Fausto Daniel Santos Tapia, Luis Felipe Trávez García
This article presents a comprehensive methodological proposal aimed at brand design and strategic brand management, using as a case study the academic outreach project between the University and the agricultural associations registered under the Decentralized Autonomous Government of Pichincha, distributed across its eight cantons. The proposed methodological approach is based on the active participation of graphic designers in collaborative processes with local communities, generating spaces for knowledge exchange, co-creation, and capacity building. This process seeks to develop a graphic system composed of visual identity, packaging, and a distinctive visual style that enhances the positioning of agricultural products in local and regional markets, integrating productive, cultural, and territorial attributes. This interaction not only promotes the recognition of ancestral knowledge and community practices but also enables social innovation processes driven by design. Thanks to its adaptable structure, the proposal is replicable in rural contexts. Its methodology, based on participatory design, contextual diagnosis, and the integration of local cultural narratives, can be adjusted to diverse productive and sociocultural dynamics. This flexibility enables its implementation by local governments and non-governmental organizations, aligning brand management with sustainable development goals and fostering a design culture committed to social transformation and communicational equity.
En el presente escrito se estudia a los NFTs (Non Fungible Token) como una tecnología digital que promete grandes ganancias económicas a usuarios y artistas digitales en México mediante el uso de internet, sin embargo, el problema que enfrenta es que tiene poca rentabilidad económica, por ello, se usa a la inducción analítica propuesta por Florian Znaniecki para el estudio de casos que ayuden a comprobar su beneficio económico. Se hallaron casos negativos que demuestran que los NFTs son una burbuja económica que ya estalló y ha beneficiado a comerciantes profesionales, una vez más el artista está en el último eslabón de la cadena. En consecuencia, los NFTs paradójicamente siguen el comportamiento de la venta ordinaria del arte. Y aquello que describian como objetos digitales únicos, se han convertido en una producción agranel. Esta investigación aporta, a manera de conclusión abierta, la urgencia de estudios de mercado en arte en México para analizar los diversos casos donde el arte, en todas sus áreas de producción, se inserta en ámbitos de lo cotidiano.
Cultural policy in Europe is deeply rooted in the Welfare State doctrine that has been prevailing during the last half century. Its implementation has gone along with the invention and rise of educational policy, social policy and health policy. This paper sketches its evolution as a four phase move towards what has been emerging as the central dual content of the current public cultural policy: preserving and promoting heritage, and bringing the creative industries at the core of the so-called knowledge society. The general evolutionary trend shows four distinct phases: 1) the creation of a systematic cultural supply policy based on a limited definition of culture suitable for public financing and based on a vertical concept of democratization by conversion; 2) the gradual decentralization of public action, which leads to an increasing disparity in its aims and functions, and which challenges the initial universalist, top-down egalitarian model; 3) a revision of the legitimate scope of public action, which declares symbolically obsolete the founding hierarchy of cultural politics, that which would oppose high culture, protected from market forces and entertainment culture and governed by the laws of the industrial economy; 4) an increasing tendency to justify cultural policy on the basis of its contribution to economic growth and to the balance of national social diversity, which legitimises the regulatory power of public action as well encouraging the expansion of the creative industries and the demands for the evaluation of procedures and results. The last section of this paper moves away from the state centered perspective and focuses on the city as the incubator of cultural generativity, in order to suggest how a city-centered approach to cultural development challenges the state-centered doctrine of cultural policy.
The main research questions for this local study of Tarkett AB, a floor manufacturer, are based on the central characteristics of the third industrial revolution: globalization, technological development, and organizational change. As a background to the local development and change towards the end of the twentieth century, I have chosen to emphasize, on the one hand, the increasing need of the industry for internationalization, rationalization, and productivity development after fordism and the demise of the regulated “real wages capitalism” in the middle of the 1970s, and, on the other, the work rights offensive of the labor movement in the 1970s and its continued struggle for economic and industrial authority. The method to analyze the essential traits of the organizational change process has aimed to construe a field of organizational change whose ideal types are based on taylorism, toyotism, flexible specialization, just-in-time, and lean production. Methods used to analyze change from the perspective of social structuration are also related to the theories of dynamic contradictory class locations, local hegemony, and gender. Apart from traditional source material and interviews, the study builds on the results from a study group consisting of a number of factory workers from Tarkett. Technological change and development (IT) of the work process on the factory floor has been analyzed as technological rationalization, quality development, work environment improvement, and as issues of gender relations and class positions at the work place. As regards the management process, leadership and control, centralization and decentralization concepts are vital. In matters concerning working conditions, including salaries, working hours, and job profiles (qualifications required for employment) are central. The management process was subject to changes that entailed deviations from the principles of traditional tayloristic management philosophy. Instead a participant change strategy implemented decentralized leadership functions in the shape of management by objectives via autonomous groups according to principles of ”responsible autonomy”. The investigation shows that computer-aided centralized control functions, competence improvement, and intensified ideological control worked together to change the management process. Decentralization of responsibility, the integration of white-collar like duties, the general competence development, and the higher demands on job qualifications, combined to render workers’ class locations more contradictory. This, together with ideological control and change, contributed to consolidate local hegemony.