Trata-se de uma pesquisa exploratório-descritiva que tem como objetivo entender como os executivos expatriados e executivos itinerantes estão vivenciando uma nova realidade cultural no âmbito profissional e pessoal. O problema de pesquisa constitui-se em identificar e analisar os entraves e os facilitadores com os quais os executivos expatriados e os executivos itinerantes se defrontam ao iniciarem suas atividades profissionais em outro país e utilizar este conhecimento para desenvolver meios para facilitar o contato intercultural, focando no executivo itinerante. Os dados foram coletados através de questionários abertos com quarenta executivos da empresa transnacional (quatorze executivos expatriados, onze executivos expatriados retornados e quinze executivos itinerantes). Para a análise das respostas às perguntas do questionário, utilizou-se a metodologia de análise de conteúdo. Os resultados são apresentados em três conjuntos de categorias: vinte categorias iniciais, posteriormente reagrupadas em nove categorias intermediárias e, por último, sintetizadas nas categorias finais: A preparação para o contato com outras culturas, O contato com outras culturas e Desenvolvendo a interculturalidade. Os resultados obtidos apontam para a importância de não só executivos expatriados receberem treinamento intercultural, mas também os executivos itinerantes, que transitam entre as diferentes culturas das diversas localidades da empresa transnacional, necessitam de um treinamento cultural para embasar o contato intercultural. A pesquisa também indica características necessárias em um executivo itinerante e a importância do conhecimento prévio do idioma da localidade. / This is an exploratory-descriptive research, with the objective to understand how the expatriate and itinerant executives are experiencing a new cultural reality in a professional and personal ambit. The researched problem consist in identify and analyze the barriers and facilitators that the expatriate and itinerary executives are exposed to when performing professional activities in other countries, and use this knowledge to develop ways to facilitate the intercultural contact, focusing on the itinerate executive. The data was collected using an open questionnaire with forty executives from a transnational company (fourteen expatriates’ executives, eleven returned expatriate executives and fifteen itinerant executives). Content analyze methodology was used to analyze the answers given to the questionnaire. The results are presented in three groups of categories: twenty initial categories, posterior rearranged in nine intermediary categories and, at last, synthesize in three final categories, which are: the preparation for the contact with other cultures, the contact with other cultures and developing interculturality. The obtained results indicate the importance that not only expatriate executives should receive intercultural training, but also itinerant executives, which transit the different cultures of the various transnational company localities, need a cultural training to base the intercultural contact. This research also indicates needed characteristics of the itinerant executives and the importance of the previous knowledge of the local idiom.

For the past three decades, policy-makers in Santiago, Chile, have pushed laissez-faire free-market reforms on most sectors of the Chilean economy. On the Archipelago of Chiloe in southern Chile, these reforms have had the effect of introducing wage labor, on a massive scale, to communities that once relied primarily on collective practices of unpaid, reciprocal labor (mingas). My research examines the role of these changing labor practices and livelihoods in the shaping of local identities. I argue that while the Chilean government's neoliberal policies have brought increased commerce to Chiloe through the introduction of export-oriented fishing and aquaculture industries, the accompanying erosion of mingas and rural livelihoods has triggered a pronounced intergenerational shift in collective identity: whereas older islanders today bemoan the disappearance of an ethos of reciprocity, solidarity, and mutual assistance, younger islanders express an explicitly critical view of Chilote history while upholding select values of old.

