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The learning outcomes are as follows: to assess the competitive position of a small business-to-business (B2B) company to remain competitive in a developing country; to identify and shape the business opportunity that represents serving small and medium enterprises that would lead to competitive positioning in the B2B environment; and to compare innovation and commercialization projects through strategic dimensions related to managing a technology company in a way that fosters business profitability and growth.

Margarita Kaplun, founder and CEO of Kapter, a small company providing country-wide technical and consultant services on thermography to industrial hubs in Mexico, had positioned the company as a reputed provider. However, the company had experienced razor-thin margins. Margarita needs to decide whether they pursue the following grant to fund a project on technology development that will source the competitive position or pursue a commercial project that help them achieve a larger customer base to reap higher income.

The case is oriented for an undergraduate audience, attending entrepreneurship, innovation and industrial organization courses. It depicts issues of technology-based entrepreneurship and is suitable for students in business, management and engineering.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

After briefly covering Bill Freudenburg’s early years, this essay reviews his major scholarly contributions and professional accomplishments while a faculty member at Washington State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Bill’s unique strengths – especially his keen sociological imagination – and crucial conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions are highlighted, as well as his commitment to providing valuable mentoring for students and colleagues. The enduring importance of his work is ensured by the continuing application and extension of his ideas by other scholars.

In 2001, two important scientific groups, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the National Research Council, published the results of two of the most extensive (and ongoing) research projects on climatic changes. They both express scientific consensus on the fact that anthropogenically induced climatic disruptions are here to stay and that they perhaps represent the most decisive policy issue of our time. A concerted effort to distract and even attack the legitimacy and expertise over this scientific consensus has been quite effective, so much so that to this day, there is no clear federal climate policy in the making. Bill’s (and my) work on “Weapons of Mass Distraction” may prove to be a handy analytic tool to understand this blunt attack on the evidence-base scientific consensus.

The purpose of this study is to present a conceptual analysis to artistic manifestation represented through graphic and multimedia pieces that are available in social media networks as document-speeches in relation to protests in Venezuela during April-July, 2017. Also, this paper proposes the implementation of digital documentation tool that allows retrieval, organization, systematization and preservation of visual contents.

Semiotic analysis based on 44 artistic pieces (images and videos) posted on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest in Venezuela against the government of Nicolás Maduro in 2017. The authors defined a metadata group for content creation of multimedia and testing information retrieval from general data, textual contents, file formats and semiotic description using Omeka software.

The digital documentation of artivism proposed has the potential to sustain over time as documents likely to be studied. It also constitutes an important analysis and a historical reconstruction, which must be taken into consideration to conduct research in the future political and social process of Venezuela.

Cyber-artivism, a concept related to online activism, is conceived as an artistic expression mediated by technologies and social media emerging in the context of social environments with a political–demographic character.

Digital preservation of multimedia contents by their semiotic and historic value as artistic cyber-activism.

Low-income mothers who use welfare benefits are frequently portrayed as “faces of dependency” in the prevailing public discourse on America’s poor. This discourse, often anchored in race, class, and gender stereotypes, perpetuates the assumption that mothers on welfare lack skills to employ constructive agency in securing family resources. Scholars, however, have suggested that their welfare program use is embedded in complex survival strategies to make ends meet. While such studies emphasize maternal inventiveness in garnering necessary resources and support, this literature devotes little attention to the costs of these strategies on maternal power as well as how mothers negotiate gender and the oppression that usually accompanies such support. Feminist scholars in particular point to the importance of exploring these issues in the contexts of mothers’ romantic unions and client–caseworker relationships. Guided by an interpersonal, institutional, and intersectional framework, the authors explored this issue using longitudinal ethnographic data on 19 Mexican-immigrant, low-income mothers from the Three-City Study. Results showed mothers negotiated gender and power by simultaneously “doing,” “undoing,” and/or “redoing” gender using three strategies that emerged from the data: symbolic reliance, selective reliance, and creative nondisclosure. Implications of these findings for the future research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the interplay between a firm’s financial situation and its inventory ownership in a single-firm and a two-firm perspective.

The analysis uses different secondary data sources to quantify the effect of both financial constraints and cost of capital on inventory holdings of public US firms. The authors first adopt a single-firm perspective and analyze whether financial constraints and cost of capital do generally affect the amount of inventory held. Next, the authors adopt a two-firm perspective and analyze the inventory ownership in customer-supplier relationships.

Inventory levels are affected by financial constraints and cost of capital. Results indicate that higher costs of capital are weakly associated with lower inventories. However, contrary to the authors’ expectations, firms that are less financially constrained hold less inventories than firms that are more financially constrained. Finally, the authors find that customers hold the larger fraction of supply chain inventory in supplier-customer dyads.

The authors’ results indicate that financial considerations generally play a role in inventory management. However, inventory holdings seem to be influenced only slightly by financing costs and inventory holdings between supplier and customer seem to be less than optimal from a financial perspective. Considering those financial aspects can lead to relevant financial advantages.

In contrast to other recent research, the authors study how the financial situation of a firm affects its inventory levels (not vice versa) and also consider inventories from a two-firm perspective.

The stock market in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is quickly developing and maturing. While the inefficiencies of this market have already been attributed to its mechanics (Abdeen and Shook, 1984; Butler and Malaikah, 1992; Abdelkader, 1993), information concerning the market players has not been available. This research reports descriptive results of 74 interviews with Saudi investors. The results provide insight into the information that is used for investing decisions, support prior evidence of market inefficiency, and encourage more research in this area.