Journal articles on the topic 'Small business bibliography'

Purpose: The objective of the present study is to analyze the effects of the transition to English Medium Instruction on lecturers in Spanish universities in one specific area, namely Operations Management courses taught in Business degrees.Design/methodology/approach: we present an overview of research so far into the effects of English Medium Instruction (EMI) on teaching and learning Operations Management in Business degrees of Spanish universities. Empirically, a survey was administered to 20 EMI lecturers in the area of Operations Management, and s the results in the light of both the bibliography on EMI and the empirical results were discussed. Using online questionnaires, information was obtained from a sample of EMI lecturers in thirteen Spanish Universities.Findings: Most professors report that they initially reacted negatively to the idea of having to teach in English, but now realize that most of their fears were ungrounded. They emphasize that it is very important to invest time in training seminars and the exchange of experiences. Other relevant findings are the perceived lack of incentives to teach in English, the need to use tools and techniques to improve the interaction with students, and the considerable amount of time needed for class preparation.Originality/value: The results of this small-scale study of EMI in OM are consistent with previous research in the area of EMI in other fields, but also provide some ideas that may pave the way for further research and development.

Providing Reference Services is number 32 in the Practical Guides for Libraries series. Beginning with a brief history of library reference service and a discussion of library stereotypes, the authors quickly move on to identifying criteria for building and maintaining a reference collection, as well as key points to consider when providing reference service, with particular emphasis on the reference interview. The authors note the need to incorporate emotional intelligence into reference work. Emotional intelligence is a topic that has recently garnered increasing interest in the business world, and it is good to see it addressed here in the context of libraries and reference services. This guide does not give detailed plans for implementing reference services but instead highlights key points and concerns to consider when developing reference services. The authors’ approach is broadly based, and the key points can be adapted by small public libraries as well large academic institutions. Each chapter ends with a helpful bibliography of sources and additional reading, and the authors also refer to another guide in the series for readers seeking more detailed help; this kind of continuity within the Practical Guides for Libraries series is useful and appreciated.

Abstract Due to the development of knowledge society, there is increased demand for using knowledge management (KM) in an entrepreneurship as well as using information and communication technology (ICT). To achieve sustainable capacity it is necessary to promote KM and ICT in small, medium and microenterprises (SMME). KM is implemented successfully in the firms with large amount of employees. There are limited abilities to handle it for SMME. It is necessary to develop the model for implementation of KM for achieving sustainable capacity in SMME. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the model for strengthening sustainable capacity of SMME in transition to knowledge economy. Study of the bibliography was applied to define main dimensions of sustainable capacity of an enterprise. The active knowledge modelling method was applied to develop the model of KM solution for achieving sustainable capacity of SMME. As a result of research, a method for evaluation of sustainable development of SMME was developed. It reflects key elements for KM solution in SMME and consists of four interrelated sub-models such as goal model, business process model, concepts model, and information systems model. The model was evaluated in the target group as well as in the group of experts.

The new "molds" of competitiveness have suggested that the attentions should be focused on an efficient management of the supply chain in the supermarket departments, starting from the producer until the end user of the products, reducing the operational costs. It's known that the elimination of some of these stages of intermediation of the ways of distribution can represent to the small and mediums retailers an important competitive advantage, with the elimination of the additional costs charged by the intermediaries. The objective of this work is to propose a model of restructuring of the ways of distribution in the brazilian retail of food through of the strategy, inducing the elimination of the intermediaries. The search of the bibliography was used like basement to the definition of the methodology of this search, that was realized through of an observational study realized with nineteen Central Business Supermarket s in the state of São Paulo. To do the collection of the datas was prepared a questionary with specific questions. After the collection of the datas and tab, were used techniques quantitive of analysis of datas through of SAS system. The study intends to discuss the proposal of the cooperation's networks like a strategic alternative, with the possibility of elimination of some phases of intermediation of the distribuition's ways.

The article first considers the historical experience of Tobolsk District Library formation and development in 1923-1930. It characterizes the forms and methods of library practice, the specifics of working with other regional libraries, especially the personnel policy. The regional libraries management was carried on under difficult natural geographical conditions: the district area was more than 1,3 million square kilometers, a significant distance from administrative centers and settlements of the district, instability of socio-political processes, low level of socio-economic development, etc. Operating from 1923 to 1930, the district library was assigned the following tasks: combining libraries, coordination of their activities, assistance in work organization, books provision, creating teaching materials, and others. During the studied period, libraries experienced difficulties related to low funding, poor working conditions, lack of electricity, insufficient supply with literature. New forms of library work required additional funding, training and retraining. These problems have not been resolved. Methodological assistance was provided in various forms: meetings, group classes, by correspondence. In October 30, 1929 the CPSU (b) adopted a resolution «On the library activity improvement», which gave a negative assessment of the library business state in the USSR. In 1930 the work of the District Library was recognized as unsatisfactory. These shortcomings in the work fully coincided with the all-Union ones. Nevertheless, a small team carried on work to preserve the existing libraries and create new ones. Much attention was paid to the rural reading rooms, mobile libraries, and bibliography activity.

The current article aims to investigate if micro and small businesses, classified as micro companies/ small businesses, are obliged to present balance sheet registered in corresponding body in biddings according to law 123/2006. To that end, we use a clipping in the law nº 10.406/02 text, Brazilian Civil Code, or by Complementary Law nº 123/06, applicable to the micro company and to the small business, yet aggregated to Managemt Board of Simples Nacional resolutions and also of the Accounting Federal Board as General Technical Interpretation resolution 1000, through bibliographic and descriptive methodology. It was verified that the obligatoriness of the anual accounting bookkeeping by the Micro Companies and Small businesses is crucial to take part in bidding events, besides being essential to data provision to controlling and decising making.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the results from a survey carried out among Portuguese companies with their management systems (MSs) certified according to, at least two of the following standards: ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. In addition, the results from a second survey conducted amid a group of experts that pointed out several aspects that impact on the integration level will be dissected. Design/methodology/approach The phenomenon of MSs integration is hardly transferable to a contained environment so some of the common research methods traditionally adopted include case studies, surveys, interviews and observation in situ. The findings from two surveys online among Portuguese companies and Portuguese experts are reported in the current paper. Findings The results suggest that a set of common characteristics is present on the majority of the surveyed companies. On first hand, there is evidence of an effective integration of the policies and the existence of an integrated system manager on the organizational structure of the companies. On the other hand, results suggest that training was provided to top management concerning integration issues, an integrating concept was taken into account during the implementation process and tools, and methods and objectives of the subsystems are aligned. Research limitations/implications This paper addresses the issues raised in the mainstream scientific bibliography through the collection of information amidst Portuguese companies. At this stage, it is not possible to infer at which extent the conclusions may be transferable to other geographic contexts. The small number of companies that completed the survey precludes the statistical generalization of the findings but the analytical generalization is not impaired. Originality/value The authors believe that the conclusions of this paper may aid both practioneers and scholars in the understanding of a complex but manageable organizational phenomenon. In addition, through the contents of this paper companies may collect information regarding the pertinent issues to address when developing their IMSs.

In recent years, the interest in corporate social responsibility issues has shown an increase. Worldwide problems, especially those related to HIV/AIDS, caught public attention towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) themes. In a country with more people living with HIV/AIDS than in any other nation (UNAIDS 2007), prevention and treatment is critical. HIV/AIDS is seen to be threatening the communities in which businesses are functioning and is further threatening the business itself. This article examines the moral and social responsibility of the corporate sector in its effort to deal with the issue of HIV/AIDS. Big business leaders have recognized the threat of HIV/AIDS to the workplace and have positioned responses towards the disease from an ethical, legal and cost-effective business perspective; however the response from small to medium businesses is relatively weak. This article conveys a descriptive critique, based on bibliographic research on Corporate Social Responsibility, HIV/AIDS and related concepts.

In recent years, the interest in corporate social responsibility issues has shown an increase. Worldwide problems, especially those related to HIV/AIDS, caught public attention towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) themes. In a country with more people living with HIV/AIDS than in any other nation (UNAIDS 2007), prevention and treatment is critical. HIV/AIDS is seen to be threatening the communities in which businesses are functioning and is further threatening the business itself. This article examines the moral and social responsibility of the corporate sector in its effort to deal with the issue of HIV/AIDS. Big business leaders have recognized the threat of HIV/AIDS to the workplace and have positioned responses towards the disease from an ethical, legal and cost-effective business perspective; however the response from small to medium businesses is relatively weak. This article conveys a descriptive critique, based on bibliographic research on Corporate Social Responsibility, HIV/AIDS and related concepts.

This paper is divided into two parts, one theoretical and one empirical. The research deals with entrepreneurs that received loans from National Fund for Entrepreneurship and Development (ETEAN in Greek language). ETEAN provided enterprises with non interest or low interest loans based on state guarantees. The main objective of this research is to examine the project\'s effectiveness and its contribution into local development on Regional Unity of Serres, Central Macedonia, Greece. The first part is divided into two sections. A comparative analysis of guarantees to small and medium enterprises (SME?s) is presented in the first part referring to the European Union and in the second part to Greece. Particularly, in the first section of our paper presented data concerning guarantees provided in the EU. At the second section presented data which indicate the role of ETEAN?s programs into the contribution of local development in Greece and the moral hazards due to state provided guarantees. Furthermore, obstacles that entrepreneurs face when they applied for guarantee loans are analyzed in this part. Our data were extracted during the last three years by the extensive use of web links on the internet. Most data were taken from the websites of above mentioned ETEAN, the Pan-European Gateway to Business and Innovation Financing, the Gateway to European Research and Development and B.I.S. At the second part presented the results of our research based on 200 entrepreneurs in Serres who receive loans from ETEAN. The results analyzed with the use of descriptive statistical methods and correlations. It is noticeable that businessmen?s answers are similar to those deduced from the results of the researches that have been referred to in bibliography. In the final part of this paper the main conclusion is pointed out and that is that those programs which provide enterprises low interest or non interest loans support local development.

