Learning business in China

I recently went to China on a study trip with a group of MBA students and faculty from my university. The trip is part of a partnership between Universidad Católica de Chile and Tshingua University, sponsored by Banco de Chile. Every year, a group of our Chilean MBA students travels to China, and a group of Chinese students from Tshingua University comes to Chile to take classes, visit companies, and learn about the local business culture. This was my first time in Asia, and I must confess I was awestruck. We landed in Shanghai, a large, modern, and very much Western (at least at first sight) looking city. Huge highways crisscross each other way up in the sky, 14 tunnels and 8 bridges cut through the Huangpu River and link the financial center of Lujiazui, at the newly developed Eastern bank of Pudong, to the historic center of the city, the Puxi area, located on the western side of the Huangpu. If you’ve been there, you know – it’s breathtaking. That, and our Chinese tour guide, Mr. Yu, spoke perfect Spanish, allowing us to call him Julio. Impressive indeed.

But more impressive than this was the economic growth and potential of the Chinese market (I know better than to think China is one big market, we’ll get to the details soon). We spent four days in Shanghai, where we visited the Harvard Shanghai Center, and had a discussion panel with representatives of Chilean companies operating in China. We visited Yihaodian, where we spent an hour with CEO and co-founder Gang Yu. Mr. Yu and his partner got together in 2008 to start the online supermarket that currently sells more than US$ 500m/year and grows at an impressive rate of 20% per month. In 2012, Walmart announced further investment to Yihaodian under the approval of Chinese Ministry of Commerce, and became the biggest shareholder of Yiyuandian (with 51% of shares). We also visited a factory of Nexans, a French cable systems company that has copper as one of its core raw materials. Chile is the world’s largest exporter of copper, and 31% of all copper exported by Chile goes to China.

In fact, China is Chile’s most important commercial partner. The relations between the People's Republic of China and Chile began 1970, shortly following the election of Salvador Allende. Chile became the first South American country to recognize the mainland Chinese government. Following the 1973 Chilean coup d'état which saw the overthrow of the Allende government, China was the only Communist country not to have severed ties with Augusto Pinochet's new regime, due to the latter's continued endorsement of the One China Policy. The continued relationship was built on pragmatism and non-interference. China supported Chile's claim of sovereignty over Antarctic, and in turn, Chile allowed the Chinese to build the Great Wall research station inside Chile's territorial claims. Following the end of the Cold War and fall of the Pinochet regime in 1990, bilateral relations continued, with the new Chilean government pursuing a policy of free trade, and supported China's entrance into the World Trade Organization. The free trade agreement between the two countries was signed in 2006, and the bilateral trade volume has been increasing since then. Chile became China's third largest Latin American trading partner behind Brazil and Mexico. Bilateral trade volume exceeded US$32 billion in 2012. China is a market of enormous proportions compared to any other, but it shines especially bright on the eyes of Chilean companies, for the small Chilean population of 17.2 million makes the local market very limiting.

We spent another week in Beijing, China’s political capital and site of Tshingua University. In addition to taking classes at SEM, Tshingua’s school of management, we visited Nestlé’s headquarters (once more, impressive numbers – 33 factories in China and growing an average of 20% per month), Lenovo (where we were introduced to their “phablet”), and the Columbia Global Center, where Dr. Joan Kaufman, Columbia Beijing Global Center Director mediated a discussion panel with Professor Wang Zhenyao (former Ministry of Civil Affairs, and current Dean of the School of Public Policy at Beijing Normal University); Roger Di (Non-profit sector partner of KPMG-China); Steven Blake (Communications Manager for The Nature Conservancy China Program); Brent Johnson (Vice President of the United Family Hospitals Group), and Pengcheng Qu (Director of Government Relations for the World Economic Forum in China). The discussion centered on the opportunities and limitations for conducting non-profit and social responsibility activities in China and was enlightening in many ways. We also spent some time with the Chilean ambassador in China, Mr. Luis Schmidt Montes, and visited Banco de Chile’s office in China, an important business platform between Chile and Asia Pacific. Through Banco de Chile, relevant developments have materialized; Chilean companies have strengthened their relationship with major Chinese financial institutions, as Banco de Chile has signed agreements with the China Development Bank (CDB) and The Export and Import Bank of China (Eximbank).

