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South America is a heterogeneous continent, with diverse prison realities. Its prison population is estimated at 600,000 inmates, of whom 10,000 are declared insane. Physical and mental health care supplied to the inmates is precarious and preventive programs in progress are rare. The authors’ comment on the Roman Law tradition and describe the situation in Brazil and Argentina, from the point of view of their legal backgrounds. They also consider the kind of mental health resources found and the types of treatment offered, mainly in Forensic Psychiatric Hospitals. Their conclusion emphasizes the need to improve the conditions of penitentiaries in South America, which, because of their deficiencies, often violate the human rights of prisoners.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a politically connected firm moderates the relationship between media coverage and market value. More specifically, the authors are interested in the interplay of an external corporate governance (CG) mechanism with an internal one. By interacting different mechanisms, this paper advances the empirical setting of application and functions of the corporate governance.

This paper tests the hypotheses presented using panel data with a fixed-effect model, by assembling and exploiting a unique, hand-collected set of data on media coverage consisting of over 164,000 media reports and a politically connected board of directors comprising over 12,000 CVs tracked from 2010 to 2014. Data is originally from Brazil, a country where political connections are highly used by firms and that has been a place of much research on corporate political activity.

The results of this paper suggest that a politically connected board of directors can mitigate the negative effects of media coverage on market value. Overall, the results imply that the validity of a CG mechanism might be affected by other mechanisms.

The findings of this paper imply the need for research focusing on the mutual effects of different CG mechanisms. While CG is understood as a set of mechanisms, new research could focus on the interplay of these mechanisms.

The findings suggest that the presence of former politicians and government officers on the board dissipates bad news reported by the media and boosts market value when media is positive. To maximize investment returns, investors should analyze firms' political human capital.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to develop hypotheses on the moderation effects of a politically connected board on the relation between media coverage and market value. This is relevant because this brings insights on how firms could jointly manage these mechanisms.

The aim of this study is to advance the understanding of firm growth determinants by comparing the factors influencing young firms' growth in 13 countries corresponding to three contrasting regions.

The authors propose an integrated model of venture growth where entrepreneurs' profile, firm resources and market characteristics are combined. This model is tested using three OLS regressions, one corresponding to each region.

The results show that compared with the remainder two regions, the less favorable business conditions verified in Latin American countries emphasize the relevance of entrepreneurs' human capital endowments in determining business development and its further growth. On the contrary, market‐related issues and the availability of financial resources are more important in South‐East Asia and Mediterranean Europe. Team size and particularly its growth are positively associated with firm growth in all the studied regions.

The results of this study confirm that a firm's growth determinants as well as their importance vary across regions. Consequently, policy interventions should take into account the specificity of each region when designing entrepreneurial policies, avoiding the adoption of “one size fits all” solutions.

The main contribution of this paper is twofold: first, it collects empirical evidence about young firm growth in less studied regions; second, by comparing the results for each region differential effects of several determinants of firm growth in quite contrasting contexts are discussed.

This paper aims to describe how the technology forecast process occurs at a technology-based company named Daiken, a Brazilian electronics industry, located in the state of Parana. The study helps to clarify the context that tech-companies in Brazil face when trying to forecast new technologies.

The paper opted for a case study, in a qualitative and descriptive approach. Primary data were collected through a semi-structured interview and non-participant observation. Secondary data were generated through documentary research.

Outcomes indicate that, for the studied case, technology forecast practices are adopted in an informal and unsystematic way, best aligned to the nature of competitive intelligence.

Because of the chosen research approach, the results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the propositions further.

The paper includes implications for the adjustment of technology forecast tools to the reality seen in emergent nations like Brazil.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how to conduct the technology forecast processes in small and mid-tech-companies in Brazil.

The purpose of this study is to deepen understanding of the effects of using social media technologies to acquire technological knowledge and organizational learning competences, of technological knowledge competences on organizational learning and finally of organizational learning on organizational performance.

The study was performed by analyzing data from a sample of 197 technology firms located in Spain. The hypotheses were tested using a structural equations model with the program LISREL 8.80.

This study’s conceptual framework is grounded in complexity theory – along with dynamic capabilities theory, which complements the resource-based view. The study contributes to the literature by proposing a model that reflects empirically how business ecosystems that use social media technologies enable the development of interorganizational and social collaboration networks that encourage learning and development of technological knowledge competences.

It would be interesting for future studies to consider other elements to conceptualize and measure social media technologies, including (among others) significance of the various tools used and strategic integration. The model might also analyze other sectors and another combination of variables.

The results of this study have several managerial implications: developing social media technologies and interorganizational social collaboration networks not only enables the organizational learning process but also encourages technological knowledge competences. Through innovation processes, use of social media technologies also contributes to strengthening companies’ strategic positioning, which ultimately helps to improve firms’ organizational performance.

Since social media technologies drive information systems in contemporary society (because they enable interaction with numerous agents), the authors highlight the use of complexity theory to develop a conceptual framework.

The study also deepens understanding of the connections by which new experiential learning contributes to the generation of coevolutionary adaptive business ecosystems and digital strategies that enable development of interorganizational and social collaborative networks through technological knowledge competences. Only after examining the impact of social media technologies on organizational performance in prior literature, did the authors underscore that both quantity and frequency of social media technology use are positively related to improvement in knowledge processes that lead to employees’ creation and acquisition of new metaknowledge.