The article deals with methodology of teaching the discipline on basic concepts of editing of artistic and children’s editions for the students of other specialty in order to improve their professional skills through experience in a highly specialized niche of information industry. The relevance of the research is that the discipline on editing of artistic and children’s editions is taught directly for those future specialists who will work with the book: they will need to review the new editions, to make the lists of recommended publications, to create the database of library resources, to consult the readers of libraries etc. And here it is impossible to estimate the value of the work without poring over its text. written by the children, which is precondition for its applicability. As particularly the creative children bunch together in the libraries. Therefore, it is essential when the library staff and especially a literary studio executive are able to give to a child-author an appropriate advice or to consult a small author. According to the results of education, a student can know well any artistic text and can determine that particular work which has literary and artistic value among other ones. According to the theme of the work, the method of its disclosure and lexical and syntactic structures of text, the student who studied the discipline “Editing of artistic and children’s editions”, can determine the age and skills of the author, as well as its readership. Thus, the acquired knowledge, skills and abilities will be useful for library staff when reviewing new revenues, analyzing bibliography processes and developing information infrastructure of library business. The acquired knowledge will be required also in service to library’s visitors.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the liability of foreignness (LOF) concept when entering a new market. Drawing on the past literature, the current research provides a summary of issues of the main LOF that companies face, as well as suggestions to help avoid such burdens. The research also attempts to provide a bibliographic analysis of the topic. Design/methodology/approach Articles were collected from All Database of ISI Web of Knowledge, using “all years,” “social science,” and “business economics” as search terms. Relevant papers on the LOF topic were retrieved and sorted to identify the main issues. Furthermore, a bibliographic analysis of the LOF concept was elaborated. HistCite software was used to create a table and a graph for the most relevant papers. A summary of issues on LOF strategies was created along with guidance for companies entering a new market. Findings The study sorts strategies to avoid LOF, including operational capabilities, entry modes, country of origin, legitimacy achievement, risk of politico-economic changes, and location selection. The study identified strategies for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) entering emerging and transitional economies, as well as suggestions when entering sophisticated economies. Practical implications The current data summary informs managers from diverse organizations who attempt to enter a new market with particular sociopolitical contexts. Originality/value A summary of issues on LOF and suggestions for overcoming these problems to help companies enter new markets have not been available. The current study attempts to fill that void, providing suggestions to managers and business owners who have moved or expanded their businesses to a foreign country or contemplate an international move.

PurposeCommensurate with the 25th anniversary of the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development (JSBED), this retrospective work distils trends across all original articles published in the journal during this time period.Design/methodology/approachBibliometric analysis techniques are used to analyse 917 original JSBED publications. Specifically, performance analysis is conducted to analyse the journal's publication and citation patterns, bibliographic coupling and author keyword co-occurrence analysis are conducted to identify major themes, and co-authorship analysis is conducted to analyse author collaborations.FindingsResults indicate JSBED has grown considerably since its inception, both in terms publication and citations. JSBED's most prevalent themes include management and growth of small firms, entrepreneurship education, strategy in small firms, business development, technology in small firms, business competencies in small firms, internationalization in small firms, role of social capital, entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurship in under-represented and minority populations.Originality/valueThis is the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of JSBED in the journal's history. Accordingly, it presents a novel and heretofore disparate understanding of the key themes and dialogues emerging from an established journal with a growing reputation for scholarly and practitioner impact.

The Business and Tourism sector have achieved significant economic growth, being a primary source of income in Ecuador. The main objective of this research work is to carry out a study to evaluate the socio-economic impact on the tourist business level of the province of Manabí, regarding the economic crisis of the coronavirus, mainly in the tourist business sector of Manta, Portoviejo, Montecristi, Chone and Pedernales. Cities with the greatest economic impact generated by COVID - 19. The research methodology that has been used consists of a bibliographic, exploratory and descriptive methodology. Through the descriptive study with a qualitative approach, surveys were carried out among the owners of small and medium-sized companies in the tourism business sector in different cities, in order to know the Social and Economic impact of MSMEs. Information was obtained, both bibliographic through texts taken from different articles, books, degree thesis, web pages, in order to meet the objective of the research and know the economic impact that has been unleashed since the coronavirus crisis in recent years. Keywords: Economic impact, Tourist impact, Social impact, health crisis. References

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of specific local development policies and partnerships for SME enterprises in Thessaloniki one of the metropolis of south Europe. The two main research questions are: first, what are the most important development policies for firms’ development? and second, in what level these policies receive different significance from firms belonging in different production sectors? Design/methodology/approach – In order to achieve the aims of the paper and answer the research questions, the study uses an extensive use of bibliography, and field research that has been implemented by administering questionnaires on a representative sample of 227 enterprises. The study comes up to valuable conclusions for the firms and the city through the use of exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis and clustering. Findings – The present research brings on important issues and questions about local economic development because it presents directly the estimations and views of a large number of local enterprises that reflect the image of local economy. Finally, this research gives a satisfactory overview of the inner growth of Thessaloniki and further the results could lead to an evaluation, planning, implementation, rejection or reconstruction of specific actions and policies locally. Research limitations/implications – The analysis is constrained by weakness since the sample of enterprises is rather small and the results concern only the enterprises located in Thessaloniki. Based on this fact, general conclusions can be drawed for other regions as well as for the whole Greece. This is subjected to more analysis. Practical implications – The added value of this research is essential since there are only few similar researches in South-East Europe and in Greece. Especially, the relationship between local development policies and firms’ development competitiveness has not been studied enough in the area under consideration. Social implications – Enterprises understand and designate the importance of specific policies that affect their development while at the same time through their evaluations they outline the character and dynamics of these policies in a unique dynamic, geographical and productive city like this of Thessaloniki. Originality/value – The analysis showed that enterprises recognize as positive factor the effort of the local authorities to set the area as a business pole in favour of enterprises and the broader area but policy problems of organization and planning arise that concern mainly the operation and support of local enterprises and specific those from the tourist and service sector. This image raises issues of competence on planning and organization of development polices by the local authorities focusing on specific productive sectors so as the effect of these policies to be effective with positive results for enterprises.

Changes taking place in Italian publishing include the decline of old family firms and the amalgamating of publishing in a relatively few, large companies with interests in other fields of activity. Art publishing is largely monopolised by a small number of big publishing groups based in Milan, although some smaller firms produce art publications, generally of local interest, elsewhere, and a number of medium-sized family or specialised businesses remain active in this field. Another, perhaps unique, feature of Italian art publishing is the production of art books financed by banks and used by them for promotional purposes. Initially hard to get hold of, these publications — sometimes in the form of a second, public, edition – are becoming more available, and are now the subject of a bibliography.

PUBLISHERS have over time played enormous roles in the dissemination of written language and the communication of ideas through and between cultures. Too often they are dismissed as the rubber stamp on the title page or that part of the citations required in a bibliography. They are the least known yet most familiar names on a title page and for too many of us they are just an administrative necessity. The common image of the publisher is that of the business face and the practical production component of the publishing process. Compared to the author and the title of the book their names convey only broad categorical information to the readers. On joining the Pacific Conservation Biology, over ten years ago, I found that this stereotype was not true for Ivor Beatty. While he was all the things mentioned above he also entered into the publishing process with his red ink. His corrections to my manuscript were my first meeting with the man behind the name — he was the Beatty in Surrey Beatty & Sons. His corrections were a point of academic contention that I enjoyed with him; they were lesson well learnt. Many years before my first experience with Ivor’s red ink, on a lower rung of my educational ladder, I had chatted with Joe Forshaw about the disappearance of Australian publishers from the publishing of Australian biota. We could both recite a long list of names of well-known publishers who no longer published in Australia. The small market and prohibitive economic costs had pushed publishing off-shore. Australian science and its communication to Australians and the world were consequently suffering. The story is too familiar to repeat here and it occurs in many areas beyond publishing. However, Ivor Beatty continued publishing biological science in Australia. He provided the forum to get the message across the same forum that provides the authors a place to promote their ideas. Many of us have much to thank him for. It has been said that “It would be impossible to imagine any zoologist, botanist, ecologist or conservation biologist trained in Australia over the last 20 years who has not had their career influenced by contributions from Beatty’s publications” (Saunders et al. 2012). I concur: I cannot believe that any student or conservation biologist would not be citing from the extensive literature than has emanated from his publishing house. A search of any good university library would find many entries from Surrey Beatty & Sons under conservation headings and many with no comparable papers or chapters published elsewhere. As a student I benefited from this literature and as a professional academic my research continues to draw on publications that have moved through Ivor’s hands. While the authors and editors of the papers and chapters are ultimately responsible for the original ideas that are rarely or not published elsewhere, they would not have seen the light of day without Ivor’s hand. At the time of his passing I point to the litany of his publications from his lifetime of dedication to conservation biology and I celebrate his achievements and his life and I recall the publisher that corrected my manuscript with his red pen.

The present work uses knowledge obtained in the course of Production Engineering, with the purpose of presenting a proposal of factory project of a handicraft truffle microenterprise. The study proceeds in the factory design area, as well as in the general administrative area, especially entrepreneurship. For this, market information, layout proposal, raw material used material costs, a good location, basic equipment were presented, in order to bring knowledge that helps to visualize what you need for the opening of a small homemade factory, of truffle production. All data were collected through bibliographic research, and through academic knowledge acquired during the course of Production Engineering. The study aims to collect information that help the entrepreneur to start his own business, efficiently and effectively, in view of quality and productivity, so that you can obtain a satisfactory financial return.

From its small beginnings in 1981 of six pilot users and the National Library of Australia (NLA), the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) has grown to be a truly national system, with 1,315 users at May 1995. The National Bibliographic Database has expanded to over 11 million records and 22 million holdings statements. It includes records from the USA, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. It has come to be the single union list of holdings of Australian libraries, and the first point of reference for the majority of interlibrary loan transactions. The ABN is seen as both an NLA business and a cooperative undertaking of Australian libraries. Management consists of a Network Committee, which advises the Director General of NLA on all aspects of operation, and a Standards Committee, whose role is to make recommendations to NLA on cataloguing standards for the network. Annual Users' Meetings are held. Since 1987 NLA has been developing a database host for Australian libraries called OZLINE, in parallel with ABN. In 1990 it was decided to go for complete redevelopment using a text retrieval product and an industry standard Relational Database Management System. Following discussions with the National Library of New Zealand, which had indicated broadly similar requirements, it was agreed that the two libraries would jointly seek a system. The Australian service is to be known in future as WORLD 1.

Reducing the environmental pressure along the products life cycle, increasing efficiency in the consumption of resources and use of renewable raw materials, and shifting the economic system toward a circular and a climate-neutral model represent the heart of the current macro-trends of the European Union (EU) policy agendas. The circular economy and bioeconomy concepts introduced in the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan and the Bioeconomy Strategy support innovation in rethinking economic systems focusing on market uptaking of greener solutions based on less-intensive resource consumption. In recent decades, industrial research has devoted enormous investments to demonstrate sustainable circular bio-based business models capable of overcoming the “Valley of Death” through alternative strategic orientations of “technological-push” and “market-pull”. The study highlights industrial research’s evolution on bio-based circular business model validation, trends, and topics with particular attention to the empowering capacity of start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to close the loops in renewable biological use and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The research methodology involves a bibliographic search based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach and the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator Data Hub investigation to understand SMEs’ key success factors and start-ups of the circular bioeconomy sector. Eco and bio-based materials, nutraceuticals, and microalgae represent the most sustainable industry applications, leading to circular bioeconomy business models’ future perspective.

