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The article focuses on varying protest intensities of social movement activists in an authoritarian political environment. Drawing on a sample of participants in El Salvador's El movimiento popular, the paper examines how structural location in the resistance movement's multi-sectoral organizational infrastructure shapes the level of participation. Those motivated by state repression and maintaining multiple or cross-sectoral organizational ties exhibited higher levels of protest participation. The findings suggest that more attention be given to how the multi-sectoral network structure of opposition coalitions induces micro-mobilization processes of individual participation in high-risk collective action.

Jordi Agusti-Panareda is a qualified lawyer in Spain and a researcher in mediation and conflict management. Lately he has been studying and undertaking research on mediation and dispute resolution at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at Stanford University. He has recently been awarded a J.S.D. doctoral degree at Stanford Law School.

In this chapter, we analyzed the effects of internationalization on innovation, productivity, and firm performance among multinational pharmaceutical companies as representatives of a global knowledge-based industry. The empirical analysis used multiple stepwise regressions based on a sample of 149 firms headquartered in Europe and the US. The results indicate that innovation outcomes are positively correlated to the number of foreign subsidiaries (scope internationalization), whereas surprisingly, formal research and development (R&D) does not seem to directly influence innovation. This suggests that the firms benefit from local overseas subsidiaries to create and implement new innovative offerings. The number of foreign subsidiaries has a U-shaped relationship to patent productivity suggesting that firms can gain advantages by locating cost-intensive activities in low-cost countries and critical tasks in advanced market locations. Firm performance has a U-shaped relationship to sales abroad (scale internationalization) and the relationship is further enhanced by a high focus on R&D. This suggests that sales abroad enable scale economies, where R&D improves quality and relevance of products and thereby boosts performance. Finally, to validate the findings we conducted two semi-structured interviews with representative industry experts and gained further insights for an extended interpretation of results.

The national immigrant rights campaign of 2006 stands as one of the largest mobilizations by people of color in US history, yet less scholarly attention has been given to systematically comparing these mobilizations at the local level. To develop an understanding of what led to sustained mobilization, a comparative case study analysis of seven cities in California's San Joaquin Valley is employed. The empirical evidence is based on interviews with key organizers and participants, newspaper documentation of protest events, census data, and other secondary sources. I find that the presence and size of policy threats explained the initial protest during the spring of 2006 in all localities, but cities with elaborate resource infrastructures (preexisting organizations, histories of community organizing, and coalitions) had more enduring levels of collective action.

The relevance of finance for strategy is probably never greater than during a recession. We argue that the strategy literature has been virtually silent on the issue of recessions, and that this constitutes a regrettable sin of omission. Recessions are also periods when the commonly held view of financial markets in the strategy literature – efficient, and therefore strategically irrelevant – is particularly misplaced. A key route to rectify this omission is to focus on how recessions affect investment behavior, and thereby firms’ stocks of assets and capabilities which ultimately will affect competitive outcomes. In the present chapter, we aim to contribute by analyzing how two key aspects of recessions, demand reductions and reductions in credit availability, affect three different types of investments: physical capital, R&D and innovation, and human- and organizational capital. We synthesize and conceptualize insights from finance- and macroeconomics about how recessions affect different types of investments and find that recessions not only affect the level of investment, but also the composition of investments. Some of these effects are quite counterintuitive. For example, investments in R&D are both more and less sensitive to credit constraints than physical capital is, depending on available internal finance. Investments in human capital grow as demand falls, and both R&D and human capital investments show important nonlinearities with respect to changes in demand.

Paul Samuelson was attracted to the irregular economic development pattern of some South American countries because of the links between economic performance and political factors. He discussed the influence of “populist democracy” on Argentina’s relative economic stagnation, which, he argued in the 1970s and early 1980s, served as a dangerous paradigm for the American economy under stagflation. Stagflation phenomena marked the end of Samuelson’s “neoclassical synthesis.” Moreover, he applied his concept of “capitalist fascism” to deal with military dictatorships in Brazil and (especially) in Chile. The Brazilian translation of his Economics in 1973 brought about a correspondence with Brazilian economists about the “fascist” features of the regime. The main variable behind the South American economic and politically unstable processes discussed by Samuelson was economic inequality, which became also a conspicuous feature of the American economy since the adoption of market-based policies in the 1980s and after.