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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mineral content of seven Brazilian infant dairy product categories (petit Suisse cheeses, fermented milks, yogurts, fermented dairy beverage, dairy dessert, Requeijão cremoso spreadable cheese and UHT dairy beverages) and estimate their contribution to daily intake.

The composition of major (Ca, K, Mg, and Na) and trace (Pb, Cd, Cu and Mn) minerals was determined using Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of the mineral levels with the Reference Daily Intake (RDI) at different child development stages was carried out.

High Ca levels were observed in petit Suisse (3.44±1.66 mg g⁻¹), dairy dessert (3.88±0.02 mg g⁻¹) and Requeijão cremoso (4.14±0.07 mg g⁻¹). Dairy dessert presented the highest K level (2.57±0.07 mg g⁻¹), while the Requeijão cremoso presented the highest Na content (4.78±0.10 mg g⁻¹), and both products had the highest Mg contents (238.55±16.27 and 197.39±5.18 µg g⁻¹, respectively). Trace elements (Cd, Cu, Mn and Pb) were below the limit of detection for all commercial dairy foods. Among food products analyzed, petit Suisse cheese and dairy dessert can be considered good sources of calcium, while Requeijão cremoso is high in both calcium and sodium.

This study is the first to analyze the mineral levels of several Brazilian infant dairy foods and the daily intake contribution during important child development stages. These findings provide valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners trying to develop healthy and nutritious dairy products for infants and children.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how R&D originality functions in an open innovation process after the introduction of knowledge spillovers (KSs).

To examine the research framework, the authors use hierarchical regression based on questionnaire data from 211 emerging enterprises in China.

Consistent with the proposed framework, the authors find that the KS effect mediates the positive relationship between openness and innovation performance. In addition, R&D originality weakens the impact of the KS effect on innovation performance.

One limitation is that the questionnaire survey the authors choose for data collection has some natural defects; furthermore, the testing method and research framework need to be improved.

Several implications of the findings for managerial practices are discussed.

First, the research expands the existing theoretical construct by introducing the KS effect into the open innovation process; second, the authors reveal the negative impact of R&D originality on the open innovation process.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Thailand by focusing on the consumer-organisational relationship and test the conceptual framework of Du et al. (2007).

A quantitative study was conducted using a mall intercept survey of 184 Thai mobile phone service provider consumers in Bangkok, Thailand.

A CSR emphasised brand is more likely than non-CSR emphasised brands to accrue consumer CSR awareness, positive attitude to company motivations and beliefs in the CSR of that company. Although beliefs are associated with consumers’ greater identification and advocacy behaviours towards the CSR emphasised brand than the non-CSR emphasised brands, they are not associated with loyalty.

The paper provides potential guidance for companies to more effectively position and communicate their CSR activities to create differential advantages.

Findings of the study demonstrate some support for a business case for CSR in Thailand.

Students’ evaluation of teaching quality plays a major role in higher education. Satisfaction is not directly observable, nevertheless it can be measured through multi-item measurement scales. These instruments are extremely useful and their importance requires accurate development and validation procedures. The purpose of this paper is to show how latent class (LC) analysis can improve the procedures for developing and validating a multi-item measurement scale for measuring students’ evaluation of teaching and, at the same time, provide a deeper insight in the phenomenon under investigation.

The traditional literature highlights specific protocols along with the statistical instruments to be used for achieving this goal. However, these tools are suited for metric variables but they are adopted even when the nature of the observed variables is different, as it often occurs, since in many cases the items are ordinal. LC analysis takes explicitly into account the ordinal nature of the variables and also the fact that the object of interest is unobservable.

The data refer to the questionnaire to evaluate didactics to the students of the University of Padua. Within LC analysis allows an insight of scale properties, such as dimensionality, validity and reliability. Moreover, the results provide a deeper view in the way students use the scale to report satisfaction suggesting to revise the instrument according to the suggestion by the National Agency for University Evaluation.

The paper gives an original contribution on two sides. On the side of methods, it introduces a more accurate methodology for evaluating scales to measure the students’ satisfaction. On the side of applications, it provides important suggestions to the university management to improve the process of quality of the didactics evaluation.

The shopping center (SC) industry in emerging countries has grown fast over the past decade; however, recently, it is showing signs of slowing down. Nevertheless, some SC-companies perform well. As those firms operate in alliance networks, relational opportunities and risks should be considered in their strategic analyses. Although there is a significant amount of research on SC from a marketing perspective, there is a dearth of research on strategic alliances from an SC management perspective. This paper aims at answering the following question: How do characteristics of the alliance networks of leading SC-companies contribute to their success by mitigating the structural threats the SC-industry in Brazil is facing?

The case study method was adopted for analyzing two leading Brazilian SC-companies. Several data sources were used to allow for data triangulation. The lack of literature on strategic alliances and the SC-industry, as well as the research’s exploratory nature, justified this choice.

The research made evident that the SC-companies’ alliance network characteristics not only mitigate some of the structural industry threats but also enhance opportunities. It illustrated how firms can conduct a strategic analysis from a network perspective with the right tools. It also made evident how much more accurate the results of a comprehensive relational analysis are compared with traditional analyses that do not consider the strategic implications of relational factors.