A Review of: Taylor, A. (2012). A study of the information search behaviour of the millennial generation. Information Research, 17(1), paper 508. Retrieved from http://informationr.net/ir/17-1/paper508.html Objective – To identify how millennial generation students proceed through the information search process and select resources on the web; to determine whether students evaluate the quality of web resources and how they use general information websites. Design – Longitudinal study. Setting – University in the United States. Subjects – 80 undergraduate students of the millennial generation enrolled in a business course. Methods – The students were required to complete a research report with a bibliography in five weeks. They also had to turn in interim assignments during that period (including an abstract, an outline, and rough draft). Their search behaviour was monitored using a modified Yahoo search engine that allowed subjects to search, and then to fill out surveys integrated directly below their search results. The students were asked to indicate the relevance of the resources they found on the open web, to identify the criteria they used to evaluate relevance, and to specify the stage they were at in the search process. They could choose from five stages defined by the author, based on Wilson (1999): initiation, exploration, differentiation, extracting, and verifying. Data were collected using anonymous user IDs and included URLs for sources selected along with subject answers until completion of all assignments. The students provided 758 distinct web page evaluations. Main Results – Students did not progress in orderly fashion through the search process, but rather proceeded erratically. A substantial number reported being in fewer than four of the five search stages. Only a small percentage ever declared being in the final stage of verifying previously gathered information, and during preparation of the final report a majority still declared being in the extracting stage. In fact, participants selected documents (extracting stage) throughout the process. In addition, students were not much concerned with the quality, validity, or authority of their sources, reporting that the main criteria they used to evaluate a web resource were its understandability, the amount of information in the source, its accuracy, and its recency. During the last stage of the assignment the main criteria were understandability and the amount of information. Finally, students used general information websites like Wikipedia throughout the process, but especially while preparing the final report. Conclusion – The search behaviour of millennial students does not conform to existing search models. The models are appropriate but the execution of these models by students is problematic. Students gathered documents, including general websites like Wikipedia, through all stages of the assignment, including the preparation of the final report. They are likely to procrastinate and do some backfilling. Furthermore they show little concern for the validity of sources: very few verified their sources and quality of the information gathered was not a priority for them. Those findings point to a problem of perception rather than a lack of information search skills: millennial students know how to search and filter, but they do not believe that there is an objective standard to evaluate information and they have a non-critical view of information. More research about the causes of such perception should help us identify effective strategies to help students improve their searches.

The objective of this study was to analyze the evolution of the entrepreneurial characteristics parting from Kuratko and Hodgetts (1995) studies over these characteristics, from 1848 to 1982, seeking to respond to questions about how they evolved over time? which characteristics remained? which disappeared? and which emerged? To this end, a bibliographic and bibliometric research from 1983 to 2014 was carried, complementing, amplifying and comparing the findings of the original research. The bibliographic survey was made based on the keywords Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Characteristics, Entrepreneurial Attitudes and Entrepreneur Profile, and from the selection of articles published in the highest rated national journals according to the Qualis system, composed by Revista de Administração de Empresas - RAE, the Revista de Administração Contemporânea – RAC, the scientific events ENANPAD and EGEPE, and the EBSCO data base in order to access international scientific journals, namely: Applied Financial Economics; Applied Economics Letters; Management Research Review; Journal of Product Innovation Management; European Management Journal; Service Industries Journal; International Journal of Entrepreneurship Innovation Management; Entrepreneurship: Theory Practice; Journal of International Entrepreneurship; Management Decision; International Small Business Journal. This study characterized as bibliometrics, reviewed 288 articles published by 341 authors and points on their results to a lot more relational entrepreneurial profile, based on interpersonal and social skills and focused more on the demands of the external environment than on the self-centered, sovereign, autonomous and independent entrepreneur profile of the first phase of the twentieth century.

Today, the coronavirus infection COVID-2019 deals a devastating blow to the economies of most countries due to disruption of production chains, the bankruptcy of small and medium-sized businesses, increasing the number of unemployed, and more. Under these conditions, the coverage of digitalization of all sectors of the economy and basic spheres of life of citizens becomes especially important. The article is devoted to the analysis of the possibilities of the latest blockchain technologies, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things in view of their impact on the transformation of the business process management system. The study used methods of bibliographic analysis of scientific publications and analytical reports of international organizations related to the concept of “Industry 4.0” and diseases of coronavirus infection, analyzing from the audit point of view, how to reinforce the principles of transparency, responsibility, and participation. It has been proven that blockchain technology is able to service online payments without intermediaries, receipt, and transfer of digital assets, as well as political elections and voting. Artificial intelligence models can help map, manage, predict, and model complex processes, reducing uncertainty, and supporting professionals in decision-making. The Internet of Things allows you to transfer information, improve control and automation, and provide opportunities to optimize the company’s operating costs. The result of the study can be practically valuable for many stakeholders: auditors – conducting audits by artificial intelligence; public administration – developing measures to address the economic, social and political crisis triggered by the pandemic, by building trust between government and citizens through communication, and by ensuring transparency and accountability. Keywords: blockchain, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, COVID-19, health care crisis, economic crisis, political crisis, control, public administration, financial management.

The amount increasing of produced information raises the issue of its effective perception and assimilation and increases attention to graphic information products as effective communication tools, including, in particular, comic books, and library practices built around comics. The article is devoted to the disclosure of modern domestic library experience in activities related to the comics use, outlining the system of service formed around comics in the libraries of Ukraine. Based on the study of funds and official websites of domestic libraries, professional publications, media materials, and the use of a set of research methods – especially bibliographic and heuristic search methods, analysis of content – it was found out that comic books are presented in the funds of domestic libraries of different levels and types: from large national-level institutions to small district book collections. The beginning of the comics history in the libraries of Ukraine dates back to the 20-the 30s of the twentieth century and today we can already talk about the formation of a comprehensive innovative library service around comics as an information product, the main components of which are the organization of educational events dedicated to comics, informing about the receipt of comics in the library, organizing exhibitions of comics, compiling lists and preparing bibliographic indexes and organization of meetings with authors and publishers of comics, workshops, and competitions. It has been found that comics as an information product is not only the subject of work of domestic librarians but also an effective tool for solving educational, social, and internal narrow professional tasks to promote the library profession and library business by them.

Resumo: Este trabalho tem como objetivo estudar um modelo de negócio social no mercado de cálculo estrutural para residências unifamiliares das classes C, D e E, cujo mercado é majoritariamente marcado pela autoconstrução. Para isso, foi realizado um estudo de caso em uma residência unifamiliar da classe C, por meio do software de dimensionamento estrutural Cypecad. Desse modo, será possível verificar as vantagens que o cálculo estrutural traz para as obras de pequeno porte qualitativamente e quantitativamente. Pretende-se demonstrar com este estudo como é possível ajudar pessoas das classes sociais menos favorecidas a construírem moradias mais seguras, confortáveis e econômicas ao mesmo tempo em que se cria uma oportunidade para engenheiros civis empreenderem. A metodologia utilizada foi a pesquisa bibliográfica em empreendedorismo e cálculo estrutural e um estudo de caso. O resultado demonstrou que, quando se trata de um negócio social na área da construção civil, existem muitas vantagens técnicas garantidas pelo projeto estrutural e que quando a obra é a realizada com o apoio de um projeto, é possível gerar economia e mais segurança nas obras de pequeno porte realizadas pelas classes C, D e E.Palavras-chave: Engenharia Civil. Cálculo estrutural. Empreendedorismo social. Negócios sociais.Abstract: This paper aims to study a social business model in the structural calculation market for classes C, D and E single-family housing, whose market is mostly marked by self-construction. For this, the work carried out a case study in a class C single-family housing, via the structural design software Cypecad. It will be possible to verify the qualitatively and quantitatively advantages that the structural calculation brings to the small sized constructions. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how it is possible to help people from lower social classes to build safer, more comfortable and economical houses and at the same time being an opportunity for civil engineers to undertake. The chosen methodology was bibliographic research in entrepreneurship and structural calculation and a case study. The result showed that when it comes to a social business in the area of civil construction, there are many technical advantages guaranteed by the structural project and that when the work is carried out with the support of a project it is possible to generate savings and more safety in classes C, D and E small sized constructions.Keywords: Civil engineering. Structural calculus. Entrepreneurship. Social business.

Open innovation, understood as a strategy for business competitiveness, has experienced growing relevance, even in traditional economic sectors, such as agri-food. This article focuses on the trends and challenges of open innovation applied to the agri-food field, based on two approaches, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and a structured survey, answered mainly by micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). For the SLR, the Scopus bibliographic database was chosen. Documents were filtered by type, novelty, and impact factor of the journal (based on the Scimago Rank). The final selection included 50 articles that were deeply analyzed. In addition, the survey was applied to 57 agri-food companies from the department of Nariño (Colombia), establishing a diagnosis of the extent of openness of their collaborative barriers and innovation capacities. The review’s results revealed a marked European dominance in this research field. Product co-creation, eco-innovation, and bioeconomy are main fields of interest and application of open innovation. The challenges identified are related to intellectual property rights and effective communication between stakeholders. The survey was successful in establishing a statistically significant correlation between innovation performance and collaboration with external partners. As a conclusion, an open innovation approach can provide dynamism and cohesion in agri-food systems.

Preserving the historical-cultural heritage is an actual problem of fundamental scientific research. A special place in this heritage is the book culture including libraries - state, public, private, personal ones. Book collections of scientists refer to the special section of libraries. A holistic view of the outstanding researcher book collections allows complementing and enriching ideas about the researcher creative laboratory, as well as providing additional materials on the history of science, book culture and, even widly, the history of Russia. The article is devoted to the collection of books from the library of a Russian physicist-chemist, Professor of the Physical Faculty of Moscow State University, Doctor of Chemical Sciences, V. K. Semenchenko, who is a major specialist in chemistry of thermodynamics, theory of electrolyte solutions, surface tension. This study is research continuation carried on in the Central Scientific Library of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (CSL UB RAS) to investigate scientific and cultural heritage of the Urals and Russi. The research methodological basis is modern concepts of the history of book business in a broad socio-cultural perspective using the following techniques: bibliographic, functional, analytical-thematic, paleographic, systematic, bio-bibliographic and others. The small collection of V. K. Semenchenko’s books (100 units) entered the collection of CSL UB RAS in 1993 under the mediation of Academician Vladimir Pavlovich Skripov, Director of the Institute of Thermophysics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was a former student and postgraduate of V. K. Semenchenko. The composition of the book collection is represented in the chart. There are many works of famous scholars, Rus- sian and Soviet classics of science of the XX century (books included in Digital Library «Russian Scientific Heritage») in V. K. Semenchenko’s collection. 42 volumes of the library have autographs of their owner V. K. Semenchenko. The books have inscriptions of authors, friends and relatives addressed to V. K. Semenchenko. The book collection uniqueness is evident due to book «Theory of atom» by of V. K. Semenchenko presented to the library by the researcher’s daughter. The book page-proofs (layout) were done in 1941. This book remained in a single copy. Many books and authors of V. K. Semenchenko’s books collection are of interest in terms of studying the history of the world science development. Thus, studying the book collection of a physicists contributes to investigating the acquisition history and stocks composition of CSL UB RAS, book culture, Russian and world science, and, in general, into the country historical and cultural heritage preservation.

