Paloma Santana Moreira Pais, Felipe de Figueiredo Silva and Evandro Camargos Teixeira
The Brazilian Government created the Bolsa Familia program to combat poverty and the insertion of so many children into the labor market. This program is an income transfer…
Abstract
Purpose
The Brazilian Government created the Bolsa Familia program to combat poverty and the insertion of so many children into the labor market. This program is an income transfer program subject to certain conditions such as a minimum school attendance for children under 17 years of age. In 2006, almost half of the people with an income per capita of R$300.00 (US$139.53) per month declared that they received this benefit. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of Bolsa Familia on child labor in Brazil in 2006.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a propensity score matching model with data from the National Household Sample Survey PESQUISA NACIONAL POR AMOSTRA DE DOMICÍLIOS (PNAD), for 2006.
Findings
Results indicate that the program increased the number of hours of child labor in Brazil. However, this outcome might be explained by the fact that those families who received Bolsa Familia were also those with higher socioeconomic vulnerability. Thus, they need to guarantee their survival with the income generated via child labor.
Social implications
The Brazilian Government needs to invest not only in monetary transfer policies but also in the improvement of the job market to create opportunities for the social development of children.
Originality/value
The contribution of the paper is the investigation into the effect of the Bolsa Familia program on the average time allocated to child labor; the authors find that this time allocation could be reduced by requiring a compulsory school attendance.
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Deoclécio Junior Cardoso da Silva, Guilherme Paraol de Matos, Artur Roberto de Oliveira Gibbon, Claudimar Pereira da Veiga, Clarissa Stefani Teixeira, Luis Felipe Dias Lopes and Josep Miquel Pique
This research investigates the barriers impeding innovation within small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Brazil, exploring 54 innovation-related barriers categorized into…
Abstract
Purpose
This research investigates the barriers impeding innovation within small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Brazil, exploring 54 innovation-related barriers categorized into six distinct groups to offer substantial insights and analyses pertinent to the decision-makers, researchers and SMEs.
Design/methodology/approach
This research employed a mixed quantitative and exploratory approach, utilizing fuzzy Delphi, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) methods. The fuzzy Delphi method confirmed the categories and barriers through quantitative analysis, the fuzzy AHP ranked the validated obstacles and the fuzzy DEMATEL method identified causal connections among the top-priority barriers.
Findings
Out of 54 barriers, 23 significantly impacted SMEs. The “Financing and Financial” category was the most significant barrier, with “Access to Financing” being the most critical impediment. The barrier with the most influence was “Instability of Fiscal Policies,” and the highest causal priority was “Survival of the Priority Business,” identifying the government’s unstable fiscal policy as the principal barrier confronting SMEs in Brazil.
Originality/value
The primary challenges for Brazilian SMEs center on financing, fiscal policies and maintaining ongoing operations. By addressing these barriers and fostering a resilient business environment, SMEs’ innovation capabilities and competitiveness can be enhanced, serving as key drivers for sustainable economic growth in fluctuating economic conditions. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting and validating the main barriers to SME innovation, providing highly relevant information about the innovation process.
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Barbara de Lima Voss, David Bernard Carter and Bruno Meirelles Salotti
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…
Abstract
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.
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Dimitrios Karkanis and Myrsini Fotopoulou
The purpose of this paper is to identify trade integration and structure effects on bilateral trade between China and its partners, focusing on Chinese merchandise imports during…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify trade integration and structure effects on bilateral trade between China and its partners, focusing on Chinese merchandise imports during the period 1995–2018.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodological approach applied here uses the augmented gravity model to investigate the factors lying behind import intensity, by use of the ordinary least squares (OLS) and Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimators.
Findings
The findings provide evidence of complementarity between the Chinese demand and the world commodity markets. Free trade agreements between China and third countries seem to gradually lose significance, as the Chinese economy consolidates in world trade. Higher product diversification in export structures of China’s trading partners can become advantageous for facilitating market penetration. Diversification of energy resources, the steady, high demand for infrastructure equipment and more sophisticated consumer products constantly determine the structure of Chinese merchandise imports originating mainly and increasingly from countries with direct access to the Pacific Ocean.
Originality/value
The analytical breakdown of Chinese imports, presented in this paper, adds value to the existing literature with regard to trade structure analysis for China, paving the way for similar research for other developing countries as well.
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Felipe Mendes Borini, Leandro Lima Santos, Muhammad Mustafa Raziq, Rafael Morais Pereira and Aldo José Brunhara
This paper underscores how organizational ambidexterity and organizational innovation play differentiated roles in the subsidiary reverse knowledge transfers (RKT). The authors…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper underscores how organizational ambidexterity and organizational innovation play differentiated roles in the subsidiary reverse knowledge transfers (RKT). The authors argue that both organizational ambidexterity and organizational innovation play a positive but differentiated role in the RKT process in that the former positively influences subsidiary knowledge creation, whereas the latter positively influences subsidiary knowledge transfers.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 289 foreign subsidiaries operating in Brazil. Hypotheses were developed and tested by applying partial least squares structural equation modeling.