The research contributed to SC management by highlighting the importance of taking into account the network characteristics of their relationships with key partners and of considering these as alliances and not merely contractual arrangements.

There is a dearth of research on the strategic implications of alliances of firms that own and manage a portfolio of SCs, as well as of their relationships with other actors in the industry, such as retailers and real estate owners, from a network perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the factors that can influence the tacit knowledge sharing (KS) in two different cultures by investigating information technology professionals (IT) in Brazil and Indonesia.

A survey method was used and a standard questionnaire was applied. The sample size comprised 115 respondents from Brazil and 86 participants from Indonesia. A partial least squares analysis was used to assess the structural and confirmatory models and test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that, in both cultures, IT workers who are committed to the organization are more likely to engage in tacit KS behavior. Similarly, strong social ties play an important role in the willingness to share tacit knowledge. Also, there are major differences between the organizational cultures; for instance, whereas Brazilians seem to be influenced by team-oriented cultures, Indonesians seem to be indifferent.

Limitations include the small sample size as only two cultures were chosen to assess the differences and the representation of just one professional category (IT).

This paper provides theoretical contributions as the literature lacks a macro-level analysis on the KS comparison between countries. The results advance the comprehension of tacit KS phenomenon by testing in a cross-country comparison the mediation effect of organizational commitment. To practitioners, this research presents important empirical contributions indicating how organizational culture, social environment, personality traits and employee commitment impact an individual’s willingness to share tacit knowledge with their coworkers.

The creation of intercultural education in the Quechua and Mapuche contexts, in Peru and Chile respectively, marks a milestone in the institutionalisation of equity-oriented state policies that deserves attention given the serious inequalities that still persist in these societies. In this chapter, we analyse ethnographic studies of intercultural knowledge and practices inside and outside the classroom and interpret them as catalysts for equity in education. The findings of the analysis point to the centrality of Indigenous actors as transformative agents inside and outside the classroom and the urgency of restructuring not only education but also society towards equity.

Despite a growing body of research on the problem of increasing disaster preparedness by pre-positioning relief supplies at strategic locations, there is a lack of a benchmark set of problem instances that hinders thorough hypotheses testing, sensitivity analysis, model validation or solution procedure evaluation. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by constructing a public library of diverse pre-positioning problem instances.

By carefully manipulating some of the instance parameters, the authors generated 30 case studies that were inspired by four instances collected from the literature that focus on disasters of different type and scale that occurred in different parts of the world. In addition, the authors developed a tool to algorithmically generate arbitrarily many diverse random instances of any size.

For many purposes, the problem library can eliminate or reduce the time-consuming process of data collection, conversion, digitization, calibration and validation, while simultaneously increasing the statistical significance of research results and allowing comparison with different works in the literature.

The case studies are inspired by only four disasters, and some of the instance parameters are defined in a reasonable, albeit arbitrary way. The instances are also limited by the underlying problem assumptions.

The instances provide a more comprehensive and balanced experimental setting (compared to a single case study) that can be used to study the pre-positioning and related problems, or derive managerial implications that can directly benefit the practitioners.

The instances can be used to derive practical guidelines that humanitarian workers can use on the ground to better plan their pre-positioning strategies and therefore minimize human suffering.

The case studies and the random instance generator are made publicly available to foster further research on the problem of pre-positioning relief supplies and humanitarian logistics in general.

The problem of determining the optimal cross‐reference structure for a given index and for a given community of users is discussed. A cross‐reference structure is represented as a graph in which the nodes are index terms and the links are relations between index terms. In order to clarify the concept of ‘level of cross‐referencing’ the characteristics of cross‐reference structures are studied. Some measures of cross‐reference distributions are suggested as a means of comparing the cross‐referencing levels of subject indexes. Types of relations linking the terms of cross‐references in existing indexes and thesauri are examined. The implications of the study for the construction and testing of indexes and thesauri are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how hospitality companies can best explain controversial corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to consumers who may not agree with the CSR activity. This research explores message framing through emotional and cognitive appeals to influence consumer perceptions of the Gideon Bible in USA hotel rooms. The study uses the theory of deontic justice to measure the impacts of messaging on consumer perceptions of the morality of the Gideon Bible as suicide prevention in hotels and its relation to controversial CSR initiatives.

The study uses an experimental study design via a self-administered survey to analyze participants’ perceptions of the placement of the Gideon Bible in hotel rooms and participants’ attitudes toward CSR initiatives based on deontic justice and religion using different message framing conditions.

Results show that religion was a major determinant of attitude towards the Gideon Bible, but the sentiment analysis also revealed that negative perceptions can be mitigated through message framing via emotional and cognitive appeals. Additionally, the cognitive appeal did impact CSR perceptions, as did identifying as Christian. Moral outrage emerged as a significant moderator for the relationships between message framing, attitudes toward the Gideon Bible and CSR.

This study provides an extension of deontic justice research to examine justice traits in accepting controversial CSR.