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The design, construction and deployment of a large virtual campus are a complex issue. Present virtual campuses are made of several software applications that complement e‐learning platforms. In order to develop and maintain such virtual campuses, a complex software engineering infrastructure is needed. This paper aims to analyse the software engineering infrastructure in the virtual campus deployed at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

The software engineering infrastructure is analysed from three perspectives: process model; programming language and computer‐aided software engineering tools and design patterns and architecture.

Software engineering infrastructure is a key issue in virtual campuses.

The value of the paper is to make our experience available to a wider audience so that organisations interested in the deployment of a large virtual campus can take advantage of our work.

In the last few decades, there has been growing interest in forecasting with computer intelligence, and both fuzzy time series (FTS) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) have gained particular popularity, among others. Rather than the conventional methods (e.g., econometrics), FTS and ANN are usually thought to be immune to fundamental concepts such as stationarity, theoretical causality, post-sample control, among others. On the other hand, a number of studies significantly indicated that these fundamental controls are required in terms of the theory of forecasting, and even application of such essential procedures substantially improves the forecasting accuracy. The aim of this paper is to fill the existing gap on modeling and forecasting in the FTS and ANN methods and figure out the fundamental concepts in a comprehensive work through merits and common failures in the literature. In addition to these merits, this paper may also be a guideline for eliminating unethical empirical settings in the forecasting studies.

This article introduces readers to the Special Issue (SI, 34-1) of ARLA, edited (not exclusively) with the best papers of the Academy of Management's Specialized Conference, scheduled for April 2020 in Mexico City. The COVID-19 pandemic forced its cancellation, but the expert peer review and editorial work continued, to contribute to the emerging literature on Latin American Management and Sustainability.

Guest editors contributed their expertise based on required editorial processes and focused literature reviews on Management and Sustainability.

There are large management and sustainability challenges to Latin American practitioners and researchers, resulting in an increasingly urgent need to systematically document similarities and differences in the fields of Management and Sustainability. It is so because the region has been affected as few others before, during and after the pandemic. Thus, this issue summarizes the literature, presents eight new studies and offers suggestions for future research.

Management and sustainability in Latin America are wide subjects, with different dimensions and issues. This is a specific contribution that leaves much ground to be covered in the different subfields of the area, in research methodologies and conclusions.

An agenda for advancing the field of management and sustainability in Latin America, highlighted by the COVID-19 disruption; additionally, eight of the most advanced research in the field are presented, chosen from two tracks of a large number of contributions to a recent specialized conference organized by the Academy of Management.

Este artículo presenta el Número Especial (SI, 34-1) de ARLA, editado (no exclusivamente) con los mejores artículos de la Conferencia Especializada de la Academy of Management, programada para abril de 2020 en la Ciudad de México. La pandemia COVID-19 obligó a su cancelación, pero se continuó la revisión por pares expertos y el trabajo editorial, para contribuir a la literatura emergente sobre Gestión y Sostenibilidad en América Latina.

Los editores invitados contribuyeron con su experiencia con base en los procesos editoriales requeridos y revisiones de literatura enfocadas en Gestión y Sostenibilidad.

Existen grandes desafíos de gestión y sostenibilidad para los profesionales e investigadores de América Latina, lo que genera una necesidad cada vez más urgente de documentar sistemáticamente las similitudes y diferencias en los campos de la gestión y la sostenibilidad. Es así porque la región se ha visto afectada como pocas antes, durante y después de la pandemia. Por lo tanto, este número resume la literatura, presenta ocho nuevos estudios y ofrece sugerencias para futuras investigaciones.

La gestión y la sostenibilidad en América Latina son temas amplios, con diferentes dimensiones y temáticas. Se trata de un aporte específico que deja mucho terreno por recorrer en los distintos subcampos del área, en metodologías de investigación y conclusiones.

Una agenda para avanzar en el campo de la gestión y la sostenibilidad en América Latina, destacada por la disrupción del COVID-19. Además, se presentan ocho de las investigaciones más avanzadas en el campo, elegidas entre dos temas de un gran número de contribuciones a una reciente conferencia especializada organizada por la Academy of Management.

In recent years, innovative methodologies of product development such as lean product development (LPD) and agile project management (APM) have emerged. Even though previous research studies focused on these subjects, only few of them were focused on traditional industries, as civil construction. The purpose of this paper is to cover a part of this gap by estimating the potential of the application of these two new approaches (LPD and APM) in the construction industry, more specifically on the design stage.

