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Formal recognition of the human rights of people living with mental health problems has greatly progressed. We must ask ourselves, however, to what extent the formal recognition of these rights has transformed the culture of psychiatric care and improved their quality of life. Gaining Autonomy & Medication Management (GAM) is an approach that strives to empower service users and providers and promotes the exercise of users’ rights by transforming their relationship with the central component of psychiatric treatment in community services: psychopharmacology. The purpose of this paper is to show how GAM highlights the issues surrounding the establishment of a culture of rights.

For this analysis qualitative data were collected in Brazil and in Quebec, Canada, through over 100 interviews done with people living with mental health issues and practitioners who participated in the different GAM implementation projects.

Issues, challenges and obstacles facing the instauration of a human rights culture in mental health services are presented. The profound changes that the understanding and exercise of users’ rights bring to the lives of individuals are supported by excerpts illustrating recurring issues, situations and common experiences that appear in the various contexts of the two different countries.

This is not a parallel study taking place into two countries. The methodologies used were different, and as a consequence the comparative power can be limited. However, the results reveal striking similarities.

There is scant research on human rights in mental health services in the community, and the issues surrounding the prescribing and follow-up of pharmacological treatment. The joint analysis of the researches in Brazil and in Canada, identified common challenges which are intertwined with the dominant approach of biomedical psychiatry.

This chapter analyzes governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in a highly decentralized federal country. Canada has a decentralized approach in many policy areas, including health care, in which provinces are the primary decision-makers and service providers. This decentralized health-care system allowed provinces to respond according to regional and local contexts and needs. The capacity building and the policy learning related to previous crises and horizontal coordination were key to policy responses to the pandemic. Moreover, unlike other countries, Canada did not centralize decisions throughout the pandemic, and did not reinforce competition and uncoordinated actions. The federal government also has had a central role coordinating COVID-19 policy responses. Nevertheless, Canada faced some challenges stemming from the lack of uniformity across the country, especially related to regional and local restrictions, enforcement mechanisms, testing, and travel restrictions.

This paper aims to study historical intercultural transfer by examining the case of the Mouvement Desjardins, a Quebec, Canada-based cooperative bank founded in 1900 by Alphonse Desjardins. The aim of the cooperative was to support the hitherto marginalized French–Canadian population and to initiate their economic and entrepreneurial activities.

The authors focus on a historical single-case analysis. This conducts them to analyse primary data from letters exchanged between Alphonse Desjardins and European actors, as well as company documents of the Groupe Desjardins.

The intercultural transfer of the cooperative bank model and its implementation in North America as a successful, self-sustaining model is owing to recontextualization and strategic decisions of the social entrepreneur Alphonse Desjardins based on intensive written correspondence with European bank directors who promoted the cooperative system.

This research instigates an impulse to extend our knowledge of intercultural transfer by looking into other historical cases to provide validation or add subtleties to our understanding of intercultural transfer dynamics.

This paper expands the current understanding of intercultural transfer and its powerful influence, namely, how an implemented cooperative bank system can contribute through successful recontextualization to institutional change and societal improvements. It also provides new insights into the creation and growth of social enterprises based on shared values within communities and coordinated strategic intentions across communities.

Since the first edition of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001, similar initiatives have flourished at the local scales. In the existing literature, local social forums are generally considered to be a natural replication of the world social forums. Beyond the label “social forums,” what do the practices of local social forums specifically entail and what is the meaning of these practices for local activists?I propose a comparison of eight cases situated in two distinct societies (Quebec and France). I use a multi-approach methodology, combining direct observation, focus groups, interviews, and documentary analysis.I show that despite strong national differences, a highly decentralized process, and the strong autonomy of local actors, local social forums share structural characteristics, and the expression “social forum” is associated with ways of doing things that limit the variety of local social forum initiatives: organizers share a common intentionality; the mode of operation of local social forum process and event belong to the same political culture and translate into the same practices; and the outputs of these gatherings are similar in terms of the building of ties. Overall, local social forums are used as tactical and cultural collective action repertoires by actors, redefining the boundaries of social resistance and its practices.

In recent years, the Internet has increasingly served as an important tactical tool for protest campaigns, arguably contributing to a restructuring of the repertoire of contention. This study analyzes a recent case of Internet-backed activism, focusing on the ongoing transnational mobilization against the Free Trade Area of the America's (FTAA) initiative. The Hemispheric Social Alliance, a coalition of hundreds of civil society organizations across the Western hemisphere opposed to the free market underpinnings of the FTAA, has employed Internet technologies to communicate, strategize, educate and pressure state authorities in an effort to promote an alternative social-developmental vision. This case of transnational contention has important implications that go beyond the Americas context. The organization of groups transnationally, combined with Internet communication and coordination strategies, suggests that popular political protest has begun to look considerably different from the time when state boundaries contained much political discourse and action.