Findings
The results supported the hypotheses and showed that organizational ambidexterity promotes knowledge creation, and that organizational innovation facilitates knowledge transfers.
Research limitations/implications
The paper offers implications with regard to drivers of subsidiary investments and actions of subsidiary managers vis-à-vis the subsidiary objectives of knowledge creation and/or transfers.
Originality/value
Showing the different roles of organizational ambidexterity and organizational innovation, this paper reveals some underlying mechanisms of the RKT process and contributes by explaining the competitive heterogeneity of subsidiaries, with impacts on subsidiary management’s evolutionary and resource dependence perspective.
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Bernardo Cerqueira de Lima, Renata Maria Abrantes Baracho, Thomas Mandl and Patricia Baracho Porto
Social media platforms that disseminate scientific information to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of the topic of scientific communication…
Abstract
Purpose
Social media platforms that disseminate scientific information to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of the topic of scientific communication. Content creators in the field, as well as researchers who study the impact of scientific information online, are interested in how people react to these information resources and how they judge them. This study aims to devise a framework for extracting large social media datasets and find specific feedback to content delivery, enabling scientific content creators to gain insights into how the public perceives scientific information.
Design/methodology/approach
To collect public reactions to scientific information, the study focused on Twitter users who are doctors, researchers, science communicators or representatives of research institutes, and processed their replies for two years from the start of the pandemic. The study aimed in developing a solution powered by topic modeling enhanced by manual validation and other machine learning techniques, such as word embeddings, that is capable of filtering massive social media datasets in search of documents related to reactions to scientific communication. The architecture developed in this paper can be replicated for finding any documents related to niche topics in social media data. As a final step of our framework, we also fine-tuned a large language model to be able to perform the classification task with even more accuracy, forgoing the need of more human validation after the first step.
Findings
We provided a framework capable of receiving a large document dataset, and, with the help of with a small degree of human validation at different stages, is able to filter out documents within the corpus that are relevant to a very underrepresented niche theme inside the database, with much higher precision than traditional state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Performance was improved even further by the fine-tuning of a large language model based on BERT, which would allow for the use of such model to classify even larger unseen datasets in search of reactions to scientific communication without the need for further manual validation or topic modeling.
Research limitations/implications
The challenges of scientific communication are even higher with the rampant increase of misinformation in social media, and the difficulty of competing in a saturated attention economy of the social media landscape. Our study aimed at creating a solution that could be used by scientific content creators to better locate and understand constructive feedback toward their content and how it is received, which can be hidden as a minor subject between hundreds of thousands of comments. By leveraging an ensemble of techniques ranging from heuristics to state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, we created a framework that is able to detect texts related to very niche subjects in very large datasets, with just a small amount of examples of texts related to the subject being given as input.
Practical implications
With this tool, scientific content creators can sift through their social media following and quickly understand how to adapt their content to their current user’s needs and standards of content consumption.
Originality/value
This study aimed to find reactions to scientific communication in social media. We applied three methods with human intervention and compared their performance. This study shows for the first time, the topics of interest which were discussed in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Marya Tabassum, Muhammad Mustafa Raziq, John Lewis Rice, Felipe Mendes Borini and Anees Wajid
Taking a co-creation perspective and integrating knowledge-based and resource-based perspectives, the authors examine the role of customer participation in organizational…
Abstract
Purpose
Taking a co-creation perspective and integrating knowledge-based and resource-based perspectives, the authors examine the role of customer participation in organizational performance and project success. The authors also investigate the mediating role of knowledge integration and the moderating role of requirement risk for these relationships in uncertain contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors undertook two studies. The first study was carried out in 2018 in which the authors drew on survey data from 150 information technology (IT) sector employees and examined the mediating role of knowledge integration in the relationship of customer participation with organizational performance and project success. In the second study undertaken in 2020, the authors drew on data from 92 IT and telecom sector employees and examined the moderating role of requirement risk in the relationship between customer participation and knowledge integration. Study 2 was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic when employees were largely working from home and were more sensitive to risks and uncertainty about the scope and system requirements. Both studies were survey-based, and analysis was carried out using structural equation modeling.
Findings
The authors’ two-study examination indicated that knowledge integration positively mediates the relationship of customer participation with organizational performance and project success during the co-creation process. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that when requirement risks are high, customer participation relationship with knowledge integration is weaker.
Originality/value
The authors show that integrating customer knowledge is critical to project success and organizational performance. By identifying risk uncertainties and environmental contingencies, the authors highlight the constraints of customer participation for knowledge integration, organizational performance and project success. The authors provide some key study findings based on survey data obtained from project teams during two periods (normal and pandemic).