For this, a case study has been conducted in order to understand if some of LPD and APM tools and practices had already been used, and also to evaluate the potential application of these new methodologies. Three Brazilian companies have been evaluated, all of them were exclusive executors of the design stage and presented distinct characteristics (size, structure, business model, etc.).

The results show that there is currently little adherence to LPD and APM practices within the companies studied. In terms of potential application of these new methodologies, the study has identified evidence regarding technical similarities between the reported cases and others mentioned in literature. However, the interviewees’ reception of these concepts was mostly pessimistic, showing considerable resistance to changes in the current process.

According to the analysis, the study identified that the main challenge/hampering to the implementation of these tools in the cases studied herein are the functional organizational structures, the customer–supplier relationships and the internal cultural resistance to change.

The logic models at the center of leading environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting programs, such as the global reporting initiative, impose a dualistic relationship between organizations and social-ecological systems. Coupled with the lack of a real-world alternative, their dualistic approach results in widespread systems thinking-based reducibility errors in business responsibility. To help develop a nondualistic alternative, this study aims to present the idea of neltilistli or “rootedness,” as developed by the ancient Nahua indigenous peoples of Central Mexico. From the perspective of the Nahua, rootedness involves a holistic relationship with one’s body, community and the creative force called “teotl.”

The authors draw on the past to speculatively theorize an imagined future using the method of prospective theorizing to draw on a historical social context that is largely missing from current management scholarship. In doing so, the authors engage in a process of imagining a radically different future reality.

Integrating a rootedness approach into ESG reporting, particularly in terms of stakeholder relations, enriches it both spatially and temporally. This approach allows researchers and practitioners to replace dualistic thinking with a more holistic approach.

This paper complements the dualistic assumptions behind ESG reporting programs with a holistic approach based on the rootedness concept of ancient Nahua thought.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the components of a gang culture in conflict with society, and second, to explore how gangs, the community, and law enforcers externalize the gang problem from the vantage point of worldview and worldmaking.

The researcher gathered news articles from the Nexus-Lexis research database system within a one-year period (from February 2012 to February 2013). The data was randomly selected and representative of newspapers published throughout the USA. The news articles were coded based upon the aspects of culture (lens of perception, motives for human behaviors, criteria for evaluation, basis of identification, means for communication, justification for social stratification, and mode for production and consumption). A thematic analysis was also conducted to determine: the aspects of gang culture in conflicts with society; and how the gangs, the community, and the law enforcements externalize the gang conflict.

Results suggest that gang violence is largely due to issues of identity, values, and gang cohesiveness rather than the result of the pathologically based environmental conditions. Criteria for evaluation and issue of identity constituted 66 percent of the violent conflict with society. In the context of worldviews and worldmaking, gang members and law enforcement personnel are more likely to adopt a rigid, win-lose framework while members of the community are more likely to prescribe to a flexible and holistic perspective toward the gang problem. In sum, gang violence is not necessarily a deviant or antisocial act; rather, it is a result of the conflicting narratives between the gang cultures and the culture-at-large.

In dissecting gang behavior from a cultural perspective, it is easy to categorize gangs as a collective subculture. However, gang members may not view themselves as a subculture nor consider themselves as belonging to a subculture community.

By examining the function of culture – in this case, the gang culture – as it conflicts with society at large, one may better able to develop an action plan that emphasize identities, cultures, and values rather than crime and punishment. Also, it may help shed light on how the various stakeholders (i.e. the gangs, law enforcements, and the community) perceive the conflict, which may assist researcher to develop a comprehensive and holistic approach toward intervention. Finally, implementing a culturally based gang violence intervention may reduce cost.

This research is unique in that it analyzes the function of gang violence in relation to the society-at-large. Also, the research addresses the issue as to how the various stakeholders interpret the “gang problem.” Finally, this research is innovative in that it employs news articles as units of analysis rather than the traditional qualitative interviews or quantitative surveys.

This paper aims to ascertain that Latin America's current urban growth through large and organized ‘land squattings’ and limited invasions is a massive, plural and common phenomenon which, to a certain extent, has been, up to now, ignored by 'the academic world and by formal urban planning.

On July 5, 1999, 10,000 organized individuals occupied a 23.45 ha. plot at Peñalolén, in Santiago de Chile. The event had great impact and received much attention, and the author closely followed the events that led to the consolidation of the ‘settlement‘ (1999-2006) through phases of negotiation, evacuation and relocation of its settlers, and finally to the current (2008) transformation stage which the plot is undergoing in order to become ‘Peñalolén's Communal Park’.

