Search

The construction, visualization and stabilization of public problems require the mobilization of civil society groups concerned about these issues to actively engage in the demand for actions and policies. This paper explores the institutional campaigns against human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Spain between 2008 and 2017 and their role in helping to shape this issue as a matter of public concern. Our aim is to identify the ideological basis of these campaigns through their representations of predominant actors, which have been systematized to identify possible mistakes and to help determine more effective actions with a greater capacity for mobilization. We applied a mixed content analysis combined with a semiotic model to evaluate the presence or absence of the different actors and their relevance in each case. Several lines of discourse have been reiterated across the 50 campaigns analysed: Curbing the demand for prostitution as a priority objective; the centrality of victims in the representations; the role of the consumer of paid sex as an accomplice to the crime; and the correlation between prostitution and human trafficking. We will also examine how these issues relate to the broader dispute on the status of prostitution in Spain. This will require a conceptual shift away from educational and social-oriented communication towards the structural causes, collective responsibility and transformative justice frameworks.

The use of e-learning for on-the-job training has grown exponentially in the last decade due to it being accepted by people in charge of businesses. Few papers have explored virtual training from the workers' standpoint, that is, the perception they have about the different training methodologies (face-to-face vs. virtual) and the attitudes they have towards on-the-job learning. Training, in this context, is an investment for both the two participating agents: businesses and workers. It seems logical that knowing the perceptions and attitudes shown by the targets of the training is, at least, as important as knowing the advantages for the companies. To analyse workers' perceptions and attitudes we conducted an online survey of 2,000 employees of the leading European savings bank, CaixaBank (http://www.caixabank.com/index_en.html), on training habits, perceptions, motivations, and disincentives of undertaking face-to-face or online instruction. The results reveal that workers perceive e-learning as a more flexible and up-to-date training methodology. On the other hand, face-to-face training continues to be perceived as a more motivating methodology compared to virtuality and with better explanations from the course trainers. As regards motivations given by the workers when it comes to training, there are three main groups of attitudes: those which are more affective and social, those which reveal poor adaptability or fear of the new training requirements, and, finally, those linked to the knowledge society. Such results state that while the benefits of distance methodology can be clearly identified from the company's point of view (i.e., as a flexible and efficient methodology to develop the employees' skills and knowledge), from the employees' standpoint, the advantages of virtual training are not so clear and depend to a great extent on their attitude towards the use of virtuality. (Contains 10 tables, 1 figure and 2 endnotes.)

This paper reports on the development of a website tool aimed at helping Spanish small and medium enterprises (SMEs) staff to write their commercial correspondence in English. It describes the steps involved in the tool system design process, making an emphasis on the methodological criteria and rational that guided us to develop the site. In order to obtain the material, a corpus of commercial correspondence written in English was collected and later analysed, applying a genre-based approach as established by Bhatia (1993) and Swales (1990). The findings provided the move structure and strategies of each type of letter as well as the lexico-grammatical realizations of each move which later would be standardised and presented to be used systematically in the composition of letters with the same communicative purpose. This work illustrates how a genre-based approach can successfully be applied to ESP materials development. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)

Personalization technology has become an important topic in e-commerce, fostered by the emergence of the relationship-marketing paradigm. But teaching e-commerce personalization technology is a challenging task, since it requires a balance between marketing and management and technical implementation issues that must be calibrated according to the student's background, all of this without losing a holistic perspective of the subject. In this paper, we describe the result of our experiences in teaching personalization, sketching both a conceptual framework and a set of curricular objectives that provide a balanced and comprehensive view of the field in its current state. The conceptual framework for the topic area puts in relationship technical and business issues as part of marketing in e-business strategy. The main categories are the topics related to "partner interaction", including adaptive hypermedia and filtering of information, and "relationship maintenance", including user profiling and modeling along with common market segmentation techniques as related to the paradigm of relationship marketing. Concepts of human-computer interaction are required to aid in understanding the assessment techniques of personalization techniques, and privacy and legal issues should also be considered. The concept of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems crosscuts interaction and relationship maintenance issues, and could be used as a criteria for curriculum organization in some cases. Seven general curricular goals are identified as key aspects of the curriculum in personalization technology, including foundations of relationship marketing, user profiling and modeling, hypermedia and adaptive hypermedia concepts, the use of personalization as a tool in marketing strategy, CRM, privacy and legal issues and mass customization. The four first aspects are considered as the core of the curriculum, and they should be addressed to some extent depending on the background and interest of the students. The content of each particular course can then be tuned to diverse student profiles by putting more emphasis in some of the goals, without losing the global view of personalization as a component of a global e-marketing strategy. Rule-base personalization systems represent an appropriate case for introducing the technical content of personalization, and marketing oriented content should be approached from a clear concept of relationship value, as the key concept from which marketing tactics and techniques are derived. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

