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The purpose of this paper is to present and interpret the “Enterprise Politics Model (EPM)” developed by Professor Antonio Valero, Founder and first Dean of IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Spain.

Drawing from a careful reading of Valero’s writings in their original context and some developments of these by his followers, this paper systematically presents and discusses the key ideas of Valero’s model for management and corporate governance.

The main features of Valero’s philosophy of the firm and of senior management can be summarized in four points: the firm as a community of persons; the firm as an intermediate social institution serving the common good of society; the different nature of political and technical practice, which leads senior management to exercise practical reason – not only science or technique, and at the same time a kind of political art, or wisdom; and the role and responsibility of entrepreneurs and top management. Valero emphasizes the political nature of management and, from a practical perspective, suggests a global analysis based on four big areas of governance: business activity, managing structure, institutional configuration, and professional community. He makes his model applicable by developing “political procedures”.

Valero’s “EPM” is an original humanistic approach to management and corporate governance, with implications to business education. Valero’s contributions were based on his business and teaching experience and in a deep humanistic background, but adopted an intuitive outlook and need further conceptual development, actualization to contemporary business context and empirical research on the relationship between this model and performance.

Valero’s “EPM” is a practically oriented humanistic approach to management and corporate governance which can be a realistic alternative to conventional, and often criticized, approaches to management and corporate governance. In fact, it has already been successfully applied in several companies.

In a context of growing discontent toward capitalism and the role of business in society, the “EPM” – discussed in this paper – shows how business might be run and organized to be socially responsible, contributing to the common good and respecting individual rights and flourishing.

The paper discusses, systematizes and interprets an innovative way of understanding management and corporate governance.

Since the early modern age, the debt of the State was a constant source for concern to the Spanish governments. Episodes of defaults caused by enormous expenditure to keep the Empire slowly faded out until a certain reorganization of public finance was attained in the central decades of the nineteenth century. The core idea that finance ministers and economists, in general, had at that time was to balance the public budget controlling expenses, in order to handle the problem of public debt. However, alternative views on government finance existed. Focusing on a crucial period for the consolidation of Spanish liberal regime and its public finance, this chapter shows that, among a predominant concern for reducing public expenditure as the best way to stabilize the economy and promote economic growth, the character of Luis María Pastor emerges to support government expansionary policies financed with credit. Far from fearing deficit, Pastor, one of the leaders of the Spanish liberal school of economic thought, believed that investment in infrastructures financed through debt was the key to economic growth. Through a multiplicative effect, a program of public investment would enhance economic growth, eventually solving the long-term insufficiency of Spanish finance. This gives evidence that ideas on public finance of classical liberal economists were far from uniform, contributing to a more precise view on the body of doctrines of this school.

The aim of this paper is to present an initiative to apply the principles of Linked Data to enhance the search and discovery of OpenCourseWare (OCW) contents created and shared by the universities.

This paper is a case study of how linked data technologies can be applied for the enhancement of open learning contents.

Results presented under the umbrella of OCW-Universia consortium, as the integration and access to content from different repositories OCW and the development of a query method to access these data, reveal that linked data would offer a solution to filter and select semantically those open educational contents, and automatically are linked to the linked open data cloud.

The new OCW-Universia integration with linked data adds new features to the initial framework including improved query mechanisms and interoperability.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the circumstances that have conditioned the development of education in Spain from the enlightenment to the present day.

Multidisciplinary scientific approach that combines the interpretation of the legal texts with the revision of the doctrinal and theoretical contributions made on the issue.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the history of education in Spain has been marked by constant fluctuations between the reactionary instincts, principally maintained by the Catholic Church and the conservative social classes, and the progressive experiments, driven by the enlightened and the liberals first, and the republicans and the socialists later. As a consequence of that, the fight for finishing with illiteracy and guaranteeing universal schooling underwent permanent advances and retreats, preventing from an effective modernization of the Spanish educative system. On the one hand, renewal projects promoted by teachers and pedagogues were inevitably criticized by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, obsessed with the idea of preserving the influence of religion on the schools. On the other hand, successive governments were weak in implementing an educational policy which could place Spain at the level of the other European and occidental nations.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, although the country has overcome a good part of its centuries-old backwardness, increasing economic difficulties and old ideological splits keep hampering the quality of teaching, gripped by neoliberal policies which undermine the right to education for all. The reading of this paper offers various historical clues to understand this process.

The Six Sigma project aims at a continual reduction in process variation, eliminating defects or flaws in products and services, optimizing processes and reducing costs. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate improvements in customer service index (CSI), product cycle time and inventory turnover after implementation of a Six Sigma project.

This research focused on the value stream mapping of a company process, performed by a multidisciplinary team that implemented a pull production system, the standard operational procedure in machines that were process bottlenecks, and the kanban system.

After three months of implementation, the authors observed an 11.7 percent reduction in product cycle time, increase in customer service index (CSI) from 93.9 to 97 percent and increase in inventory turnovers from 4.9 to 9.

The project was in accordance with the competitive strategy of the company, which is focused on customer satisfaction and cost reduction.

Organizations spend considerable time and money educating individuals on Six Sigma; however, existing literature does not examine Six Sigma adoption at the individual level or the factors that impact individual Six Sigma adoption. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of individual adoption of Six Sigma tools and methodology.

This paper used a single-site field study in a manufacturing organization to empirically test and refine a theory of the factors impacting Six Sigma adoption at the individual level.

Reaction to training, project management and project infrastructure were found to be significant input factors for individual Six Sigma adoption with an R² of 0.482, which indicates that about 48 per cent of the variation in Six Sigma adoption is explained by the input factors. All of the identified input factors were found to have a positive relationship with individual Six Sigma adoption, as well as positive correlations with each other.

This paper was not a controlled experiment or a longitudinal study, so it is not possible from the results of this research to prove causal relationships, although the literature supports a causal relationship between the input factors and outcome.

The findings of this paper will be useful to practicing organizations which seek to improve individual Six Sigma adoptions, as well as inform future Six Sigma adoption research.

Six Sigma adoption at the organizational level has been well documented in the existing literature. The successful adoption of Six Sigma in an organization is dependent, at least in part, to adoption Six Sigma at the individual level. A review of the existing literature indicates that there has been no research into individual adoption of Six Sigma tools and methodology.

This paper sets out to investigate the potential contribution of the inter‐disciplinary field of ecological economics to the explanation of the current economic crisis. The root of the crisis is the growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance.

The authors trace the epistemological origins of this disjuncture to the myths of economism – a mix of academic, popular and political beliefs that served to explain, rationalise and perpetuate the current economic system.

The authors recommend ending with economism and developing new collective and discursive processes for understanding and engaging with ecological‐economic systems.

The authors embrace the notion of sustainable de‐growth: an equitable and democratic transition to a smaller economy with less production and consumption.