Peripheral vision (PV) or side vision refers to that which is visible to the eye while being outside of its central area of focus. PV enables organisms to detect movement and potential threats in their environment. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the concept of PV in the business environment, as well as its relationship with knowledge structures in the form of technology knowledge and absorptive capacity. The relative importance and significance of technology knowledge and absorptive capacity as mediators between “relational capital” (RC) and “PV” are also examined.

The paper reports an empirical investigation involving 125 employees from the banking sector. Data collected was statistically analysed using PLS-graph software version 03.00. Results of the data analysis show relationships uncovered in the existing literature.

The creation of RC by employees from the banking sector relies to a large extent on managers’ ability to perceive, analyse and understand activity that is often outside the focus of their attention.

Managers who explicitly value their RC have a wider vision of their environment. In turn, a wider understanding of the activity in the environment drives the strengthening of the organisation and its RC.

PV can have a direct impact on the organisation’s appetite for the development of its technology knowledge base, thus contributing to enhance the firm’s absorptive capacity as well as the extent, quality and value of its RC.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to analyze the origins of Adelco in the context of the “Consumer Orientation Campaign” (Orientación Para El Consumidor, OPEC, in Spanish) promoted by the Ministry of Economy between 1978 and 1981; second, to describe the main characteristics of Adelco during its first years, especially its activities, structure and its international connections; finally, to contribute to the study of consumer organizations in Argentina and Latin America, where very little research has been done on the subject.

This article is organized into three sections. First, it outlines the deep transformations taking place in the Argentine economy during the military regime, highlighting particularly the variations in inflation rates and a series of inflation-related policies. It goes on to offer a brief overview of some new studies in consumer history in Argentina as well as an analysis of the Consumer Orientation campaign, promoted by Martínez de Hoz, the Minister of Economy from 1978 to 1981. Finally, it details the origins and key features of Adelco. For source material, this paper uses a qualitative approach, working with government documents, interviews and magazines. It also makes use of the Minutes of the Board of Directors Meeting of Adelco. At the same time, this paper contributes to current debates in the history of consumption.

This paper reaches two main conclusions. First, while Adelco may have presented itself as a non-government organization (NGO) linked to consumer interests and responsive to grass-roots pressures, it maintained a top-down structure with close ties to state policy. Second, Adelco was part of what Matthew Hilton has analyzed as a shift in the consumer movement of the last several decades: a change from collective action to individual choice.

The main value of the paper rests on three factors. First, it offers an insight into the origins of Adelco, the first consumer defense NGO in Argentina. Second, it studies sources that have never previously been analyzed, such as the Minutes of the Board of Directors meeting and personal interviews. Third, it shows the ties between the origins of Adelco and the consumer policy of the military government in Argentina.

External communities of practice are groups formed by company clients and employees based on common interests, commitment, mutual trust and collaboration whose members regularly share knowledge and learning. This paper examines how external communities of practice contribute to the creation of relational capital through an empirical investigation of 139 small to medium‐sized enterprises in the Spanish optometry sector using structural equation modelling validated by factor analysis.

This study investigates the relationship between family-managed firms and firm employment growth by considering the effects of location and economic crisis as moderating variables.

The study uses random-effect models on a large panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms covering 2003 to 2015 to estimate the joint effects of municipality size and economic crisis on firm employment growth.

The analysis reveals a positive association between family-managed firms and employment growth. However, this association is not uniform across space and time. When it considers location, the study finds that municipality size positively affects employment growth in family-managed firms but not in non-family firms. Additionally, while the study reveals that both firm types experience negative employment growth during the early stage of the global economic crisis (2007–08), it also finds that family-managed firms located in small municipalities downsize less than their non-family counterparts.

This study provides new evidence on the resilience of family-managed firms during economic crises, particularly those located in geographically bounded settings, such as small municipalities. When an adverse event, such as an economic crisis, jeopardizes employment levels, the embedded and trust-based relationships, between a family firm and its community leads them to prioritize employees' claims. However, family-managed firms' commitment to preserve jobs in small municipalities cannot be maintained over the long term; this effect disappears if the economic crisis is protracted. This study sheds new light on family-managed firms' distinctive behavior toward with local communities.

The purpose of this paper is to model and to value a temperature derivative to hedge late frost risk in viticulture.

Starting from 11 years of historical temperature data collected in Mendoza, Argentina, the authors reconstruct the missing data using principal component analysis. The frequency content of time series is examined by the periodogram method; ordinary least squares are used to estimate the trends of minimum, maximum and average temperatures, and hypothesis tests of univariate and bivariate normality are performed on deseasonalized and filtered temperature returns. The authors express the temperature dynamics by correlated Ornstein‐Uhlenbeck processes and historical data were fitted into the model to obtain parameters estimates. An Asian‐type option on a temperature index is constructed and its price and sensitivities are computed by Monte Carlo method.

The authors define an index in terms of minimum and average temperatures that, under some simplifying hypotheses, quantifies the damage produced by a late frost. To hedge the late frost risk, an Asian‐type option on the index is constructed. Together with the results concerning the design and pricing of the option, the analysis of historical data reveals non‐negligible linear trends, negative in minimum temperature and positive in maximum and average temperatures. These findings may be consistent with the hypothesis of global warming or with the presence of out‐of‐phase very low frequency components.

The authors have not found in the literature a similar option to hedge the risk of spring frosts faced by fruit producers.