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The creation of small businesses in Mexico since 1990, largely the result of the diversification of activities in rural areas, is one of the most prominent strategies, both for the improvement of the quality of place and life and for value of localized resources. Although the rural context imposes barriers, social capital and networks constitute an advantage for rural entrepreneurship, since shared values and norms such as the local context allow the articulation of economic, productive, social, and cultural resources for production and sale of significant goods for the region. The cases analyzed show the value of the collective dimension for the start of productive projects, which have contributed to reconverting and sometimes reconfiguring old resources such as land, ecosystems, landscape, animals, and crafts, in assets to start a business.

The objective of the work is to show the way in which creativity can influence entrepreneurial activity in Latin America. To do this, a review was made of the work related to: the mechanisms and contexts that stimulate creativity in business activities both internationally and in the region; and those that account for the contextual frameworks that favor or inhibit the development of business activity. Based on the above, it was reviewed in a more specific way, to what extent the link between creativity and entrepreneurship works or does not work in different types of companies such as small rural companies, women's businesses, and informal ones. In the last section of the chapter, with data constructed from the GEM, the impact of the context is shown to understand the geographical, historical, cultural, and institutional variations in the actions of entrepreneurship and creativity in the region, and with it, qualify the global studies on their relation.

This study aims to evaluate whether cultural market orientation (MO) of blood transfusion centres and services (BTCS) results in behaviours aimed at offering a suitable service-experience to blood donors and if the relationship between cultural and behavioural MO is partially mediated by BTCS staff members’ organisational identification (OI). Also, it analyses whether certain employee characteristics, particularly their status of medical or non-medical staff, may affect their perceptions about MO (cultural and behavioural), OI and the relationship between these variables.

An online survey was conducted with senior management staff and chiefs of Spanish BTCS, as well as blood collection staff – physicians, nurses and promoters – (147 participants).

Spanish BTCS has a strong belief in the importance of donors as key stakeholders in the donation system, although cultural MO does not turn into behaviours with the same strength. The results also show that there is a direct effect between cultural and behavioural MO, as well as a mediator effect of OI in this relationship.

This study demonstrates that OI is a relevant internal marketing construct with a high potential explanatory power of customer orientation.

This study offers a validated tool to assess and monitor BTCS’ donor orientation and recommends that BTCS’ design effective marketing intelligence systems.

This research contributes to social welfare by helping to explain how the organisational culture of BTCS and their employees’ perceptions and behaviours might help to enhance donor orientation, which would guarantee continual blood collection. This might be useful in the context of negative evolution of blood donation levels in many countries.

This research puts the focus on the role of the BTCS’s employees to understand the process by which a donor orientation culture would translate into market-oriented behaviours aimed to reach blood donor satisfaction, to guarantee a constant, growing blood donor pool. In this translation process, the organisational climate seems to play a fundamental role through one of its main variables, i.e. organisational identification.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consensus decision making serves as a foundation for organizing an alternative economy while the agency of the economic project itself organizes participants because it serves to distribute resources as people need them and foment a community of sharing based on the concept that as individuals we are lacking but as a community we have enough. The paper asserts that as activists looking to foment change, alternative economic projects in themselves are actors in organizing community building and resistance to capitalism.

El Cambalache (The Swap in English), located in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, is an exchange-based money-less economy that trades unwanted items as well as knowledge, abilities and skills that one wants to share. The project receives anything; specifically used, broken and/or unwanted electronics as well as just about anything else that one might possess. In exchange people provide laptop maintenance classes, language exchange, land to be worked, rooms, gardening services, objects, stories, etc. The rules in this money-less non-capitalist economy organize participation through one exchange or many.

Consensus decision making is an effective method for engaging in non-hierarchical research projects.

This project contributes to research in heterodox economies by presenting an original project with a new suggestion for exchange value as an inclusive process of exchange among participants in the economy. It also provides evidence that consensus decision making can be a useful and productive method for research.