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By the end of the case study discussion, it is expected that students will have learned to assess what makes it likely that firms will respond to episodes of stakeholder activism; establish the interplay between nonmarket strategies and corporate governance mechanisms in assessing shareholder activism; explain about the board of directors as a corporate governance mechanism; evaluate the threats of nonmarket dimensions as a strategic response from the board; and understand the impact and increasing power of shareholders over board decisions.

In April 2019, to pressure Rumo S.A. regarding the duplication of the Itirapina–Cubatão railroad, indigenous peoples from 12 São Paulo villages bought six Rumo shares, which were quoted on Tuesday, April 23, 2019, at around BRL17 each. Duplication of the railroad started in 2011 and affected the lives of the Indians. The company promised to implement more than 100 improvements to the villages, but as of 2019, half of the improvements were at a standstill. After buying enough shares to entitle them to participate in the annual general meeting (AGM) of shareholders, the Indians went to Rumo’s AGM to voice their concerns and show how the villages had been affected. It was the audit committee that needed to discuss and solve the case of the indigenous peoples. What steps would Rumo take next? What was the best thing to do with regard to the claims of the Indians? This case shows the start of corporate activism in Brazil. This case reports the dilemma that Rumo faced with the indigenous activism at the beginning of 2019 because of the expansion of their railroad network across indigenous lands.

This case is suited for a class in which the students are exposed to a corporate governance framework and internal and external governance mechanisms. The case can be applied at the graduate and executive levels in relevant courses such as corporate governance, corporate responsibility, strategic management, and the stock market.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a politically connected firm moderates the relationship between media coverage and market value. More specifically, the authors are interested in the interplay of an external corporate governance (CG) mechanism with an internal one. By interacting different mechanisms, this paper advances the empirical setting of application and functions of the corporate governance.

This paper tests the hypotheses presented using panel data with a fixed-effect model, by assembling and exploiting a unique, hand-collected set of data on media coverage consisting of over 164,000 media reports and a politically connected board of directors comprising over 12,000 CVs tracked from 2010 to 2014. Data is originally from Brazil, a country where political connections are highly used by firms and that has been a place of much research on corporate political activity.

The results of this paper suggest that a politically connected board of directors can mitigate the negative effects of media coverage on market value. Overall, the results imply that the validity of a CG mechanism might be affected by other mechanisms.

The findings of this paper imply the need for research focusing on the mutual effects of different CG mechanisms. While CG is understood as a set of mechanisms, new research could focus on the interplay of these mechanisms.

The findings suggest that the presence of former politicians and government officers on the board dissipates bad news reported by the media and boosts market value when media is positive. To maximize investment returns, investors should analyze firms' political human capital.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to develop hypotheses on the moderation effects of a politically connected board on the relation between media coverage and market value. This is relevant because this brings insights on how firms could jointly manage these mechanisms.

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.

In port cities with declining industries, waterfront redevelopment is one major part of the competitive agenda. The increasing economic importance of service, leisure, and tourism industries created an opportunity to reuse urban waterfront areas no longer considered profitable. Parque das Nações in Lisbon is a product of such a process: It’s a newly built mixed-use waterfront neighborhood, planned, and developed, first and foremost, to be the site of Expo ’98. This former industrial and port area has been emerging in the last 15 years as a “showcase” for Lisbon: a piece of the competitive strategy of the Portuguese capital. Its public spaces are an important part of that strategy and have been managed in order to remain particularly safe and clean.

On one hand, Parque das Nações is a socially homogenous elite residential neighborhood, on the other hand, it is emerging as a new metropolitan centrality characterized by an intense mobility and by an increasing concentration of urbanites carrying on work and leisure related activities. It is the coexistence of these two complementary and contradictory dynamics that shapes the interactive logic of public life in the area.

This chapter explores the use, appropriation, and interaction patterns afforded by the public spaces of Parque das Nações. I discard both the idealized conception of public spaces that characterizes them as havens of diversity and accessibility and the more contemporary idea of public spaces as empty spaces that no longer promote encounters with others, serving exclusively as marketing tools for real-estate developers. Instead, I argue that the production of urban areas such as Parque das Nações is a socially unequal process resulting in excessively planned and controlled public spaces. However, when they attract different populations for different reasons, these spaces might foster unexpected, emergent, or even transgressive uses and interactions that promote public space vitality.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between family managers and firms’ risk levels in a context characterized by low investor protection and firm opacity. Specifically, this paper examines whether the level of risk faced by firms is affected by family shareholders’ ownership stake and activism.

