Artigos de revistas sobre o tema "Corporate state – latin america – congresses"

A country review shows that Argentina has been the first Latin American country to respond pragmatically to financial pressure. Peru appears prepared to take a similar radical approach. Brazil, Mexico and to a letter extent Venezuela, still protect a monopolistic state-owned oil industry which is a deterrent to foreign investment.

The upsurge of mass struggles in Latin America comes at a time when the party-based Left has lost hegemony. The far-Right is seeking a restoration of neoliberalism as part of a militarized expansion of transnational corporate plunder. Spaces that until recently exercised a modicum of autonomy, such as indigenous highlands in Guatemala and Peru, areas of the Amazon, and Colombia’s Pacific coast, are being violently cracked open and their abundant natural resources and labor supply made available to transnational capital. There is a disjuncture throughout Latin America between mass social movements that are resurgent and the institutional Left that has lost its ability to mediate between the masses and the state with a viable project of its own. The most likely scenario is a momentary stalemate as storm clouds gather.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary overview of the state of research on education as an instrument of domination during the «exceptional» moments assumed by the State throughout the 20th century in Latin America. This is a summary review mainly aimed at recovering part of the knowledge debated in the Ibero-American Congresses on the History of Latin American Education (CIHELA) in the last thirty years. Certainly, the universe of connotations that open up in this call outlined by the concepts «authoritarianism, violence, war, vulnerability and school», forces a limited theoretical-methodological operation and, for instance, affordable. In this sense, this work results from the search, identification, selection and analysis of a broad field of research and reflection on this subject, problems and academic objectives. Following the works presented in the CIHELA, this selection focuses on the transformations of the educational field, in general, and the school, in particular, in periods of restriction or closure of democratic participation. More specifically, it addresses the devices, uses and scope of authoritarian power according to the many variants assumed in each geography and unique history (foreign occupations, military and civil-military dictatorships, etc.).

Purpose This paper presents an overview of Latin American (LA) publications on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and closely related themes that appear in ISI Thompson Reuters Social Science Citation Index journals, in the period 2000-2017. The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first is to understand the institutional context in which this research is being produced, and to reflect on how it can be improved. The second is to map out key research strands in this literature, to discuss its achievements and limitations, and identify opportunities for future research. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative-qualitative systematic review was performed using a standard bibliometric approach. A total of 148 articles from 36 journals, indexed in the ISI Thompson Reuters Social Science Citation Index, were selected and analyzed. A systematic analysis was performed, based on a review protocol, which comprised following eight steps: research objectives, article search, articles selection, article identification, root themes coding, data coding, data coding validation and content analysis. Findings Research about CSR Latin America features a very low citation record. It is also very fragmented. Both of these characteristics reflect little conversation amongst scholars publishing on this topic in indexed venues. More generally, participation in these venues reflects the location of scholars working on this topic as peripheral actors in scholarly conversations. The study identifies many opportunities for future research that attend to key issues that are relevant for Latin America and that will stimulate a more dynamic conversation among scholars interested in the region. Research limitations/implications First, this study is limited to articles on CSR research on LA published in ISI journals. It does not show the whole trend of other academic and managerial publications in the region. Second, although the articles selected were retrieved based on 17 search terms derived from the theoretical framework, the complexity of CSR-related themes and its evolution could have caused some terms, and therefore publications, to be left out. Practical implications Results provide scholars interested in the region with updated information about the state of research on the topic and about opportunities for future research. They also provide business schools in the region with a valuable input for a comprehensive reflection on research policy. Social implications In the 30th anniversary of Academia (Revista Latinoamericana de Administración), this study offers recommendations on how research on CRS in Latin America could be made more visible and relevant. Originality/value This is the first bibliometric analysis of scholarly publications on CSR and related issues in Latin America. It is also unique in addressing institutional factors that may be conditioning intellectual production on the topic.

The article analyzes the current state of Spanish-Latin American investment ties and assesses the prospects for their development. The research task of the article is to analyse the functioning of Spanish capital in the key Latin American region under the crisis conditions of the last five years. A distinctive feature of Spain among other EU members in the Latin American region is the institutional aspect, which has become one of the drivers of sustainable Spanish-Latin American investment cooperation, in which Iberoamerican multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a key role. To create an up-to-date panorama of investment interaction, the dynamics of Spanish foreign direct investment (FDI) flows the author does assesse their key corporate participants Spanish investments are characterized in comparison with global FDI flows to the region. The financial performance of the leading MNEs participating in the investment process is analysed this factor serves as an indicator to reflect current trends in Spanish-Latin American investment cooperation. The impact of the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the current tense geopolitical and geoeconomic situation is taken into account, the evolution of the dynamics of Spanish FDI in Latin America’ and the Caribbean region (LAC) over the past five years is given, the reasons for the main changes and the prospects for their development are indicated. Examples of the processes of internationalization of individual Spanish companies are given. The conclusion is made about the continued dominance of investment as opposed to trade in the vector of Spanish interaction with the LAC countries, with a general decline in Spanish FDI flows, their reorganization, reorientation to Western countries and the existence of new global challenges to the sustainable growth of investment, the prospects for attracting FDI to the region are assessed. In this regard, challenges and associated opportunities are identified.

This study is based on a sample of the thirty Chilean companies with the highest stock presence and which demonstrate opacity problems in their tax sustainability related to the GRI 207 standard available since 2019 (which emphasizes the disclosure of tax strategies to stakeholders, especially as regards any links with their small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)). The study also explores the literature related to tax transparency and its evolution in Latin America. Significantly different performances were found among the tax sustainability reports. The reasons for these differences are related to the fact that some demand simple declarations of principles, while others require both reporting of evidence in front of the interest groups and revealing of the tax strategy. As a result, taxpayers seem to use their corporate social responsibility activities more to moderate reputation risk than to aim at tax transparency. At the same time, the findings reveal that the actions toward tax transparency which have defined the tributary administrations of Latin American countries since the 2018 Punta del Este Global Forum do not consider the possibility of public disclosure. In this sense, the evidence highlights the need for Latin American policymakers to introduce, at the normative level, integrated tax transparency cooperation mechanisms between state administrations and regulated companies.

An integral responsibility of nation-states is to provide protection and the means for attaining a fulfilling life to those it governs. Given the fact that most current global powers were not founded with the needs of racialized peoples in mind, one is infuriated but not surprised, at the cyclical pattern of disregard and exploitation that people of colour in the Americas experience. Indigenous and Black communities in the Americas are not just disregarded by the state, but are actively targeted for exploitation and undermining. Analyzing Haiti’s post-colonial history and Canada’s domestic and international mining operations, I argue that nations in the Caribbean and Latin America have been extensively exploited economically by imperial powers, and their survival undermined by colonial legacies. Numerous countries in the region, to varying degrees, continue to experience the wrath of state-sponsored white supremacy and crippling debt that prevent authentic development. I advance the position that coerced debt and resource extraction have been weaponized against already ostracized communities by behemoth states that employ the myth of being a post-racial democracy. This paper also highlights a complex set of global relationships by linking extraction, state-corporate relations, and North-South divides, with a focus on Canadian mining in Latin America.

The paper deals with the development of a design concept for a museum of Inca culture in Ecuador. The current trends in the organization of historical museums in Latin America are presented. An overview of the graphic support of the Latin American museums of culture, archeology, and history is made. The historical foundations of the Museum of Inca culture are presented, the iconography of the Inca civilization of various periods is analyzed. The current state of the museum, the history of its foundation, prerequisites for creating a new brand are described. Associative graphic images for creating a new logo for the museum were considered, corporate colors were substantiated, and components of the brand were developed. This will strengthen the museum's brand and increase its social significance for the popularization of the Inca culture.

Purpose: The objective of this research was to know the scientific evidence on Corporate Social Responsibility: a look at the citizen approach in a systematic review from 2018 to 2022 in Latin America. Method: To this end, a review of the state of the art was carried out, taking into account the indicators of the Prisma guide of the articles that were found in different databases such as: Scopus, Scielo, Wos, Proquest and Ebscohost. Results and Conclusion: The results indicated aspects that companies must take into account from the actions of Corporate Social Responsibility to achieve sustainable development that responds to the needs of the communities, these results affirm the following: the inclusive financial system, positioning of the brand in the business environment, strengthening the social awareness of the population, social commitment of companies, strengthening citizenship, sustainable development and quality of life of the population, development of good management practices, sustainable development of sustainability – competitiveness and care of the environment. Research implications: If companies have demonstrated these needs from their business history, it means that CSR will allow them to strengthen social awareness, social commitment with the purpose of sustainable development and quality of life of the population. Originality/value: The development aspect of good management practices where sustainability and competitiveness are variables that achieve economic, social and environmental balance between Latin American communities.

The article analyzes the priorities of the Obama’s administration in the region and the Latin American states actions in rebuilding the existing system of relations at the global and regional levels. The current financial and economic crisis has shown the need for changes in the economic world order, financial system, which was formed in the end of the Second World War, where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) play a key role. For many decades developing countries were rather an object of economic expansion than serious actors in the world economy.In the article features of foreign policy of the USA of relatively Latin America are examined in the article; the conceptual providing of foreign policy is analysed the USA, the comparative analysis of foreign policy of administrations of presidents of relatively Latin America is carried out, the detailed analysis of influence of foreign-policy course of the USA is presented, the basic factors of forming of new foreign policy the USA of relatively Latin America are found out. Purpose of the research: External U.S. Relations with Latin America and the Caribbean under the Barack Obama Administration. The article of analysis is includes resolution of long duration aims and corporate strategic planning taking into account correlation of application in space and in time of necessary resources, as activity of the American state that is sent to determination and achievement of long-term aims in a region by means of corresponding facilities. Without belittling the importance of not denying the «national roots» the origin of these crises can not be ignored or underestimated the fact that the development of Latin America in previous decades influenced deep region in the processes of global integration with its «distortions» and instability, with increasingly the apparent inability of international institutions. The main mechanisms for implementation of the USA foreign policy strategy objectives are LAC, bilateral relations with main European countries and USA as well as crisis management. The work ascertains the limited effectiveness of multilateral instruments for the achievement of strategic objectives of the LAC foreign policy. LAC represents one of the power centers of the multipolar world in LAC strategy, but in this regard, has to possess proper political and military mechanism for regulation of international relations. LAC suggested a lot of proposals and projects in the field of crisis management under B.Obama presidency, but its initiatives did not receive proper support in the LAC.

In this literature, the author reviews board gender diversity in areas related to corporate governance and corporate finance, namely Company Performance globally in various countries in the world. The research method in this article uses a qualitative research approach with the type of research, namely Systematic Literature Review (SLR), where researchers identify and summarise topics related to the main topic, then 24 research articles are selected that are most suitable and used as research samples, as for the subject of the topic mapped in this literature, namely 12 countries in the world. After analysis, the majority of countries in the world, namely Turkey, Ghana, United Kingdom, Greece, Pakistan, Russia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, state that Board Gender Diversity (BGD) can improve company performance. While in several other countries such as Malaysia, Nigeria, and Latin America, the existence of BGD can reduce company performance.

Os programas de Responsabilidade Social Corporativa (RSC) na América Latina, e particularmente no Brasil, aumentaram significativamente nas últimas duas décadas. Este artigo revisa a literatura sobre RSC no contexto latino-americano e descreve as contribuições de atores corporativos do Brasil, Colômbia e México para a validação de um quadro conceitual de análise da gestão de sustentabilidade. Os resultados da pesquisa sinalizam para a necessidade de levar-se em consideração os contextos culturais e organizacionais na análise da implementação de práticas de RSC e apontam para os desafios para as estratégias corporativas de sustentabilidade, particularmente no que tange à mitigação da pobreza.Palavras-chave: Sustentabilidade; Responsabilidade Social Corporativa; América Latina.AbstractCorporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in Latin America have increased in the last two decades, and Brazil, in particular, has become a leader in this field. The article reviews unique aspects of CSR in the Latin American context and describes the contributions of four non-state actors to sustainability development, as well as those of the corporations that participated in this study. A previous exploratory study on the transfer of sustainability values between German headquarters and their Brazilian subsidiaries yielded a sustainability model and normative implementation practices that were tested and expanded in this follow-up study. Participants from eight corporations located in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico were interviewed and surveyed to determine which sustainability implementation practices are utilized and rated as important. Respondents found the overall conceptual framework, which consists of rationale, conceptualization, direction, transfer, and evaluation, to be a valid reflection of how sustainability is perceived. Research implications include the need for cultural and organizational contextualization to structured approaches for CSR for implementation. Future research should focus on the variables of culture on sustainability management and the industrial context. Notable progress has been made in sustainability development, but more work still remains, particular in the mitigation of poverty.Keywords: Sustainability Management Framework; Corporate Social Responsibility; Latin America;

This article, in the context of documentary research carried out and interpreted for that was taken as baseline in investigations on electronic security and their themes for the ORCA group, it´s describe the state of the art of electronic surveillance focused in communications for monitoring stations. It’s set up chronologically in the last decade, in Latin America, and Colombia particularly. The subject has been categorized and subcategorized in such a way that keys are established sources extraction: university digital repositories, online academic magazines and corporate web page. As a product produced by the review, a particular communication model is presented for a case of a monitoring center and a equipment for tracking people.

This article is the result of a panel discussion between representatives from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, at the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA)'s International Section 2011 Seasonal Meeting. The panel was given a case study and asked to analyse the general tax issues arising from a highway infrastructure project entered into by a fictitious US company ('Highways, Inc.') in one of the involved Latin American jurisdictions (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico). Under the hypothesis, Highways, Inc. was to choose the appropriate investment vehicle (special purpose vehicle (SPV)), corporate structure, and capital structure. The SPV's tax obligations and tax incentives in the investment country were also analysed by the panel. The objective was to come up with potential barriers and incentives to invest in the four envisaged investment jurisdictions.

AbstractThis paper examines relations between the state and capital in Argentina with respect to agricultural biotechnology. Argentina is one of the world's leading exporters of genetically modified (GM) crops and is a key player in the global politics of biotechnology. Whereas in other parts of the world, including other countries in Latin America, active civil societies and some governments have rejected the technology, Argentina has adopted it as a central accumulation strategy. The desirability of this strategy has been secured in material, institutional and discursive arenas of power, producing a particular expression of ‘bio-hegemony’. Looking at the role of business in the political economy of agricultural biotechnology is revealing both of the extent and forms of corporate power and contributes to an understanding of hegemony in practice.

PurposeIn the past, simply fulfilling economic performance alone was critical to ensuring the success of companies and their shareholders, but this traditional perspective is not compatible with society's current demands, as there is increasing social pressure on organizations to become more sustainable and reduce impacts on the environment, promoting sustainable results in their business processes. In this context, the specialized literature states that human resources management (HRM) is considered a central aspect for building sustainable organizations, in particular, the area of green human resources management (GHRM). Thus, this study analyzes the relationship between GHRM and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Brazilian companies. Company's age, size, ISO 9001 and 14001 certifications are the control variables.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopted a quantitative approach in conducting the survey. Four waves of email were sent to HR and CSR managers from 853 Brazilian companies from the metallurgical, automotive and chemical industries. In total, 79 questionnaires were fully answered, higher than the minimum sample calculated by the G*Power 3.1 software, which corresponds to a return rate of 9.26%. For the analysis of the results, the partial least squares method was used.FindingsThis research identifies that GHRM practices, in fact, positively influence CSR practices. The findings evidence that practices of performance evaluation, teamwork and recruitment and selection are the most important for a better CSR performance. The research results indicate that the “ISO 9001 certification” control variable also has a positive and significant effect on CSR and that the size of the company, the age of the company and the ISO 14001 certification, in the analyzed sample, were not relevant (as control variables) for CSR.Originality/valueCurrent literature highlights the gap between GHRM and CSR. This relationship is not explored in Brazil. The study uses a new theoretical model, and it fills the gap identified in the literature. This paper brings important theoretical and managerial contributions. It is the first in the literature to show, in an empirical way, the positive relationship between GHRM and CSR, contributing in an original way to the state of the art of the GHRM and CSR theme. In addition, this research adds empirical evidence on GHRM and CSR in Latin America/South America/Brazil.