The intent of this cross‐national research is to study the personal and cultural characteristics of successful professional women. High‐achieving women may share certain personal characteristics, beliefs, and experiences, regardless of the countries in which they live. However, every individual is socialized within a particular national culture, and may be expected to share certain values and expectations with other members of that culture.

Over 1,100 professionally “successful women” (including high‐level managers, entrepreneurs, academics, government personnel, and professionals) and 531 undergraduate business students in nine countries – Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, the USA and the West Indies (Barbados, Jamaica, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines) completed surveys containing two sets of variables: national/cultural (collectivism/individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance) and personal (self‐efficacy, locus of control, need for achievement).

There were significant differences in the personal characteristics between successful women and the student comparison samples, with successful women consistently higher on self‐efficacy and need for achievement, and more internal on locus of control. There were some significant but smaller than expected differences in cultural characteristics between national samples.

This contrast of successful women living in the Americas provides new insights for managers of international companies seeking to be gender inclusive.

The purpose of this article is to investigate how social integration, immigrant networks and barriers to ventureing affect the entrepreneurial activities of Brazilians in Canada, indicating how mixed embeddedness takes place in that context.

Data were collected in Toronto, through the application of a survey with 74 Brazilian entrepreneur respondents and 42 semi-structured interviews with selected subjects, thus representing a multi-method approach. The analysis included descriptive statistics from the survey data and a qualitative analysis of the trajectories and life stories of Brazilian immigrants.

Our sample comprises respondents with a high level of education and proficiency in English, coming predominantly from the southeast of Brazil, white, aged from 30 to 49. The majority of businesses are small and related to the service sector. The article contributes to the literature by discussing the elements related to mixed embeddedness, including the need for cultural adaptation and for the creation of networks as a crucial element for business venturing.

The study focuses on entrepreneurs regardless of their businesses sector or formality/informality status. It could be used as an instrument to support Canadian public policies for welcoming Brazilians and for the Brazilian government to prevent the evasion of potential entrepreneurs.

The article contributes to the body of knowledge of immigrant entrepreneurship in Canada and of Brazilian entrepreneurship overseas. The results suggest factors that may be relevant to the expansion of their business, such as social networking, cultural embeddedness and adaptation of the products/services to a wider range of target customers.

Long established and revisionist approaches to European state formation are put to one side in this article and a turn to the imperial domains of early modern states is made. The rise of Atlantic Studies as a new current of history has drawn attention to transatlantic patterns of colonialism. However, historical sociologists and comparativists have yet to grapple with the conclusions of this field of research. This article points to a possible line of argument that could draw historical sociology and Atlantic Studies together. It takes up the argument that early modern polities broke new ground in the formation of territorial institutions when they turned to transcontinental state building. From their inception, the projects of empire produced conflict-driven institutions. Comparative examination of the Spanish, British, Dutch, French and Portuguese empires reveals that, despite the authority accorded to overarching institutions of imperial government, domestic and colonial patterns of institutional formation diverged considerably. The article explores how developments in European territories took one course in each case, while colonial trajectories in the Americas took others and thereby generated distinct kinds of conflict.

It is a well known fact that bacteria play a large part in the success or failure of the satisfactory production of dairy products, but the role of yeasts and moulds should not be overlooked. These living organisms, commonly known as fungi, are the next higher form of life in the vegetable world after the bacteria stage. Their form of growth resembles the growth of plants in that they reproduce by budding, and their spores, analogous to the seeds of plants, are the means whereby many species propagate further generations. The yeast cell is much larger than the ordinary bacterium, so that it is possible to study them with the aid of much lower magnifications. When grown on solid media the yeasts give colonies not unlike those of bacteria except that the edges of the colonies are less defined, the colonies themselves project well above the surface of the media, and their surfaces are usually of a rough appearance. A good example of mould growth is that of the ordinary “green mould.”—Yeasts usually prefer to grow on the surface of liquids, and moulds are found to grow most vigourously on solid or semi‐solid media, such as meat, cheese, butter, etc. The growth of bacteria in the media hinders the simultaneous growth of the fungi, so that it is only after the media has become too acid for the growth of bacteria that yeasts and moulds are able to grow. In support of this theory it has been found that fungi will grow on the surface of sterile milk, but ordinary fresh milk containing bacteria is not a suitable media as the fungi cannot compete with the bacteria. It is found, therefore, that only bacteria proliferate in fresh milk. However, when milk has become sour bacterial growth is arrested, and it is then that mould growth becomes perceptible. The fungi tolerate a relatively large amount of acid. Media used for their cultivation is generally standardised to a ph of about 4.5. The optimum temperature for their growth is in the region of 75°–90° F. Some species will grow at 32° F., others even below this temperature. Low temperatures are not lethal to the fungi, so that when infected products are removed from cold storage growth may occur. The temperatures required to kill them and their spores generally falls between 130°–180° F. Most yeasts are killed at temperatures above 120° F., while their spores may have to be exposed to higher temperatures.