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), generally, have been known as the tools that allow firms to capture, process, store and transfer information. But also, ICTs are acknowledged as a valuable tool in the knowledge management process. Many research works related to SME have defined ICTs as one of the critical factors when implementing knowledge management. The process for managing knowledge can be grouped into three stages: knowledge acquisition, storing and sharing. The knowledge process starts when a necessity triggers the interest to acquire new knowledge. In this process, knowledge sharing has become an important variable in enterprises; however, the workplace cannot be considered the best context to make employees’ knowledge flow. Nevertheless, in practice, knowledge sharing proves to be a significant barrier for effective development of this mentioned process. And due to the existence of this barrier, it has become very important to analyse the influence of the ICTs in the last decade and they evolution towards filling up that gap. The bibliographic review in this paper illustrates that some of the existing ICTs, such as Web 2.0, are perfect matches to knowledge management. Web 2.0 focuses on people and can help us find a solution in order to improve the knowledge sharing. Fur thermore, these tools are inexpensive to acquire and operate, so they adapt better to the requirements of small enterprises in what refers to their resource scarcity. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are an essential part of economy, and due to this, they are important in employment creation. Besides, the characteristics of SMEs are different from large business, and that is why the ICT theories developed for larger enterprises may not be suitable for SMEs. In addition, it can be confirmed that not many research works focused on SMEs have been conducted in the field of knowledge management. Therefore, with the aim of confirming a significant presence of ICTs in the Basque enterprises, this research study analyzes what is the current availability of technological tools for Basque Country SMEs. More specifically, we research the use of Web 2.0, in order to evaluate whether the Basque SMEs give importance to knowledge sharing process and what activity sector and size of SME, grouping the results by number of employees.Keywords: Knowledge management, knowledge sharing, ICT, Web 2.0, SME.La Web 2.0 como herramienta clave para compartir conocimiento en las Pymes del País VascoResumen: Un análisis bibliográfico basado en la evolución de las TICs nos ha permitido descubrir el desarrollo de herramientas, como la Web 2.0, cuyos principios son similares a los de la gestión del conocimiento y son consideradas como facilitadoras para la compartición del conocimiento entre las personas. Por ello, este artículo tiene como objetivo conocer cuál es la actual situación del uso de las TICs para la gestión del conocimiento en las pymes del País Vasco. Además, con el fin de conocer el grado de importancia que otorgan estas pymes a la compartición de conocimiento, se analiza el uso de las herramientas Web 2.0 según el sector de actividad y el número de empleados de la pyme vasca.Palabras clave: gestión del conocimiento, compartición del conocimiento, TIC, Web 2.0, PYME.

RESUMO A humanidade enfrenta uma nova pandemia causada pelo Coronavírus ,o governo se ver obrigado a tomar diversas medidas protetivas a longo prazo com a finalidade de diminuir o contágio, o regime de quarentena foi aplicado para controlar a população em suas residências. Diante do exposto, o objetivo desse artigo é analisar as estratégias econômicas adotadas pelos empresários brasileiros até a retomada da abertura do comércio e circulação de pessoas pelo país. O presente artigo é uma pesquisa bibliográfica, está organizada em três capítulos e é de natureza qualitativa, baseando-se em documental e coleta de dados secundários. A economia brasileira gradativamente vinha melhorando em seus indicadores econômicos e sociais, porém longe de ter estrutura capaz de suportar um impacto tão grande como é o caso do isolamento social vivenciado do pelos brasileiros. Esse novo cenário econômico mostra o processo sobre as estratégias mais eficientes, as quais atuam envolvendo inovação, desenvolvimento e maior canal de vendas eficientes, isso impulsiona um ciclo que segura os consumidores tenham um fluxo financeiro que garanta continuarem atuando até o período pós-pandemia do Covid-19. Conclui-se que após pandemia é esperado que os veículos de comercialização se consolidem e assim os pequenos empresários possam ter acesso a grandes mercados e a obtenção de novos clientes. O uso das estratégias como e-marketplace e omnichannel vem colaborar com a notoriedade ao conceito de negócio, acelerando o retorno do crescimento econômico brasileiro e todos têm a ganhar com isso. ABSTRACT Humanity faces a new caused by the Coronavirus, the government is forced to take several long-term protective measures in pandemic order to reduce contagion, the quarantine regime was applied to control the population in their homes. Given the above, the objective of this article is to analyze the economic strategies adopted by Brazilian business people until the resumption of the opening of trade and circulation of people across the country. This article is a bibliographic research, organized in three chapters and is of a qualitative nature, based on documentary and secondary data collection. The Brazilian economy was gradually improving in its economic and social indicators, but far from having a structure capable of withstanding such an impact as is the case of the social isolation experienced by Brazilians. This new economic scenario shows the process on the most efficient strategies, which work involving innovation, development and a greater efficient sales channel, this drives a cycle that ensures consumers have a financial flow that ensures they continue to act until the post-pandemic period of the Covid-19. It is concluded that after the pandemic, the commercial vehicles are expected to consolidate and thus small entrepreneurs can have access to large markets and obtain new customers. The use of strategies such as e-marketplace and omnichannel contributes to the notoriety of the business concept, accelerating the return of Brazilian economic growth and everyone has to gain from it.

This article briefly diagnoses the rapid growth of the production of soya in Argentina over the last twelve years, taking into account the geographic areas of expansion, as well as the social, economic, environmental and political consequences, and placing this phenomenon in the broader international context. Official statistics, bibliographic sources, and news reporting have been used in preparing the article. Also field work in rural areas has been conducted, including participation in several social events along with interviews with key informants. In Argentina, the nineties were synonymous with privatization, the regressive redistribution of wealth, the concentration of economic and political power, the demise of the railway network, external indebtedness, impoverishment, unemployment, de-industrialization and re-primarization of the economy, among many others plagues. Regarding the latter, the return to the primary economy includes more agriculture than livestock in rural production, with a 50% of the cultivated area occupied by soya crops. The critical point for the consolidation of the fast expansion of soya in the country was the 1996/97 campaign. During this campaign, the first transgenic soya seeds tolerant to glyphosate were released, along with the spread of direct sowing. The remarkable expansion of the area under cultivation made Argentina the third biggest world producer of grains after the U.S. and Brazil, and the world's leading exporter of soy oil. Uncontrolled expansion of soya crops has generated huge profits for transnational business and even for medium and small farmers, as well as those with interests in financial speculation ( seed pools). At the same time, it has increased unemployment and an exodus to the cities, where the declining industrial sector cannot absorb the surplus rural population. Besides, it has produced soil deterioration, watershed damage, destruction of fauna and large forests, and so on. Furthermore, the shift to soya production by many rural enterprises has resulted in a dramatic reduction of the production of food stuffs to meet domestic needs. In March this year the government announced an increase in export taxes, affecting principally soya exports. The interest groups affected complained and launched a strike, including blocking of highways and disrupting the normal supply of the domestic market (this resulting in food stuff shortages in the cities and increasing speculation about drastic economic instability). Rural institutions representing diverse actors that formerly had conflicting interests, united to launch this strike, which has deeply affected public confidence in the government. The conflict expressed rural entrepreneurs’ interests rather than the needs of rural workers, and it has worsened the economic and political stability characterizing the country in the years following the 2001–2002 crisis. Debate on this issue filled the front pages of the newspapers for many months, but it never dealt with issues of the working conditions of rural labor, the need for the production of food to alleviate hunger, solutions to the problem of unemployment, or the future of the soils and destruction of wildlife. Rather, with the large majority of media supporting rural institutions’ interests, the logic that prevailed was that of the right to property. In face of this, a small segment of the society endorses the need to socialize the means of production to achieve food sovereignty, to improve living conditions for workers, and secure the proper management of natural resources. Only these people raised the issue of socialization of the means of production as the only way to oppose not only the expansion of soya crops, but also capital which, as asserted by Marx, strikes at the same time against earth and humans, which in the end are the real bases of production.

<p>La auditoría un tema abordado y aplicado en las Empresas Públicas y Privadas, grandes o pequeñas reguladas y no por órganos de control en la República del Ecuador. Las Pequeñas y Mediana Empresas (PyMEs) al no ser obligadas, no aplican, porque un gran porcentaje de ellas son empresas personales, familiares o societarias, no cuentan con una estructura organizacional, contable y procedimientos adecuados de control financiero y administrativo. La investigación tiene el objetivo de identificar cuáles son los factores que determinan la aplicación de la auditoría en las MyPEs a partir de la determinación de la demanda voluntaria de una auditoría. Se usa el método descriptivo, analítico y estadístico, a través de la revisión bibliográfica y la regresión lineal binaria a datos de la última Encuesta Nacional a Empresas con sus establecimientos y Microempresa. Se demuestra que H1. La aplicación de una auditoría financiera y de gestión, está medida por la obligatoriedad de llevar contabilidad y viene asociada a la naturaleza jurídica y al costo del servicio de una auditoría; y, H2. Si la auditoría no es obligatoria entonces es necesario que las instituciones reguladoras y la universidad jueguen el papel motivador. Se concluye, que existe la probabilidad de contratación de servicios de auditoría voluntariamente porque ayuda al logro de los objetivos y sirve como un elemento importante para el administrador en la toma de decisiones y tener la certeza de la situación financiera y la realidad del negocio, basados en las conclusiones y recomendaciones del informe de auditoría con base en los hallazgos y juicios de valor que emite el profesional auditor.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Descriptores claves:</strong> <em>Control interno, gestión, hallazgos, juicios de valor, medidas correctivas</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p align="center"><strong>ABSTRAC</strong></p><p>The audit is an issue addressed and applied in Public and Private Enterprises, large or small regulated and not by control bodies in the Republic of Ecuador. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are not obliged, do not apply, because a large percentage of them are personal, family or corporate companies, do not have an organizational structure, accounting and adequate procedures for financial and administrative control. The objective of the research is to identify the factors that determine the application of the audit in the MSEs from the determination of the voluntary demand for an audit. The descriptive, analytical and statistical method is used, through the bibliographic review and the binary linear regression to data of the last National Survey to Companies with their establishments and Microenterprise. It is shown that H1. The application of a financial and management audit is measured by the obligation to keep accounting and is associated with the legal nature and cost of the service of an audit; Y, H2. If the audit is not mandatory then it is necessary that the regulatory institutions and the university play the motivating role. It is concluded that there is a probability of hiring audit services voluntarily because it helps the achievement of the objectives and serves as an important element for the manager in making decisions and having the certainty of the financial situation and the reality of the business based In the conclusions and recommendations of the audit report based on the findings and value judgments issued by the auditor.</p><p> </p><p><strong><em>Keywords:</em></strong><em> internal control, management, findings, value judgments, corrective measures</em></p>

Shane Hamilton of University of Georgia reviews “The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America” by Marc Levinson. The EconLit abstract of the reviewed work begins: Explores the history of the A&P grocery chain and considers its influence in the modernization of the consumer economy. Discusses the verdict; the founder; the birth of the Great A&P; the grocer; the death of George F. Gilman; gearing for battle; the economy store; the chain-store problem; wrong turns; the profit machine; minute men and tax men; the supermarket; Franklin Roosevelt; Wright Patman; the fixer; friends; defying death; the fourth revolution; the trustbuster; Mom and Pop's last stand; the fall; and the legacy. Bibliography; index.

