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1 – 6 of 6Barbara de Lima Voss, David Bernard Carter and Bruno Meirelles Salotti
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…
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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.
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Since the late 1980s, the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform, alongside the anti-asylum movement, has promoted a change in the way of treating people with mental suffering in the…
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Since the late 1980s, the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform, alongside the anti-asylum movement, has promoted a change in the way of treating people with mental suffering in the country. This process produced transformations in the flows and forms in which individuals with mental illnesses use the city, intending to make the city itself less unequal.
Taking into account that accessibility measures must consider individual, temporal, transportation and land-use elements as relevant, this study will focus on the relation between mobility and access, looking at subjects who were submitted to prolonged psychiatric hospitalisation and got discharged to live in the Residential Therapeutic Services – RTS, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In order to do that, the study used focus groups, observation, shadowing and in-depth interviews as methodologies strategies.
The results of the study demonstrate that: (a) there are a variety of ways of accessing the city; (b) displacements outside the facilities are characterised by the proximity of the destinations and by being made, mostly, on foot; (c) there is a restriction regarding the use of public transport system; and (d) access to money is a determinant factor for the accomplishment of mobility practices in city spaces. However, it is also observed that the mobility and access to the city can exert an effect of autonomy by allowing governance of the subjects’ own time and destination.
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Ana Marcela Ardila Pinto, Marcos Fontoura De Oliveira, Bruna Barradas Cordeiro and Laíse Lorene Hasz Souza e Oliveira
Since the 1990s, several policy instruments have been produced in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to improve accessibility to urban mobility systems, especially for people with…
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Since the 1990s, several policy instruments have been produced in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to improve accessibility to urban mobility systems, especially for people with disabilities. However, the city still faces important shortcomings in understanding the demands of the population with disabilities and in implementing an appropriate urban structure. The present work identifies mobility practices and demands for accessibility of this population based on a descriptive analysis of the city’s origin/destination survey (2012) and results of a focus group with representatives of the population with disabilities and public authorities. The analysis demonstrates that the demands of persons with reduced mobility are characterised first by a high level of immobility, comparing to people without disabilities, which has important consequences on access to urban goods, especially jobs and health and educational services. Second, mobility has a relevant role in producing forms of discrimination and exclusion. Third, in addition to the problems faced by the general population, people with reduced mobility also face greater challenges in using transport systems. Ultimately, this analysis points out that the main needs for people with disabilities are related to the problems of articulation between public places and transportation systems, both in terms of infrastructure and in terms of attitude and behaviour of service providers and other citizens.
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Access can be understood as the spatial dimension of social inclusion and exclusion. It is from this understanding that the authors incorporate the gender perspective when…
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Access can be understood as the spatial dimension of social inclusion and exclusion. It is from this understanding that the authors incorporate the gender perspective when analysing the possibilities of mobility in the city. This research focusses on a specific moment in the life cycle of men and women: childbirth and the presence of children in the household. The aim is to elucidate how much the presence of children in the household impacts the urban mobility of the people responsible for the household, comparing data of men and women responsible for households with or without cohabiting children. The authors used descriptive statistics and correlation analysis based on data from the Origin–Destination Survey 2012 of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The authors analysed the travel motivations, the ratio of journeys by trips and the means of transportation used, in addition to some indicators of immobility. The results of the research show the impact of the presence of children in an unequal way considering the gender of those responsible for the household, with women in all scenarios carrying out a greater frequency of trips associated with care, but in a specific way according to their degree of schooling and their children’s ages.
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Zbigniew Smoreda, Ana-Maria Olteanu-Raimond and Thomas Couronné
Purpose — In this chapter, we will review several alternative methods of collecting data from mobile phones for human mobility analysis. We propose considering cellular network…
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Purpose — In this chapter, we will review several alternative methods of collecting data from mobile phones for human mobility analysis. We propose considering cellular network location data as a useful complementary source for human mobility research and provide case studies to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each method.
Methodology/approach — We briefly describe cellular phone network architecture and the location data it can provide, and discuss two types of data collection: active and passive localization. Active localization is something like a personal travel diary. It provides a tool for recording positioning data on a survey sample over a long period of time. Passive localization, on the other hand, is based on phone network data that are automatically recorded for technical or billing purposes. It offers the advantage of access to very large user populations for mobility flow analysis of a broad area.
Findings — We review several alternative methods of collecting data from mobile phone for human mobility analysis to show that cellular network data, although limited in terms of location precision and recording frequency, offer two major advantages for studying human mobility. First, very large user samples – covering broad geographical areas – can be followed over a long period of time. Second, this type of data allows researchers to choose a specific data collection methodology (active or passive), depending on the objectives of their study. The big mobile phone localization datasets have provided a new impulse for the interdisciplinary research in human mobility.
Originality/value of chapter — We propose considering cellular network location data as a useful complementary source for transportation research and provide case studies to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of each proposed method. Mobile phones have become a kind of “personal sensor” offering an ever-increasing amount of location data on mobile phone users over long time periods. These data can thus provide a framework for a comprehensive and longitudinal study of temporal dynamics, and can be used to capture ephemeral events and fluctuations in day-to-day mobility behavior offering powerful tools to transportation research, urban planning, or even real-time city monitoring.
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