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This chapter presents a comparative study of the trends and patterns of communication and tourism research in Brazil and the United States over the last 20 years. Through a bibliometric analysis of the CAPES and EBSCO databases, the study identifies the main theoretical and methodological references, classifies the fundamental themes in the area, and describes the role of communication for tourism. The results indicate the predominance in North American scientific literature of research related to the image and the brand of the tourist destinations, as well as the measurement and the evaluation of the communicative strategies. On the other hand, Brazilian research presents a greater diversity of approaches: destination image studies, tourism consumption, tourist narrative analysis, identities, social networks, community-based tourism, sports, and ecological tourism, with an explicit recognition of the dangers of sexual objectification and dehumanization within tourism. The survey showed that the scientific community has a strong interest in this area, signaling a search for knowledge to deepen the conceptual understanding of the subject. Thus, this chapter provides insights regarding the opportunities and directions for the next decades of research in this field of study.

In 2008, a phenomenon emerged in online retail that attracted the attention of many people, creating a new virtual model of commerce. This phenomenon was called online group buying and arrived in Brazil in 2010. The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that affect satisfaction and loyalty to group buying sites.

Through structural equation modeling, the relationships between the attractiveness of discount rates, service quality, popularity, online brand image, antecedent word of mouth (WOM), creativity and trust in relation to consumer general satisfaction, declared loyalty, repurchase intention and positive WOM were observed. A total of 727 valid questionnaires were collected from online group buyers to test the 11 hypotheses proposed in this study.

The main contribution of this study was that it identified the strong influence of service quality, popularity and online brand image on consumer general satisfaction, and the influence of service quality, trust and general satisfaction on repurchase intention. It also identified the influence of trust, creativity and general satisfaction on declared loyalty, and finally, the influence of trust and general satisfaction on positive WOM.

Because of the extensive and robust model, other statistical interactions among the constructs were gauged. It is possible that new structures and paths for alternative models can be proposed in the future with the inclusion of new relationships not analyzed in the present study. Furthermore, future studies should consider testing the generated model in other countries, as the particular features of collective purchasing in Brazil should be taken into account.

In addition to being concerned with the attractiveness of discounts, marketing managers of group buying sites should concentrate their efforts on strengthening perceived quality, image, trust and the creativity of the site to ensure customer loyalty.

The online group buying business model that was established in Brazil differs significantly from the American and European models. As many online group buying studies have been conducted in these markets, Brazilian consumers will enjoy substantial gains in the quality of the service provided by collective purchasing sites through the development of actions that focus on improving the factors that affect these consumers.

The originality of this study lies in the development of a single model that tests a set of factors gauged separately in other studies related to online purchase behavior in a broader perspective.

Strategic management plays a pivotal role in the growth and success of organizations, significantly impacting their business performance and competitive edge. In today’s globalized markets, strategic management is gaining prominence as a means to enhance company performance and distinctiveness. Within this landscape, the evaluation of organizational effectiveness takes on heightened significance, complemented by the emergence of strategic management frameworks designed to secure enduring competitive advantages for businesses.

One of the best known approaches to organizational resource assessment is the value, rarity, inimitability and organizational-oriented (VRIO) framework. However, this tool comes with inherent limitations that have hindered its advancement, primarily related to the need for less subjective means of identifying and assigning weights to resources and capabilities during the evaluation process. This study, therefore, endeavored to refine the VRIO framework, making it more transparent and empirically robust. To achieve this aim, the framework was combined with the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method (i.e. a multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method), and a real-life application was conducted.

The evaluation system created was tested, and the results demonstrate that the dual methodology used can increase the understanding of resource appraisal and lead to more informed and potentially better evaluations of resources and capabilities. The strengths and shortcomings of this new structured evaluation model are also analyzed.

The authors know of no prior work reporting the integrated use of VRIO and DEMATEL in this study context.

Building on social career cognitive theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate outcome expectations as a mediator and subjective norms as a moderator in the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intentions.

Using a sample of 1,026 students from US public and private universities retrieved from the Entrepreneurship Education Project, this study tests a first-stage moderated mediation model in a two-step process.

Results show that entrepreneurial self-efficacy is positively related to entrepreneurial intentions through the partial mediating effect of entrepreneurial outcome expectations, and that this relationship is consistently significant and positive for individuals with lower, average and higher subjective norms towards entrepreneurship.

These findings contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial intentions by providing a comprehensive overlook on the mechanisms and boundary conditions relevant for intentions.

These results reinforce the need for educators and policy makers to ensure programs manage outcome expectations and recognize the role of peer, parent and mentor role models on the construction of these expectations and, consequently, on entrepreneurial intentions.

Exploring the combined effect of entrepreneurial outcome expectations as a mechanism and subjective norms as boundary conditions on the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions is an unexplored issue to date, and helps to understand how and why entrepreneurial intentions emerge.

Gazelle companies are characterized by rapid growth in a short time. Identifying the determinants of this exponential expansion is important as these firms have a significant impact on the economy. They generate increased employment and investment by investors interested in new opportunities. Previous studies have failed to reach a consensus about what fosters high growth in gazelle companies as each firm’s geographical, political and economic context is different. The present research uses cognitive mapping and interpretive structural modeling (ISM) to overcome the limitations of prior investigations and identify factors that can potentially accelerate growth in gazelle companies.

Two sessions were held with an expert panel with knowledge about and experience with these firms. In the first session, data were collected to create a group cognitive map, while the second meeting comprised ISM-based analyses of the high-growth determinants identified and the causal relationships between them. A final consolidation session was held to discuss the results with two members of the Committee for Central Region Coordination and Development (i.e. Comissão de Coordenação e Desenvolvimento Regional do Centro – a public entity that grants gazelle awards in Portugal).