According to (Sebrae-Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service), in 2018, micro and small companies accounted for 52% of employment positions, and correspond to 99% of existing companies in Brazil. However, even with this representativeness 58% of these companies manage to exceed five years of existence. It is estimated that this high percentage of mortality of organizations is related to the lack of planning and adoption to the basic principles of administration. This article aims to conduct a reflection, using the methodology of bibliographic review, on the importance of marketing for these organizations, as well as the need for entrepreneurs to adopt a strategic posture through marketing possibilities, especially in relation to Digital Marketing, thus ensuring the sustainability of the organization.

PurposeThe field of scientific research on small and medium-sized family businesses has been growing exponentially and the aim of this paper is to systematize the body of knowledge to develop an agenda for the future.Design/methodology/approachAdopting comparative bibliometric analyses on 155 articles (from 1989 until 2018) the authors provide a systematic assessment of the scientific research about small family firms, unveiling the structure and evolution of the field. Bibliographic coupling, co-citation analysis and co-occurrence analysis are adopted to identify the most influential studies and themes.FindingsFour clusters of research are reviewed: succession in family SMEs, performances of family SMEs, internationalization of family SMEs and organizational culture of family SMEs.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the field of family SMEs by providing a systematic analysis of the scientific knowledge. Reviewing those clusters allows to providing avenues and reflections for future research and further practice.

Faced with a new business scenario, organizations need to share the understanding between technological development and socio-environmental responsibility, since IT ally’s sustainability and seeks community interaction with organizations, acting in an ecologically responsible manner. In this context, green IT helps to reduce the environmental problems caused by the disposal of technological equipment and incorrect use of technology. The methodology is a case study with bibliographic research, direct observation and quantitative research. The company studied has a high energy consumption due to the misuse of computer equipment and therefore, with the applicability of Green IT is possible to visualize and measure the benefits for the company, including not only the reduction of energy costs, but a sustainable education that favors the company and society as a whole. The results showed savings in monthly energy costs, while the reuse of paper reduces 50% of total paper consumption for document printing. So, it's noticeable that with the implementation of Green IT practices, even if implemented in a small business, if done in the long term, the benefits will be even greater and noticeable to the corporation and society.

Objective: to verify and characterize the use of formal and non-formal methods to protect intellectual property by incubated companies that operate in the health sector. Methodology/approach: bibliographic research, research with primary sources, and comparative study of the interaction of organizations with the environment. The incubated companies' primary source information was obtained through face-to-face interviews in field research carried out at the Celta incubator, in Florianópolis/SC, Brazil. Main results: there was an intense use of non-formal methods by the companies studied. The literature adequately predicted non-formal methods adopted by companies. It was also identified that regularity in certifications with Anvisa – Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency, constitutes an important complementary asset for the appropriation of intellectual property (Teece, 1986) for the companies studied. Theoretical/methodological contributions: identification of the use of non-formal methods by companies and their composition of use with formal methods contributes to the advancement of literature and business practice. Relevance/originality: this study emphasized research on the use of non-formal methods to protect intellectual property by incubated companies, a topic little explored in the literature. Social and practical contribution: the use of non-formal methods is of particular interest to small and medium-sized companies because their implementation is under the company's control and, also, because they circumvent the time and costs incurred in the formal registration. It is recommended to expand the understanding concerning the role of complementary assets (Teece, 1986) for technology-based companies.

La presente investigación tuvo como objetivo, analizar el régimen de facturación ecuatoriano, esencialmente el uso de los comprobantes de venta en las transacciones de los contribuyentes y como se relaciona con las tipologías de evasión tributaria o fiscal que hacen que el contribuyente pague menos impuestos al incluir gastos inexistentes u omisión de ingresos en las declaraciones, perjudicando al Estado ya que reciba menos recursos y realice mayores controles, se estudia el avance tecnológico en el régimen de facturación impulsado por la Administración Tributaria resaltando las mejoras y analizando las falencia que aportan a las variables. Además se estudia la normativa tributaria vigente que se relacionan con el tema y su constante evolución desde el 2008 año en el cual el sistema tributario incluye mecanismos para evitar la evasión fiscal y la defraudación tributaria como un delito, se hace además un análisis del proyecto de control emblemático de empresas fantasmas y los resultados obtenidos por el SRI en donde se evidencia la importancia de las variables de estudio, su aplicación práctica y la incidencia en la recaudación tributaria, el enfoque de la investigación es cualitativa y cuantitativa ya que se analiza por qué los contribuyente evaden sus impuestos y los datos estadístico obtenidos de la información disponible y solicitada al SRI, utilizando una investigación de campo al realizar entrevistas a funcionarios del SRI de los departamentos de control tributario que son las personas que detectan el mal uso de comprobantes de venta e investigación bibliográfica revisando leyes y estudios relacionados a la presente investigación, estableciendo sectores de mayor riesgo de evasión e identificando las causas principales del problema de estudio como son: el desconocimiento del sistema tributario, asesoramiento que reciben los ciudadanos para disminuir el pago de sus impuestos e incluso la dificultad de cumplir las obligaciones tributarias puesto que el sistema es complejo. The objective of this research was to analyze the Ecuadorian billing system, essentially the use of sales receipts in the taxpayers’ transactions and how it relates to tax evasion or tax evasion typologies that cause the taxpayer to pay less taxes when including non-existent expenses or omission of income in the declarations, harming the State and receiving less resources and carrying out greater controls, technological progress is studied in the billing regime promoted by the Tax Administration highlighting the improvements and analyzing the failures they bring to the variables. In addition, the current tax regulations related to the subject and its constant evolution since 2008 are studied, in which the tax system includes mechanisms to avoid tax evasion and tax fraud as a crime, and an analysis of the project is made. emblematic control of ghost companies and the results obtained by the SRI in which the importance of the study variables, their practical application and the incidence on tax collection are evidenced, the research focus is qualitative and quantitative since it is analyzed why the taxpayers evade their taxes and the statistical data obtained from the information available and requested from the SRI, using a field investigation when conducting interviews with SRI officials from the tax control departments who are the people who detect the misuse of sales receipts and bibliographic research reviewing laws and related studies This study is based on establishing sectors at greater risk of evasion and identifying the main causes of the study problem, such as: ignorance of the tax system, advice received by citizens to reduce their tax payments, and even the difficulty of complying with the tax obligations since the system is complex. Palabras claves: Facturación, evasión fiscal, empresas fantasmas, procesos de control, defraudación tributaria. Keywords: Invoicing, tax evasion, ghost companies, control processes, tax defraud.

