel and the touristic attraction proposed by Visit Porto website. This novel is representative of the cultural identity and society of Porto city in the 19th century. Developing an itinerary based on this novel can facilitate the reading and understanding of the historical and cultural development of Porto.

This case study is based on the reading of the Julio Dinis’ novel An English Family (Uma Família Inglesa), whose storyline takes place in Porto city, Portugal in the 19th century. It used QGIS v. 3.12 software, a geographical information system to identify the places, to produce the maps and to create the itinerary.

The comparison between the places identified in the novel and the tourist attraction in Visit Porto website revealed that only 6 points in the novel are referenced on Visit Porto website. These points correspond to the ones in the historical city centre of Porto. However, the creation of an itinerary that brings together all the points mentioned by Julio Dinis in his novel, will allow the development of a new touristic itinerary, alternative to existing itineraries in the city and that can be seen as a distinguish offer that allows a different view of the urban space of Porto.

There are some limitations to this study that can be highlighted. First, it was difficult to find the correct location of some points identified in the novel, due to difficulty of finding historical maps with quality of the data. At the same time, as tourist information is dispersed by several sources, and most of those data is not georeferenced, it was time consuming the integration of all the information in the same geodatabase. The choice of the shortest path can also be considered as a limitation, rather than the route followed by the author in the novel, but geographic information systems operates on spatial and temporal scale, which can present a limitation in tourism analysis. In the case of this project, we have chosen the shortest path, assuming that tourist would prefer that.

This research allowed to address two areas of knowledge that are emerging in the study of urban centres as tourist areas: the use of GIS and literary tourism. Despite the fact that there are already articles on this subject, the originality focuses on the approach made around one of the greatest writers of Portugal in the 19th century, allowing to present a tourist itinerary about one of his literary works, and the comparison made between the places identified in the novel and the tourist points identified on the Visit Porto website.

The recent increase in the number of infections and mortality rates in many regions has emphasized the cyclical nature of this pandemic, with new variants emerging constantly. Understanding what has been done by efficient administrations to contain the outbreak is essential while new immunization developments for the new variants are not available.

This work adapts the traditional Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) Variable Returns to Scale model for including panel data on the Brazilian Federal Government spending over the first pandemic months in Pernambuco to identify efficient municipalities and conduct a benchmark on the best practices, reactions and implications that can serve as a guide for the post-Covid recurrence era.

The results provide an interesting panorama of municipal response to the pandemic and some quantitative and qualitative prospects on potentials for improvements from the perspective of efficient and inefficient cities. Only one administration (São Bento do Una) was identified as efficient for the entire period. The authors’ benchmark and discussion are focused on this municipality.

The authors believe this work has two innovative components. The first is a robust and systematic methodology integrating the advances in testing convexity and returns to scale in the construction of a production frontier based on panel data. The second is a discussion on what drives efficiency (benchmarking of best practices) in addition to how to quantitatively attain such efficiency prospects. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, both methodological and empirical implications are original to the present manuscript.

This study aims to investigate the effect of innovation on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and, consequently, its influence on the economic and financial performance of companies.

A quantitative and descriptive research was carried out based on secondary data from the Refinitiv Eikon^® database, using the panel data regression technique, considering the constructs: innovation, ESG performance and economic and financial performance.

The results showed that companies that tend to invest more financial resources in R&D are more likely to have higher ESG performance. In addition, companies that have higher ESG performance tend to have higher economic and financial performance.

Managers may consider investing more resources in R&D to achieve superior ESG performance. They should be aware that ESG is a strategic tool for creating financial and nonfinancial value for the organization. More than the traditional preparation of a financial report, stakeholders demand another type of information: ESG information.

The results confirm the basis of Stakeholder Theory, showing that the companies that meet the needs of all stakeholders tend to have greater economic and financial performance. ESG practices can include keeping employees motivated to work, improved corporate image in the eyes of customers, more satisfied suppliers and community and environment aligned with management. Therefore, these ESG initiatives are instrumental in protecting organizational objectives as well as increasing shareholder value.