The analysis system created was tested, and the results demonstrate that the dual methodology used can increase our understanding of the dynamics of high-growth determinants and lead to more informed and potentially better evaluations of gazelle companies. Indeed, once high-growth determinants in gazelle companies are understood, this information can help other firms implement the same business model to achieve similarly rapid growth. The strengths and shortcomings of this new structured analysis model are also analyzed.

The authors know of no prior work reporting the integrated use of cognitive mapping and ISM in this study context.

Discovering opportunities is a key entrepreneurship competence for those who want to start their own business and who choose to enter the workforce. In this study, the authors focus on the antecedents of the ability to discover entrepreneurial opportunities by uncovering how and when students' personal initiative (Frese and Fay, 2001) leads to an increase in this key competency. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of risk-taking and creativity in the interplay between personal initiative and opportunity discovery competencies among university students.

Data were collected with a self-assessment tool in two moments in time, using a sample of 103 university students from Portugal enrolled in an entrepreneurship course. The authors measured personal initiative and entrepreneurial risk-taking at the beginning of the entrepreneurship course (Time 1). Two months later (Time 2), by the end of an entrepreneurship course, the authors measured creativity and opportunity discovery abilities.

The results of this study showed that risk-taking mediates the effect of personal initiative on opportunity discovery and that creativity interacts with risk-taking and opportunity discovery. Specifically, the authors found that the relationship between entrepreneurial risk-taking and opportunity discovery is positive and statistically significant when students display average or above-average creativity. The indirect effect of the personal initiative on opportunity discovery through entrepreneurial risk-taking seems to increase when the student's creativity increases, as the index of moderated mediation is positive.

As with all studies, there are limitations to work of this study. First, data of this study is restricted to a sample of students from Portugal. As such, the authors should be careful about generalizations concerning students from other cultural settings; entrepreneurship competencies can differ across countries. Second, the findings of the present study are based on students’ self-reports regarding their own entrepreneurship competencies.

This work can inspire entrepreneurship educators to look at the entrepreneurship competencies models holistically and inspire future work to explore the relationship patterns between entrepreneurial competencies.

The present paper assesses the decision problem of selecting Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems (SARP) by the hybrid MPSI-SPOTIS approach for deployment in border control and transborder illicit combat.

By the hybrid MCDA MPSI-SPOTIS approach, and from the database available in Gettinger (2019), models were filtered by Endurance, Range, Maximum Take-Off Weight (MTOW), and Payload, fitting within the classification of Categories EB 0 and 2. Category EB 1 was not considered in this study due to the limited number of models in the data source.

The use of the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) tool MPSI-SPOTIS allowed the determination of weights by stochastic criteria, applied in a ranking method resistant to reverse ordering. The application of the method identified the Raybird-3 (Cat EB 0) and Searcher (Mk3) (Cat EB 2) models as the best alternatives. From a proposed clustering, other selection possibilities with close performance in the evaluation were presented. The cost criterion was not taken into consideration due to the absence of information in the data source employed. Future studies are suggested to include criteria related to the life cycle and acquisition cost of the models.

The cost criterion was not taken into consideration due to the absence of information in the data source used. Future studies are suggested to include criteria related to the life cycle and acquisition cost of the models.

This paper aims to propose a technology selection method applied to complex defense acquisitions when multiple factors influence the decision makers and it is hard to obtain a major optimum solution in multitask and multi-mission platform.

Building on construal level theory (CLT), this study explores mental representations of entrepreneurial intentions (EIs) with different foci (i.e. social and commercial) among university students from Generations Y and Z.

Using a sample of university students from the United States contacted through the Entrepreneurship Education Project, this study employs a configurational perspective—fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)—to identify the pathways leading to EIs and social entrepreneurial intentions (SEIs).

Results show that the configurations of conditions leading to the outcomes (EI and SEI) are not disparate but share far more similarities even when considering socially oriented antecedents, supporting the claim that students perceive both EIs with different foci as high-level construals. The results also demonstrate no differences within gender, but there are asymmetries between gender in the configurations leading to EI and SEI.

This study contributes to EI literature by providing new insights into understanding how individuals perceive EIs at an early stage of entrepreneurship and by bringing CLT to the EI literature.

These results have implications for entrepreneurship education and practice, as it recognizes that students' EIs are psychologically distant, lacking a level of detail and specificity. This would explain why students do not immediately create ventures, but that entrepreneurship has a certain incubation time to create an entrepreneurial mindset.

Exploring the configurational approaches can help to uncover the complexity and idiosyncrasies underlying EIs.

As the Web 2.0 induces changes in human relationships, several implications across issues and domains of socio-economic life follow; politics is one of them. In the context of Web 2.0, social media have established themselves as a part of citizen’s daily routine. Hence, social media have a direct impact on politics today. This chapter examines this phenomenon and its implications for politics by tracing and examining the recent initiative launched by Rede Globo aimed at collecting citizens’ views and visions on Brazil’s future. “The Brazil I Want” project sought to encourage citizens to publish videos featuring their visions and views of Brazil’s future. Thousands of citizens used this opportunity to express their concerns and hopes related to the future of their cities and their country. This chapter seeks to make sense of it in two ways. First, it explores to what extent and how social media can serve as source of information. Here the concepts and tools of big data and data mining are employed. Second, it inquiries into what people currently think about their country. By bringing these two research perspectives together, this chapter argues that effective ways of resolving issues and concerns the citizens thus voiced exist to the benefit of the efficiency of the policymaking process and the society’s wellbeing.