Lope de Aguirre, the Tyrant, and the Prince: Convergence and Divergence in Postcolonial Collective Memory

In Latin America, collective remembering is shaped by stories of colonizers whose voracious ambitions left an indelible mark on the landscape and its people. This essay examines a set of narratives about a legendary colonizer, Lope de Aguirre, that continue to be invoked in the collective imagination on the island of Margarita, in Venezuela. Drawing on Bormann\u27s Symbolic Convergence Theory and Bakhtin\u27s work on cultural discourse, this analysis shows that on the one hand, the narratives converge to support official records of Aguirre as an archetype of colonial brutality. Yet on the other, alternate versions of the stories reveal a more discordant picture, one that complicates Aguirre\u27s character and reevaluates his influence on the island and in the wider context of Latin America. © 2012 Copyright National Communication Association

Understanding Communication of Sustainability Reporting: Application of Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies that are implicit in the standalone sustainability reporting of the top 24 companies of the Fortune 500 Global. We adopt Bormann’s (Q J Speech 58(4):396–407, 1972) SCT framework to study the rhetorical situation and how corporate sustainability reporting (CSR) messages can be communicated to the audience (public). The SCT concepts in the sustainability reporting’s communication are subject to different types of legitimacy strategies that are used by corporations as a validity and legitimacy claim in the reports. A content analysis has been conducted and structural coding schemes have been developed based on the literature. The schemes are applied to the SCT model which recognizes the symbolic convergent processes of fantasy among communicators in a Society. The study reveals that most of the sample companies communicate fantasy type and rhetorical vision in their corporate sustainability reporting. However, the disclosure or messages are different across locations and other taxonomies of the SCT framework. This study contributes to the current CSR literature about how symbolic or fantasy understandings can be interpreted by the users. It also discusses the persuasion styles that are adopted by the companies for communication purposes. This study is the theoretical extension of the SCT. Researchers may be interested in further investigating other online communication paths, such as human rights reports and director’s reports

Public Development Banks

The market for credit to firms is believed to be plagued with imperfections that public development banks (PDBs) could alleviate, but it is not clear which market failures prevail, and which PDB activities are best suited to dealing with each of these failures. This chapter analyses one particular source of credit under-provision: the inability of banks to internalize the benefits of projects they might finance. A PDB may alleviate these credit inefficiencies by lending to commercial banks at subsidized rates or providing credit guarantees, targeting the firms that generate high added value as opposed to those with little credit history or low collateral. Direct lending by the PDB to the targeted industries could be superior to these subsidies to private lending, but only if the PDB’s corporate governance is strong. Whether subsidies or guarantees are preferred depends on the presence or absence of liquidity shortages or banks’ capital constraints.</p

Comparative Advantage, Multi-Product Firms and Trade Liberalisation: An Empirical Test

This paper investigates how economies of scope in multi-product firms interact with comparative advantage in determining the effect of trade liberalisation on resource reallocation, using Belgian manufacturing firm- and firm-product-level data over the period 1997-2007. We first provide evidence on industry integration induced by multi-product firms producing simultaneously in multiple industries and on the extent to which industry integration occurs between industries that have different degrees of comparative advantage. We then examine the impact of opening up trade with low-wage countries on both inter- and intra-industry resource reallocation, taking into account heterogeneity in the integration rate across sectors and industries. Our results indicate that, within more closely integrated sectors, trade liberalisation with low-wage countries leads to less reallocation from low-skill-intensity (comparative-disadvantage) industries to high-skill-intensity (comparative-advantage) industries, both in terms of employment and output. We also find that more integrated industries experience less skill upgrading after trade liberalisation with low-wage countries. Furthermore, we find that within sectors with a low integration rate, trade liberalisation with low-wage countries induces relatively more aggregate TFP and average firm output growth in comparative-advantage industries than in comparative-disadvantage industries, in line with the prediction of Bernard, Redding and Schott (2007), while the opposite is true in highly integrated sectors. Decomposition of the industry-level aggregate TFP changes reveals that the result is mainly driven by reallocation between incumbent firms within industries. Overall, the results are highly consistent with the predictions of the Song and Zhu (2010) model