Consumer or home use (previously ‘amateur’) moving image formats are distinguished from professional (still known as ‘professional’) ones by relative affordability, ubiquity and simplicity of use. Since Pathé Frères released its Pathé Baby camera, projector and 9.5mm film gauge in 1922, a distinct line of viewing and making equipment has been successfully marketed at nonprofessional use, especially in the home. ‘Amateur film’ is a simple term for a complex, variegated and longstanding set of activities. Conceptually it is bounded only by the negative definition of nonprofessional (usually intended as sub-professional), and the positive definition of being for the love of the activity and motivated by personal passion alone. This defines a field broad enough that two major historians of US amateur film, Patricia R. Zimmermann and Alan D. Kattelle, write about different subjects. Zimmermann focuses chiefly on domestic use and ‘how-to’ literature, while Kattelle unearths the collective practices and institutional structure of the Amateur Ciné Clubs and the Amateur Ciné League (Zimmerman, Reel Families, Professional; Kattelle, Home Movies, Amateur Ciné). Marion Norris Gleason, a test subject in Eastman Kodak’s development of 16mm and advocate of amateur film, defined it as having three parts, the home movie, “the photoplay produced by organised groups”, and the experimental film (Swanson 132). This view was current at least until the 1960s, when domestic documentation, Amateur Ciné clubs and experimental filmmakers shared the same film gauges and space in the same amateur film magazines, but paths have diverged somewhat since then. Domestic documentation remains committed to the moving image technology du jour, the Amateur Ciné movement is much reduced, and experimental film has developed a separate identity, its own institutional structure, and won some legitimacy in the art world. The trajectory of Super 8, a late-coming gauge to amateur film, has been defined precisely by this disintegration. Obsolescence was manufactured far more slowly during the long reign of amateur film gauges, allowing 9.5mm (1922-66), 16mm (1923-), 8mm (1932-), and Super 8 (1965-) to engage in protracted format wars significantly longer than the life spans of their analogue and digital video successors. The range of options available to nonprofessional makers – the quality but relative expense of 16mm, the near 16mm frame size of 9.5mm, the superior stability of 8mm compared to 9.5mm and Super 8, the size of Super 8’s picture relative to 8mm’s – are not surprising in the context of general competition for a diverse popular market on the usual basis of price, quality, and novelty. However, since analogue video’s ascent the amateur film gauges have all comprehensibly lost the battle for the home use market. This was by far the largest section of amateur film and the manufacturers’ overt target segment, so the amateur film gauges’ contemporary survival and significance is as something else. Though all the gauges from 8mm to 16mm remain available today to the curious and enthusiastic, Super 8’s afterlife is distinguished by the peculiar combination of having been a tremendously popular substandard to the substandard (ie, to 16mm, the standardised film gauge directly below 35mm in both price and quality), and now being prized for its technological excellence. When the large scale consumption that had supported Super 8’s manufacture dropped away, it revealed the set of much smaller, apparently non-transferable uses that would determine whether and as what Super 8 survived. Consequently, though Super 8 has been superseded many times over as a home movie format, it is not obsolete today as an art medium, a professional format used in the commercial industry, or as an alternative to digital video and 16mm for low budget independent production. In other words, everything it was never intended to be. I lately witnessed an occasion of the kind of high-fetishism for film-versus-video and analogue-versus-digital that the experimental moving image world is justifiably famed for. Discussion around the screening of Peter Tscherkassky’s films at the Xperimenta ‘09 festival raised the specifics and availability of the technology he relies on, both because of the peculiarity of his production method – found-footage collaging onto black and white 35mm stock via handheld light pen – and the issue of projection. Has digital technology supplied an alternative workflow? Would 35mm stock to work on (and prints to pillage) continue to be available? Is the availability of 35mm projectors in major venues holding up? Although this insider view of 35mm’s waning market share was more a performance of technological cultural politics than an analysis of it, it raised a series of issues central to any such analysis. Each film format is a gestalt item, consisting of four parts (that an individual might own): film stock, camera, projector and editor. Along with the availability of processing services, these items comprise a gauge’s viability (not withstanding the existence of camera-less and unedited workflows, and numerous folk developing methods). All these are needed to conjure the geist of the machine at full strength. More importantly, the discussion highlights what happens when such a technology collides with idiosyncratic and unintended use, which happens only because it is manufactured on a much wider scale than eccentric use alone can support. Although nostalgia often plays a role in the advocacy of obsolete technology, its role here should be carefully qualified and not overstated. If it plays a role in the three main economies that support contemporary Super 8, it need not be the same role. Further, even though it is now chiefly the same specialist shops and technicians that supply and service 9.5mm, 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm, they are not sold on the same scale nor to the same purpose. There has been no reported Renaissances of 9.5mm or 8mm, though, as long term home movie formats, they must loom large in the memories of many, and their particular look evokes pastness as surely as any two-colour process. There are some specifics to the trajectory of Super 8 as a non-amateur format that cannot simply be subsumed to general nostalgia or dead technology fetishism. Super 8 as an Art Medium Super 8 has a longer history as an art medium than as a pro-tool or low budget substandard. One key aspect in the invention and supply of amateur film was that it not be an adequate substitute for the professional technology used to populate the media sphere proper. Thus the price of access to motion picture making through amateur gauges has been a marginalisation of the outcome for format reasons alone (Zimmermann, Professional 24; Reekie 110) Eastman Kodak established their 16mm as the acceptable substandard for many non-theatrical uses of film in the 1920s, Pathé’s earlier 28mm having already had some success in this area (Mebold and Tepperman 137, 148-9). But 16mm was still relatively expensive for the home market, and when Kiyooka Eiichi filmed his drive across the US in 1927, his 16mm camera alone cost more than his car (Ruoff 240, 243). Against this, 9.5mm, 8mm and eventually Super 8 were the increasingly affordable substandards to the substandard, marginalised twice over in the commercial world, but far more popular in the consumer market. The 1960s underground film, and the modern artists’ film that was partly recuperated from it, was overwhelmingly based on 16mm, as the collections of its chief distributors, the New York Film-Makers’ Co-op, Canyon Cinema and the Lux clearly show. In the context of experimental film’s longstanding commitment to 16mm, an artist filmmaker’s choice to work with Super 8 had important resonances. Experimental work on 8mm and Super 8 is not hard to come by, even from the 1960s, but consider the cultural stakes of Jonas Mekas’s description of 8mm films as “beautiful folk art, like song and lyric poetry, that was created by the people” (Mekas 83). The evocation of ‘folk art’ signals a yawning gap between 8mm, whose richness has been produced collectively by a large and anonymous group, and the work produced by individual artists such as those (like Mekas himself) who founded the New American Cinema Group. The resonance for artists of the 1960s and 1970s who worked with 8mm and Super 8 was from their status as the premier vulgar film gauge, compounding-through-repetition their choice to work with film at all. By the time Super 8 was declared ‘dead’ in 1980, numerous works by canonical artists had been made in the format (Stan Brakhage, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall), and various practices had evolved around the specific possibilities of this emulsion and that camera. The camcorder not only displaced Super 8 as the simplest to use, most ubiquitous and cheapest moving image format, at the same time it changed the hierarchy of moving image formats because Super 8 was now incontestably better than something. Further, beyond the ubiquity, simplicity and size, camcorder video and Super 8 film had little in common. Camcorder replay took advantage of the ubiquity of television, but to this day video projection remains a relatively expensive business and for some time after 1980 the projectors were rare and of undistinguished quality. Until the more recent emergence of large format television (also relatively expensive), projection was necessary to screen to anything beyond very small audience. So, considering the gestalt aspect of these technologies and their functions, camcorders could replace Super 8 only for the capture of home movies and small-scale domestic replay. Super 8 maintained its position as the cheapest way into filmmaking for at least 20 years after its ‘death’, but lost its position as the premier ‘folk’ moving image format. It remained a key format for experimental film through the 1990s, but with constant competition from evolving analogue and digital video, and improved and more affordable video projection, its market share diminished. Kodak has continued to assert the viability of its film stocks and gauges, but across 2005-06 it deleted its Kodachrome Super 8, 16mm and slide range (Kodak, Kodachrome). This became a newsworthy Super 8 story (see Morgan; NYT; Hodgkinson; Radio 4) because Super 8 was the first deletion announced, this was very close to 8 May 2005, which was Global Super 8 Day, Kodachrome 40 (K40) was Super 8’s most famous and still used stock, and because 2005 was Super 8’s 40th birthday. Kodachome was then the most long-lived colour process still available, but there were only two labs left in the world which could supply processing- Kodak’s Lausanne Kodachrome lab in Switzerland, using the authentic company method, and Dwayne’s Photo in the US, using a tolerable but substandard process (Hodgkinson). Kodak launched a replacement stock simultaneously, and indeed the variety of Super 8 stocks is increasing year to year, partly because of new Kodak releases and partly because other companies split Kodak’s 16mm and 35mm stock for use as Super 8 (Allen; Muldowney; Pro8mm; Dager). Nonetheless, the cancelling of K40 convulsed the artists’ film community, and a spirited defence of its unique and excellent properties was lead by artist and activist Pip Chodorov. Chodorov met with a Kodak executive at the Cannes Film Festival, appealed to the French Government and started an online petition. His campaign circular read: EXPLAIN THE ADVANTAGES OF K40We have to show why we care specifically about Kodachrome and why Ektachrome is not a replacement. Kodachrome […] whose fine grain and warm colors […] are often used as a benchmark of quality for other stocks. The unique qualities of the Kodachrome image should be pointed out, and especially the differences between Kodachrome and Ektachrome […]. What great films were shot in Kodachrome, and why? […] What are the advantages to the K-14 process and the Lausanne laboratory? Is K40 a more stable stock, is it more preservable, do the colors fade resistant? Point out differences in the sensitometry curves, the grain structure... There was a rash of protest screenings, including a special all-day programme at Le Festival des Cinemas Différents de Paris, about which Raphaël Bassan wrote This initiative was justified, Kodak having announced in 2005 that it was going to stop the manufacturing of the ultra-sensitive film Kodachrome 40, which allowed such