This paper aims to propose a new model for the manner in which companies manage innovation. To that end, some of the most important research on the topic is analyzed and summarized through a review of its historical background in the indexed databases in WoS (Web of Science) and an analysis of frequently used terms over the past 15 years (2001–2016). The analysis is developed through bibliometric techniques using VOSviewer software, version 1.6.4, seeking to identify recurring and related concepts, such as corporate entrepreneurship, that can leverage company innovation management from the strategy, inherent factors related to human resources and the environment in which the organization operates. Henceforth, this paper focuses on a new model to manage innovation in companies through a conceptualization of innovation and corporate entrepreneurship, this model can be useful in countries with low levels of cooperation between stakeholders and scarce resources, countries on bias of development like Latin America, Africa and some Asian countries. It can be concluded that the company innovation should start with the definition of its strategy, taking into account factors like the human talent and the environment in which the organization is operating, through customized innovation processes that can be applied following some of the multiple models referred to in the literature, framed within the needs of different stakeholders, as indicators of organizational performance. Therefore, the actors which are part of the model are: employees, clients, state, suppliers, academics, community, shareholders and business.

Abstract This article addresses the opportunities and challenges for researching the history of Indigenous custom during a period in which constitutional and legal reform have led to the recognition of customary law as an official framework for local governance and the administration of justice in Oaxaca, Mexico. The article begins by situating Oaxaca’s laws within the context of broader neoliberal reforms in Latin America characterized by the promulgation of multicultural constitutions recognizing the legal jurisdiction and cultural autonomy of Indigenous communities. Some Indigenous intellectuals, activists, and NGOs working in Oaxaca have declared this new administrative arrangement a victory for Indigenous rights to self-determination, arguing that customary law serves as a defensive wall against state and corporate incursions of many kinds. Other local Indigenous scholars have nuanced the custom-law and community-state oppositions, situating customary law—currently referred to as “Indigenous normative systems”—as historical and contested, and in dynamic interplay with relationships of power within and beyond the community. The article’s author considers these debates about custom’s ambiguous meanings and effects and reflects on how the recent context of legal reform nourishes the author’s own scholarship on the colonial period by providing a broad temporal, cultural, and political framework with which to understand its stakes. The author also explores how historians researching Oaxaca’s deep past can meet the interpretive demands of their discipline while being attentive to historical justice and engaging the communities whose ancestors occupy center stage in our histories.

China’s raw materials diplomacy and unregulated purchasing of minerals in Africa and Latin America, as well as its domestic raw materials export quota, have for years been eyed with suspicion by state and private actors. Industrialized countries want to uphold and extend free market access to raw materials, but also strengthen their political accountability and sustainability. However, critics argue that in contrast, China, the world’s largest metals and minerals trading power, has taken the opposite course, ignoring social and environmental standards, reinforcing authoritarian governments, and erecting trade barriers. China is faced with several interrelated challenges in its resource diplomacy and governance. This article claims that an identifiable, chronological connection and pattern has existed between China’s aid and investment diplomacy for resources since the late 1990s, free trade agreements since the 2000s, Beijing’s resource nationalism since the 2010s, and the reform process of national and privately organized transnational governance toward sustainability in the present day. Is China socializing with emerging transnational standards on mining and resource extraction in the developing world, and if so, why? This article argues that China’s raw materials governance, including corporate governance, has entered a phase of reform to pacify the external environment and to implement the Belt and Road Initiative. In theoretical terms, China’s raw materials governance will continue to emphasize neoliberal and neo-mercantilist goals, cushioned by globalist features.

As competition in international and national markets intensifies, it is important to create a system to protect economic actors from potential threats and adverse factors. To solve these issues, it is necessary to ensure the effective functioning of the insurance market, which is one of the important components of financial security. Without the developed insurance market, it will be impossible to ensure the social and economic progress of the country, its corporate security, welfare etc. The current state of the world insurance market has certain features, which makes it possible to adapt to the change of the modern world and improve the work of the insurance industry. To create a clear insurance market, it is necessary to develop an effective policy as to the insurance activities of both the insurer and the reinsurers, as well as to establish solvency insurance systems. The development of the insurance market is accompanied by many economic, regulatory, organizational, methodological and personnel issues. The publication is aimed at studying and distinguishing the peculiarities of development of the world market of insurance services. On the basis of studying the works of scholars, the main features of the modern insurance market are provided; key signs of the insurance industry are presented; statistical information on trends in the insurance market development during 2019 in the following regions: North and Latin America, Western Europe, Asia, European developing countries. The impact of COVID-19 on the state of the insurance industry in Europe has been characterized. As result of studying the key trends in the future development of the insurance market, the main components that are necessary for the formation of an effective policy of insurance companies in the context of COVID-19 have been formed as follows: digitalization, innovation, analytics, feedback.

Problem setting. Although modern humanity has proclaimed the universality of human dignity and desperately upholds this value, which is fully in harmony with freedom, equality and fraternity, the truth is that in reality it has not yet been able to go beyond the status of a citizen of the nation state in its legal and political conventions. . In this sense, a very important issue is the representation of the real situation around the categories of "universal citizenship", "human rights" and "globalization" in the midst of the geopolitical conflict in Latin America caused by the persecution of 21st century socialism. Paper objective. This critical essay aims to discuss the real significance of such political and legal categories as "universal citizenship", "human rights" and "globalization" in the midst of the geopolitical conflict that led to the persecution of 21st century socialism in Latin America. Methodology. The methodological field of the research uses documentary observation and dialectical hermeneutics, which help to compare and reconcile categories with different semantic contexts to reconstruct their true meaning. The technique of writing this research was the methodological procedure of the hermeneutic circle, which is a sequential analysis of numerous written documentary sources, combined in a kind of dialogic context with hidden messages that can be read between the lines, as well as interpretive theories and critical thinking. Paper main body. There is much in common between the contemporary political and philosophical programs of the Western cultural space, of which Latin Americans are a part, and the ideas of universal citizenship, globalization, and human rights in a spirit of deep militant universalism that function fully today not only as abstract theories at the disposal of peoples and nations who continue to work to improve their living conditions and strengthen their freedom to exist and act in a better world. As for the tradition of human rights as a modern expression of natural law, it dates back to ancient times and even dates back to the great religions, which in their own way developed and substantiated the idea of human dignity. The history of the Institute of Human Rights has a pronounced anthropocentric character and deserves to be expanded in accordance with the geopolitical realities of the modern world, in order to protect the indisputable value of all life forms affected by such phenomena as global warming and the associated greenhouse effect. economic growth that requires technological and industrial modernization. For its part, "globalization with a human face" means the ability to interconnect and enrich not only material and financial resources, due to the insatiability of international markets, but also the cycle of knowledge and people required by modern world democracies to strengthen their social and human capital. . In this context, the idea of global or universal citizenship, while seeming utopian, is of paramount importance as it broadens the political phenomenon of citizenship, which is vital to modern democracies or polyarchies, forgetting the tradition of history ruled by supreme forces and structures. Although, according to K. Popper, already the historicist concept assigned a fundamental role in building a reality conducive to the exercise of freedom, the citizen, conscious and active. Thus, if globalization is reduced purely to the internationalization of capital and selective human and technological resources solely in the interests of corporate elites and does not turn into a globalization of social welfare and dignity - a process in which universal citizenship would be a logical consequence, then partial globalization, which can do little to promote an open society in the 21st century. Conclusions of the research. The study concludes that if globalization is reduced to the internationalization of capital and individual human and technological resources for the benefit of the corporate elite and does not extend to the globalization of social welfare and dignity, where universal citizenship would be a logical consequence, such globalization is unlikely to contribute building an open society of the XXI century.

The COVID-19 scenario led to new ways of buying, selling, and consuming, a triad that lead to emerging voluntary bets on the part of companies for social, economic, and environmental improvement that legitimizes their actions in the new context. This mentioned process in situations such as confinement, work at home, interaction with diverse teams, and even the transformation of productive practices in the face of the scarcity of raw materials led to a behavioral perspective of corporate social responsibility (CSR) focused on the adaptative capacity of the dynamics of the context. Under this understanding, this research characterizes the management and practices of CSR during the pandemic in Latin America. Methodologically, the 200 best-positioned companies in the Merco Ranking were studied, allowing interaction of companies, leaders, and corporate responsibility and governance. The «social contribution» variable was analyzed with eight crossed variables and contrasted with the information disclosed by the organizations have studied regarding management and CSR practices in the period of the pandemic. The selected countries were Uruguay and Colombia, considering their extreme geographic location on the continent, the disparity in GDP, and the difference in state policies to manage the pandemic. After inferring the research hypothesis, it was possible to determine that the companies studied, despite the territorial disparity, geographical aspects, the number of inhabitants, and separate management of the pandemic, both in Colombia and Uruguay, adopted several measures to face the crisis produced by the COVID-19. Additionally, a social contribution has in both markets has been made, where 92% of Uruguayan companies and 99% of Colombia companies have developed new business models. The mentioned models include digitization of operations, delivery of food baskets and personal hygiene, technological contributions, and among others, donations of supplies and medical pieces of equipment. The companies that contributed the most are located at the top of the ranking in their countries and mostly belong to the industrial sector, a sector that in principle is most affected by the pandemic. In addition, the longest-standing companies made greater contributions. All of those studied presented sustainability reports using international standards and indicators and focused on social and environmental contributions since the beginning of the pandemic.

A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. Ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco reveals the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing how resources act as conduits for deeper postcolonial struggles over territory, sovereignty, and citizenship. Un creciente cuerpo de literatura examina cómo el surgimiento de los estados “neo-extractivistas” en América Latina está reconfigurando la relación entre los recursos, la nación, el territorio y la ciudadanía. Sin embargo, las implicaciones para los proyectos territoriales indígenas han sido poco exploradas. Investigaciónes etnográficas en el Chaco boliviano revela cómo los pueblos indígenas están repensando sus proyectos territoriales en el contexto de las luchas espaciales de un estado extractivista. Destaco la tensión entre el deseo de los pueblos indígenas para su inclusión en un proyecto de desarrollo nacional basado en los hidrocarburos, y sus experiencias de despojo por la expansión de la frontera hidrocarburífera. Esta tensión ha dado lugar a modos opuestos de “ciudadanía de hidrocarburos” en el territorio Guaraní Itika Guasu, donde una visión de autonomía indígena patrocinada por una empresa petrolera se enfrenta a nuevos proyectos de desarrollo financiados por el estado. Estas dinámicas cuestionan narrativas de resistencia y teorías de “la maldición de los recursos,” revelando que los recursos actúan como conductos para luchas postcoloniales por el territorio, la soberanía y la ciudadanía.

This paper explores the challenges for democratizing land and natural resource control in Guatemala through use of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (Tenure Guidelines). This international human rights instrument comes at a critical moment, in which the current global land rush has shaped contemporary agrarian transformation with serious implications for the right to food and control of natural resources. The Tenure Guidelines provide us with a unique opportunity to put land and natural resource tenure squarely under the prescriptions of international human rights law, rather than allowing tenure to be subsumed by a narrow understanding of property rights based on civil and merchant law. In Guatemala, we are witnessing a political opening, where the government has incorporated the language of the Tenure Guidelines into its regulatory framework unlike any other country in Latin America. At the same time, the world watches on while a slow-motion coup engulfs the Central American country, reflecting a global trend of gutting democracies and coopting the language and legislation meant to protect them. Thus, the implementation of the Tenure Guidelines is strongly contested by state and corporate actors seeking to use the instrument in order to gain political legitimacy for the expansion of agribusiness like oil palm and sugarcane, and other forms of extractive industry. This paper’s findings indicate that when applied together with a rights-based approach, the Tenure Guidelines are a powerful social and political tool. Such is especially true of the most marginalized populations who require protection and respect for their existing tenure rights, promotion of reforms for better access to and control over land and resources, and restoration of tenure rights resulting from displacement or dispossession.

BackgroundRheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs) are a burden for individuals and a challenge to healthcare systems.Comparing the current and the future number of rheumatologists and the frequency of RMDs, studies state a huge gap. Another key issue is the uneven distribution of rheumatologists in most countries. These deficits are glaring in low and middle income countries in particular. In sub-Saharan Africa e.g. just in the past 20 years more attention has been drawn to non-communicable diseases. Great challenges exist in Latin America.Patient organisations (POs) offer information and assistance, are competence networks, represent and advocate for patients’ interests and needs and play a pivotal role in healthcare systems.ObjectivesOverarching:With its activities IPARE aims at contributing to a world, where RMDs are recognized, prevented and cured, and patient-centredness is an integral part of health care delivery.Thespecificaims are.To connect and exchange with national patient organisations and continental networks/organisations of patient organisations from other continents than Europe.To develop, step by step, a network of globally active national POs, national umbrella POs and continental POs.To initiate collaborative projects in the field of education, research, quality of care, congress and advocacy.To share best practices aiming at developing and supporting POs and pan-continental POs.To promote the access to and the exchange at conferences and congresses for RMDs.MethodsIPARE is a PARE project group embedded in the PARE Sub-Committee „Community Relations“, meaning all EULAR regulations will apply.A small project group consisting of representatives from South and Central America, North America, Africa and Europe has been established. We are aiming at enlarging the group (e.g. by having a representative from Asia), but the total number should not exceed 10 in order to work efficiently.After an introductory in-person meeting at the PARE Conference in October the members decided to meet virtually every 6-8 weeks. Webinars are offered every 2-3 months.Aspects of membership, objectives, mode of working were defined.ResultsThe project group members identified - in spite of different health care systems, economic statuses and the extent of the deficits - certain commonalities like lack of rheumatologists (in particular lack of paediatric rheumatologists), shortage of health professionals (e.g. nurses, physiotherapists trained for the treatment of RMDs), delayed diagnosis, access to medical treatment according to internationally accepted treatment recommendations, insufficient non-pharmacological treatment, needs to educate the public and create awareness for RMDs and the situation of people with an RMD, research and patient involvement in research.The group developed a first list of items how these deficits could be tackled, how we can collaborate being aware of the fact that national peculiarities and features and language items have to be taken into account if any material will be produced. To avoid duplication and to check what already exists, an inventory list of informative and educational material is being established.A first webinar open to all representatives of international patient organisations is determined for February.ConclusionThe project group members work with great enthusiasm, are eager to share knowledge and want to learn what can be implemented in their organisations and countries. In addition the group members focus on supranational issues.The project group members share, learn and convey to support implementation.Reference[1]Objectives have to be approved by the PARE Council.Acknowledgements:NIL.Disclosure of InterestsNone Declared.