This paper emphasizes the main paradigms that can be drawn from the different occupation stages, with special focus on peculiarities found at ‘Peñalolén Settlement’ compared to other Latin American ‘squattings’, in an attempt to systematize and draw conclusions on ‘self-development urbanism’.

This study provides a new look at the late 19th-century university issue in Spain. Loss of self-government among universities and the state’s centralization brought a conflict between science and religion to the fore in the process of the secularization of knowledge.

We first delve into the anti-Darwinian framework associated with the scientific professionalization process, focusing on the case of the jurist Antonio Hernández Fajarnés (1851–1909). Secondly, we study the idea of the university that emerged from the Ateneo de Madrid, analyzing key speeches from the jurist Francisco Fernández de Henestrosa (1855–s.d.) given in 1887/88 and from the pharmacist José Rodríguez Carracido (1856–1928).

The study concludes that the Restoration Era in Spain was characterized by a generalized desire – shared by neo-Scholastics, conservatives and liberal rationalists – to improve the public university system. In this context, French influence was no doubt decisive; however, the Humboldtian university idea had already begun to have notable influence.

This article analyzes sources yet unknown to international research, such as the Ateneo de Madrid debates and Spanish university rectors’ inaugural speeches. It opens up a critical examination of the so-called displacement of educational principles in Spain toward a state-centered system of doctrinal moderantismo as opposed to the nation-centered system of the Cádiz liberalism. At the same time, it identifies key pockets of resistance relative to Spanish university transformation toward increased methodological secularization.

In the current education context, quality management has increasingly become a key element and more educational organizations are deciding to implement a Quality Management System. Because there are so few studies on the impact that implementation has on educational institutions, the main objective of this paper is to profile educational centers on the basis of their implementation of ISO 9001 quality standards.

Specifically, this was done by taking a sample of 83 educational centers from four regions of Spain (Comunidad de Madrid, Castilla y León, Andalucía and the Comunidad Valenciana) and analyzing assessments made by teachers and members of the center Management Teams (2,132 subjects in total). The first step was to carry out a number of descriptive and differential studies globally, analyzing 8 broad dimensions: Communication System, Management, Support and Recognition, Learning Process, Quality, Climate, Satisfaction, and External Relations. A cluster analysis was then performed to identify center profiles in terms of the degree of impact from their having implemented ISO 9001 standards.

The results show that the impact of is greater in educational centers in Comunidad Valenciana and Andalucía with 9–11 years of implementation, with internal financial aid or funding, and at charter centers.

The cluster analysis reveals three clearly differentiated profiles (with high, medium, and low degrees of impact) in the different dimensions evaluated in the study.

A rich agenda for future research in the field of Lean Manufacturing (LM) is available in the academic literature. The purpose of this paper is to determine the LM future research methodologies suggested in the literature and to classify them into themes. Classifying these themes into broad categories is also an aim of the present study.

For the purpose of the present study, a systematic literature review (SLR) of peer reviewed journal articles in LM was conducted. A total of 214 articles published in 46 journals during 2010–2020 were collected from four major management science publishers, namely, Emerald Online, Elsevier/Science Direct, Springer Link and Taylor and Francis. To organize the qualitative data into meaningful themes and these themes into broad categories, the quality tool “affinity diagram” was applied.

The review of LM articles that are increasing over time reveals the “vital few” academic journals, which have published most of the sample articles. The plethora of the suggested future research methodologies are analytically presented and classified into meaningful themes, namely, the size of the research sample and its composition, several types of study (other than surveys), longitudinal studies, applying advanced statistical analysis and (mathematical) modeling techniques, objective, real and quantitative data, surveys, mixed/multiple research studies, reliability and validity analysis, using computer-aided technology for data collection and processing and research collaborations. These themes in turn are classified into broad categories, namely, study, data and statistical analysis and modeling.

This SLR is not comprehensive because the number of the databases searched is restricted to four. Moreover, the literature review is limited to peer reviewed journal articles regarding Lean only in the manufacturing sector, while the subject reviewed is limited to the future research methodologies. The subjectivity of classifying the large number of the future research methodologies into themes and these themes into broad categories is also a limitation of the present SLR. Based on these limitations, future literature review studies can be carried out.

Researchers can be analytically informed about the future research methodologies suggested in the literature and their respective key themes and broad categories, to design original research studies of high academic and practical value.

This study goes beyond previous SLRs on LM by presenting analytically the plethora of the future research methodologies suggested in the literature as well as by identifying natural patterns or groupings of these methodologies.