INTRODUCTION In January 2006, the Spanish government enacted a tobacco control law that banned the advertising, promotion and sponsorship of tobacco. In January 2011, further legislation on this matter was adopted to provide a more restrictive specification of the ban. In this study, we analyze the effect produced on cigarette sales by these two prohibitions. We address this problem using a cluster time-series analysis to test whether the sales of cigarettes by brands have been homogenized with the prohibition of advertising, promotion, and sponsorship. METHODS The data source used was the official data on legal sales of cigarettes by brands in Spain, from January 2005 to December 2021 (excluding the Canary Islands and the Autonomous Communities of the cities of Ceuta and Melilla). To achieve our objective, we used log(t) test statistics to check if there is global convergence in the three selected periods according to the regulatory changes that have occurred in Spain (2005-2021, 2005-2010 and 2011-2021). Second, once absolute convergence is rejected, we applied a clustering algorithm to test for the existence of subgroup convergence. RESULTS The cigarette brands that have been marketed during the period 2005- 2021 (n=40), can only be grouped into three groups according to the behavior of their sales. When we focus on the period 2005-2010 (n=74), cigarette brands are grouped into five groups according to their sales behavior. Finally, the cigarette brands marketed during the period 2011-2021 (n=67) are grouped into three groups according to the temporal evolution of their sales. These results suggest a greater homogenization of cigarette sales after the application of the law of January 2011. CONCLUSIONS Act 42/2010 (total ban on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship actions) was associated with greater homogenization of cigarette sales than the application of Act 28/2005 (partial ban). This finding supports what is established in the previous literature that indicates that Act 42/2010 provided a more restrictive specification of the ban than Act 28/2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: Drug shortages are a growing global problem, posing clinical and economic challenges. To understand them better, we conducted an inventory of national public drug shortage registers and their comparability in Europe and the USA.Methods: The study was based on openly accessible drug shortage notifications published by national drug authorities. These data were obtained from all national data sources mentioned on the European Medicines Agency's (EMA's) web page and FDA in the USA. After selection of the countries with comparable data, descriptive statistics were used to present characteristics of the shortages both across countries and within countries for 9 months (January-September) in 2020. We studied whether the shortages that occurred in these countries were the same, and how shortages were distributed by therapeutic uses and formulations. We also investigated price variation between the United States and Finland among drugs in shortage in one formulation category (creams and gels).Results: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spain, and the United States had suitable registers and were included. Altogether 5132 shortage reports from Finland (n = 1522), Sweden (n = 890), Norway (n = 800), Spain (n = 814), and the United States (n = 1106) were published during the study period. Of active ingredient level shortages 54% occurred in only one country, and 1% occurred in all five. However, at the country level, where there was one or more shortage notifications in an ATC active ingredient category, 19-41% were in a single country. The distributions by ATC therapeutic class and drug formulation differed substantially between countries, particularly between the USA and European countries. Injectables had a high shortage risk in the USA (57% of all shortages versus 17-31% of all shortages in the European countries). By contrast, shortages in gels and creams occurred only in European data (4-6% of all shortages). In the price comparison, creams and gels in shortage in Finland were 160% more expensive in the USA where these shortages were not detected.Conclusions: Public drug shortage registers are vital data sources for proactively maintaining and managing a reliable drug supply. However, our study demonstrates that much work remains to standardize the contents and quality of public register data. Shortages may not be solely a consequence of manufacturing disruptions but may reflect other contributing factors in the international drug distribution and supply mechanisms, including price differences and profit margins between national pharmaceutical markets. Data to perform practical and useful international comparisons to understand these shortages are required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study attempts to contribute to the scarce knowledge on how eco-design, and to broad extent sustainability, is connected to innovation driven companies. In particular, this cross sectional research verifies i) perception and knowledge of eco-design of the professionals from innovation driven companies in Spain, ii) specific eco-design strategies towards sustainability that innovation driven companies are integrating in their strategic plans and their application in the supply chain and iii) the companies’ future predictions on innovation and eco-design linkage. The methodology of this paper is based on a survey, developed defining measurable proxies for both eco-design and innovation approaches and conducted on 10,000 multidisciplinary professionals from Spanish innovation driven companies. The study shows that sustainability is a cardinal driver for innovation and that responses have specificities regarding company size, activity or respondent position. Innovation and eco-design strategies for the future aim to use materials with a lower environmental impact and to develop new concepts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses the highlights of the III International Conference on Digital Citizenship which was held in San Sebastian, Spain on May 8 and 9, 2012. Among the speakers were Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the domain name system (DNS), and Matt Barrie, chief executive of Freelancer.com. The conference featured events to help participants to go further into certain aspects of the new network-society in which people live.

Copyright of E-balonmano.com: Journal of Sports Science / Revista de Ciencias del Deporte is the property of Federacion Extremena de Balonmano and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)