The Hudson Bay Company (HBC) fundamentally changed food strategies in North America. Rather than go where food was, company servants stationed along Hudson Bay traded with Indigenous hunters for the flesh of wild animals. HBC officials expected this food to be cheap, a strategy that defines our understandings of commodity frontiers. Yet a focus on price requires greater attention to how firms account for costs. This article argues that the HBC’s post-1774 expansion inland exacerbated tensions related to control over the trade in country provisions between the company and Maškēkowak hunters. Recurrent food crises related to one animal—partridge—at the HBC’s principal post, York Fort, in the 1780s and 1790s prompted defences of what food was worth beyond its exchange value, in evaluations recorded outside the company’s ledgers. Not only did experiences hunting and eating partridges shape the HBC’s later search for other cheap foods. It also suggests ways to rethink the politics of prices within commercial enterprises.

This article aims to provide an overview of family firms and entrepreneurial ecosystems regarding their current trends and future research directions. A systematic literature review was carried out on 37 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters extracted from the Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection databases up to December 2025. By carrying out a coding procedure and thematic approach, we blend the input-process-outcome model with three levels of analysis (i.e., individual, family, and firm). Findings reveal that family firms shape and are conditioned by entrepreneurial ecosystems. At the same time, resource deployment and embeddedness foster knowledge transfer and regional resilience, thus corroborating the co-evolutionary relationship between family firms and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The contribution of this work is threefold: (i) an integrated theory-driven conceptual model; (ii) an inductive thematic map grounded in coded outcomes; and (iii) a future research agenda steering scholars towards novel research directions.

This paper extends the traditional group self-annuitisation framework by explicitly incorporating mortality heterogeneity among participants. Heterogeneity stems from multiple factors that lead individuals to age at different paces, despite being born in the same year. Ageing is modelled as a finite-state continuous-time Markov process where each state represents a distinct phase of physiological deterioration, and transitions capture the stochastic progression towards death. Benefits are differentiated by ageing state and, after issue, they are dynamically adjusted in response to the realised evolution of both ageing and mortality. Our design is novel in its use of the Markov ageing framework within a risk-sharing scheme and in how benefits are updated. Indeed, both benefits and their respective adjustment coefficients are state-specific. Through the explicit modelling of cross-subsidies across states, the design ensures that actuarial equivalence between benefits and available resources is preserved both at the pool level and within each ageing state. However, we find that benefit adjustments based on actuarial equivalence may display undesirable patterns in some ageing classes, when their size shrinks substantially; this happens, in particular, in the younger ageing states, which are likely to empty out. To contrast such effects, we introduce a design preserving a target level of differentiation across states that mitigates the unfavourable impact of a declining size for younger ages. In our analysis, we point out that such a design (which is desirable in many respects) implies solidarity effects across states. Such effects can be identified by comparing benefit amounts under the two assumptions (i.e., benefits adjusted according to actuarial equivalence or so to preserve a predefined level of differentiation). The proposed framework is tested using Australian mortality data.

This article explores the relationship between urban violence in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s economic capital, and two works of contemporary Ecuadorian literature. I introduce the term mangrove gothic to analyze how María Fernanda Ampuero’s short-story collection Pelea de gallos (2018) and Mónica Ojeda’s novel Mandíbula (2018) appropriate gothic tropes to depict the violent realities of twenty-first-century Guayaquil. The mangrove gothic encompasses the narrative strategies through which these authors inscribe fear into the experience of living in—or having lived in—Guayaquil, where oppressive humidity and heat, social hierarchies, and violence haunt the urban space. At the same time, the term offers geographic, social, and cultural specificity to the broader category of the “new Latin American female gothic.” In doing so, it counters the risk of homogenizing Latin American literature under a single transnational trend tailored for global consumption.

This study investigates the significant presence and function of nonhuman elements, specifically flora and fauna, in Aluísio Azevedo’s seminal Brazilian naturalist novel, O Cortiço (1890). Drawing on the increasing academic interest in plant and animal studies in literary criticism, this analysis catalogs and categorizes the numerous references to plants and animals, as well as instances of animalization, to illuminate Azevedo’s naturalistic portrayal of the urban environment of Rio de Janeiro. The research demonstrates how, in line with naturalist principles, Azevedo employs these nonhuman comparisons to characterize his human figures, often reducing them to their physical or instinctual traits under the deterministic influence of the milieu. The study investigates patterns in the use of flora and fauna where both are frequently used to evoke sensuality, purity, the physical states of characters—often reinforcing social hierarchies, reflecting racist and patriarchal views. Ultimately, this study argues that Azevedo’s extensive use of flora and fauna in O Cortiço is crucial to conveying to naturalist ideas, characterized by degeneration, decay, and the leveling of distinctions. The constant interplay of the characters and their environment, mediated through plant and animal allegories, underscores the deterministic forces at play, where individuals are subject to the relentless and often brutal influence of heredity and their surroundings. This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of Brazilian naturalism and the sophisticated ways nonhuman elements can shape and influence narrative meaning.

Chile’s 1860 Banking Law established a system of free banking that seems similar to the Scottish one. It may not be a coincidence. The drafter of the law was Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, an admirer of Adam Smith on money and banking and of the Scottish free banking system, thus making Adam Smith’s banking ideas a contributing influence (so far, unrecognized) on Chilean free banking.

This article tests claims from the comparative extractive literature by examining how state-company linkages shape civil society mobilization against extractive projects. We focus on convenios de cooperación (CCs)—contracts through which extractive companies finance branches of the Colombian armed forces or judiciary to provide security for company operations. We employ a mixed-methods design. First, we analyze a panel dataset of nearly six hundred contracts signed between 2002 and 2020, assessing their relationship to threats, assassinations of social leaders, arbitrary detentions, and other security indicators across municipalities. We then pair this statistical analysis with fieldwork in two case study sites: Jericó, Antioquia, and the Ariari region of Meta. Our analysis asks two central questions. How do CCs fit into extractive companies’ broader repertoires of community control? And what do they mean for civil society mobilization—how are they lived and felt on the ground? Findings reveal sectoral variation and differences in how CCs are activated and experienced over time. By introducing the first systematic dataset on CCs, we make visible a widespread but understudied mechanism through which firms embed repressive capacity in state security apparatuses, thereby advancing debates on corporate counterinsurgency, protest criminalization, and security governance in Latin America.

Missed hospital appointments (Do Not Attend [DNAs]) undermine healthcare efficiency and access. A high-profile study found that adding descriptive social norms (DSNs) or specific institutional cost (SIC) messages to SMS reminders could substantially reduce DNAs. This prompts optimism that integrating behavioural insights, besides reminders themselves, offers a cost-effective approach to mitigate DNAs. However, subsequent similar interventions have reported heterogeneous findings, echoing broader debates on recent meta-analyses about how to evaluate such findings. We address this issue by framing Behavioural Insights as Applied Science, which structures validation in three phases inspired by clinical research. We treat the aforementioned study as a Phase 1 proof of concept and conduct a Phase 2 replication under comparable operational conditions in a quasi-experimental, time-blocked field trial at South-western Jutland Hospital (20,867 appointments) across Cardiology, Endocrinology and Pulmonology. Patients received SMS reminders rotating every 2 months between a standard message, DSN framing or SIC framing. Neither DSN nor SIC reduced DNAs overall. SIC increased cancellations (OR = 1.41, p < 0.001) but not DNAs; DSN reduced DNAs in Cardiology (OR = 0.76, p = 0.027), while SIC increased DNAs in Endocrinology (OR = 1.31, p = 0.021). Our findings underscore the importance of applying a systematic approach in the evaluation of Behavioural Insights.