Wood durability around the world in a global climate change context. Wood has long been one of the world’s primary building materials, and it remains so today despite competition from alternative materials (e.g., PVC, fiberglass, concrete). Worldwide wood consumption is on the rise, and this trend is set to continue, given the growing importance of the bioeconomy (FAO 2022). This rising demand for wood to provide local construction materials with a low environmental impact is all the more pronounced in the southern countries, where demographic growth is high. In response to higher wood consumption, the area occupied by forest plantations is increasing in most developed countries, while deforestation in tropical parts of the world is still of serious concern (Fisher et al. 2020). In most tropical countries, with large forest areas and great diversity in terms of wood species, local timber production generally only focuses on a few abundant species (associated with a long renewal period) and only values the old large-sized trees (with a diameter greater than 50 cm). In the context of growing needs for timber, such a restrictive value chain may exacerbate pressure on tropical forest ecosystems. It is therefore essential to broaden our knowledge about the potential to use more species and lower-quality logs for timber production. Tropical rainforests currently cover 1,070 million hectares of the world’s surface (90% of them are located in Central Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia), with more than 50,000 timber species, but only a handful of these are used (figure 1). It is estimated that 400 million hectares of these forests are currently given over to timber production. However, research over many decades has shown that the regulations that govern timber harvesting in tropical forests – currently based on logging intensity and cutting cycle – do not allow for the long-term recovery of the timber volume being harvested from these ecosystems. It is therefore urgent that we seek out new sources of timber (Putz et al. 2012). Many types of wood are overlooked in the international market today, as the demand lies with the more well-known types of timber species. It is therefore important to consider alternative options and choose wood according to the qualities and characteristics required to meet targeted end-use applications. In numerous tropical forest species, wood properties are poorly described, and wood is undervalued. At the same time, to maximise yield, foresters often apply intensive silvicultural management to fast-growing tree species, resulting in wood with wide growth rings, lower wood density, a lower proportion of heartwood, and, in many cases, lower wood durability (Kojima 2009). Wood protection refers to measures that, in various ways, aim to improve the resistance of wood and wood-based materials to biodegradation and biodeterioration. Such organisms include wood-decaying fungi, termites, and other wood-destroying insects, marine borers, and discolouring microorganisms such as blue stain and mould (Jones and Brischke 2017). Wood-decaying fungi are the most common of the destructive organisms in temperate climates, while termites are a dominant vector in tropical regions. In this context, and although preservation or modification methods to improve the durability of wood have been developed, some of these processes or chemicals remain expensive, unavailable worldwide, or create potential environmental risks. While research on effective and sustainable preservation and modification methods are still needed, the study of traits related to the natural durability of wood is of great importance for increasing wooden products’ service life, choosing an appropriate wood species for an application, and increasing the service life of wooden products in general (Martín and López 2023). Furthermore, the current context of globalisation and climate change is influencing the biological agents that deteriorate wood materials and wood-based products. On the one hand, globalisation in the trade of wood and wood packaging increases the probability of the inadvertent introduction of forest pathogens and xylophagous microorganisms, which in some cases emerge as invasive species with the potential to attack indigenous forests and timber products. On the other hand, climate change is altering the worldwide distribution of some wood-destroying organisms. Global trade and climate change are inducing a shift in the distribution of invasive organisms (e.g., favouring spreading to higher altitudes) with the potential to cause damage to forest and wood elements, a trend that will probably be exacerbated in the next decades (Brischke and Rapp 2010). There are still important knowledge gaps regarding the mechanisms wood-deteriorating organisms use to attack wood, their ecology and mode of dispersion, and furthermore is some wood traits are affecting the natural durability of wood in service. To improve the social perception of wood as a raw material, further research is needed to develop or improve sustainable methods for preserving wood species of low natural durability against biological deterioration. Finally, it remains important to continue developing durability test methods, experimental studies, and monitoring approaches (figure 2) (Brischke et al. 2023). Focus on the scopes and activities of the International Research Group on Wood Protection (IRGWP) A brief history The International Research Group on Wood Protection (IRGWP) (known until 10 June 2004 as The International Research Group on Wood Preservation) was launched as an independent research group in 1969 to continue the work of a previous group of experts on wood protection that had been set up, following an Austrian proposal in 1965, by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in Paris, France. In 1979, the Group's administrative Secretariat moved to Sweden and was supported by the Swedish National Board for Technical Development (STU) until 1985. Since then, the IRGWP secretariat remains in Sweden and has been self-financing, relying entirely on the support of its personal and corporate members. Initially, the IRGWP was composed of 22 scientists from nine countries (Austria, Belgium, France, the German Federal Republic, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). Today, IRGWP has more than 350 members from 51 countries around the world. Wood protection The science of wood protection is by nature multi-disciplinary, and can encompass elements of forestry, wood science, mycology, entomology, physics, chemistry, engineering, and technology. Progress in modern wood protection development usually includes two or more of these elements, making the field highly accepting of multi-institutional approaches to solving complex challenges. Moreover, to adequately describe the current state of wood protection, it requires an approach that involves viewpoints from various regions of the world and, within some of those regions, a country-by-country approach. In this regard, IRGWP has included the following regions of the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, and Oceania. IRGWP’s activities The IRGWP provides the global forum for research and industrial developments in wood protection sciences, including method development, experimental studies, monitoring approaches, models, product development, environmental aspects, etc., in order to promote knowledge about wood durability science and strategies for the protection and preservation of woods, wood-based materials, structures and building components. Through worldwide cooperation, the IRGWP: Facilitates contacts between specialists working on the complex problems of wood protection and durability. Issues more than one hundred documents every year, providing members and sponsors with invaluable information. Arranges, with the help of local organising committees, annual conferences, and regional meetings with active workshops to discuss and disseminate significant research progress and develop the relationships between academics and industrial companies (figure 3). Provides help and encouragement for scientists in developing countries to enable contributions to their research activities and to attend conferences. Facilitates the participation of able young scientists in the collaborative research of its Working Parties using the Ron Cockcroft Award scheme[1]. Works continuously as a forum for discussion and dissemination of research results. Avoids duplication of research work and therefore saves time, effort, and money, through its unique around-the-world strategy. Shares a durability database aimed at the allocation of wood durability test results (in the field and laboratory conditions) for comparative studies and re-analyses. Stimulates progress and quality. IRGWP members and sponsors are proud of their status and strive continuously towards excellence. Provides cost-benefits: the annual conferences and the regional meetings provide powerful opportunities for making business contacts while keeping aware of the very latest information in this field. Supports financially a permanent Secretariat based in Stockholm, which aims to provide supportive services to members, sponsors, and new interested parties. A brief description of the papers published within this Special issue. This special issue of Bois et Forêts des Tropiques was prepared in the framework of the IRG54 Annual meeting, which was held in Queensland, Australia, from May 28 to June 1, 2023. During this international meeting, the IRGWP proposed a special session dealing with the natural and conferred durability of tropical wood species. Topics of interest included extractives defense mechanisms against fungi and termites, protection of tropic wood in service (including modification and design), and valorisation of tropical wood with low natural durability. From these presentations, several papers were selected and are hereby presented in this Special issue. The Scientific Program Committee feels these give a good indication of the current status of durability, preservation and valorisation of tropical wood species, and that you find them as interesting as they did during their presentation during the IRG54 conference. [1] https://www.irg-wp.com/RCAGuidelines.html

Editorial – Revista Ambiente Contábil – Volume 14 – Número 1 – Ano 2022 (Jan./Jun. 2022) A Revista Ambiente Contábil (Ambiente) apresenta na sua 27ª edição 19 (dezenove) artigos que tratam de assuntos relevantes para a área contábil; 01 (uma) resenha de livro e 15 (quinze) artigos no idioma inglês (versão de artigos submetidos em português). Seção 1: Contabilidade Aplicada ao Setor Empresarial Artigo 1 - Aplicabilidade dos modelos CAPM local, CAPM local ajustado e CAPM ajustado híbrido ao mercado brasileiro de Vandliny Paiva Martins Teixeira, Moisés Ferreira da Cunha e Thaisa Renata dos Santos com o objetivo de verificar a aplicabilidade dos modelos CAPM local, CAPM Local Ajustado e CAPM Ajustado Híbrido ao mercado brasileiro, a partir da análise de suas respectivas premissas e, adicionalmente, verificar a existência de diferenças estatísticas significativas entre os modelos. Artigo 2 - Gerenciamento de resultados e de capital por bancos latino-americanos com instrumentos financeiros José Alves de Carvalho, Júlio César Gomes Mendonça, Maurício Soares de Faria Júnior e José Alves Dantas com o objetivo de avaliar se os bancos da América Latina utilizam os ganhos e perdas não realizados com instrumentos financeiros, registrados como outros resultados abrangentes, com o objetivo de gerenciamento de resultados e de capital regulatório. Artigo 3 - Cultura organizacional e desempenho financeiro: evidências em empresas listadas no Índice Brasil 100 de Leonardo Portella Ilowski, Iago França Lopes, Cintia Lopes da Silva Vieira, Danieli de Assis Machado, Ruberval Gonçalves de Matos e Nayane Thais Krespi Musial com o objetivo de analisar a relação entre cultura organizacional e desempenho financeiro de empresas listadas no IBrX 100. Artigo 4 - Impacto da exclusão do ICMS da base de cálculo do PIS e da COFINS: estudo sobre a decisão do STF e seus efeitos em uma empresa do segmento alimentício de Jéssica Andressa Zago, Letícia Twardowski da Silva e Vitor Paulo Rigo com o objetivo de apresentar o impacto da decisão proferida pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal que exclui o ICMS da base de cálculo do PIS e da COFINS e demonstrar o montante dessas contribuições a serem restituídas por uma empresa do setor alimentício, enquadrada no regime do Lucro Real. Artigo 5 - Práticas de responsabilidade socioambiental e o desempenho organizacional em companhias abertas de Naline Tres, Claudia Dalla Porta, Sady Mazzioni, Cristian Bau Dal Magro e Daniela Di Domenico com o objetivo de analisar a relação entre as práticas de responsabilidade socioambiental no desempenho das companhias abertas listadas na [B3]. Artigo 6 - Agressividade tributária nas empresas de capital aberto que atuam em mercado regulado de Thaís Salvatori França e Francisco Antonio Bezerra com o objetivo de identificar se o mercado regulado por intermédio de suas agências é fator determinante para uma postura de menor agressividade tributária nas empresas. Artigo 7 - Avaliação da condição econômico-financeira de operadoras brasileiras de planos de saúde: uma nota sobre finanças e regulação de Carlos Henrique Rocha, Gladston Luiz da Silva e Paulo Augusto Pettenuzzo de Britto com o objetivo de avaliar o desempenho econômico-financeiro de operadoras brasileiras de planos de saúde e investigar possíveis fontes de variações relativas dos índices estudados. O artigo discute, ainda, a questão da regulação a partir da análise econômico-financeira dos entes regulados. Artigo 8 - O impacto do uso da tecnologia no desempenho da produção leiteira: manejo tradicional, compost barn e free stall de Ana Maria Meinl e Euselia Paveglio Vieira com o objetivo de analisar a contribuição do uso de tecnologias e sistemas de produção diferenciados na formação dos resultados da atividade leiteira de três propriedades rurais, que utilizam diferentes sistemas produtivos e estão localizadas na região Noroeste do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul. Artigo 9 - Análise da relação da quantidade de participantes ativos das entidades fechadas de Previdência Complementar (EFPC) com o ambiente socioeconômico de Ivone Pedro de Lima, Elis Regina de Oliveira, Geovane Camilo dos Santos, Dryelle Laiana de Jesus Silva dos Santos e Élcio Dihl Oliveira com o objetivo de analisar a associação entre a quantidade de participantes ativos de planos de previdência, vinculados às EFPC, e as variáveis: PIB, taxa de desocupação, inflação (INPC), taxa de juros (Selic), quantidade de EFPC e fluxo de entrada e saída de participantes ativos. Artigo 10 - Transparência corporativa e desempenho: qual o papel das mulheres nessa relação? de Verivaldo Alves de Freitas, Messias Elmiro Gomes Loiola de Oliveira, Jislene Trindade Medeiros e Márcia Martins Mendes De Luca com o objetivo de investigar a influência da participação feminina no conselho de administração na relação entre a transparência corporativa e o desempenho de empresas brasileiras. Artigo 11 - Análise da viabilidade econômica, em condições de riscos, do sistema de confinamento utilizado para a terminação de bovinos no estado de São Paulo, Brasil de Kaio Expedito Rodrigues Queiroz, Janderson Damaceno dos Reis e André Rozemberg Peixoto Simões com o objetivo de avaliar a sensibilidade e a viabilidade econômica do sistema de confinamento utilizado para a engorda de bovinos tomando como referência uma propriedade localizada no norte do estado de São Paulo, Brasil. Artigo 12 - Avaliação do nível de disclosure de arrendamentos mercantis nas demonstrações contábeis de empresas de consumo não-cíclico: um estudo sob a luz do novo IFRS 16 de Ícaro Luiz de Sousa Silva, Alexandre Gonzales e Fernando de Almeida Santos com o objetivo de averiguar o nível de disclosure contábil demandado de acordo com o IFRS16 nas empresas de capital aberto na B3, mais precisamente no segmento de consumo não-cíclico. Artigo 13 - Desempenho dos maiores bancos brasileiros: um estudo sobre o impacto da crise subprime de Cristiana Maria Coeli e Vanessa Martins Pires com o objetivo de analisar o impacto da crise subprime no desempenho dos maiores bancos brasileiros, utilizando indicadores contábeis que permitem mensurar o comportamento dos índices de inadimplência, a evolução das despesas com Provisão para Devedores Duvidosos (PDD), do volume de ativos totais e dos índices de rentabilidade. Seção 2: Contabilidade Aplicada ao Setor Público e ao Terceiro Setor Artigo 1 - Emenda Constitucional n.º 95/2016 e seu impacto em uma universidade federal de Viviane Amorim de Oliveira, Eduardo Tadeu Vieira, Tiago Mota dos Santos e Jorge Katsumi Niyama com o objetivo de avaliar, em um cenário hipotético e por meio de abordagem retrospectiva, no período de 1995 a 2017, os efeitos da Emenda Constitucional n.º 95/2016 sobre o orçamento da Universidade de Brasília, a partir de um modelo econométrico de previsão de despesa paga. Artigo 2 - Impactos na eficiência do gasto público na educação fundamental dos municípios paulistas por meio das categorias do elemento da despesa de Gabriel Santana Machado, Jaime Crozatti, Vinicius Macedo de Moraes, Bianca de Oliveira e Carlos Eduardo de Oliveira Silva com o objetivo de mensurar os impactos dos gastos públicos na educação fundamental dos municípios paulistas sobre a eficiência do gasto público educacional. Artigo 3 - Eficiência do sistema de transporte metroferroviário brasileiro: uma aplicação da Análise Envoltória de Dados de Maria Cecilia da Silva Brum e Tiago Wickstrom Alves com o objetivo de analisar a eficiência técnica das empresas metroferroviárias brasileiras. Seção 3: Pesquisas de Campo sobre Contabilidade (Survey) Artigo 1 - Controles internos para o gerenciamento de riscos: percepção de auditores e gestores de Isadora Marques dos Santos, Rosângela Queiroz Souza Valdevino, Rosilania Silva de Queiroz, Adriana Martins de Oliveira, Letícia Jéssica Freitas de Oliveira e Meskla Gislainy Marques da Silva com o objetivo de analisar a percepção dos auditores e gestores em relação aos controles internos no gerenciamento de riscos nas empresas. Artigo 2 - Sistema eletrônico de informações em uma instituição pública do estado de Pernambuco: uma análise da aceitação e uso do sistema de Antônio Alves da Silva, Paulo de Tasso de Souza Junior e Alessandra Carla Ceolin com o objetivo de promover uma avaliação da aceitação e uso da tecnologia implantada (Sistema Eletrônico de Informações) em uma instituição pública do estado de Pernambuco, sob a perspectiva dos usuários internos do sistema à luz da Teoria Unificada de Aceitação e Uso da Tecnologia (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis & Davis, 2003). Artigo 3 - Avaliação da utilização do Portal Capes de periódicos na ótica dos usuários pesquisadores em administração e contabilidade com base na escala SERVQUAL de Ana Carolina Vasconcelos Colares e Cássia de Oliveira Ferreira com o objetivo de avaliar a utilização do Portal Capes de Periódicos na ótica dos usuários pesquisadores em administração e contabilidade, e investigar a relação entre a satisfação do usuário com as cinco dimensões do modelo SERVQUAL de avaliação de serviços. Seção 4: Casos de Ensino Aplicados a Contabilidade Não houve submissão. Seção 5: Resenhas de Teses, Dissertações e Livros sobre Contabilidade Resenha 1 - Resenha do livro: Escola Nacional de Administração Pública (ENAP). Capacidades Estatais para Produção de Políticas Públicas: Resultados do Survey sobre o Serviço Civil no Brasil. Brasília: Enap, 2018, 74 páginas, Cadernos Enap, 56, ISSN: 0104-7078 Autores: Everaldo Nogueira de Souza e Antônio Carlos Brunozi Júnior Seção 6: Banco de Dados (Arquivos suplementares em Excel) Não houve submissão. Seção 7: Internacional (S7) ENGLISH Section 1 Article 2 (Section 1) – Earnings and capital management by Latin American banks through financial instruments of José Alves de Carvalho, Júlio César Gomes Mendonça, Maurício Soares de Faria Júnior and José Alves Dantas. The purpose of this study is to assess whether banks in Latin America make use of unrealized gains and losses through financial instruments, recorded as other comprehensive income, when engaging in earnings management and capital resource allocation. Article 3 (Section 1) – Organizational culture and financial performance: evidence in companies listed in the Brazil Index 100 of Leonardo Portella Ilowski, Iago França Lopes, Cintia Lopes da Silva Vieira, Danieli de Assis Machado, Ruberval Gonçalves de Matos and Nayane Thais Krespi Musial. The study investigates the relationship between organizational culture and financial performance of companies classified in the IBrX 100. Article 4 (Section 1) - Impact of the exclusion of ICMS from PIS and COFINS calculation base: study on the STF decision and its effects on a food company of Jéssica Andressa Zago, Letícia Twardowski da Silva e Vitor Paulo Rigo. This study aims to present the impact of the decision issued by the Supreme Federal Court that excludes ICMS from PIS and COFINS calculation basis and to present the amount of these contributions to be refunded by a company in the food sector, within the framework of the actual profit method. Article 5 (Section 1) - Socio environmental responsibility practices and organizational performance in public companies of Naline Tres, Claudia Dalla Porta, Sady Mazzioni, Cristian Bau Dal Magro and Daniela Di Domenico. Analyze the relationship between socio-environmental responsibility practices in the economic and financial performance of companies listed in [B3]. Article 6 (Section 1) - Tax aggressiveness in publicly traded companies operating in a regulated market of Thaís Salvatori França and Francisco Antonio Bezerra. The research aims to identify whether the regulated market through its agencies is a determining factor for a posture of less tax aggressiveness in companies. Article 7 (Section 1) – An appraisal of Brazilian private health plan operators’ economic-financial conditions: a note on finance and regulation of Carlos Henrique Rocha, Gladston Luiz da Silva and Paulo Augusto Pettenuzzo de Britto. This study aims to evaluate the economic-financial performance of Brazilian private health plan operators and investigate possible sources of relative variations in the studied indicators. The article also discusses the question of regulation based on an economic-financial analysis of the regulated entities. Article 8 (Section 1) – The impact of using technology on the performance of dairy production: traditional management, compost barn and free stall of Ana Maria Meinl and Euselia Paveglio Vieira. This theoretical application seeks to analyze the contribution of the use of differentiated technologies and systems in the formation of the results of the dairy activity of three rural properties, which use different productive systems and are located in the Northwest region of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Calculation of costs of the three properties using the absorption costing method, in order to know the respective results in each production system analyzed. Article 10 (Section 1) – Corporate transparency and performance: what is the role of women in this relationship? of Verivaldo Alves de Freitas, Messias Elmiro Gomes Loiola de Oliveira, Jislene Trindade Medeiros e Márcia Martins Mendes De Luca. In this study, we investigated the influence of female board membership on the relationship between corporate transparency and performance in Brazilian public firms. Article 11 (Section 1) – Analysis of economic viability under risk conditions of a beef cattle feedlot system in São Paulo State, Brazil of Kaio Expedito Rodrigues Queiroz, Janderson Damaceno dos Reis e André Rozemberg Peixoto Simões. Assess the sensitivity and economic viability of the beef cattle feedlot system using as a reference a farm located in northern São Paulo State, Brazil. Article 12 (Section 1) – Disclosure analysis of leases in financial statements of non-cyclical consumer companies: a study considering IFRS 16 of Ícaro Luiz de Sousa Silva, Alexandre Gonzales and Fernando de Almeida Santos. This article then aims to ascertain the level of accounting disclosure required under the IFRS 16 in publicly traded companies in B3, more precisely in the non-cyclical consumer segment. Section 2 Article 1 (Section 2) - Constitutional Amendment 95/2016 and its impact on a federal university of Viviane Amorim de Oliveira, Eduardo Tadeu Vieira, Tiago Mota dos Santos and Jorge Katsumi Niyama. To evaluate the effects of Constitutional Amendment 95/2016 on the budget of the University of Brasília in the period from 1995 to 2017, based on an econometric model for forecasting expenditure, using a hypothetical scenario and a retrospective approach. Article 2 (Section 2) - Impacts on the efficiency of public expenditure in the fundamental education of São Paulo cities through the expenditure element categories of Gabriel Santana Machado, Jaime Crozatti, Vinicius Macedo de Moraes, Bianca de Oliveira and Carlos Eduardo de Oliveira Silva. This study aims to measure the impact of public spending on basic education in São Paulo cities on the efficiency of public educational expenditure. Article 3 (Section 2) - The efficiency of Brazilian railway system: an application of Data Envelopment Analysis of Maria Cecilia da Silva Brum and Tiago Wickstrom Alves. To analyze the technical efficiency of Brazilian railway companies. Section 3 Article 1 (Section 3) - Internal controls for risk management: perception of auditors and managers of Isadora Marques dos Santos, Rosângela Queiroz Souza Valdevino, Rosilania Silva de Queiroz, Adriana Martins de Oliveira, Letícia Jéssica Freitas de Oliveira and Meskla Gislainy Marques da Silva. This article aims to analyze the perception of auditors and managers in relation to internal controls in risk management in companies. Article 3 (Section 3) - Evaluation of the use of the Capes Portal of journals from the perspective of research users in administration and accounting based on the SERVQUAL scale of Ana Carolina Vasconcelos Colares and Cássia de Oliveira Ferreira. The objective of this research is to evaluate the use of the Capes Portal of Periodicals from the perspective of research users in administration and accounting, and to investigate the relationship between user satisfaction with the five dimensions of the SERVQUAL model of service evaluation. Boa leitura. Cordiais saudações! Prof. Dr. Maurício Corrêa da Silva Editor Gerente da Revista Ambiente Contábil

