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The rapid growth of 3D printing has transformed the cost-effective production of prototypes and functional items, primarily using extrusion technology with thermoplastics. This study aims to focus on optimizing mechanical properties, precisely highlighting the crucial role of mechanical compressive strength in ensuring the functionality and durability of 3D-printed components, especially in industrial and engineering applications.

Using the Box−Behnken experimental design, the research investigated the influence of layer thickness, wall perimeter and infill level on mechanical resistance through compression. Parameters such as maximum force, printing time and mass utilization are considered for assessing and enhancing mechanical properties.

The layer thickness was identified as the most influential parameter over the compression time, followed by the degree of infill. The number of surface layers significantly influences both maximum strength and total mass. Optimization strategies suggest reducing infill percentage while maintaining moderate to high values for surface layers and layer thickness, enabling the production of lightweight components with adequate mechanical strength and reduced printing time. Experimental validation confirms the effectiveness of these strategies, with generated regression equations serving as a valuable predictive tool for similar parameters.

This research offers valuable insights for industries using 3D printing in creating prototypes and functional parts. By identifying optimal parameters such as layer thickness, surface layers and infill levels, the study helps manufacturers achieve stronger, lighter and more cost-efficient components. For industrial and engineering applications, adopting the outlined optimization strategies can result in components with enhanced mechanical strength and durability, while also reducing material costs and printing times. Practitioners can use the developed regression equations as predictive tools to fine-tune their production processes and achieve desired mechanical properties more effectively.

This research contributes to the ongoing evolution of additive manufacturing, providing insights into optimizing structural rigidity through polylactic acid (PLA) selection, Box−Behnken design and overall process optimization. These findings advance the understanding of fused deposition modeling (FDM) technology and offer practical implications for more efficient and economical 3D printing processes in industrial and engineering applications.

The extant literature provides much-needed support to understand marketing accountability and how marketing actions are related to financial performance (FP). However, we have limited understanding of the relationships between marketing actions and firms' social performance (SP) and environmental performance (EP). Understanding these links is critical to enhancing sustainable FP, SP, and EP. Moreover, the literature provides limited understanding of the measures by which SP and EP may be operationalized, or the data necessary to reach a conclusion. This study bridges these gaps by extensively reviewing the extant literature to offer a set of measures and data sources to operationalize SP and EP, and empirically show their relationships with marketing actions. We find that greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, environmental disclosure score, waste reduction, energy consumption, and recycling are prominent measures of EP, and that social disclosure score, philanthropy or community spending, and diversity of gender and race are prominent measures of SP. The KLD, ASSET4, and Bloomberg are prominent sources of data that can be used to operationalize SP, to which CDP may be added for EP. We also show that marketing actions positively affect EP and SP. This study contributes to the extant literature on SP and EP by identifying measures and data sources and linking marketing actions to both performance types. It contributes to policy development by identifying the importance of EP and SP and how marketing actions can help achieve such performance.

We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

Sports leagues, such as Major League Soccer (MLS), aim at expanding their audience at global level through alternative media other than television (TV). Brazil stands out among football media consumer audiences as one of the main markets worldwide. Brazilian MLS consumers play the role of fans to converge between TV media and digital platforms, in a phenomenon that has been called Social TV.

The aim of the current research is to investigate how Brazilian MLS fans' consumption process is established through Social TV; it was done based on netnography performed between 2018 and 2020.

Results have indicated that Social TV is a catalyst of practices associated with fan culture: cultural convergence, technologies appropriations, poaching experiences and production of a collective intelligence.

Current research reinforces how ethnography methodology has been gaining room as likely consumer market research, working as alternative method based on the prevalence of focus group and survey techniques.

Social TV phenomenon presents itself as a possibility to expand and direct marketing strategies focused on sports management, just as the media often consumed by fans.

From the results, it is possible assuming that connections between fans are punctually guided by their relationship with the cultural object consumed by them in a network relationship whose actors deindividualize sociocultural practices such as consumption. Thus, the main contribution of the study lies on identifying how fan culture can be autonomously established in the market arena in comparison to other cultures.

This review aims to identify the determinants of voluntary disclosure of corporate social performance (CSP) and to analyze and consolidate previous quantitative studies to identify the theoretical perspectives and the variables used in measuring the determinants of CSP disclosure (CSP-D).

A literature review of articles published from 1987 to 2015 was conducted using the three databases, Ebsco, ISI and Jstor, with CSP-D as the dependent variable. The goal was to identify the theoretical perspectives underlying the studies and the independent variables.

The literature revealed a set of variables and their general measures, but the consensus confirmed that there was no single explanation for what determined CSP-D. The published theories that support a relationship between CSP-D and its determinants are legitimacy, institutional, stakeholder, agency and voluntary disclosure theory.

The results allowed us to identify the perspectives underlying the major theories and disclosed a set of factors considered by the literature as the ones that influence CSP-D. This information will be useful for researchers interested in developing their own studies on CSP-D because it presents the evolution of CSP-D factors over time and organizes the findings of multiple studies developed since the emergence of the theme.

Sports leagues have stood out in the entertainment industry due to their great economic value and cultural impact. This is the case of the American sports leagues, with emphasis on the National Basketball Association (NBA), whose largest Latin American market lies on Brazil. The aforementioned league’s audience is constantly growing, a fact that can be partially explained by the encouragement provided for its viewers to interact through social media, in a phenomenon called social TV. Accordingly, the aim of the present study is to investigate how social TV works as a means for Brazilian fans to coproduce their NBA broadcasting enjoyment through social media interactions.

