The politics of flexing soybeans: China,Brazil and global agroindustrial restructuring

The political geography of the global soybean complex is shifting. While the complex has long been controlled by US-based transnational corporations, new agribusiness actors, business logics and power relations rooted in South America and East Asia are emerging, based in part on commodity flexing. We explore how soybean flexing is shaping and being shaped by global restructuring of the soybean processing industry. Using the divergent histories and uses of soy in China and Brazil, we propose that in order to understand the changing soy landscape, we must examine the relationships between soy's multiple-ness and flexible-ness, the political economy of soy processing, and the relationships between crop ‘flexors’ – those powerful firms that control the soy complex – with each other and with governments. We demonstrate that the agribusiness actors who are gaining more control over the soy complex are doing so in part through flexing, and that the ability to flex may ultimately determine the trajectory of global agroindustrial restructuring. Finally, we raise questions and make suggestions for further research on flex crops.     

Caring consumption as marketing schema: representations of motherhood in an era of hyperconsumption

What can representations of women's ‘caring consumption’ (Thompson 1996 Thompson, C., 1996. Caring consumers: gendered consumption meanings and the juggling lifestyle. Journal of consumer research, 22, 388–407. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489789.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) reveal about broad cultural understandings of the nature of motherhood? We study Canadian television advertisements to gain insight into the production of cultural schemas and the reproduction of beliefs about gender and motherhood. Employing an inductive qualitative analysis of portrayals of mothers and women who are not depicted as mothers, we find that the defining feature of mothers' consumption is a unidimensional depiction of control and caring for others, presented as self-evidently gratifying and fulfilling, in the absence of competing consumption goals. Mothers' identity emerges solely from successful consumer choices that benefit others. Such unidimensional representations of consumption stand in contrast to the consumption of women who are not depicted as mothers, who are found to engage in hyperbolic and indulgent consumption targeted towards self-gratification. We thus provide novel empirical data which show that depictions of consumption in mothers and in women not depicted as mothers are extreme in nature. Our findings provide support for, and elaborate on, the concept of ‘caring consumption’ by helping to make sense of media representations appearing within the conjunction of the contemporary marketing context of hyperconsumption, and the parenting/gender context of intensive mothering. By examining extreme consumption in television advertisements, we gain insight into features of maternal consumption ideals that may not be observable in everyday instantiations, such as the lack of mothers' consumption for self-benefit.     

What Encourages Cities to Become Sustainable? Measuring the Effectiveness of Implementing Local Adaptation Policies

This research seeks to understand which essential characteristics are necessary to drive municipal governments to adopt smart growth measures. By testing previously expected outcomes for why a local government would adopt a particular policy, we find an inherent need to create strong needs-based policies promoted by interest groups. We conducted a principal component analysis and a linear regression model to test several hypotheses. A discussion of this analysis is provided along with policy recommendations to explain why and when metropolitan areas use sustainability plans and how to encourage more to do so.     

Paths to the recognition of homo-parental adoptive rights in the EU-27: a QCA analysis

Although the recognition of the adoptive rights of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) couples is a socially salient topic, cross-national variation regarding this issue has been largely underexplored in social science research. With the aid of configurational analysis, this article fills this gap and shows the conditions that explain the recognition of the adoptive rights of homosexual couples in the countries of the EU-27. It is argued that two different paths led to this outcome. All countries where adoptive rights were recognized had higher degrees of secularization and lower levels of social homophobia. In addition, in Northern European countries, the Protestant background and absence of conservative governments for a certain time period seemed to be the determinant. However, for the remaining European countries that recognized these rights, rising levels of gender equality appeared to have a more salient role.     

Third-worldism: sensibility and ideology in Uruguay – from Third Position to the thought of Carlos Real de Azúa

This article examines the trajectory of the concepts ‘Third World’ and ‘Third-worldism’ in Uruguay, and attempts to prove that, although Third-worldism developed thoroughly as sensibility, it did not have the same success as ideology. The article examines authors and intellectual groups who reflected on the Third World, and especially on ‘tercerismo’ (Third Position) – understood as a set of ideas related to Third-worldism but not part of Third-worldism as such. It next explains the importance of the thought of Carlos Real de Azúa, identified as the main ideologist of Third-worldism in Uruguay. The research shows as a result that there was great concern about the Third World, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, expressed in articles, reports and speeches, among others. Nevertheless, a full conceptualisation was never realised, except in the contribution made by Real de Azúa. The article concludes that, paradoxically, ‘tercerismo’ blocked the development of more elaborated third-worldist thought in Uruguay.     

The role of mitigation and strengthening cognitive operations in brand names design: a case study of Spanish and American wine brands

Despite the relevance of powerful brands in the present-day market, research on the process of brand name design from a cognitive perspective focuses almost exclusively on the effects of the use of conceptual metaphor, and to a lesser extent, metonymy, overlooking the role played by other cognitive strategies. This paper analyzes the potentiality of mitigation and strengthening cognitive operations as tools for the systematic, risk-free design of new brand names with highly predictable and felicitous connotations. In particular, it focuses on their role in the systematic generation of axiologically positive brands in both Spanish and American wine labels, thus largely reducing the need for the costly and time-consuming cultural checks that branding companies need to run on new brand names before their commercial launching. In so doing, the interaction of the two aforementioned cognitive operations with a number of pragmatic principles and cultural models of social interaction, and their subservience to other cognitive operations, like those of comparison, correlation, and domain expansion and reduction, are also considered. The results of the study offer new insights on the semantics of commercial brand names which should prove useful for branding professionals, as well as data of interest to linguists dealing with inter-linguistic issues and cognitive modeling alike.     

Universities,NGOs, and civil society sustainability: preliminary lessons from Ecuador

The context for NGOs in the Global South – delegitimising discourse, restrictive policies, and decreasing international funding – leads to major concerns about the sustainability of organised civil society. As a result, NGOs are exploring new means to contribute to social development. This article explores developing university–NGO collaborations through the case of Ecuador. It contributes to development research on two fronts. First, it examines the role of the university in the South and their collaborations with NGOs. Second, it situates university–NGO collaborations within concerns about civil society sustainability. The article presents lessons learnt by Ecuadorian NGOs.