RESUMENEl objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre los mecanismos de financiación y de control de las instituciones religiosas por los laicos en las primeras décadas de la conquista y colonización de Hispanoamérica. Investigar sobre la inversión laica en lo sagrado supone en un primer lugar aclarar la historiografía sobre laicos, religión y dinero en las sociedades de Antiguo Régimen y su trasposición en América, planteando una mirada desde el punto de vista de las motivaciones múltiples de los actores seglares. A través del ejemplo de restituciones, donaciones y legados en losAndes, se explora el papel de los laicos españoles, y también de las poblaciones indígenas, en el establecimiento de la densa red de instituciones católicas que se construye entonces. La propuesta postula el protagonismo de actores laicos en la construcción de un espacio cristiano en los Andes peruanos en el siglo XVI y principios del XVII, donde la inversión económica permite contribuir a la transición de una sociedad de guerra y conquista a una sociedad corporativa pacificada.PALABRAS CLAVE: Hispanoamérica-Andes, religión, economía, encomienda, siglos XVI y XVII.ABSTRACTThis article aims to reflect on the mechanisms of financing and control of religious institutions by the laity in the first decades of the conquest and colonization of Spanish America. Investigating lay investment in the sacred sphere means first of all to clarifying historiography on laity, religion and money within Ancien Régime societies and their transposition to America, taking into account the multiple motivations of secular actors. The example of restitutions, donations and legacies inthe Andes enables us to explore the role of the Spanish laity and indigenous populations in the establishment of the dense network of Catholic institutions that was established during this period. The proposal postulates the role of lay actors in the construction of a Christian space in the Peruvian Andes in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when economic investment contributed to the transition from a society of war and conquest to a pacified, corporate society.KEY WORDS: Hispanic America-Andes, religion, economics, encomienda, 16th and 17th centuries. BIBLIOGRAFIAAbercrombie, T., “Tributes to Bad Conscience: Charity, Restitution, and Inheritance in Cacique and Encomendero Testaments of 16th-Century Charcas”, en Kellogg, S. y Restall, M. 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O instituto do compliance está intrinsicamente ligado ao combate da corrupção, trata-se de um instrumento interno da pessoa jurídica em parceria com as autoridades estatais a fim de evitar a corrupção corporativa, como a lavagem de dinheiro, subornos e fraudes em licitações, tal instituto tem aplicação recente na América Latina, onde deve ser estudado de maneira internacional a fim de abranger todos os países da região. PALAVRAS CHAVE: Compliance. Corrupção. América Latina. Direito Internacional. Lavagem de Dinheiro. Suborno. ABSTRACT The compliance institute is intrinsically linked to the fight against corruption; it is an internal legal entity instrument in partnership with state authorities to prevent corporate corruption, such as money laundering, bribery and fraud in biddings, such an institute has a recent application in Latin America, where it must be studied in order to cover all the countries of the region. Keywords: Compliance. Corruption. Latin America. International right. Money laundry.

ABSTRACT Several studies have indicated a type of hierarchical capitalism in Latin America, characterized by the presence of multinational and state corporations, diversified multi-enterprise groups, low-skilled labor, and segmented labor markets. From the perspective of ownership networks, we explore who the owners of large Brazilian corporations are. These networks reveal actors and groups with prominent positions in the structure and ownership of companies. Thus, this article proposes to 1) describe the ownership network of the largest Brazilian corporations; 2) analyze the density, average degree, modularity, and the number of components connected in this network; 3) analyze measures of weighted degree centrality, intermediation, and eigenvector; 4) identify and analyze subgroups in the network, and 5) relate the configuration of the ownership network with hierarchical capitalism in the Brazilian context. The results point to prominent positions of financial shareholders, the Brazilian state (state-owned firms), and groups composed mostly of large multinationals, financial firms, families, and state-owned firms, confirming that the ownership structure is strongly linked to these players.

ABSTRACT Firms should be considered as actors that potentially mediate between social movement pressures and policy outcomes. This article shows that at the mining project level, social mobilization can generate important changes in corporate practices toward nearby communities, and that these practices can undermine the cohesion of social movement coalitions advocating for regulatory intervention or reform, thus limiting their ability to make compelling claims on the state. In this way, company interpretations of and responses to protest are an important mediating process that conditions civil society efforts to activate state institutions in their favor. This argument extends recent work on the social foundations of regulation in Latin America by including corporate actors. The article is based on a comparative case study of the Pascua Lama/Veladero mining projects in both Argentina and Chile, using both secondary sources and primary field research.

AbstractThis article explores Southern Saami reindeer herders’ experiences and contestations over state consultation and corporate dialogue during a conflict over the Øyfjellet wind energy project in Norway. Informed by a committed research approach and juxtaposition with findings from Indigenous peoples' territorial struggles in Latin-America, the article provides critical perspectives on governance practices in a Nordic-Saami green colonial context. The research draws on ethnography from a consultation meeting between Jillen Njaarke, the impacted reindeer herding community, and state authorities, as well as diverse written material. The study suggests that the state- and corporate-led “dialogues” displaced the root cause of the conflict, revealed epistemic miscommunication, and perpetuated relations of domination which limited emancipatory effects for Jillen Njaarke. The premises and discourses underpinning the “dialogues” further reproduced racist notions which devalue ancestral Saami reindeer herding knowledges, practices, and landscape relations. These findings challenge dialogue as prescription of good governance and conflict resolution in a context where democracy and compliance with Indigenous peoples’ rights are perceived as high.

Tax fraud is a very large problem within the economies of Latin America and Ecuador, it is no exception; the northern commercial sector of the city of Guayaquil was located as the object of study, which presents a problem with a limited current income due to tax fraud, raising as main objective: to characterize the relationship between corporate tax fraud and public current income in the period 2018-2020. The research design is qualitative. The interview technique was used and applied to ten experts chosen for convenience. The results show that tax evasion is an evasion mechanism that directly affects current revenue and affects the funds available to the State to improve strategic sectors for the benefit of society in general. It is concluded that the general objective was met, recommending that there should be greater tax control by the competent national body and studies should be conducted to help estimate efficient calculation mechanisms for tax evasion and money laundering that affect the economy of Guayaquil.

Abstract Background The first Latin-American COVID-19 case was reported in Brazil on February 26, 2020; since then, all regional governments tried to set-up sanitary measures to avoid COVID19 and lower mortality rates among susceptible population. Main goal here is to describe early political decisions and actions on education and healthcare against COVID-19 in five regional countries. Methods Qualitative study based upon intersectoral policy content analysis of bills, plans, and ministry-level documents issued in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador during February – April 2020; political actions and social reactions as depicted in broad news agencies (CNN, DW) were considered also. Analysis was categorized by three document levels (government, corporate, news), two dimensions (education, healthcare), five measures (quarantine, curfews, social distancing; hands washout, face mask). PDF/DOC/DOCX files were downloaded from their respective webpages, compiled in Google Drive, and analyzed to obtain both emergent categories and compacted texts for integration in a narrative way. Results Emerging categories included political/legal context, rationale, choice of approach against COVID-19, timeline, recurring concepts. Healthcare and education reflected citizens’ perception, states’ strength, and reactive/proactive congressional or ministerial responses. Lack of preventive measures - laboratory tests, low to none contacts’ follow-up, insufficient vaccines/biological products development, and failure in long-term education or science programs triggered a negative cascade effect. Conclusions Depending on each country, there was either compromise on social science to bolster executive management or negation, political polarization, and corruption/corruption of state structures; these issues are complex demanding long-term inter/transdisciplinary approaches solutions against a new pandemic in the future. Key messages Social and political structures and organization have had direct incidence in national response to COVID-19 pandemic. In Latin America, long term research in both health and education is required facing a future new pandemic.

