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1 – 10 of 885Ana 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…
Abstract
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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Cândido Borges, Fernando Dolabela and Louis Jacques Filion
As of 2020, London's Financial Times had ranked Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC) as one of the world's leading executive education institutions and the top such institution in Latin…
Abstract
As of 2020, London's Financial Times had ranked Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC) as one of the world's leading executive education institutions and the top such institution in Latin America for 15 consecutive years. In 2011, FDC was also ranked fifth on the Financial Times' list of the 40 most respected business schools in the world. For FDC itself and for its co-founder, Emerson de Almeida, this recognition was a wonderful way of celebrating the 35th anniversary of an institution that has become a leader in applied management education in Brazil.
How did this young Brazilian institution achieve this? As is the case for any great undertaking, many people played crucial roles in its creation and consolidation. However, its history is closely tied to the life of its co-founder, Emerson de Almeida.
Emerson was FDC's Chief Executive from its foundation in 1976 until 2012, when he became President of its Board of Governance. 1 He is primarily an innovator and drew his inspiration from visits to world-renowned business schools. Once he understood the needs arising from executive thinking processes, he was able to adapt these schools' best practices to suit the Brazilian culture and context.
‘You must always try the impossible’, he says. This case study presents the story of an exceptional institutional intrapreneur who championed and led the transformation of executive education in Brazil.
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Lucas de S. Batista, Jaime A. Ramírez and Frederico G. Guimarães
The purpose of this paper is to present a new multi‐objective clonal selection algorithm (MCSA) for the solution of electromagnetic optimization problems.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a new multi‐objective clonal selection algorithm (MCSA) for the solution of electromagnetic optimization problems.
Design/methodology/approach
The method performs the somatic hypermutation step using different probability distributions, balancing the local search in the algorithm. Furthermore, it includes a receptor editing operator that implicitly realizes a dynamic search over the landscape.
Findings
In order to illustrate the efficiency of MCSA, its performance is compared with the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA‐II) in some analytical problems and in the well‐known TEAM benchmark Problem 22. Three performance evaluation techniques are used in the comparison, and the effect of each operator of the MCSA in its accomplishment is estimated.
Research limitations/implications
In the analytical problems, the MCSA enhanced both the extension and uniformity in its solutions, providing better Pareto‐optimal sets than the NSGA‐II. In the Problem 22, the MCSA also outperformed the NSGA‐II. The MCSA was not dominated by the NSGA‐II in the three variables case and clearly presented a better convergence speed in the eight variables problem.
Practical implications
This paper could be useful for researchers who deal with multi‐objective optimization problems involving high‐computational cost.
Originality/value
The new operators incorporated in the MCSA improved both the extension, uniformity and the convergence speed of the solutions, in terms of the number of function evaluations, representing a robust tool for real‐world optimization problems.
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Stephanie Bispo and Luana Caroline dos Santos
This paper aimed to characterize the nutrition and health of Brazilians living in Bournemouth, England, and changes in lifestyle after migration.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aimed to characterize the nutrition and health of Brazilians living in Bournemouth, England, and changes in lifestyle after migration.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a descriptive study conducted with adult residents of Bournemouth for over a year, selected through a snowball sample. We obtained demographic and food data through a structured questionnaire. An anthropometric evaluation gathered weight, height and waist circumference data.
Findings
The final sample consisted of 111 immigrants, 57.7 percent female, with a mean age of 33.02 (±9.58) years. We found evidence that despite the existence of the health immigrant effect, health and nutritional benefits in immigrants erode over time. They reported weight gain post migration, and changes in diet, with increased consumption of food rich in calories and low in nutrients. We found a high proportion of obesity and risk of metabolic complications, which increased with time living in England because of reduced physical activity and worsening dietary habits.
Originality/value
The number of people migrating to other countries has been increasing, resulting in interference in the processes of integration and acculturation of lifestyle, including those related to diet and physical activity. But there is little about its impact on Brazilians living abroad. This study showed that health behaviors of migrants were negatively altered by migration.
