Solidarity economy and alternative currency in Latin America = 中美洲互助經濟與另類貨幣

From the very beginning of the millennium the call of the World Social Forum has gathered each year thousands of social organizations and movements of all kinds imaginable under the motto “Another world is possible!”. This way tens of thousands civil organizations gather in search of alternatives to the current world, to the current system, to the current way of life. This need of Another World –better yet: of Other Worlds- is the certainty of the depletion of the hegemonic neoliberal system: if more than half of the world population is suffering of hunger and sickness this is due to the fact that the system is collapsed. It is urgent to look for alternatives. The SOLIDARTITY ECONOMY movement in Latin America has been present in the World Social Forum with the proposal: “Another economy is possible!” In order to make another world possible it is necessary to start by changing the economical basis. We must change the whole economical system. There is a real variety of proposals inside the = SOLIDARITY ECONOMY movement: starting with the very house we are living in (our body): supporting Alternative Medicine; supporting as well our family home: gender equality, cooperating in all kinds of subsistence chores and those for child and older people care. Finally, supporting our social environment: the solidarity to our neighborhood, city and nearest rural producers

What is a networked business?

Due to increasing competitive pressure in their market, many enterprises are implementing changes to the way they conduct business. These changes range from implementing new IT, to redesigning the structure of the organization and entering into all kinds of cooperations with other enterprises, forming what we call a ‘networked business’. In this paper, we try to explain the origin of the networked business from three different, but related, perspectives: resource dependence, transaction cost and IT impact. We also explore some terms that are used to describe interorganizational structures to find their principal components in an attempt to determine relationships between them and find a broad and precise, new definition of the term ‘networked business’

Livelihood and living for the youth in Latin America = 拉丁美洲青年人的人生與生活

I am part of the despairing middle class in Mexico, a generation of young people who went to private schools, who went to college, who speak English, live on their own and have a job. I am part of a minority, and even that seems exaggerating, only around of 17% of the total population actually gets in to a college in Mexico. And I say despairing because the crisis is fast finishing with this middle class social stratus There has been awareness about the crisis for some years now, but poverty has always been a part of Mexico’s reality. I grew up in Chiapas, the poorest state in the country. Kids without shoes, begging for money was an everyday event something that was just there, not necessarily as part of a big economical failure, but as part of the country’s reality itself

Coordination and partnering structure are vital domains in collaborative business-IT alignment: Elaborating on the ICoNOs MM

Current business-IT alignment (B-ITa) maturity models are oriented to single organizations and fail in taking special characteristics of collaborative networked organizations (CNOs) into account, such as the need for considering domains like coordination and partnering structure. In this paper, we elaborate on these two domains which are included in our IT-enabled Collaborative Networked Organizations Maturity Model (ICoNOs MM)

IT process architectures for enterprises development: A survey from a maturity model perspective

During the last years much has been published about IT governance. Close to the success of many governance efforts are the business frameworks, quality models, and technology standards that help enterprises improve processes, customer service, quality of products, and control. In this paper we i) survey existing frameworks, namely ITIL, ASL and BiSL, ii) find relations with the IT Governance framework CobiT to determine if the maturity model of CobiT can be used by ITIL, ASL and BiSL, and (iii) provide an integrated vista of IT processes viewed from a maturity model perspective. This perspective can help us understand the importance of maturity models for increasing the efficiency of IT processes for enterprises development and business-IT alignment

DECISÕES DE DESINVESTIMENTO POR PARTE DAS EMPRESAS DE CAPITAL DE RISCO

Building upon the equilibrium model of Jeng and Wells (2000) and prior research, we study the determinants of the European venture capital market, adding up the unemployment tax, the trade sale exit and the market/book ratio. We collected aggregated data about this market and macroeconomic data, to which we applied panel data models, with fixed and random effects. With the best adequacy of the random effect models, we got confirmation of the importance of some of the already used factors and also the introduced ones, confirming the importance of the unemployment tax and trade sales. The questionnaire to venture capital investors of twenty European countries allowed us to perceive that they are young, have postgraduate education, prefer late stage investments, are indifferent to high-tech versus non high-tech investments, prefer relatively small investments, have strong involvement in portfolio companies, and exiting in the following order: trade sale, write-offs and IPO. Using the data from the questionnaire, OLS and duration models for the hypotheses validation, and having presented the theory of asymmetric information, we analyzed the duration and the divestment decision. We conclude that the aspects related with the investor and their involvements in the business are the most influencial. In the case of IPO, late stage and high-tech investments enjoy greater probabilities of occurrence; while early stage and not high-tech investments are more likely for trade sale

Formalization of the partnering structure for networked businesses

Rapidly changing market demands and increasing competitive pressure cause many businesses implement changes to the way they conduct business. One of these changes is the decision to collaborate with other businesses, forming what we call a 'networked business'. Networked businesses are formed by different organizations working together to reach a common goal. For the participating organizations in a networked business to be able to promptly react to their customers' needs, they must set up as cornerstone a well-defined collaborative partnering structure. In this report we discuss the partnering structure of networked businesses and present a framework for its formalization. Using a case study, we illustrate that existing approaches for value modeling, roles specification, and responsibilities definition can be used successfully if employed in a unifying way to address this structure concept

Stratifying ideals and twisted products

We study stratifying ideals for rings in the context of relative homological algebra. Using LU-decompositions, which are a special type of twisted products, we give a sufficient condition for an idempotent ideal to be (relative) stratifying.Comment: 14 page