ABSTRACT: The multilevel economic relationship between community-State-company gives rise to contexts of conflict and ruptures in the local social fabric. The access of local communities to justice requires new ways of dealing with the transnational phenomenon to resolve disputes beyond traditional judicial procedures within nation-States. Our main hypothesis highlights Business and Human Rights as a possible transnational legal instrument of access to justice. The objective is to understand access to justice in the methodological perspective of Economics and Law and Business and Human Rights, identifying their autonomy in relation to the voluntarism of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the practical application of this in the context of transnational mining activity in post-1970 Chile. The hypothetical-deductive method is used with bibliographic research. Conclusion: i) despite the existence of sustainable business ethics, it only becomes relevant to the Law when a certain normative framework is conjectured, establishing legal and semi-legal procedures and integrating a complex of specific obligations and rights; ii) the process of progressive conversion of CSR to legal responsibility is envisaged through a new gateway represented by the intersection of Business and Human Rights; iii) The pioneering Chilean experience is a result of internal and external political pressures and serves as an example for Latin America in its successes and mistakes, especially the attempt to consolidate the UN theoretical framework through National Action Plan on Business and Human rights with the active participation of representatives from academia, local communities, NGOs, and companies, which serves as a starting point for further research.

Photo ID 131102170 © Geckophotos | Dreamstime.com INTRODUCTION Medical tourism should contribute to developing a more robust healthcare system that acts in the best interests of patients and ensures equal access to healthcare. This paper examines medical tourism in Colombia and argues that developing a system that aligns with bioethical principles is necessary. People traveling for care should have access to the Ministry of Health rather than only the Ministry of Industry and Tourism, emphasizing their purpose as patients seeking medical procedures or treatments rather than tourists engaging in leisure activities. Additionally, in the interest of justice, Colombian patients should benefit from the revenue derived from medical tourism. It is crucial to recognize that both patients traveling for care and people in the destination country can derive benefits from medical tourism. The Colombian government can protect the rights and well-being of patients seeking care and ensure that any benefits are distributed fairly among Colombian citizens. I. Background Medical tourism refers to people traveling to foreign countries to obtain health care.[1] Many individuals from high-income countries seek health care in less developed countries to take advantage of the lower costs. Destination countries are increasingly showing interest in becoming medical tourism hubs due to the significant financial potential of this multi-billion dollar industry. The global medical tourism market is projected to reach $207.9 billion by 2027.[2] This growth not only generates income but also creates employment opportunities and business prospects for local residents in sectors such as tourism, pharmaceuticals, and infrastructure. By establishing themselves as medical tourism destinations, countries can stimulate economic development and enhance their healthcare structure. Colombia is among the fastest-growing medical tourism destinations in the world. It has become a popular destination for medical tourists due to its advanced healthcare infrastructure, biotechnology, and highly skilled physicians who cater to international patients at affordable prices.[3] The healthcare entities in Colombia offer a wide range of medical procedures, including cardiovascular, bariatric, orthopedics, cosmetic surgery, dental care, and fertility treatments. [4] The Colombian government has actively promoted medical tourism to position the country as a destination for world-class medical services.[5] Through strategic economic policies, effective regulation, and digital marketing, medical tourism has emerged as a significant contributor to Colombia’s income. The Colombian Ministry of Industry and Tourism, which regulates medical tourism in Colombia, forecasts at least 2.8 million health tourists and a revenue of at least $6.3 billion by 2032.[6] Colombia intends to have medical tourism play a significant role in its economy. However, ethical issues exist. The Colombia Ministry of Industry and Tourism is more involved in medical tourism than the Ministry of Health is. Additionally, the government has not been held accountable for the shortcomings in the medical tourism industry. There should be an organization advocating for the rights and well-being of medical tourists. Furthermore, using public funds to attract international patients may divert funds from local communities. Last, the negative impacts of medical tourism on Colombian patients deserve attention. This paper aims to explore these ethical issues from two perspectives: that of medical tourists and that of Colombian citizens. I argue that the benefits of medical tourism outweigh the harms but that those traveling for health care deserve protection. II. Patients: Are They International Patients or Tourists? When medical tourists seek hospitals and physicians in a destination country, facilitators may direct them to non-licensed practitioners and questionable facilities. These facilitators, who receive commissions, may not act in the patient’s best interest. Rather, like travel agents, they base their referrals on the referral fees that hospitals or physicians pay.[7] International patients risk getting lower-quality health care from unregulated hospitals or providers. This can interfere with informed consent and increase the risk of infections. There may be an absence of medical malpractice coverage from physicians. Unregulated or unlicensed medical care may even lead to patient fatalities. Therefore, it is crucial for international patients to carefully evaluate the risks associated with “booking” their healthcare options. To mitigate these risks, it is important for international patients to thoroughly assess the accreditation status of the hospital or clinic they plan to visit. The Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation can provide patients with an external quality assessment and assist them in making an informed decision.[8] International patients should proactively seek out certified and reputable healthcare providers and institutions to ensure both their safety and a high quality of care. Colombia has five hospitals and clinics with JCI accreditation.[9] Colombia is the third most-used destination for plastic surgery in the world; the first is Brazil, and the second is Turkey. In Colombia, one out of every three plastic surgery patients is an international patient.[10] The Colombian Association for Plastic Surgery advises all patients to check the hospital's accreditation. Patients should check the website of the local Secretary of Health in each city and see if the physician conducting the plastic surgery is listed.[11] Institutions and doctors must fully comply with requirements, including describing the procedure and obtaining informed consent from patients. It is very common to read in the media plastic surgeries conducted in what is known in Latin America as “clinicas de garage” (garage clinics) with negative results and deaths.[12] Official data covers plastic surgeries conducted at accredited institutions with registered doctors. There is a lack of data on garage clinics. There are a few things the government can do to make medical tourism safer. First, the Ministry of Health’s website should maintain a list of healthcare providers with JCI accreditation. In each city, the local Secretary of Health is responsible for providing patients with information about the quality of care of the hospitals in its region. Second, the government should take responsibility for providing accurate and comprehensive information to international patients, enabling them to make fully informed decisions regarding their medical procedures. In the context of informed consent, patients may have trouble understanding due to language barriers, terminology, and the complexity of the risks involved in medical procedures. Lastly, Congress should enact a legal framework that determines the responsibility of all parties involved in medical tourism.[13] In the unfortunate event that a medical tourist requires intensive care, it becomes imperative to determine who will bear the responsibility for their well-being and any potential financial implications. Medical tourists are not protected from errors and failures of medical procedures because the Colombia Constitution specifies that the healthcare system exclusively caters to its citizens, while coverage for foreigners is limited to emergencies only. The US State Department recommends that those traveling to Colombia have international health insurance.[14] International patients can sue doctors in Colombia for medical malpractice, referred to as medical liability.[15] The government should take responsibility for certifying medical institutions and issuing medical visas with specific requirements and regulations specific to medical tourism.[16] A new medical visa system is in place. Changing the terminology may help the government see those traveling for care as medical patients rather than medical tourists. That may lead to a different mindset and spur the government to protect them and ensure high-quality care. It may also help those traveling avoid tourism industry facilitators and find reputable surgeons and hospitals. III. Are Colombian Patients and the Local Healthcare System Benefiting from Medical Tourism? The main reason for the growth of medical tourism from developed countries to developing countries like Colombia is the excessive cost of treatment in wealthier nations.[17] Other reasons include the long queues for certain types of medical services in the home country, the availability of better technologies abroad, inadequate (or absence of) health insurance, and the unavailability[18] (or prohibition) of certain medical services in the home country.[19] The Colombian Constitution recognizes health as a fundamental right for all citizens.[20] Pursuant to the Constitution’s health mandate, Colombia designed a mandatory universal social health insurance system in 1993. It aims to achieve a fair distribution of resources, opportunities, and services while holding the government accountable.[21] Before 1993, less than 25 percent of the population had coverage; now, between 94 and 99 percent have it, regardless of income level or employment.[22] However, universal care does not entitle Colombian citizens to many of the modern surgical centers, technology, and doctors that tourists access. Local wealthy Colombian citizens tend to purchase private insurance that allows them many more healthcare options.[23] The OECD reports that only 41 percent of Colombian citizens were satisfied with the availability of the quality of care, while the OECD average is 67 percent. According to the OECD, the out-of-pocket health expenditure in Colombia is 14 percent, which is lower than the OECD average of 18 percent. Despite its recognized right to health care, the current system is not providing the quality of care that the people would prefer. Those traveling to Colombia for care are not covered by universal social health insurance and must pay for their health care[24] out of pocket or through their private insurers using international coverage.[25] Like local supplemental private insurance, medical tourists and their insurance plans tend to pay more for their care than the rate that the universal system would pay the providers for care provided to the general Colombian population. This situation often leads to higher revenue from medical tourists than local patients unless the local patients have supplemental private insurance. The mismatched payment schemes leave the local population with unequal access to healthcare resources[26] since healthcare providers prefer to cater to patients paying more than the government-subsidized insurance pays. Medical tourism “threatens to result in a dual market structure”[27] characterized by a higher-quality, expensive segment that serves wealthy nationals and foreigners alongside a lower-quality segment that caters to the poor, most of whom are covered by universal healthcare coverage.[28] Medical tourists should pay taxes or a special premium to improve the local healthcare system. While the medical tourism industry arguably generates tax revenue,[29] some additional money should flow from the medical tourists to the healthcare outlets that the local people use. Then, the country can benefit even more from promoting medical tourism while ensuring that the government and the healthcare system follow the principles of justice, beneficence, and public welfare.[30] In Colombia, Fundación Cardioinfantil, a private non-profit hospital known as “La Cardio,” is a good example of a regional leader committed to providing clinical excellence to both national and international patients.[31] About 20 years ago, La Cardio, well known for its cardiovascular health care, aimed to become the top hospital in the region (Latin America and the Caribbean) to obtain financial resources for improving its facilities. It became the first hospital in Colombia to achieve the JCI accreditation, attracting patients from countries with inadequate cardiovascular healthcare systems.[32] Foreign governments covered their citizens’ medical expenses, allowing La Cardio to fund system improvement. Currently ranked as the fifth-best clinic in Latin America and having won the Gold Award for Corporate Social Responsibility, La Cardio has received recognition for its dedication to serving economically disadvantaged Colombian patients.[33] This example demonstrates how introducing a high-paying market has not led to neglecting local patients, as resources from medical tourists are used to enhance the healthcare system for the local population. CONCLUSION The Colombian government needs to recognize that international patients are seeking medical services, not tourism or vacation experiences. Therefore, a new policy should categorize international patients separately from the tourism sector and treat them purely as patients. The introduction of medical visas may help this. Once establishing international patients are patients and not tourists, the Colombian government could impose taxes on them and allocate the funds generated to reinvest in the healthcare needs of its citizens, ensuring justice and promoting awareness of the ethical rights of international patients. At the same time, home country governments directing patients to a destination country should conduct thorough due diligence of the ethical principles applied to international patients as well as the accreditation of the destination country’s hospitals. Colombia may be aware of the implications of the difference in terms but unwilling to modify the language due to the associated costs, liabilities, and risks involved. - [1] Gaines, J., Lee, C. V. (2019). Medical tourism. Travel Medicine, 371–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-323-54696-6.00039-2 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780323546966000392 [2] Forecasted Evolution of Medical Travels, 2023-2027: A Segmental View. ReportLinker. (2023, December). https://www.reportlinker.com/p06473784/Medical-Tourism-Market-Size-Share-Trends-and-Analysis-by-Region-Service-Provider-and-Segment-Forecast.html [3] Forecasted Evolution of Medical Travels, 2023-2027: A Segmental View. ReportLinker. (2023, December). [4] Arias-Aragonés, F.J.A., Payares, A.M.C., & Jiménez, O.J. (2020). Characterization of the healthcare tourism in the city of Bogotá and the District of Cartagena. Clío América, 14 (28), 486-492. https://doi.org/10.21676/23897848.3941 [5] Arias-Aragonés, et al. (2020). [6] Arias- Aragones, et al. (2020). https://www.colombiaproductiva.com/ptp-sectores/historico/turismo-salud (citing the Colombian Production Transformation Program (PTP)) [7] Glenn Cohen, Patients with Passports Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics. New York Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 25 [8] Glenn, Cohen. (2015), p. 23-24. [9] A Global Leader for Health Care Quality and Patient Safety. Joint Commission International. https://www.jointcommissioninternational.org/ (The five Colombian hospitals and clinics with JCI accreditation are two hospitals in the capital city Bogota (la Cardio and Fundación Hospital Universitario Santa Fé de Bogotá), one hospital in Cali (Clinica Inbanaco), one hospital in Medellín (Hospital Pablo Tobón), and one clinic in Florida Blanca (Fundación Cardiovascular de Colombia). Nearby countries such as Venezuela and Trinidad Tobago do not have any accredited hospitals or clinics. Ecuador and Panamá have one each, Perú has eleven, and Brazil has seventy-one.) [10] International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery ISAPS (2023), ISAPS International Survey on Aesthetic/Cosmetic Procedures performed in 2022, p. 52. https://www.isaps.org/discover/about-isaps/global-statistics/reports-and-press-releases/global-survey-2022-full-report-and-press-releases/ (most frequently cited countries of foreign patients in Colombia are the US, Spain, and Panama.) [11] Why choose a member of the SCCP. (2023). Colombia Plastic Surgery Association (SCCP). https://cirugiaplastica.org.co/porque-elegir-un-miembro-de-la-sccp/ See also: To Find a Surgeon. (2023). Colombia Plastic Surgery Association (SCCP). https://cirugiaplastica.org.co (This website is helpful for checking the list of members of the SCCP.) [12] Cosmetic Surgeries Performed in Garage Offices can Become a Public Health Problem. Concejo de Bogotá D.C. (2022). https://concejodebogota.gov.co/cirugias-esteticas-practicadas-en-consultorios-de-garaje-se-pueden/cbogota/2015-07-17/100100.php (There are many cases of deaths resulting from illegal plastic surgeries. The local government in Bogota is aware of the deaths, as reported in the Bogota Counsel (2015)). See also Travel.State.Gov, US Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs. (August 17, 2023). https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html (There is a warning that says: “Although Colombia has many elective/cosmetic surgery facilities that are on par with those found in the United States, the quality of care varies widely. If you plan to undergo surgery in Colombia, carefully research the doctor and recovery facility you plan to use. Make sure that emergency medical facilities are available, and that professionals are accredited and qualified. Share all health information (e.g., medical conditions, medications, allergies) with your doctor before surgery.") [13] Arias-Aragonés, F.J.A., Payares, A.M.C., & Jiménez, O.J. (2020), p. 490. (report “the absence of regulation and a legal framework that determines the responsibilities of each link in the production chain” as a difficulty that affects competitivity to become a leader in medical tourism in the Latin American region.) See also: Trujillo, M. A. (2023, November 24). Colombia’s New Bill on Regulating Cosmetic Surgeries. BNN Breaking. https://bnn.network/breaking-news/health/colombia-to-regulate-cosmetic-surgeries-a-step-towards-patient-safety/ (On November 22, 2023, as a response to rising cases of death and injuries associated with plastic surgeries, a bill was introduced in the Colombian House of Representatives to regulate the practice of cosmetic surgeries and protect the integrity of patients) [14] U.S. Department of State, Travel.State.Gov, Colombia. (August 17, 2023). Traveler’s Checklist, https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html [15] U.S. Department of State, Travel.State.Gov, Colombia. (August 17, 2023). Traveler’s Checklist. See also: Medical Tourism and Elective Surgery. The Department of State informs that “U.S. citizens have suffered serious complications or died during or after having cosmetic surgery or other elective surgery“ and “the legal options in cases of malpractice are very limited in Colombia,” https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html See also: The law firm Alvarez Gonzalez Tolosa Attorneys. (August 8, 2023). Medical Malpractice in Colombia, includes medical malpractice as one of the areas of expertise of the firm. https://www.agtattorneys.com/blog/medical-malpractice-in-colombia/ [16] Colombia recently enacted a new visa regulation (Resolution 5477 from July 22, 2022, issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) effective as of October 22, 2022. No data currently exists about a "medical treatment" visa because it is a new legislation. Even though the regulation refers to the visitor as a patient and includes requirements such as (1) a letter from the medical institution explaining the treatment and approximate duration, (2) a letter explaining costs and who will pay for the treatment, (3) insurance policy, and (4) the general requirements for tourists, the regulation specifically explains that this kind of visa is considered as a TOURISM visa (art 37). [17] Glenn, Cohen. 2015 [18] Frequently Asked Questions. Bioxcellerator. https://www.bioxcellerator.com/faqs (For example, Bioxellerator stem cell therapies conducted in Medellin, Colombia, are not FDA-approved.) [19] Vovk, Viktoriia, Lyudmila Beztelesna, and Olha Pliashko. (2021). "Identification of Factors for the Development of Medical Tourism in the World" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 21: 11205. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111205 [20] Colombian Constitution. (1991). art. 49 [21] Ministry of Health and Protection. Columbia Ministry of Health. (2023). https://www.minsalud.gov.co/English/Paginas/Ministry.aspx [22] “Does Colombia’s Health System Need an Overhaul?” (March 2, 2023). The Dialogue, Latin America Advisor. https://www.thedialogue.org/analysis/does-colombias-health-system-need-an-overhaul/ [23] Health at a Glance 2021 Colombia Country Note. OECD. (2023). https://search.oecd.org/colombia/health-at-a-glance-Colombia-EN.pdf [24] Travel.State.Gov, US Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html [25] Glenn, Cohen. (2015). p. 2-9. [26] Banco de la República. (2023). Regional Health Inequalities in Colombia. https://www.banrep.gov.co/en/regional-health-inequalities-colombia (The Central Bank of Colombia (“Banco de la República”) in reports that despite having relatively high health coverage compared with other countries, empirical results show persistent inequalities in the healthcare system. The aim is to reduce and eventually eliminate such inequalities.) [27] Glenn, Cohen (2015), p. 158-160, citing Rupa Chanda, an Indian business professor, Trade in Health Services, 80 Bull. World Health Org. 158, 160 (2002). [28] Banco de la República. (2023). Regional Health Inequalities in Columbia. https://investiga.banrep.gov.co/es/be-1233. (Under Colombian law, it is mandatory for all employees and employers to pay 4 percent and 8 percent of the applicable salary, respectively, to the universal healthcare system (EPS) to obtain coverage for the employee and family members. This is known as the contributive system, and the funding is known as parafiscal. The unemployed obtain coverage through the government-subsidized system known as SISBEN (System of Identification of Beneficiaries of Social programs), funded with taxpayers’ money, known as fiscal funding. According to the Central Bank of Colombia (Banco de la República), “in recent years, the healthcare sector has faced financial and administrative problems that have increased the need for fiscal resources for its financing and that could affect its sustainability. Regarding the composition of the outflow, it is worth noting the cost of ensuring the contributory and subsidized regime, which on average explains 80 percent of the total system expenses during the period 2011-2022.” “Additionally, pressures derived from the Covid-19 pandemic, Venezuelan migration” and expenses derived from the increase in the subsidized system due to the high rate of unemployment and informal employment are negatively impacting financing of the healthcare system in Colombia. Additional fiscal resources are needed because the health care Colombians receive costs more than what beneficiaries pay.) [29] Statista. (2023). Revenue of the medical tourism sector in Colombia from 2019 to 2024 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1156551/colombia-revenue-medical-tourism/ [30] Glenn, Cohen. (2015), p.218 (The beneficence principle is the general moral obligation to act for the benefit of others, and some of those acts are obligatory, as is the government’s obligation concerning healthcare.) [31] Hospital Cardioinfantil Bogotá, Colombia. https://cardioinfantil.org [32] Hospital Cardioinfantil https://cardioinfantil.org (Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Curacao, and Panamá were the first countries with international agreements with La Cardio.) [33] Hospital Cardioinfantil Bogotá, Colombia. https://www.lacardio.org/historia/