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Paula Raissa, Sérgio Dias, Mark Song and Luis Zárate
Currently, social network (SN) analysis is focused on the discovery of activity and social relationship patterns. Usually, these relationships are not easily and completely…
Abstract
Purpose
Currently, social network (SN) analysis is focused on the discovery of activity and social relationship patterns. Usually, these relationships are not easily and completely observed. Therefore, it is relevant to discover substructures and potential behavior patterns in SN. Recently, formal concept analysis (FCA) has been applied for this purpose. FCA is a concept analysis theory that identifies concept structures within a data set. The representation of SN patterns through implication rules based on FCA enables the identification of relevant substructures that cannot be easily identified. The authors’ approach considers a minimum and irreducible set of implication rules (stem base) to represent the complete set of data (activity in the network). Applying this to an SN is of interest because it can represent all the relationships using a reduced form. So, the purpose of this paper is to represent social networks through the steam base.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors’ approach permits to analyze two-mode networks by transforming access activities of SN into a formal context. From this context, it can be extracted to a minimal set of implications applying the NextClosure algorithm, which is based on the closed sets theory that provides to extract a complete, minimal and non-redundant set of implications. Based on the minimal set, the authors analyzed the relationships between premises and their respective conclusions to find basic user behaviors.
Findings
The experiments pointed out that implications, represented as a complex network, enable the identification and visualization of minimal substructures, which could not be found in two-mode network representation. The results also indicated that relations among premises and conclusions represent navigation behavior of SN functionalities. This approach enables to analyze the following behaviors: conservative, transitive, main functionalities and access time. The results also demonstrated that the relations between premises and conclusions represented the navigation behavior based on the functionalities of SN. The authors applied their approach for an SN for a relationship to explore the minimal access patterns of navigation.
Originality/value
The authors present an FCA-based approach to obtain the minimal set of implications capable of representing the minimum structure of the users’ behavior in an SN. The paper defines and analyzes three types of rules that form the sets of implications. These types of rules define substructures of the network, the capacity of generation users’ behaviors, transitive behavior and conservative capacity when the temporal aspect is considered.
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Bárbara Schausteck de Almeida and Wanderley Marchi Júnior
Purpose – To outline the arguments and consequent legislation that prohibited and then allowed alcohol consumption by fans in Brazilian sports arenas since 1996…
Abstract
Purpose – To outline the arguments and consequent legislation that prohibited and then allowed alcohol consumption by fans in Brazilian sports arenas since 1996.
Design/methodology/approach – We present the social and political debates regarding alcohol consumption by sports fans having the Brazilian legislation as a starting point and using the multiple streams framework (Kingdon, 1995). We identify the problems, policies and politics streams on three phases: the prohibition of sale and consumption of alcohol in sport stadiums, the exceptional allowance for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and its consequences on state laws five years after the 2014 event.
Findings – Violence among football supporters was the focal event to approve laws prohibiting alcohol consumption in sports arenas. For the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the sport governing body demanded the opposite, so Brazil and some states approved an exception to their laws. Since then, states see an opportunity to allow the sale and consumption of alcohol in and around the stadiums, questioning the relationship between alcohol and violence. These state laws are under examination by the Supreme Court because they may counteract a national law.
Research limitations/implications – Public safety is the key justification to uphold the laws, but a lack of empirical data and research delimit the arguments on how beneficial alcohol prohibition is to suppress supporters' violence. Lawmakers and groups of interest may also include beer industry lobbying strategies and health-related issues as relevant variables in the debate, although they are not discussed in this chapter.
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Danilo de Oliveira Sampaio and Marlusa Gosling
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons why the Brazilian consumer of organic foods chooses this type of food in the retail sector, considering sustainable…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons why the Brazilian consumer of organic foods chooses this type of food in the retail sector, considering sustainable development.