In the first essay using a sample of 3437 U.S. companies over the period 1992-2014, I demonstrate that international business activities of newly listed firms influence their corporate policies. Specifically, firms earning foreign pre-tax income at an early phase of their growth and development have higher investment and a higher propensity to acquire. I show that cash holdings are lower for firms involved in foreign activities, supportive of Duchin’s (2010) coinsurance theory. Further, CEOs of globally diversified firms have less pay-for-performance sensitivity than those of purely domestic firms. The second essay examines the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX, 2002) on excess valuation calculated with the “chop shop” approach, which is typically used to measure the diversification discount. The results indicate a significant drop in excess valuation after SOX for both pure-play and multi-segment companies. Additional investigation of the calculation methodology and a difference-in-differences model show no distinction in this impact between un-accelerated and accelerated companies. There is no evidence to support that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act leads firms to diversify or focus. I run several robustness tests by including 2003 observations, creating a 2000-2006 subsample, excluding geographic segments. Finally, when in a firm's life would it fit for it to become involved in global strategies? What are the important influences on the decisions of young and mature firms to go international? I answer these questions in the third essay by examining the determinants that affect the choices of born-globals (BGs) and born-again globals (BaGs) to expand worldwide. My study is based on pre-existent theories of diversification, and I place specific emphasis on the conceivable role of peer influence and the motivation or desire for growth. I further study the entrenchment, the idiosyncratic risk, and the innovation caliber hypothesis. My results document that innovation efficiency strongly enhances BG’s propensity to global diversify. On the other hand, peer pressure, CEO ownership and idiosyncratic risk level significantly influence BGs not to globalize. In contrast, BaGs are positively influenced by their industry peers, showing how competition works in the financial markets for youthful versus mature companies.

The primary focus of this dissertation is to determine the degree to which political, economic, and socio-cultural elites in Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago influenced the development of the Caribbean Court of Justice’s (CCJ) original jurisdiction. As members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), both states replaced their protectionist model with open regionalism at the end of the 1980s. Open regionalism was adopted to make CARICOM member states internationally competitive. Open regionalism was also expected to create a stable regional trade environment. To ensure a stable economic environment, a regional court with original jurisdiction was proposed. A six member Preparatory Committee on the Caribbean Court of Justice (PREPCOM), on which Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago sat, was formed to draft the Agreement Establishing the Caribbean Court of Justice that would govern how the Court would interpret the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (RTC) and enforce judgments. Through the use of qualitative research methods, namely elite interviews, document data, and text analysis, and a focus on three levels of analysis, that is, the international, regional, and domestic, three major conclusions are drawn. First, changes in the international economic environment caused Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago to support the establishment of a regional court. Second, Jamaica had far greater influence on the final structure of the CCJ than Trinidad & Tobago. Third, it was found that in both states the political elite had the greatest influence on the development and structure of the CCJ. The economic elite followed by the socio-cultural elite were found to have a lesser impact. These findings are significant because they account for the impact of elites and elite behavior on institutions in a much-neglected category of states: the developing world.

This research was conducted to assess cultural diversity in the institutionalisation of the African Union (AU). Most researchers have found interest on the subject of cultural diversity that edifice the African Union because “Africa does not have a single culture not in religions, not in economic systems, and especially not in languages, the number of different languages spoken on the continent, numerous dialects not included, range as high as 2,000 or more languages. While some languages, such as Swahili, are spoken by millions, other languages may be spoken by only a handful” (Robert & Feldman, 2008: 267) The AU member states heads are quiet aware of the forces of cultural diversity in the Union, hence several workshops were carried out between member states heads to put together the cultural policy for the Union. There are also numerous policies on African cultural diversity that were approved previously by different organisations that intended to unify Africa before the African Union was formed. Those policies are aligned within the AU cultural policy - The Charter for African Renaissance that will be reviewed in length in Chapter 3 in the literature review. What comes as a mystery is that, even though the Charter for African Renaissance has unified and adopted various policies ethnic and religion segregations within states and between states is still visible in most African countries (ethnicity, language and religion will also be evaluated and a sample of various cultures found in African countries will also be discussed in Chapter 3 under literature review). The Charter for African Renaissance contains guiding principle and objectives of the AU pertaining cultural diversity and these objectives needs to be met. However the biggest well known challenge about policies is that in most cases they remain on paper and shelved, they never make that much difference to the society that they intend to change. As Cloete and Wissink (2000) will put it that “policies only exist because they need to bring about change, however, it is also possible to change policies on paper, whilst effecting no real social change" (2000: 239). African cultural diversity policies are as well littered with failed institutions and initiatives that have not been followed through to completion, or of promises that have been broken. The driving force for this research is that Africans has seen many false starts in the last few decades and they are desperate for change, they need to see democracy, development and institutional building in the African countries. African Union on the other hand has existed for a decade but it has not yet achieved its objectives. How do we know that this is not just another focus for a misplaced enthusiasm? Will the current initiatives of the AU fall by the wayside? Will the world continue to mock Africa as the land of broken promises, of criminalized and failed states that inevitably subvert the best intentions of their peoples and their development partners? Unfortunately these questions has influenced this investigation but cannot be answered by this paper. However this paper intends to find out if cultural diversity has an impact in the missed opportunities and broken promises of Africa and this will be examined in the structures of the African Union.