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. 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05–566Abu-Rabia, Salim (U of Haifa, Israel), Social aspects and reading, writing, and working memory skills in Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Circassian: the quadrilingual case of Circassians. Language, Culture and Curriculum (Clevedon, UK) 18.1 (2005), 27–58.05–567Bao, Zhiming (National U of Singapore, Singapore; ellbaozm@nus.edu.sg), The aspectual gsystem of Singapore English and the systemic substratist explanation. Journal of Linguistics (Cambridge, UK) 41.2, (2005), 237–267.05–568Barwick, Linda (U of Sydney, Australia; Linda.Barwick@arts.usyd.edu.au), Allan Marett, Michael Walsh, Lysbeth Ford & Nicholas Reid, Communities of interest: issues in establishing a digital resource on Murrinh-patha song at Wadeye (Port Keats), NT. Literary and Linguistic Computing (Oxford, UK) 20.4 (2005), 383–397.05–569Berns, Margie (Purdue U, USA; berns@purdue.edu), Expanding on the Expanding Circle: where do WE go from here?World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.1 (2005), 85–93.05–570Bolton, Kingsley (Stockholm U, Sweden: kingsley.bolton@english.su.se), Where WE stands: approaches, issues, and debate in world Englishes. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.1 (2005), 69–83.05–571Carter, Julie A. (The Wolfson Centre, London, UK; j.carter@ich.ucl.ac.uk), Gladys M. Murira, Joseph Gona, Brian G. R. Neville & Charles R. J. C. Newton, Issues in the development of cross-cultural assessments of speech and language for children. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders (London, UK) 40.4 (2005), 385–401.05–572CoetzeeVan Rooy, Susan (Potchefstroom, S. Africa; basascvr@puk.ac.za) & Bertus Van Rooy, South African English: labels, comprehensibility and status. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.1 (2005), 1–19.05–573de Haan, Mariëtte & Ed Elbers (U of Utrecht, the Netherlands; m.dehaan@fss.uu.nl), Reshaping diversity in a local classroom: communication and identity issues in multicultural schools in the Netherlands. Language & Communication (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 25.3 (2005), 315–333.05–574Dogançay-Aktuna, Seran (Southern Illinois U Edwardsville, USA; saktuna@siue.edu) & Zeynep Kiziltepe, English in Turkey. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.2 (2005), 253–265.05–575Hiraga, Yuko (Keio U, Japan; nene_terada@hotmail.com), British attitudes towards six varieties of English in the USA and Britain. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.3 (2005), 289–308.05–576Joseph, Clara A. B. (U of Calgary, Canada; ejoseph@ucalgary.ca), Language in contact and literatures in conflict: text, context, and pedagogy. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.2 (2005), 131–143.05–577Lai, Mee-Ling (Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, China; mllai@ied.edu.hk), Language attitudes of the first postcolonial generation in Hong Kong secondary schools. Language in Society (Cambridge, UK), 34.3 (2005), 363–388.05–578Moraa Michieka, Martha (Purdue U, USA; michieka@purdue.edu), English in Kenya: a sociolinguistic profile. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.2 (2005), 173–186.05–579Nickerson, Catherine (Radboud U Nijmegen, the Netherlands; c.nickerson@let.ru.nl), English as alingua francain international business contexts. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 24.4 (2005), 367–380.05–580Ouhiala-Salminen, Leena, Charles Mirjaliisa & Anne Kankaanranta (Helsinki School of Economics, Finland; leena.louhiala@hkkk.fi), English as alingua francain Nordic corporate mergers: two case companies. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 24.4. (2005), 410–421.05–581Planken, Brigitte (Radboud U Nijmegen, the Netherlands; b.planken@let.ru.nl), Managing rapport inlingua francasales negotiations: a comparison of professional and aspiring negotiators. English for Specific Purposes (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 24.4 (2005), 381–400.05–582Rajagopalan, Kanavillil (State U at Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil), Language politics in Latin America. AILA Review (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 18 (2005), 76–93.05–583Seargeant, Philip (U of London, UK; pseargeant@ioe.ac.uk), Globalisation and reconfigured English in Japan. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.3 (2005), 309–319.05–584Smith, Geoff P. (University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China), Chinese language sources for Chinese Pidgin English: what we know and what we need to know. Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics (Hong Kong, China) 9.2 (2004), 72–79.05–585Sweeting, Anthony & Edward Vickers (U of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; sweetone@mac.com), On colonizing ‘colonialism’: the discourses of the history of English in Hong Kong. World Englishes (Oxford, UK) 24.2 (2005), 113–130.05–586Tanaka, Hiroko (U of Essex; htanaka@essex.ac.uk), Grammar and the ‘timing’ of social action: word order and preference organization in Japanese. Language in Society (Cambridge, UK), 34.3 (2005), 389–430.