Corporate governance data were hand-collected for a sample of 90 Italian listed companies and 540 observations from the year 2018. Regression analysis was then used to test the research hypotheses.

This study provides evidence of a positive association between active family ownership and risk faced by sampled firms. This study also finds that the number of inside directors is negatively correlated with firms’ risk-taking. Overall, the results confirm family managers’ influence on firms’ risk choices and show consistency with theoretical arguments in favor of hiring professional managers to guide family-owned firms.

Practical implications emerge from the study findings. First, family owners should consider to hire a larger number of professional managers to support firms’ wealth maximization and retention and to reduce default risks. Second, investors should take into account the firms’ board of directors and management composition to better assess the investments risk level. Finally, the positive correlation between active family owners and systematic risk suggests the opportunity for regulators to improve the legal requirements related to minority directors to increase their effectiveness and, therefore, minority shareholders’ protection.

This study extends the literature on the association between ownership structure and firms’ risk levels, showing the effect of family managers on firms’ risk levels. Besides, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous study investigates professional executives’ influence on risk when family ownership prevails.

The global health crisis represents an unprecedented opportunity for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. This paper aims to integrate explainable AI into the decision-making process in emergency scenarios to help mitigate the high levels of complexity and uncertainty associated with these situations. An AI solution is designed to extract insights into opioid overdose (OD) that can help government agencies to improve their medical emergency response and reduce opioid-related deaths.

This paper employs the design science research paradigm as an overarching framework. Open-access digital data and AI, two essential components within the digital transformation domain, are used to accurately predict OD survival rates.

The proposed AI solution has two primary implications for the advancement of informed emergency management. Results show that it can help not only local agencies plan their resources for timely response to OD incidents, thus improving survival rates, but also governments to identify geographical areas with lower survival rates and their primary contributing factor; hence, they can plan and allocate long-term resources to increase survival rates and help in developing effective emergency-related policies.

This paper illustrates that digital transformation, particularly open-access digital data and AI, can improve the emergency management framework (EMF). It also demonstrates that the AI models developed in this study can identify opioid OD trends and determine the significant factors improving survival rates.

At the end of the millennium Mexico faced the double challenge of adjusting to an economic policy based on open markets and the protection of a reinvigorated democratic political system through an increased awareness of civil rights and responsibilities among citizens. Nevertheless, tertiary education reforms shifted the onus on education from the formation of social capital to that of human capital. I consider the background of the introduction of the neo-liberal model in the Mexican economy, and the economists’ critique of the adequacy of that model. I contrast the latter to the educationalists’ debate in response to where it becomes apparent that the neoliberal model had come to dominate the conceptual framework in which the impact of the introduction of the reform model could be analyzed. Finally, I consider a recent text in which the neo-liberal tendencies in tertiary education are more clearly outlined, although an alternative option is not forthcoming. By situating my consideration of the challenges of a knowledge society firmly within the historical, social and economic context of Mexico, I indicate factors which such an alternative would need to take into account.

The nuclear purpose of this research paper is to analyse representative bridges around the world as a tourist attraction and iconic element through destination marketing organisations’ (DMOs’) tourism official websites where these are localised and three online travel agencies’ (OTAs’) websites.

This research used a mixed method. The author carried out Google research (13 March 2023) that included the following search word string “iconic bridges around the world” and “the most famous bridges worldwide” to select the most relevant bridges around the globe. Moreover, this research used a content analysis to examine how Expedia, Booking and Orbitz OTAs promote the bridges through their websites in terms of a tourist attraction, iconic element, tourist package, images and information.

Findings suggest that the most representative bridges analysed in this study are promoted as iconic element and tourist attraction through DMOs’ websites. Nevertheless, Booking, Expedia and Orbitz OTAs promote and sell products and services related to bridges selected, except in the case of the Millau Viaduct in France, the Si-O-Se-Pol bridge in Iran, the Danyang Kunshan Grand bridge in China and the Royal Gorge in the USA. Furthermore, results support that OTAs need to enhance the quality and variety of products and services that are linked to iconic bridges sightseeing tours because at the moment, there is a great uniformity in the promotion of products and services provided.

This paper contributes to broader debates in the importance of bridges as a tourist attraction and iconic element to attract tourists through tourism promotion websites.

L'activité économique des stations thermales a pris aujourd'hui un tournant important. Après des décennies de conflit entre le thermalisme et la médecine clinique et pharmacologique, les stations thermales ont reçus aujourd'hui une nouvelle mission toute aussi précise qu'importante pour l'humanité.