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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.

This paper seeks to describe an experiment carried out in the 1980s by a small practice called Céu do 3o. Mundo (C3M) relating to the application of cybernetics principles to a design process with special regard to house design in Brazil.

After discussing the peculiarities of architectural practice in Brazil, the paper presents C3M's design methodology, which is based on the creation of three models (“conceptual model”, “analogical model”, and “scale model”); a case study is presented and the results of the application of the methodology to several projects are discussed.

The paper shows that cybernetics principles are relevant for dealing with the Brazilian housing shortage, especially because it is an adequate framework to deal with the Brazilian culture, known for its informality, its social plasticity and its playful nature.

The correlation of cybernetics principles to the design of affordable houses is articulated through the concept of “indeterminate project,” intended as a project that would allow for flexibility, interpretation and adaptation.

The paper aims to present a framework for discussing ethics and computational design.

The main propositions of computational design are presented, discussed according to different authors and contrasted with cybernetic principles.

The paper finds that with algorithmic and parametric procedures, architects are using computation to reach a hitherto unknown ease of modelling multiple iterations of a design, so they can expand their possible design scenarios and cope with the uncertainties of ill-defined tasks. However, this strategy faces an ethical limitation because they fail to extend this openness to the final segment of the design chain, the user in the act of dwelling.

The paper brings a cybernetic perspective for discussing the often-overlooked ethical implications of computational strategies in design.

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.

This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.

The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.

Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.

Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.

The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.

The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.

This paper aims to highlight the political influences that account for the destination image of a tourist city: Campos do Jordão, São Paulo State, Brazil. The study took into consideration the collective imagination and its influence on the formation of touristic destinations.

Descriptive study based on literature and document review, accompanied by an analysis of texts and photos available on non-official websites – about Campos do Jordão – from November to December 2018 and by visits to selected location.

“Charm”, “refinement” and “sophistication” are the most frequently used words to describe Campos do Jordão, which remains a symbol of exclusiveness and refuge for the highest social classes. These images are shaped by political and economic influences.

The investigation focussed on a single city. Also, as it is an analytical study aimed at showing the permanence of preconceived values used to build the image of a destination it is not possible to talk about extrapolating the present study to other cities. In addition, the research was done by using the reproduction of physical and cultural aspects in addition to the use of European landscapes structures and values in a locality with an exceptional environmental context.

Many of the images connected to Campos do Jordão are replicated by local citizens, a fact that evidences the importance of associative memory, which concerns memories citizens have of their living space. The social implications presented herein seek to recover the formative memories of the assessed city, although it is not the focus of the current study. Assumingly, becoming an active segment of the tourism sector is the only way for local citizens to appropriate the city.

The influence of local government and public actions in tourism construction and in the image linked to the city is used as a case study. Building a touristic imagination demands a wide range of businesses, but this process takes time and effort, as highlighted by the applied documental review; it would not happen without the straight interference of the public sector through the local government.

We examine how home market political connexions can influence internationalisation as the number of foreign subsidiaries and the volume of investment abroad when targeting specific host countries. Our aim is to provide in-depth insights into the relationship between multinational enterprises and home country institutions by presenting a teaching case about a Brazilian construction company operating in more than 20 countries.

We developed a longitudinal study based on the trajectory of Odebrecht, an important Emerging Market Multinational Enterprise, highlighting the relevance of governmental support for its international expansion.

We could reveal that international strategy is constituted not only by internal appraisal (availability of resources) and market factors, but also linked to national political priorities.

We only used secondary data to develop this teaching case. Even though we built the case also using the information available on the company’s website and its annual report, we believe that newspaper articles might provide some bias in the way they were written. Then, we tried to be neutral and just use facts mentioned in the articles to understand the international strategy.

The literature tends to emphasise the role of institutions in international business activities. We contribute to the literature by presenting the benefits and consequences of political connexions for an EMNE’s internationalisation path. Moreover, our study brings light to the need of redefining the firm’s international strategy without taking into account the governmental alignment.