Area Studies and Study Abroad in the 21st Century The future now belongs to societies that organize themselves for learning. - Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker, Thinking for a Living, xiii Few today would argue with the conviction that nearly every phase of our daily lives is shaped and informed by global societies, corporations, events and ideas. More than ever before, it is possible to claim that we are increasingly aware of the dynamic power and penetrating effects of global flows on information, technology, the sciences, the arts, the humanities, and languages. Borderless, spaceless and timeless, such sources of knowledge, it appears, are effortlessly digested and disseminated without clocks, calendars, or physical limitations. It is, of course, a mistake to believe that packages of “instant” knowledge that appear to wing their way at megahertz speeds in and through our earthly lives account for all or nearly all that there is to know—or, more importantly, to learn—about our communities, regions and the globe itself. On the contrary: the “knowing” about how to live, to work, to prosper, or to understand ourselves and those around us is not what educators mean when they speak of intellectual achievement and practical understanding. It is the “learning” about us, our societies and our global knowledge that lies at the heart of the international educator’s life work, and it is the learning that is the most controversial aspect of education. The act of “learning,” in fact, is less objective and more subjective, is less passive and more active, and is less superficial and more profound in each of our lives. By definition, a responsible learner is one who takes on the intellectual challenge and the social and personal obligation to leave this globe a better place for those who follow, who assumes the life work of influencing the lives of others, and who is committed to making the best of every opportunity both within the reach and beyond the vision of the mind’s eye. Study abroad has traditionally been viewed as a time of seeing and viewing, however passively, the differences and similarities of other peoples, societies and cultures. The period of knowing about what others do or say can occur at any time during one’s life; however, the “knowing” of studying abroad is accomplished in the college years prior to the accumulated knowledge about practical learning and living. In this respect, study abroad has been seen as an experience which may or may not invest the students in greater or lesser insights about the peoples, societies or cultures around them. Further, when study abroad is bound up with travel or movement from place to place, it can become a passive act, so much so that travel rather than learning becomes the goal of the study abroad experience. Simply put, the more that one travels, the more, it is argued, one learns. Furthermore, while seen as desirable for “classroom learning,” some would say that no amount of academic preparation appears to be useful in the enterprise of the travel experience, since so many experiences are unpredictable, individualized and, in some cases, arbitrary. From the perspective of study abroad, it might be said that the gods of area studies no longer completely fulfill our students’ needs, while the gods of global studies have not yet fulfilled their promises. Janus-like, international educators look in one direction at a still highly intense and valued picture of local cultures and identities, and in another direction toward an increasingly common culture, economy and society. The former appears to celebrate the differences and “uncommonness” of the human experience while the latter smoothes over the differences to underscore the commonalities and sameness of our contemporary world. The choice appears to be between the particular and the universal, the local and the global. Academic preparations, such as area studies programs, appear to be unnecessary for the individualized forms of learning, such as study abroad. Indeed, since an area studies preparation may raise or strengthen stereotypical perceptions of the overseas peoples, societies and cultures, it has been argued that it best be left aside. In this context, students are viewed as a tabula rasa on which new discoveries from living and studying overseas leave an imprint or impression. It seems that sending as many students as possible in as many directions as possible has become the dominant study abroad objective. Thus, “whole world” presentations and documentation often rely on the “other” as the learning objective with little or no attempt to discriminate or distinguish the levels of learning that such “whole world” immersion entails. In recent times, additional concerns about liability, health, safety and comfort levels have been added to the “pre-departure” orientations and training programs. The “student as self-learner” continues to be viewed and treated as a “customer knowledge-consumer” within both U.S. private and public colleges and universities. In the age of “globalization,” it is the conviction of the editors of Frontiers that knowledge consumption is only a small aspect of the 21st century international educators’ arsenal. More importantly, it will be argued in this special issue on area studies and Study Abroad that the intellectual development of the U.S. undergraduate needs to be enhanced with skills of self-learning and transdisciplinary perspectives on local and regional cultures and languages. The authors contributing to this special thematic issue of Frontiers have been asked to bring their state-of-the-art thinking on area studies to bear on the key question confronting study abroad: How does specialized understanding of geographical and cultural areas of the world enhance and strengthen undergraduate learning on and beyond our campuses? In other words, in what ways do area studies inform overseas learning through the activity of study abroad? The variety of responses demonstrates two principal ways in which area studies has begun to reformulate its goals and strategies. First, area studies reaffirms a commitment to local and regional comprehensive research and teaching, and redefines its mission in terms of the need to come to grips with local knowledge and specific social and cultural practices within a globalized world. Second, area studies specialists question long-held definitions of concepts, including those of “geographical area” and “globalization,” in order to maximize contributions to U.S. undergraduate learning. David Ludden begins our issue with a review of the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation’s understanding of the transition in area studies from the Sputnik era to the globalization era. Ludden notes the faculty dilemma in working in an “area.” He points out the political interests of the Cold War for public funding of such specialized academic skills, skills which, whether funded by the government or not, were and continue to be defined by the scholar first and then by finances. Drawing on his own experience at the South Asia Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, Ludden takes the reader through the intellectual rationale for area studies, and how that rationale is being redefined in favor of stronger area studies in the present globalization era. Gregory Kulacki’s study of China and the Chinese experience points accurately to one approach to defining area studies; that is, in terms of the peoples and cultures studied. In a sense, Kulacki makes it clear that Chinese studies is “legitimate” and has authority as long as it reflects the Chinese themselves, their experiences and lives. Ann Curthoys, on the other hand, notes the growing importance of defining Australians and Australian studies not only in terms of the changing experiences of contemporary Australia, but also in terms of the demands of non-Australians, who ask for more precision in defining Australians, their history, society and cultures. Richard Beach and George Sherman take on a more difficult matter, at least from the viewpoint of U.S. faculty and students. Canada is rarely seen as a study abroad site for U.S. students, not only because of its geographical position but also for its cultural and historical proximity. The overall U.S. view, albeit unflattering, is that Canada and Canadians are very much like the U.S. and Americans, so why study in Canada? Beach and Sherman argue that history, languages, and borders do make a difference, both physically as well as culturally. Using the argument of the previous area studies specialists, they are interested in the ways that Canadians have shaped and informed their cultural and social identities in the teeth of U.S. economic and political domination in the region. The implications of globalization are, perhaps, more immediately evident in the Canadian case than in any other world region. U.S. students would do well to observe the processes of adaptation and acculturation first-hand by studying and living in Canada. James Petras gives us a broader vista of regional adaptation to the economic and political forces of globalization with his essay on Latin America. Indeed, Latin America has a dynamic similar to that of Canada due to its physical, cultural and historical proximity to the U.S. It would be a mistake to see Latin America only in terms of the north-south regional dynamics, since Europe, Asia and Africa have also shaped both past and present structures and institutions within that region in ways far more dramatic than has the United States. Study abroad, Petras reminds us, is an excellent way of learning directly about Latin American societies, cultures and politics from Latin Americans themselves, a learning that may be widely different from the official U.S. diplomatic and corporate perspectives. Finally, the very familiar world regions, such as England, offer in some cases more challenges to the U.S. undergraduate than might be expected. Jane Edwards looks at Britain and all that U.S. students may or may not know about that culture and society. The study of Britain lends itself, Edwards argues, to more than the usual challenges, due to the preconceived notions that U.S. students bring with them to, say, London. Understanding the “European-ness” of Britain and its historic relationship with continental Western Europe will justify the need to see Britain as less familiar and more complex, thus necessitating the need to study, visit and live in parts of Britain and Western Europe. In this case, the area does define the country, its identity and culture in a historical interplay of social, cultural and economic forces. David Lloyd, Philip Khoury and Russell Bova invite the reader to return to large regional perspectives through African, Middle Eastern and Russian area studies. David Lloyd presents an analysis of the broad and immediate contexts of African studies. While recognizing the difficulty of establishing consistently causal links between African studies and study abroad in Africa, he delineates the significance of local, experience-based study for the development of collaborative African studies research. Lloyd argues that the benefits of study abroad in Africa to African studies belie the relatively small number of students involved. Further, assessment for funding and other purposes needs to utilize criteria that take into account the challenges of on-site study in Africa and the depth of post-study abroad participation not just in African studies per se, but in other related areas as well. Considering the recent past of Middle East studies, Philip Khoury charts its response to post-Cold War criticism. He illustrates new directions the field is taking towards including different geographic areas, and new emphasis in organizational priorities, noting the importance of funding for providing first-hand contact for students in Middle Eastern studies with scholars from the Middle East. Khoury assesses the impact of recent historical and political events in the area on Middle Eastern studies, and looks toward more inclusive research efforts. Russell Bova examines another region that has undergone considerable political, social and economic change in the 20th century. Having moved from empire to soviet socialist states and now to a confederation of nation states, Russia and, naturally, Russian area studies, offer an excellent example of local and regional complexities both in the nomenclature of the region and in the changes in Russian studies programs. Bova illustrates the need to understand the specific dynamics of local communities in their relationship to larger administrative units such as provinces, states and national capitals. In referring to the “double transition” of contemporary Russia, Bova reminds us that globalization is both a grass roots and elite process with many unlikely “bedfellows” that is also changing more rapidly each decade than had been the case fifty years ago. Finally, Richard Falk and Nancy Kanach collaborate to discuss the ways in which globalization and study abroad are emerging in the post-Cold War period. The sudden shifts of economic and political power make our world more fragile and more difficult to comprehend without considering the “computer gap” that is rapidly leaving whole communities and even nations in a more uneven relationship with the power brokers than ever before. The need to reflect with care and precision through area studies is complemented by the additional pressing need to study, see and learn outside of the U.S. Globalization means promoting study abroad and reaffirming the strengths of local and regional studies. Taken together, these essays invite international educators to reconsider notions of learning before, during and after study abroad. The writers view study abroad as an opportunity for social and intellectual engagement with other peoples and with oneself. The essays point to a variety of ways of intellectually preparing our students for their initial encounters with sets of real-life global experiences. Reflecting on such engagement and encounters allows students to begin to formulate, with increasing sophistication, specific and general concepts about individual differences, local and regional commonalities, and the global transformations of our present era. In light of the current area studies debates, we might also reconsider approaches to pre-departure preparations, create onsite projects, and reorganize the overseas curricula of study abroad programs themselves. In particular, students can continue to benefit from area and global studies programs back on the home campus upon their return, where they can enter effectively into scholarly debates and continue the learning and personal growth that began while they were abroad. Frontiers welcomes comments and suggestions for future special issues. We see ourselves and our field of international education in greater need of close cooperation with our faculty colleagues both in terms of defining the work of international learning, and in terms of formulating and designing international or global programs. We thus invite our readers to see Frontiers as a forum for such academic exchanges, and promise that Frontiers will respond to articles, essays, book reviews and reviews of resources for study abroad with collegial interest and enthusiasm. We wish to thank especially Brian Whalen, Rhoda Borcherding and our other colleagues on the Editorial Board for their support, encouragement and assistance in completing this special issue. We are particularly pleased with the authors and their willingness to listen to our requests and comments. Thomas Ricks, Villanova University Katharine Krebs, SUNY Binghamton Michael Monahan, Macalester College Suggestions for Further Reading Altbach, Philip G. and Patti McGill Peterson, eds. Higher Education in the 21st Century: Global Challenge and National Response. IIE Research Report Number 29. Annapolis, MD: IIE Books, 1999. This slim volume focuses on principal topics for colleges and universities to consider both locally and globally. Philip Altbach and Todd Davis set the tone of the volume with their “notes for an international dialogue on higher education.” Stressing the need for practical education, the authors also raise issues about the role of technology, the increase in “internationally mobile students,” the global role of graduate education, privatization of higher education, committed faculty and the threats of “managerialized” universities. The eight responses to the opening themes address specific issues for China, India, Africa and South Africa, Latin America, Japan and Europe. The work is a very good discussion text for international educators and their area studies faculty colleagues, and also provides a theoretical basis for the design and development of overseas programs. Stephen R. Graubard, ed. “Education Yesterday, Education Tomorrow.” Daedalus. Vol. 127, No. 4 (Fall, 1998). The eleven authors of this issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences build off the Fall 1995 issue of Daedalus and its topic of “American Education: Still Separate, Still Unequal.” While neither accepting nor rejecting the thrust of A Nation at Risk, the authors look both at what has occurred over the past three decades, and at what is on the horizon for the next decade. In stressing reforms of systems and innovative ways of learning, the authors’ discussions invite the international educator to address a variety of ways in which students learn and to challenge the system in which they thrive. WWW. NAFSA.ORG/SECUSSA.WHYSTUDY In 1989, NAFSA and COUNCIL created the Whole World Committee (WWC). Initially chaired by John Sommers and now chaired by Mick Vandenberg, the WWC set out to find ways by which U.S. students could and would choose non-European overseas sites for a semester of study and learning. One of the tasks that the WWC accomplished was the creation of four area study essays on Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East. Each essay, entitled “Why Study in …,” addresses basic fears and stereotyping of the non-European world regions. The essays then focus on benefits, health and safety, “getting started,” housing, and practical learning in each of these regions. In newly-attached longer versions, the essays also have a bibliography and more informative texts. The shorter versions were published serially in Transitions Abroad. NAFSA has added two additional important essays to this website, on “Class and Study Abroad” and “An African-American in South Africa.” Overall, the readers of Frontiers will be well-advised to access the articles at the website and consider using all the essays in their pre-departure orientation training, faculty area studies discussion groups, and in welcome-back sessions for returning students. Richard Falk. Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999. The thesis of Richard Falk’s critique is that “predatory globalization’ has eroded, if not altogether broken, the former social contract that was forged between state and society during the last century or so” (p. 3). The breaking of that contract resulted from the state’s “deference to the discipline of global capital” and the neglect of the common good. Falk argues that only the “massing of strong transnational social pressures on the states of the world could alter the political equation to the point where the state could sufficiently recover its autonomy in relation to the world economy.” He demonstrates the emergence of a new kind of transnational politics referred to as “globalization-from-below.” In restoring “global civil society,” this new politics will need to move forward with the project of cosmopolitan democracy, including the protection of human rights. For the international educator, creating overseas programs that allow for a better understanding of the interconnectedness of regional and global levels is an admirable goal. More important, however, are those programs that offer U.S. undergraduates insights into “world order priorities” such as global poverty, protection of the planet, the sources of transnational violence, and “responsible sovereignty” in ways rarely found in traditional classroom learning on our campuses. Mark Tessler, Jodi Nachtwey and Anne Banda. Eds. Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. This edited work addresses a wide range of issues involved in the “rational choice” versus area studies debate that is so well elucidated by David Ludden in the opening article of our special issue. Looking at the “area studies controversy” from the perspective of political scientists, the editors’ Introduction underscores questions that we international educators need to address ourselves. It is valuable to wonder about the “uses and abuses” of area studies in planning our overseas programs, or discussing the “internationalization” of our curricula. It is also critical to understand the Eurocentric and overly-simplistic approaches of the social science “rational choice” models. While agreeing that both area studies and the social science theories and methodologies are necessary for a global understanding, the present work places such questions within the context of the Middle East as a stimulus and a model for increasing the value of research about any country or region.

All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36). As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700). The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story. Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. August 2004 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough. My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty. September 2004 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars). For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so. For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. November 2004 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. April 2005 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy. In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. August 2005 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces. It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege. I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that. Endnotes As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris. According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing. References Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.