Intellectual property rights (IPR) have become a major problem in the relationship between the industrialized West and the developing South, primarily because the West demands that developing countries adopt and enforce Western IPR. Since the relationship between US corporations and Chinese businesses is among the most successful and at the center of the current process of globalization, IPR have been a major cause of conflict and controversy between them and serve as an exemplar for this thesis. I argue, first, that the reason that a large number of Chinese businesses, especially privately-owned small and medium-sized enterprises, infringe foreign IPR lies in the nature of the difference between what have been mostly low-tech traditional Chinese businesses and high-tech industrial economies, to which intellectual property laws belong. Second, I demonstrate that the steady improvement of intellectual property protection in the more successful areas of development in the Chinese economy suggests that the solution for improved IPR protection in China and perhaps other emerging nations will follow, not precede, the development and transformation of a low-tech pre-industrial economy into an industrial high-tech economy.

The thesis start from general introduction to globalization but its focus is on the following areas: global buying of company inputs (sourcing), expanding on the foreign/global markets (output) and managing the risks associated with globalization (increased competition, foreign currency and raw material/inputs hedge). Overall the thesis is practical in its approach and thus it provides the real applicable approaches in terms of the management in the global economy. Despite these practicalities the thesis also aims at analyzing the more general business environment for global activities of a firm. This is realized in section on economic assessment of the market and evaluation of foreign currency fundamentals.

The thesis start from general introduction to globalization but its focus is on the following areas: global buying of company inputs (sourcing), expanding on the foreign/global markets (output) and managing the risks associated with globalization (increased competition, foreign currency and raw material/inputs hedge). Overall the thesis is practical in its approach and thus it provides the real applicable approaches in terms of the management in the global economy. Despite these practicalities the thesis also aims at analyzing the more general business environment for global activities of a firm. This is realized in section on economic assessment of the market and evaluation of foreign currency fundamentals.

During the campaign of South Africa's first multi-racial elections of 1994, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) pledged to provide 1,000,000 new homes within the first presidential term of five years. This goal became more than just campaign rhetoric when it was written into the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), a broad guideline for the new government's goals. However the Housing White Paper, the first housing policy of the new government, did not include a plan for mass housing construction. By 1998, Mandela had publicly abandoned the goal of 1,000,000 new homes in his term. Rather, private sector financing and vigorous community involvement through partnerships and collaboration between stakeholders were to be the cornerstones of delivery. The policy formulation process, which began two years prior to the elections, yielded an incremental approach of in situ upgrading through a capital subsidy, derived in large part from that of the previous administration. <p> This paper examines the policy formulation process, and why Mandela's ambitious housing agenda was not followed up with a policy that could realize the goal of 1 million homes in five years. Three explanations are offered, incrementalism in the policy formulation process, and the need for both domestic and international legitimization in light of poor economic conditions. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

Thesis advisor: Kalpana Seshadri / The novel is generally read through a Western lens that privileges both individual subjectivity and the nation-state. My dissertation acts as an intervention into the critical tradition that sees the novel as a genre preoccupied with the individual, the nation-state, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship through which the two relate to each other. This tradition includes seminal theorists Ian Watt, Fredric Jameson, and Benedict Anderson as well as contemporary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Joseph Slaughter. Transnational Communities challenges this accepted framework for understanding the novel genre through an examination of novels which decenter the categories of individual and nation-state and argues that in this moment of unprecedented globalization, the novel’s ability to imagine new forms of community is an increasingly relevant social function. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.