recognized artists as Gérard Courant, Joseph Morder, Stéphane Marti and a whole new generation of filmmakers to express themselves through this supple and inexpensive format with such a particular texture. (Bassan) The distance Super 8 has travelled culturally since analogue video can be seen in the distance between these statements of excellence and the attributes of Super 8 and 8mm that appealed to earlier artists: The great thing about Super 8 is that you can switch is onto automatic and get beyond all those technicalities” (Jarman)An 8mm camera is the ballpoint of the visual world. Soon […] people will use camera-pens as casually as they jot memos today […] and the narrow gauge can make finished works of art. (Durgnat 30) Far from the traits that defined it as an amateur gauge, Super 8 is now lionised in terms more resembling a chemistry historian’s eulogy to the pigments used in Dark Ages illuminated manuscripts. From bic to laspis lazuli. Indie and Pro Super 8 Historian of the US amateur film Patricia R. Zimmermann has charted the long collision between small gauge film, domesticity and the various ‘how-to’ publications designed to bridge the gap. In this she pays particular attention to the ‘how-to’ publications’ drive to assert the commercial feature film as the only model worthy of emulation (Professional 267; Reel xii). This drive continues today in numerous magazines and books addressing the consumer and pro-sumer levels. Alan D. Kattelle has charted a different history of the US amateur film, concentrating on the cine clubs and their national organisation, the Amateur Cine League (ACL), competitive events and distribution, a somewhat less domestic part of the movement which aimed less at family documentation more toward ‘photo-plays’, travelogues and instructionals. Just as interested in achieving professional results with amateur means, the ACL encouraged excellence and some of their filmmakers received commissions to make more widely seen films (Kattelle, Amateur 242). The ACL’s Ten Best competition still exists as The American International Film and Video Festival (Kattelle, Amateur 242), but its remit has changed from being “a showcase for amateur films” to being open “to all non-commercial films regardless of the status of the film makers” (AMPS). This points to both the relative marginalisation of the mid-century notion of the amateur, and that successful professionals and others working in the penumbra of independent production surrounding the industry proper are now important contributors to the festival. Both these groups are the economically important contemporary users of Super 8, but they use it in different ways. Low budget productions use it as cheap alternative to larger gauges or HD digital video and a better capture format than dv, while professional productions use it as a lo-fi format precisely for its degradation and archaic home movie look (Allen; Polisin). Pro8mm is a key innovator, service provider and advocate of Super 8 as an industry standard tool, and is an important and long serving agent in what should be seen as the normalisation of Super 8 – a process of redressing its pariah status as a cheap substandard to the substandard, while progressively erasing the special qualities of Super 8 that underlay this. The company started as Super8 Sound, innovating a sync-sound system in 1971, prior to the release of Kodak’s magnetic stripe sound Super 8 in 1973. Kodak’s Super 8 sound film was discontinued in 1997, and in 2005 Pro8mm produced the Max8 format by altering camera front ends to shoot onto the unused stripe space, producing a better quality image for widescreen. In between they started cutting professional 35mm stocks for Super 8 cameras and are currently investing in ever more high-quality HD film scanners (Allen; Pro8mm). Simultaneous to this, Kodak has brought out a series of stocks for Super 8, and more have been cut down for Super 8 by third parties, that offer a wider range of light responses or ever finer grain structure, thus progressively removing the limitations and visible artefacts associated with the format (Allen; Muldowney; Perkins; Kodak, Motion). These films stocks are designed to be captured to digital video as a normal part of their processing, and then entered into the contemporary digital work flow, leaving little or no indication of the their origins on a format designed to be the 1960s equivalent of the Box Brownie. However, while Super 8 has been used by financially robust companies to produce full-length programmes, its role at the top end of production is more usually as home movie footage and/or to evoke pastness. When service provider and advocate OnSuper8 interviewed professional cinematographer James Chressanthis, he asserted that “if there is a problem with Super 8 it is that it can look too good!” and spent much of the interview explaining how a particular combination of stocks, low shutter speeds and digital conversion could reproduce the traditional degraded look and avoid “looking like a completely transparent professional medium” (Perkins). In his history of the British amateur movement, Duncan Reekie deals with this distinction between the professional and amateur moving image, defining the professional as having a drive towards clarity [that] eventually produced [what] we could term ‘hyper-lucidity’, a form of cinematography which idealises the perception of the human eye: deep focus, increased colour saturation, digital effects and so on. (108) Against this the amateur as distinguished by a visible cinematic surface, where the screen image does not seem natural or fluent but is composed of photographic grain which in 8mm appears to vibrate and weave. Since the amateur often worked with only one reversal print the final film would also often become scratched and dirty. (108-9) As Super 8’s function has moved away from the home movie, so its look has adjusted to the new role. Kodak’s replacement for K40 was finer grained (Kodak, Kodak), designed for a life as good to high quality digital video rather than a film strip, and so for video replay rather than a small gauge projector. In the economy that supports Super 8’s survival, its cameras and film stock have become part of a different gestalt. Continued use is still justified by appeals to geist, but the geist of film in a general and abstract way, not specific to Super 8 and more closely resembling the industry-centric view of film propounded by decades of ‘how-to’ guides. Activity that originally supported Super 8 continues, and currently has embraced the ubiquitous and extremely substandard cameras embedded in mobile phones and still cameras for home movies and social documentation. As Super 8 has moved to a new cultural position it has shed its most recognisable trait, the visible surface of grain and scratches, and it is that which has become obsolete, discontinued and the focus of nostalgia, along with the sound of a film projector (which you can get to go with films transferred to dvd). So it will be left to artist filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, talking in 1995 about what Super 8 was to him in the 1980s, to evoke what there is to miss about Super 8 today. Unlike any other format, Super-8 was a microscope, making visible the inner life of images by entering beneath the skin of reality. […] Most remarkable of all was the grain. While 'resolution' is the technical term for the sharpness of a film image, Super-8 was really never too concerned with this. Here, quite a different kind of resolution could be witnessed: the crystal-clear and bright light of a Xenon-projection gave us shapes dissolving into the grain; amorphous bodies and forms surreptitiously transformed into new shapes and disappeared again into a sea of colour. Super-8 was the pointillism, impressionism and the abstract expressionism of cinematography. (Howath) Bibliography Allen, Tom. “‘Making It’ in Super 8.” MovieMaker Magazine 8 Feb. 1994. 1 May 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/making_it_in_super_8_3044/›. AMPS. “About the American Motion Picture Society.” American Motion Picture Society site. 2009. 25 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.ampsvideo.com›. Bassan, Raphaël. “Identity of Cinema: Experimental and Different (review of Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, 2005).” Senses of Cinema 44 (July-Sep. 2007). 25 Apr. 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/experimental-cinema-bassan.html›. Chodorov, Pip. “To Save Kodochrome.” Frameworks list, 14 May 2005. 28 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw29/0216.html›. Dager, Nick. “Kodak Unveils Latest Film Stock in Vision3 Family.” Digital Cinema Report 5 Jan. 2009. 27 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/Kodak-Vision3-film›. Durgnat, Raymond. “Flyweight Flicks.” GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen booklet. Originally published in Films and Filming (Feb. 1965). London: BFI, 2009. 30-31. Frye, Brian L. “‘Me, I Just Film My Life’: An Interview with Jonas Mekas.” Senses of Cinema 44 (July-Sep. 2007). 15 Apr. 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/jonas-mekas-interview.html›. Hodgkinson, Will. “End of the Reel for Super 8.” Guardian 28 Sep. 2006. 20 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/sep/28/1›. Horwath, Alexander. “Singing in the Rain - Supercinematography by Peter Tscherkassky.” Senses of Cinema 28 (Sep.-Oct. 2003). 5 May 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/tscherkassky.html›. Jarman, Derek. In Institute of Contemporary Arts Video Library Guide. London: ICA, 1987. Kattelle, Alan D. Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979. Hudson, Mass.: self-published, 2000. ———. “The Amateur Cinema League and its films.” Film History 15.2 (2003): 238-51. Kodak. “Kodak Celebrates 40th Anniversary of Super 8 Film Announces New Color Reversal Product to Portfolio.“ Frameworks list, 9 May 2005. 23 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw29/0150.html›. ———. “Kodachrome Update.” 30 Jun. 2006. 24 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw32/0756.html›. ———. “Motion Picture Film, Digital Cinema, Digital Intermediate.” 2009. 2 Apr. 2009 ‹http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/index.htm?CID=go&idhbx=motion›. Mekas, Jonas. “8mm as Folk Art.” Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971. Ed. Jonas Mekas. Originally Published in Village Voice 1963. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Morgan, Spencer. “Kodak, Don't Take My Kodachrome.” New York Times 31 May 2005. 4 Apr. 2009 ‹http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E1DF1F39F932A05756C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2›. ———. “Fans Beg: Don't Take Kodachrome Away.” New York Times 1 Jun. 2005. 4 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/technology/31iht-kodak.html›. Muldowney, Lisa. “Kodak Ups the Ante with New Motion Picture Film.” MovieMaker Magazine 30 Nov. 2007. 6 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/cinematography/article/kodak_ups_the_ante_with_new_motion_picture_film/›. New York Times. “Super 8 Blues.” 31 May 2005: E1. Perkins, Giles. “A Pro's Approach to Super 8.” OnSuper8 Blogspot 16 July 2007. 13 Apr. 2009 ‹http://onsuper8.blogspot.com/2007/07/pros-approach-to-super-8.html›. Polisin, Douglas. “Pro8mm Asks You to Think Big, Shoot Small.” MovieMaker Magazine 4 Feb. 2009. 1 May 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/cinematography/article/think_big_shoot_small_rhonda_vigeant_pro8mm_20090127/›. Pro8mm. “Pro8mm Company History.” Super 8 /16mm Cameras, Film, Processing & Scanning (Pro8mm blog) 12 Mar. 2008. 3 May 2009 ‹http://pro8mm-burbank.blogspot.com/2008/03/pro8mm-company-history.html›. Radio 4. No More Yellow Envelopes 24 Dec. 2006. 4 May 2009 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/m6yx0/›. Reekie, Duncan. Subversion: The Definitive History of the Underground Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Sneakernet, Christopher Hutsul. “Kodachrome: Not Digital, But Still Delightful.” Toronto Star 26 Sep. 2005. Swanson, Dwight. “Inventing Amateur Film: Marion Norris Gleason, Eastman Kodak and the Rochester Scene, 1921-1932.” Film History 15.2 (2003): 126-36 Zimmermann, Patricia R. “Professional Results with Amateur Ease: The Formation of Amateur Filmmaking Aesthetics 1923-1940.” Film History 2.3 (1988): 267-81. ———. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