Introduction In December 2010, Nespresso, the world’s leading brand of premium-portioned coffee, opened a flagship “boutique” in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. This was Nespresso’s fifth boutique opening of 2010, after Brussels, Miami, Soho, and Munich. The Sydney debut coincided with the mall’s upmarket redevelopment, which explains Nespresso’s arrival in the city: strategic geographic expansion is key to the brand’s growth. Rather than panoramic ubiquity, a retail option favoured by brands like McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks, Nespresso opts for iconic, prestigious locations. This strategy has been highly successful: since 2000 Nespresso has recorded year-on-year per annum growth of 30 per cent. This has been achieved, moreover, despite a global financial downturn and an international coffee market replete with brand variety. In turn, Nespresso marks an evolution in the coffee market over the last decade. The Nespresso Story Founded in 1986, Nespresso is the fasting growing brand in the Nestlé Group. Its headquarters are in Lausanne, Switzerland, with over 7,000 employees worldwide. In 2012, Nespresso had 270 boutiques in 50 countries. The brand’s growth strategy involves three main components: premium coffee capsules, “mated” with specially designed machines, and accompanied by exceptional customer service through the Nespresso Club. Each component requires some explanation. Nespresso offers 16 varieties of Grand Crus coffee: 7 espresso blends, 3 pure origin espressos, 3 lungos (for larger cups), and 3 decaffeinated coffees. Each 5.5 grams of portioned coffee is cased in a hermetically sealed aluminium capsule, or pod, designed to preserve the complex, volatile aromas (between 800 and 900 per pod), and prevent oxidation. These capsules are designed to be used exclusively with Nespresso-branded machines, which are equipped with a patented high-pressure extraction system designed for optimum release of the coffee. These machines, of which there are 28 models, are developed with 6 machine partners, and Antoine Cahen, from Ateliers du Nord in Lausanne, designs most of them. For its consumers, members of the Nespresso Club, the capsules and machines guarantee perfect espresso coffee every time, within seconds and with minimum effort—what Nespresso calls the “ultimate coffee experience.” The Nespresso Club promotes this experience as an everyday luxury, whereby café-quality coffee can be enjoyed in the privacy and comfort of Club members’ homes. This domestic focus is a relatively recent turn in its history. Nestlé patented some of its pod technology in 1976; the compatible machines, initially made in Switzerland by Turmix, were developed a decade later. Nespresso S. A. was set up as a subsidiary unit within the Nestlé Group with a view to target the office and fine restaurant sector. It was first test-marketed in Japan in 1986, and rolled out the same year in Switzerland, France and Italy. However, by 1988, low sales prompted Nespresso’s newly appointed CEO, Jean-Paul Gillard, to rethink the brand’s focus. Gillard subsequently repositioned Nespresso’s target market away from the commercial sector towards high-income households and individuals, and introduced a mail-order distribution system; these elements became the hallmarks of the Nespresso Club (Markides 55). The Nespresso Club was designed to give members who had purchased Nespresso machines 24-hour customer service, by mail, phone, fax, and email. By the end of 1997 there were some 250,000 Club members worldwide. The boom in domestic, user-friendly espresso machines from the early 1990s helped Nespresso’s growth in this period. The cumulative efforts by the main manufacturers—Krups, Bosch, Braun, Saeco and DeLonghi—lowered the machines’ average price to around US $100 (Purpura, “Espresso” 88; Purpura, “New” 116). This paralleled consumers’ growing sophistication, as they became increasingly familiar with café-quality espresso, cappuccino and latté—for reasons to be detailed below. Nespresso was primed to exploit this cultural shift in the market and forge a charismatic point of difference: an aspirational, luxury option within an increasingly accessible and familiar field. Between 2006 and 2008, Nespresso sales more than doubled, prompting a second production factory to supplement the original plant in Avenches (Simonian). In 2008, Nespresso grew 20 times faster than the global coffee market (Reguly B1). As Nespresso sales exceeded $1.3 billion AU in 2009, with 4.8 billion capsules shipped out annually and 5 million Club members worldwide, it became Nestlé’s fastest growing division (Canning 28). According to Nespresso’s Oceania market director, Renaud Tinel, the brand now represents 8 per cent of the total coffee market; of Nespresso specifically, he reports that 10,000 cups (using one capsule per cup) were consumed worldwide each minute in 2009, and that increased to 12,300 cups per minute in 2010 (O’Brien 16). Given such growth in such a brief period, the atypical dynamic between the boutique, the Club and the Nespresso brand warrants closer consideration. Nespresso opened its first boutique in Paris in 2000, on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a symbolic choice and signalled the brand’s preference for glamorous precincts in cosmopolitan cities. This has become the design template for all Nespresso boutiques, what the company calls “brand embassies” in its press releases. More like art gallery-style emporiums than retail spaces, these boutiques perform three main functions: they showcase Nespresso coffees, machines and accessories (all elegantly displayed); they enable Club members to stock up on capsules; and they offer excellent customer service, which invariably equates to detailed production information. The brand’s revenue model reflects the boutique’s role in the broader business strategy: 50 per cent of Nespresso’s business is generated online, 30 per cent through the boutiques, and 20 per cent through call centres. Whatever floor space these boutiques dedicate to coffee consumption is—compared to the emphasis on exhibition and ambience—minimal and marginal. In turn, this tightly monitored, self-focused model inverts the conventional function of most commercial coffee sites. For several hundred years, the café has fostered a convivial atmosphere, served consumers’ social inclinations, and overwhelmingly encouraged diverse, eclectic clientele. The Nespresso boutique is the antithesis to this, and instead actively limits interaction: the Club “community” does not meet as a community, and is united only in atomised allegiance to the Nespresso brand. In this regard, Nespresso stands in stark contrast to another coffee brand that has been highly successful in recent years—Starbucks. Starbucks famously recreates the aesthetics, rhetoric and atmosphere of the café as a “third place”—a term popularised by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe non-work, non-domestic spaces where patrons converge for respite or recreation. These liminal spaces (cafés, parks, hair salons, book stores and such locations) might be private, commercial sites, yet they provide opportunities for chance encounters, even therapeutic interactions. In this way, they aid sociability and civic life (Kleinman 193). Long before the term “third place” was coined, coffee houses were deemed exemplars of egalitarian social space. As Rudolf P. Gaudio notes, the early coffee houses of Western Europe, in Oxford and London in the mid-1600s, “were characterized as places where commoners and aristocrats could meet and socialize without regard to rank” (670). From this sanguine perspective, they both informed and animated the modern public sphere. That is, and following Habermas, as a place where a mixed cohort of individuals could meet and discuss matters of public importance, and where politics intersected society, the eighteenth-century British coffee house both typified and strengthened the public sphere (Karababa and Ger 746). Moreover, and even from their early Ottoman origins (Karababa and Ger), there has been an historical correlation between the coffee house and the cosmopolitan, with the latter at least partly defined in terms of demographic breadth (Luckins). Ironically, and insofar as Nespresso appeals to coffee-literate consumers, the brand owes much to Starbucks. In the two decades preceding Nespresso’s arrival, Starbucks played a significant role in refining coffee literacy around the world, gauging mass-market trends, and stirring consumer consciousness. For Nespresso, this constituted major preparatory phenomena, as its strategy (and success) since the early 2000s presupposed the coffee market that Starbucks had helped to create. According to Nespresso’s chief executive Richard Giradot, central to Nespresso’s expansion is a focus on particular cities and their coffee culture (Canning 28). In turn, it pays to take stock of how such cities developed a coffee culture amenable to Nespresso—and therein lays the brand’s debt to Starbucks. Until the last few years, and before celebrity ambassador George Clooney was enlisted in 2005, Nespresso’s marketing was driven primarily by Club members’ recommendations. At the same time, though, Nespresso insisted that Club members were coffee connoisseurs, whose knowledge and enjoyment of coffee exceeded conventional coffee offerings. In 2000, Henk Kwakman, one of Nestlé’s Coffee Specialists, explained the need for portioned coffee in terms of guaranteed perfection, one that demanding consumers would expect. “In general”, he reasoned, “people who really like espresso coffee are very much more quality driven. When you consider such an intense taste experience, the quality is very important. If the espresso is slightly off quality, the connoisseur notices this immediately” (quoted in Butler 50). What matters here is how this corps of connoisseurs grew to a scale big enough to sustain and strengthen the Nespresso system, in the absence of a robust marketing or educative drive by Nespresso (until very recently). Put simply, the brand’s ascent was aided by Starbucks, specifically by the latter’s success in changing the mainstream coffee market during the 1990s. In establishing such a strong transnational presence, Starbucks challenged smaller, competing brands to define themselves with more clarity and conviction. Indeed, working with data that identified just 200 freestanding coffee houses in the US prior to 1990 compared to 14,000 in 2003, Kjeldgaard and Ostberg go so far as to state that: “Put bluntly, in the US there was no local coffee consumptionscape prior to Starbucks” (Kjeldgaard and Ostberg 176). Starbucks effectively redefined the coffee world for mainstream consumers in ways that were directly beneficial for Nespresso. Starbucks: Coffee as Ambience, Experience, and Cultural Capital While visitors to Nespresso boutiques can sample the coffee, with highly trained baristas and staff on site to explain the Nespresso system, in the main there are few concessions to the conventional café experience. Primarily, these boutiques function as material spaces for existing Club members to stock up on capsules, and therefore they complement the Nespresso system with a suitably streamlined space: efficient, stylish and conspicuously upmarket. Outside at least one Sydney boutique for instance (Bondi Junction, in the fashionable eastern suburbs), visitors enter through a club-style cordon, something usually associated with exclusive bars or hotels. This demarcates the boutique from neighbouring coffee chains, and signals Nespresso’s claim to more privileged patrons. This strategy though, the cultivation of a particular customer through aesthetic design and subtle flattery, is not unique. For decades, Starbucks also contrived a “special” coffee experience. Moreover, while the Starbucks model strikes a very different sensorial chord to that of Nespresso (in terms of décor, target consumer and so on) it effectively groomed and prepped everyday coffee drinkers to a level of relative self-sufficiency and expertise—and therein is the link between Starbucks’s mass-marketed approach and Nespresso’s timely arrival. Starbucks opened its first store in 1971, in Seattle. Three partners founded it: Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, both teachers, and Gordon Bowker, a writer. In 1982, as they opened their sixth Seattle store, they were joined by Howard Schultz. Schultz’s trip to Italy the following year led to an entrepreneurial epiphany to which he now attributes Starbucks’s success. Inspired by how cafés in Italy, particularly the espresso bars in Milan, were vibrant social hubs, Schultz returned to the US with a newfound sensitivity to ambience and attitude. In 1987, Schultz bought Starbucks outright and stated his business philosophy thus: “We aren’t in the coffee business, serving people. We are in the people business, serving coffee” (quoted in Ruzich 432). This was articulated most clearly in how Schultz structured Starbucks as the ultimate “third place”, a welcoming amalgam of aromas, music, furniture, textures, literature and free WiFi. This transformed the café experience twofold. First, sensory overload masked the dull homogeny of a global chain with an air of warm, comforting domesticity—an inviting, everyday “home away from home.” To this end, in 1994, Schultz enlisted interior design “mastermind” Wright Massey; with his team of 45 designers, Massey created the chain’s decor blueprint, an “oasis for contemplation” (quoted in Scerri 60). At the same time though, and second, Starbucks promoted a revisionist, airbrushed version of how the coffee was produced. Patrons could see and smell the freshly roasted beans, and read about their places of origin in the free pamphlets. In this way, Starbucks merged the exotic and the cosmopolitan. The global supply chain underwent an image makeover, helped by a “new” vocabulary that familiarised its coffee drinkers with the diversity and complexity of coffee, and such terms as aroma, acidity, body and flavour. This strategy had a decisive impact on the coffee market, first in the US and then elsewhere: Starbucks oversaw a significant expansion in coffee consumption, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the decades following the Second World War, coffee consumption in the US reached a plateau. Moreover, as Steven Topik points out, the rise of this type of coffee connoisseurship actually coincided with declining per capita consumption of coffee in the US—so the social status attributed to specialised knowledge of coffee “saved” the market: “Coffee’s rise as a sign of distinction and connoisseurship meant its appeal was no longer just its photoactive role as a stimulant nor the democratic sociability of the coffee shop” (Topik 100). Starbucks’s singular triumph was to not only convert non-coffee drinkers, but also train them to a level of relative sophistication. The average “cup o’ Joe” thus gave way to the latte, cappuccino, macchiato and more, and a world of coffee hitherto beyond (perhaps above) the average American consumer became both regular and routine. By 2003, Starbucks’s revenue was US $4.1 billion, and by 2012 there were almost 20,000 stores in 58 countries. As an idealised “third place,” Starbucks functioned as a welcoming haven that flattened out and muted the realities of global trade. The variety of beans on offer (Arabica, Latin American, speciality single origin and so on) bespoke a generous and bountiful modernity; while brochures schooled patrons in the nuances of terroir, an appreciation for origin and distinctiveness that encoded cultural capital. This positioned Starbucks within a happy narrative of the coffee economy, and drew patrons into this story by flattering their consumer choices. Against the generic sameness of supermarket options, Starbucks promised distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, and diversity in its coffee offerings. For Greg Dickinson, the Starbucks experience—the scent of the beans, the sound of the grinders, the taste of the coffees—negated the abstractions of postmodern, global trade: by sensory seduction, patrons connected with something real, authentic and material. At the same time, Starbucks professed commitment to the “triple bottom line” (Savitz), the corporate mantra that has morphed into virtual orthodoxy over the last fifteen years. This was hardly surprising; companies that trade in food staples typically grown in developing regions (coffee, tea, sugar, and coffee) felt the “political-aesthetic problematization of food” (Sassatelli and Davolio). This saw increasingly cognisant consumers trying to reconcile the pleasures of consumption with environmental and human responsibilities. The “triple bottom line” approach, which ostensibly promotes best business practice for people, profits and the planet, was folded into Starbucks’s marketing. The company heavily promoted its range of civic engagement, such as donations to nurses’ associations, literacy programs, clean water programs, and fair dealings with its coffee growers in developing societies (Simon). This bode well for its target market. As Constance M. Ruch has argued, Starbucks sought the burgeoning and lucrative “bobo” class, a term Ruch borrows from David Brooks. A portmanteau of “bourgeois bohemians,” “bobo” describes the educated elite that seeks the ambience and experience of a counter-cultural aesthetic, but without the political commitment. Until the last few years, it seemed Starbucks had successfully grafted this cultural zeitgeist onto its “third place.” Ironically, the scale and scope of the brand’s success has meant that Starbucks’s claim to an ethical agenda draws frequent and often fierce attack. As a global behemoth, Starbucks evolved into an iconic symbol of advanced consumer culture. For those critical of how such brands overwhelm smaller, more local competition, the brand is now synonymous for insidious, unstoppable retail spread. This in turn renders Starbucks vulnerable to protests that, despite its gestures towards sustainability (human and environmental), and by virtue of its size, ubiquity and ultimately conservative philosophy, it has lost whatever cachet or charm it supposedly once had. As Bryant Simon argues, in co-opting the language of ethical practice within an ultimately corporatist context, Starbucks only ever appealed to a modest form of altruism; not just in terms of the funds committed to worthy causes, but also to move thorny issues to “the most non-contentious middle-ground,” lest conservative customers felt alienated (Simon 162). Yet, having flagged itself as an ethical brand, Starbucks became an even bigger target for anti-corporatist sentiment, and the charge that, as a multinational giant, it remained complicit in (and one of the biggest benefactors of) a starkly inequitable and asymmetric global trade. It remains a major presence in the world coffee market, and arguably the most famous of the coffee chains. Over the last decade though, the speed and intensity with which Nespresso has grown, coupled with its atypical approach to consumer engagement, suggests that, in terms of brand equity, it now offers a more compelling point of difference than Starbucks. Brand “Me” Insofar as the Nespresso system depends on a consumer market versed in the intricacies of quality coffee, Starbucks can be at least partly credited for nurturing a more refined palate amongst everyday coffee drinkers. Yet while Starbucks courted the “average” consumer in its quest for market control, saturating the suburban landscape with thousands of virtually indistinguishable stores, Nespresso marks a very different sensibility. Put simply, Nespresso inverts the logic of a coffee house as a “third place,” and patrons are drawn not to socialise and relax but to pursue their own highly individualised interests. The difference with Starbucks could not be starker. One visitor to the Bloomingdale boutique (in New York’s fashionable Soho district) described it as having “the feel of Switzerland rather than Seattle. Instead of velvet sofas and comfy music, it has hard surfaces, bright colours and European hostesses” (Gapper 9). By creating a system that narrows the gap between production and consumption, to the point where Nespresso boutiques advertise the coffee brand but do not promote on-site coffee drinking, the boutiques are blithely indifferent to the historical, romanticised image of the coffee house as a meeting place. The result is a coffee experience that exploits the sophistication and vanity of aspirational consumers, but ignores the socialising scaffold by which coffee houses historically and perhaps naively made some claim to community building. If anything, Nespresso restricts patrons’ contemplative field: they consider only their relationships to the brand. In turn, Nespresso offers the ultimate expression of contemporary consumer capitalism, a hyper-individual experience for a hyper-modern age. By developing a global brand that is both luxurious and niche, Nespresso became “the Louis Vuitton of coffee” (Betts 14). Where Starbucks pursued retail ubiquity, Nespresso targets affluent, upmarket cities. As chief executive Richard Giradot put it, with no hint of embarrassment or apology: “If you take China, for example, we are not speaking about China, we are speaking about Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing because you will not sell our concept in the middle of nowhere in China” (quoted in Canning 28). For this reason, while Europe accounts for 90 per cent of Nespresso sales (Betts 15), its forays into the Americas, Asia and Australasia invariably spotlights cities that are already iconic or emerging economic hubs. The first boutique in Latin America, for instance, was opened in Jardins, a wealthy suburb in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Nespresso, Nestlé has popularised a coffee experience neatly suited to contemporary consumer trends: Club members inhabit a branded world as hermetically sealed as the aluminium pods they purchase and consume. Besides the Club’s phone, fax and online distribution channels, pods can only be bought at the boutiques, which minimise even the potential for serendipitous mingling. The baristas are there primarily for product demonstrations, whilst highly trained staff recite the machines’ strengths (be they in design or utility), or information about the actual coffees. For Club members, the boutique service is merely the human extension of Nespresso’s online presence, whereby product information becomes increasingly tailored to increasingly individualised tastes. In the boutique, this emphasis on the individual is sold in terms of elegance, expedience and privilege. Nespresso boasts that over 70 per cent of its workforce is “customer facing,” sharing their passion and knowledge with Club members. Having already received and processed the product information (through the website, boutique staff, and promotional brochures), Club members need not do anything more than purchase their pods. In some of the more recently opened boutiques, such as in Paris-Madeleine, there is even an Exclusive Room where only Club members may enter—curious tourists (or potential members) are kept out. Club members though can select their preferred Grands Crus and checkout automatically, thanks to RFID (radio frequency identification) technology inserted in the capsule sleeves. So, where Starbucks exudes an inclusive, hearth-like hospitality, the Nespresso Club appears more like a pampered clique, albeit a growing one. As described in the Financial Times, “combine the reception desk of a designer hotel with an expensive fashion display and you get some idea what a Nespresso ‘coffee boutique’ is like” (Wiggins and Simonian 10). Conclusion Instead of sociability, Nespresso puts a premium on exclusivity and the knowledge gained through that exclusive experience. The more Club members know about the coffee, the faster and more individualised (and “therefore” better) the transaction they have with the Nespresso brand. This in turn confirms Zygmunt Bauman’s contention that, in a consumer society, being free to choose requires competence: “Freedom to choose does not mean that all choices are right—there are good and bad choices, better and worse choices. The kind of choice eventually made is the evidence of competence or its lack” (Bauman 43-44). Consumption here becomes an endless process of self-fashioning through commodities; a process Eva Illouz considers “all the more strenuous when the market recruits the consumer through the sysiphian exercise of his/her freedom to choose who he/she is” (Illouz 392). In a status-based setting, the more finely graded the differences between commodities (various places of origin, blends, intensities, and so on), the harder the consumer works to stay ahead—which means to be sufficiently informed. Consumers are locked in a game of constant reassurance, to show upward mobility to both themselves and society. For all that, and like Starbucks, Nespresso shows some signs of corporate social responsibility. In 2009, the company announced its “Ecolaboration” initiative, a series of eco-friendly targets for 2013. By then, Nespresso aims to: source 80 per cent of its coffee through Sustainable Quality Programs and Rainforest Alliance Certified farms; triple its capacity to recycle used capsules to 75 per cent; and reduce the overall carbon footprint required to produce each cup of Nespresso by 20 per cent (Nespresso). This information is conveyed through the brand’s website, press releases and brochures. However, since such endeavours are now de rigueur for many brands, it does not register as particularly innovative, progressive or challenging: it is an unexceptional (even expected) part of contemporary mainstream marketing. Indeed, the use of actor George Clooney as Nespresso’s brand ambassador since 2005 shows shrewd appraisal of consumers’ political and cultural sensibilities. As a celebrity who splits his time between Hollywood and Lake Como in Italy, Clooney embodies the glamorous, cosmopolitan lifestyle that Nespresso signifies. 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