Design/methodology/approach
This was a descriptive study including an exploratory phase. Regarding the methods of research, two focus groups (FGs) were developed in the qualitative phase, and then structural equation modelling was used by means of a cross-sectional survey in a quantitative design. The sample was non-probabilistic, intentionally non-random, for convenience and accessibility (n=560). Organic food consumers were addressed in different types of food retail: supermarkets, restaurants and specialised retailers.
Findings
Only one of 12 hypotheses was not confirmed. The FGs provided important information for the development of the questionnaire used in the survey. The endogenous construct, intent to purchase, showed a correlation coefficient of 41 per cent (R2=41 per cent), indicating that 41 per cent of their variations are explained by the exogenous constructs. It can be considered that one of the academic contributions of this research was to develop a model that will drive how the purchasing behaviour/consumption of organic food in Brazil occurs.
Practical implications
Considering the results of the variables of this research, retailers can create advertising campaigns that have an appreciation for the environment and quality of product and availability (logistics) in relation to organic food as the message content, because these variables can motivate the purchase. It is also suggested that the layout of the sales area in the retail premises highlights the organic food on the shelves, and the retailer's job could define the associations to the brands of organic foods, focusing on health and well-being.
Originality/value
As in Brazil there is little information on the behaviour of organic food consumers, the creation of a new model will assist entrepreneurs in their strategies and highlights a type of food that meets the principles of sustainability.
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Marcelo Bronzo, Marcos Paulo Valadares de Oliveira and Kevin McCormack
How do planning and capabilities affect operational performance? This paper aims to formulate hypotheses comprising correlations amongst those constructs in an integrated approach…
Abstract
Purpose
How do planning and capabilities affect operational performance? This paper aims to formulate hypotheses comprising correlations amongst those constructs in an integrated approach for industrial companies, considering the source, make and deliver process areas.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a survey of 164 Brazilian industrial companies, analysis of data was conducted including descriptive statistics, evaluation of a research model's internal scale reliability, statistical construct path analysis, and structural equation modeling.
Findings
The findings indicate that planning and capabilities must be taken as inter‐related initiatives that jointly influence operations performance. Significant correlations were found amongst these constructs in the source, make and deliver process areas. The model tested on this study was able to explain 84 percent of the variation in the overall performance of the companies sampled.
Research limitations/implications
The reference model was tested using a diversified sample of Brazilian industrial organizations and did not include service or other types of organizations, thereby limiting the generalizability of the results and conclusions. The findings suggest a balanced weight of operations capabilities and planning. Both play an important role on performance. These results can drive organizational strategy, indicating that companies should look to their capabilities, but that developing planning activities driven to the market should be considered mandatory.
Originality/value
Whereas some aspects of the relationship between planning and performance as well as the relationship between capabilities and performance have been reviewed in early contributions, few studies have addressed these complex mediations using an integrated process value approach.
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Antonio Campo, Richard Johnson, Mark D. Landon and Luben Cabezas‐Gómez
The purpose of this paper is to provide a suitable linkage between a computational fluid dynamics code and a shape optimization code for the analysis of heat/fluid flow in forced…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a suitable linkage between a computational fluid dynamics code and a shape optimization code for the analysis of heat/fluid flow in forced convection channels normally used in the cooling of electronic equipment.
Design/methodology/approach
A parallel‐plate channel with a discrete array of five heat sources embedded in one plate with the other plate insulated constitutes the starting model. Using water as the coolant medium, the objective is to optimize the shape of the channel employing a computerized design loop. The two‐part optimization problem is constrained to allow only the unheated plate to deform, while maintaining the same inlet shape and observing a maximum pressure drop constraint.
Findings
First, the results for the linearly deformed unheated plate show significant decrease in the plate temperatures of the heated plate, with the maximum plate temperature occurring slightly upstream of the outlet. Second, when the unheated plate is allowed to deform nonlinearly, a parabolic‐like shaped plate is achieved where the maximum plate temperature is further reduced, with a corresponding intensification in the local heat transfer coefficient. The effectiveness of the computerized design loop is demonstrated in complete detail.
Originality/value
This article offers a simple, harmonious technique for optimizing the shape of forced convection channels subjected to pre‐set design constraints.
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