One of the most distinct places the politics of affect have played out in Australia of late has been in the struggles around the mandatory detention of undocumented migrants; specifically, in arguments about the amount of compassion border control practices should or do entail. Indeed, in 1990 the newly established Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) published its first report, Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Contemporaneous, thought not specifically concerned, with the establishment of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, this report helped shape the context in which detention policy developed. As the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research put it in their summary of the report, “the Committee endorsed a tough stance regarding all future illegal entrants but a more compassionate stance regarding those now in Australia” (24). It would be easy now to frame this report in a narrative of decline. Under a Labor government the JSCM had at least some compassion to offer; since the 1996 conservative Coalition victory any such compassion has been in increasingly short supply, if not an outright political liability. This is a popular narrative for those clinging to the belief that Labor is still, in some residual sense, a social-democratic party. I am more interested in the ways the report’s subtitle effectively predicted the framework in which debates about detention have since been constructed: control vs. compassion, with balance as the appropriate mediating term. Control and compassion are presented as the poles of a single governmental project insofar as they can be properly calibrated; but at the same time, compassion is presented as an external balance to the governmental project (control), an extra-political restriction of the political sphere. This is a very formal way to put it, but it reflects a simple, vernacular theory that circulates widely among refugee activists. It is expressed with concision in Peter Mares’ groundbreaking book on detention centres, Borderlines, in the chapter title “Compassion as a vice”. Compassion remains one of the major themes and demands of Australian refugee advocates. They thematise compassion not only for the obvious reasons that mandatory detention involves a devastating lack thereof, and that its critics are frequently driven by intense emotional connections both to particular detainees and TPV holders and, more generally, to all who suffer the effects of Australian border control. There is also a historical or conjunctural element: as Ghassan Hage has written, for the last ten years or so many forms of political opposition in Australia have organised their criticisms in terms of “things like compassion or hospitality rather than in the name of a left/right political divide” (7). This tendency is not limited to any one group; it ranges across the spectrum from Liberal Party wets to anarchist collectives, via dozens of organised groups and individuals varying greatly in their political beliefs and intentions. In this context, it would be tendentious to offer any particular example(s) of compassionate activism, so let me instead cite a complaint. In November 2002, the conservative journal Quadrant worried that morality and compassion “have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the government’s policies” on border protection (“False Refugees” 2). Thus, the right was forced to begin to speak the language of compassion as well. The Department of Immigration, often considered the epitome of the lack of compassion in Australian politics, use the phrase “Australia is a compassionate country, but…” so often they might as well inscribe it on their letterhead. Of course this is hypocritical, but it is not enough to say the right are deforming the true meaning of the term. The point is that compassion is a contested term in Australian political discourse; its meanings are not fixed, but constructed and struggled over by competing political interests. This should not be particularly surprising. Stuart Hall, following Ernesto Laclau and others, famously argued that no political term has an intrinsic meaning. Meanings are produced – articulated, and de- or re-articulated – through a dynamic and partisan “suturing together of elements that have no necessary or eternal belongingness” (10). Compassion has many possible political meanings; it can be articulated to diverse social (and antisocial) ends. If I was writing on the politics of compassion in the US, for example, I would be talking about George W. Bush’s slogan of “compassionate conservatism”, and whatever Hannah Arendt meant when she argued that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men [sic] of all revolutions” (65), I think she meant something very different by the term than do, say, Rural Australians for Refugees. As Lauren Berlant has written, “politicized feeling is a kind of thinking that too often assumes the obviousness of the thought it has” (48). Hage has also opened this assumed obviousness to question, writing that “small-‘l’ liberals often translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will” (8-9). These social conditions are complex – it isn’t just that, as some on the right like to assert, compassion is a product of middle class comfort. The actual relations are more dynamic and open. Connections between class and occupational categories on the one hand, and social attitudes and values on the other, are not given but constructed, articulated and struggled over. As Hall put it, the way class functions in the distribution of ideologies is “not as the permanent class-colonization of a discourse, but as the work entailed in articulating these discourses to different political class practices” (139). The point here is to emphasise that the politics of compassion are not straightforward, and that we can recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings. For example, a politics that takes compassion as its basis seems ill-suited to think through issues it can’t put a human face to – that is, the systematic and structural conditions for mandatory detention and border control. Compassion’s political investments accrue to specifiable individuals and groups, and to the harms done to them. This is not, as such, a bad thing, particularly if you happen to be a specifiable individual to whom a substantive harm has been done. But compassion, going one by one, group by group, doesn’t cope well with situations where the form of the one, or the form of the disadvantaged minority, constitutes not only a basis for aid or emancipation, but also violently imposes particular ideas of modern western subjectivity. How does this violence work? I want to answer by way of the story of an Iranian man who applied for asylum in Australia in 2004. In the available documents he is referred to as “the Applicant”. The Applicant claimed asylum based on his homosexuality, and his fear of persecution should he return to Iran. His asylum application was rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal because the Tribunal did not believe he was really gay. In their decision they write that “the Tribunal was surprised to observe such a comprehensive inability on the Applicant’s part to identify any kind of emotion-stirring or dignity-arousing phenomena in the world around him”. The phenomena the Tribunal suggest might have been emotion-stirring for a gay Iranian include Oscar Wilde, Alexander the Great, Andre Gide, Greco-Roman wrestling, Bette Midler, and Madonna. I can personally think of much worse bases for immigration decisions than Madonna fandom, but there is obviously something more at stake here. (All quotes from the hearing are taken from the High Court transcript “WAAG v MIMIA”. I have been unable to locate a transcript of the original RRT decision, and so far as I know it remains unavailable. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this case, and for help with references.) Justice Kirby, one of the presiding Justices at the Applicant’s High Court appeal, responded to this with the obvious point, “Madonna, Bette Midler and so on are phenomena of the Western culture. In Iran, where there is death for some people who are homosexuals, these are not in the forefront of the mind”. Indeed, the High Court is repeatedly critical and even scornful of the Tribunal decision. When Mr Bennett, who is appearing for the Minister for Immigration in the appeal begins his case, he says, “your Honour, the primary attack which seems to be made on the decision of the –”, he is cut off by Justice Gummow, who says, “Well, in lay terms, the primary attack is that it was botched in the Tribunal, Mr Solicitor”. But Mr Bennett replies by saying no, “it was not botched. If one reads the whole of the Tribunal judgement, one sees a consistent line of reasoning and a conclusion being reached”. In a sense this is true; the deep tragicomic weirdness of the Tribunal decision is based very much in the unfolding of a particular form of homophobic rationality specific to border control and refugee determination. There have been hundreds of applications for protection specifically from homophobic persecution since 1994, when the first such application was made in Australia. As of 2002, only 22% of those applications had been successful, with the odds stacked heavily against lesbians – only 7% of lesbian applicants were successful, against a shocking enough 26% of gay men (Millbank, Imagining Otherness 148). There are a number of reasons for this. The Tribunal has routinely decided that even if persecution had occurred on the basis of homosexuality, the Applicant would be able to avoid such persecution if she or he acted ‘discreetly’, that is, hid their sexuality. The High Court ruled out this argument in 2003, but the Tribunal maintains an array of effective techniques of homophobic exclusion. For example, the Tribunal often uses the Spartacus International Gay Guide to find out about local conditions of lesbian and gay life even though it is a tourist guide book aimed at Western gay men with plenty of disposable income (Dauvergne and Millbank 178-9). And even in cases which have found in favour of particular lesbian and gay asylum seekers, the Tribunal has often gone out of its way to assert that lesbians and gay men are, nevertheless, not the subjects of human rights. States, that is, violate no rights when they legislate against lesbian and gay identities and practices, and the victims of such legislation have no rights to protection (Millbank, Fear 252-3). To go back to Madonna. Bennett’s basic point with respect to the references to the Material Girl et al is that the Tribunal specifically rules them as irrelevant. Mr Bennett: The criticism which is being made concerns a question which the Tribunal asked and what is very much treated in the Tribunal’s judgement as a passing reference. If one looks, for example, at page 34 – Kirby J: This is where Oscar, Alexander and Bette as well as Madonna turn up? Mr Bennett: Yes. The very paragraph my learned friend relies on, if one reads the sentence, what the Tribunal is saying is, “I am not looking for these things”. Gummow J: Well, why mention it? What sort of training do these people get in decision making before they are appointed to this body, Mr Solicitor? Mr Bennett: I cannot assist your Honour on that. Gummow J: No. Well, whatever it is, what happened here does not speak highly of the results of it. To gloss this, Bennett argues that the High Court are making too much of an irrelevant minor point in the decision. Mr Bennett: One would think [based on the High Court’s questions] that the only things in this judgement were the throwaway references saying, “I wasn’t looking for an understanding of Oscar Wilde”, et cetera. That is simply, when one reads the judgement as a whole, not something which goes to the centre at all… There is a small part of the judgement which could be criticized and which is put, in the judgement itself, as a subsidiary element and prefaced with the word “not”. Kirby J: But the “not” is a bit undone by what follows when I think Marilyn [Monroe] is thrown in. Mr Bennett: Well, your Honour, I am not sure why she is thrown in. Kirby J: Well, that is exactly the point. Mr Bennett holds that, as per Wayne’s World, the word “not” negates any clause to which it is attached. Justice Kirby, on the other hand, feels that this “not” comes undone, and that this undoing – and the uncertainty that accrues to it – is exactly the point. But the Tribunal won’t be tied down on this, and makes use of its “not” to hold gay stereotypes at arm’s length – which is still, of course, to hold them, at a remove that will insulate homophobia against its own illegitimacy. The Tribunal defends itself against accusations of homophobia by announcing specifically and repeatedly, in terms that consciously evoke culturally specific gay stereotypes, that it is not interested in those stereotypes. This unconvincing alibi works to prevent any inconvenient accusations of bias from butting in on the routine business of heteronormativity. Paul Morrison has noted that not many people will refuse to believe you’re gay: “Claims to normativity are characteristically met with scepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance” (5). In this case, it is not a parent but a paternalistic state apparatus. The reasons the Tribunal did not believe the applicant [were] (a) because of “inconsistencies about the first sexual experience”, (b) “the uniformity of relationships”, (c) the “absence of a “gay” circle of friends”, (d) “lack of contact with the “gay” underground” and [(e)] “lack of other forms of identification”. Of these the most telling, I think, are the last three: a lack of gay friends, of contact with the gay underground, or of unspecified other forms of identification. What we can see here is that even if the Tribunal isn’t looking for the stereotypical icons of Western gay culture, it is looking for the characteristic forms of Western gay identity which, as we know, are far from universal. The assumptions about the continuities between sex acts and identities that we codify with names like lesbian, gay, homosexual and so on, often very poorly translate the ways in which non-Western populations understand and describe themselves, if they translate them at all. Gayatri Gopinath, for example, uses the term “queer diaspor[a]... in contradistinction to the globalization of “gay” identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all other sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (11). I can’t assess the accuracy of the Tribunal’s claims regarding the Applicant’s social life, although I am inclined to scepticism. But if the Applicant in this case indeed had no gay friends, no contact with the gay underground and no other forms of identification with the big bad world of gaydom, he may obviously, nevertheless, have been a Man Who Has Sex With Men, as they sometimes say in AIDS prevention work. But this would not, either in the terms of Australian law or the UN Convention, qualify him as a refugee. You can only achieve refugee status under the terms of the Convention based on membership of a ‘specific social group’. Lesbians and gay men are held to constitute such groups, but what this means is that there’s a certain forcing of Western identity norms onto the identity and onto the body of the sexual other. This shouldn’t read simply as a moral point about how we should respect diversity. There’s a real sense that our own lives as political and sexual beings are radically impoverished to the extent we fail to foster and affirm non-Western non-heterosexualities. There’s a sustaining enrichment that we miss out on, of course, in addition to the much more serious forms of violence others will be subject to. And these are kinds of violence as well as forms of enrichment that compassionate politics, organised around the good refugee, just does not apprehend. In an essay on “The politics of bad feeling”, Sara Ahmed makes a related argument about national shame and mourning. “Words cannot be separated from bodies, or other signs of life. So the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (73). At one level, these points are often made with regard to compassion, especially as it is racialised in Australian politics; for example, that there would be a public outcry were we to detain hypothetical white boat people. But Ahmed’s point stretches further – in the necessary relation between words and bodies, she asks not only which bodies do the describing and which are described, but which are permitted a relation to language at all? If “words cannot be separated from bodies”, what happens to those bodies words fail? The queer diasporic body, so reductively captured in that phrase, is a case in point. How do we honour its singularity, as well as its sociality? How do we understand the systematicity of the forces that degrade and subjugate it? What do the politics of compassion have to offer here? It’s easy for the critic or the cynic to sneer at such politics – so liberal, so sentimental, so wet – or to deconstruct them, expose “the violence of sentimentality” (Berlant 62), show “how compassion towards the other’s suffering might sustain the violence of appropriation” (Ahmed 74). These are not moves I want to make. A guiding assumption of this essay is that there is never a unilinear trajectory between feelings and politics. Any particular affect or set of affects may be progressive, reactionary, apolitical, or a combination thereof, in a given situation; compassionate politics are no more necessarily bad than they are necessarily good. On the other hand, “not necessarily bad” is a weak basis for a political movement, especially one that needs to understand and negotiate the ways the enclosures and borders of late capitalism mass-produce bodies we can’t put names to, people outside familiar and recognisable forms of identity and subjectivity. As Etienne Balibar has put it, “in utter disregard of certain borders – or, in certain cases, under covers of such borders – indefinable and impossible identities emerge in various places, identities which are, as a consequence, regarded as non-identities. However, their existence is, none the less, a life-and-death question for large numbers of human beings” (77). Any answer to that question starts with our compassion – and our rage – at an unacceptable situation. But it doesn’t end there. References Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Bad Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1.1 (2005): 72-85. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.” Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ed. Jodi Dean. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000. 42-62. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. Illegal Entrants in Australia: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994. Dauvergne, Catherine and Jenni Millbank. “Cruisingforsex.com: An Empirical Critique of the Evidentiary Practices of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.” Alternative Law Journal 28 (2003): 176-81. “False Refugees and Misplaced Compassion” Editorial. Quadrant 390 (2002): 2-4. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto, 2003. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Joint Standing Committee on Migration. Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Canberra: The Committee, 1990. Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. Millbank, Jenni. “Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 144-77. ———. “Fear of Persecution or Just a Queer Feeling? Refugee Status and Sexual orientation in Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 20 (1995): 261-65, 299. Morrison, Paul. The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Pendleton, Mark. “Borderline.” Bite 2 (2004): 3-4. “WAAG v MIMIA [2004]. HCATrans 475 (19 Nov. 2004)” High Court of Australia Transcripts. 2005. 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/HCATrans/2004/475.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGrath, Shane. "Compassionate Refugee Politics?." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>. APA Style McGrath, S. (Dec. 2005) "Compassionate Refugee Politics?," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>.