The authors conducted a netnography on the community of fans engaged in Twitter hashtag #NBAnaESPN, which was released by ESPN to promote audience integration during NBA games' broadcasting.

A theorization about the role played by social TV in the way fan culture articulates through social media to enjoy broadcasting media products was herein presented. The findings of this study have evidenced three categories concerning the role played by television broadcasting, social media and the fandom in NBA consumption by Brazilian fans. Based on these findings, the authors got to the conclusion that social TV establishes a mediatized environment where fan culture can be articulated through social media to enable interactions about television broadcasting.

The study was limited to members of the Brazilian NBA audience who engage in the official social media of the league’s broadcasting.

The study heads toward a theoretical generalization based on the research results.

Fans are proactive consumers of pop culture products, who can be seen as prosumers. Fanvideo production is one of their most widespread practices in the participatory culture scenario. Thus, the aim of the present study is to analyze how ludic prosumption is featured on plays performed in Brazilian fanvideos based on successful pop culture franchises.

Research based on the interpretive content analysis of fanvideos of plays produced by Brazilian fans based on five emblematic pop culture franchises and published on YouTube.

Results have shown six play types in the analyzed fanvideos – i.e. child's play, performing powers, cosplay, play in social rites, teaching to play and “zuêra” –, which revealed a way of having fun in different situations through different practices based on ludic consumption experiences in different spheres of social life.

CCT-based studies focused on investigating plays as ludic consumption phenomenon, as well as fan culture, remain at early research stage. Thus, the main contribution of the present study lies on associating such concepts based on the concept of prosumption.

Fans have been characterized as specialized consumers who often express disagreements with the entertainment industry's decisions, especially when it comes to the original content of the works that serve as the basis for the development of media products, evidencing a kind of consumer resistance. Under a Foucauldian perspective aligned with the consumer culture theory (CCT), power relations are established in a dynamic of power exercise and resistance to power. Based on this, the authors pose the following research question: how do fans of media products resist the changes made by the entertainment industry in relation to their canons?

The authors adopted the Foucault's genealogy of power as a method, analyzing the comments posted on the Westeros.Org website, the main discussion forum of fans of A Song of Ice and Fire (ASoIaF) book series and Game of Thrones (GoT) TV series.

The findings reveal ways of resistance in relation to the adaptation of the media text permeated by an entertainment dispositif, which considers the adaptation legitimate, and a fannish dispositif, which criticizes the way this adaptation was made. However, their empirical categories reveal that they are forged not only from singularities but also from overlaps. The authors conclude, therefore, that this process occurs in an agonist way, in which conflicts are fought as a reciprocal incitement revealing a productive and ethical relationship.

The agonism shows how consumers can simultaneously be led to incorporate and resist to discourses and market practices. This demonstrates how resistance is not necessarily a force opposed to another, but a dynamic of reciprocal negotiation.

The paper presents final results of a comparative research on young Brazilian collegians in the 18–24-year-old age bracket. The objective was to understand the interactions and ways in which they transit within the physical and digital Web spaces and, within their transits, set up “circulatory territories,” deepen and enrich their secondary socialization setups and sociability, as well as their processes of individuation within the historic condition in which youth lives.

The study is supported by conceptual contributions offered by the sociology of youth, circulatory territory, socialization, sociability, and individuation. Research was carried out with students of two different universities: a public/state one and a public/municipal/foundational one situated in different urban centers of the southeastern region of the country. Procedures were qualitative and quantitative – closed questions forms, interviews, registries in field notebooks, etc.

The results of the investigation demonstrate: (a) that the representatives of the two student collectives studied circulate in physical and digital territories, setting up circulatory territories; (b) there are also different youth lifestyles, either due to social positions and the fact that they possess social capital, or because of differences and inequalities referring to gender, race/ethnicity (whites and non-whites), living situations.

In this manner, the study indicates the importance of questioning the homogenized image of connected youth since some collegians’ lives are limited due to their condition as young workers, while others live their youth condition as a social moratorium, being able to produce other manners of being and of living in the world.

This paper aims to investigate if the world top manufacturing corporations' cost structures are moving from tangible to intangible activities and their impact on profitability.

The theoretical approach is interdisciplinary, combining global value chains, international manufacturing networks, cost management literatures. The empirical approach has a sample out of financial statements' data from 220 multinational corporations between 2006 and 2017, grouping them by technological intensity. It is created the “COGS-share” indicator – the ratio between the costs of goods sold and overall costs and expenses – as a proxy for the firms' expenses of tangible and intangible value chain activities. It is tested as an explanatory variable for the companies' profits through dynamic panel data econometric models.

The results show that the cost structure still is very concentrated in tangibles. Though costs of both tangible and intangible activities negatively impact profits, they affect value generation differently: the higher the share of intangible in comparison to tangible activities in overall cost and expenses, the greater the profits in most manufacturing groups, regardless of their technological intensity.

The empirical analysis simplifies the composition of value chains per activity because financial statements data are aggregates, preventing detailed analysis by markets, business units or products. Stocks' levels are assumed to be at the desired level during the time series. The dataset does not allow value curves to be drawn because direct wages' data and more precise information on cost (especially deferred assets and wages) are missing.

The presented approach, particularly the COGS-share indicator, contribute to assess value generation from activities for improving corporate strategies and public policies on operations and cost management of global value chains.

Supporting upgrading decisions that impact value production, allocation and distribution between workers, firms and countries.

Interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical assessment of the manufacturing companies' cost structures and profits based on financial statements data for the better understanding of value generation from tangible and intangible activities.