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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.

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.