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This paper examines the effect of national culture on the process of innovation and research and development activities in the subsidiaries of multinational companies. For this purpose, we use a sample of 222 subsidiaries for five European countries. The paper has drawn up two important findings. Firstly, cultural dimensions such as individualism, masculinity, power distance and uncertainty avoidance influence research and development activities of the subsidiaries. Secondly, the type of management model, defined according to the location of the parent company, influence the organization of the research and development activities.

This paper aims to determine whether the implementation of knowledge management (KM) is linked to e‐business performance and to identify the nature of the relationship existing in the different components of knowledge‐sharing and application and internet‐based KM.

This paper establishes a new model of the practices and results of the KM which has been tested in European companies. For that purpose, a structural equation modelling analysis was used.

The results show that product innovation and external employees’ access to databases have a strong positive effect on the maximization of internet‐based KM and that internet‐based KM has also a positive impact on e‐business performance.

Limitations of this study include the need for more research into the KM cycle. This paper contributes to the research on this topic with new evidence in a broad sample.

These results point to KM's usefulness in improving every day e‐business processes. Therefore managers should be aware of these benefits.

The present study advances knowledge on the nature of the relative importance of different components of internet‐based KM as drivers of e‐business performance.

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.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

The “moral panic” generated by public response to teenage mothering marginalizes the experiences of young women as mothers, with adolescent pregnancy viewed as catastrophic for young women, their families, and society. In this analysis, focused on the experience of a group of teen women from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, the author explores how the integration of a maternal identity, shaped by Brazilian norms of “good motherhood,” with previously existing identities might lead to new aspirations and ambitions for the future or to hopelessness and despair.

Visions of the future were shaped by individual women’s structural circumstances and fell into four rough groups. Well-established adult women expressed their maternal identity through personal ambition, revealing confidence in their ability to provide “the best” for their children. Some adolescent mothers were fortunate enough to be buffered by family resources so that optimistic objectives for the future that pre-dated the pregnancy remained fairly attainable and were compatible with a “good mother” identity. For teens from less well-off families, motherhood resulted in a new-found determination to succeed in school and work, in line with ideals of Brazilian “good mothering” that focus on working hard to benefit one’s children. Women from the poorest households could or would not conjure a vision of the future, faced with the overwhelming challenges of their circumstances. The detailed, longitudinal qualitative data analyzed here reveal how the construction of maternal identity and visions of the future among adolescent mothers are shaped by the embodied experience of motherhood and pre-existing structural forces.

The interaction of consumers and technology has become a challenge for companies and marketing professionals. Technological acceleration has transformed how business is conducted and the consumer-company relationship. The need to establish communication with (potential) consumers to promote engagement with the brand highlights the importance of using mobile instant messaging (MIM). In this context, this paper aims to investigate the use of MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers.

This article investigates, through a systematic literature review (SLR), the state of the art of scientific research regarding the use of MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers. To analyze the selected articles, the authors used a research protocol composed of three stages: (1) planning, (2) conducting and (3) disseminating knowledge.

This study made four main contributions to the MIM field: (1) extends the literature on MIM, focusing on the perspective of companies and consumers; (2) expands the ongoing discussions, suggesting the limited availability of research on MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers; (3) development of a typology composed of three classes, namely “Consumer relationship,” “Social interaction and technology, and “Social media as channels strategy”; (4) the fourth contribution concerns identifying future research areas and answering questions.

This article is the first to investigate, through a SLR, the state of the art of scientific research regarding the use of MIM as a tool for interaction between companies and consumers.

We survey the literature on the Risk Augmented Mincer equation that seeks to estimate the compensation for uncertainty in the future wage to be earned after completing an education. There is wide empirical support for the predicted positive effect of wage variance and the negative effect of wage skew. We discuss robustness of the findings across specifications, potential bias from unobserved heterogeneity and selectivity and consider the core issue of students' information on benefits from education.