All these visits and activities were incredibly interesting – but as a consumer culture scholar, what I was really thrilled to observe were the cultural differences, and the particular aspects of Chinese consumers’ relations to brands and products, as well as how some Chinese traditions seem to impact the introduction and marketing of new products in the country. I will share these on my next post, coming soon.

Tweeting alone: Is it the end of community (again)?

“People wonder about the absence of what used to be, while new forms of community have slipped under their radar scopes” – Wellman

The other day I was checking some references on online communities in preparation for a class. I found neat definitions of community, general consensus around the characteristics of online communities, and a sense of progression in understandings of community boundaries from being strictly delimited to being more “fluid”. Researchers have observed that notions of social bonding, social interaction, and communal needs have changed dramatically over a short period of time. These changes are frequently attributed to the rapid expansion of information and communication technologies and to the broad social changes promoted by them (or vice-versa). In accordance with the dominant view on contemporary community literature, Delanty (2003) notes that communication technologies have reshaped what is meant by the term ‘community’. He defends that ‘place, locality and symbolic ties are being drained off any content, and in their place are more fluid and temporary forms of social relations sustained only by processes of communication outside of which they have no reality’ (168). In online social networks, for example, individuals keep at reach a vast collection of acquaintances with whom they can interact without much effort. Interactions, is this case, consist of short messages written in ‘walls’, actions played with avatars, or the exchange of virtual gifts. Here, what creates and sustains a communal feeling among participants is a shared reason for communicating, combined to norms and protocols, and based on interactions that happen on the internet over time on a given platform(e.g. a website).

However, as my students and I noticed, it has become increasingly harder to identify such online communities. How does one set boundaries around a group of individuals interacting online when they move from discussion forums through chats, blogs, IM, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, texting, Flickr, YouTube, back to Facebook, and connect to different people in each of these platforms?

Online communities are spreading and fragmenting, just like the geographical communities of the past. As Americans bowl alone, Brazilians type to themselves on a deserted Orkut. In 2006, the 50 most visited communities on Google's social network Orkut totaled more than 37 million members and received almost 1,3 million daily visitors. Although Google has been cautious in revealing the network statistics, a little browsing suffices to show that what was once a vibrant platform for online community formation now looks more like an abandoned alley. However, in observing this I do not suggest that we fall on the nostalgia trap. That could lead us to miss the “new forms of community” mentioned by Wellman, which might be forming around you as you read this post.

For example, mobile phone usage has made connecting to certain platforms easier that others. We now find people interacting through Foursquare and Instagram more than on discussion boards. Finding community, then, might be a matter of looking at the right places – or the right online platforms. However, what sort of community shall we find, once we are able to identify where the "online people” currently gathers?

Computer-mediated communication is changing with increased mobility – we communicate in a way that is faster, more fragmented, and more on-the-move than ever. Synchronicity became more relevant than it was in the early days of the internet – we want to connect to anyone, anytime. We want to know “what’s up” and we don’t want to wait to know it. We link our profiles one to another and seamlessly move across platforms to complete a social interaction. E-mail is considered “too slow” by most members of the millennium generation. If we think about these characteristics – speed, movement, change - we can notice a striking contrast among them and the way we usually think about community. Our way of conceptualizing community has systematically excluded “movement.” To the exception of entry and exit of a community, which are mostly treated as one-time, highly consequential events, not much has been written or discussed about how people move in, out, between or within communities. There are exceptions, such as Kozinets’ analysis of how community members move from newbies to insiders as they develop more social ties within the community and the activity around which the community is centered gains more importance to them. In general, however, our understanding of community participation has been mostly static. If we make an attempt to focus on change and movement instead, we can see how online communities have adapted to the technological and social changes – and reconsider whether what we’ve been struggling to find online has disappeared or still exists, albeit in a different format.

Bernardo Figueiredo, a post-doc at the University of Southern Denmark whose research focuses on the how global mobility impacts consumption practices of global cosmopolitans, introduced me to the “new mobilities paradigm” that is becoming popular within the social sciences.I have since been thinking about the implications of this paradigm to research in online communities.

In a fundamental article for the new mobility scholars, Sheller and Urry discuss methods for mobility research – and point to some advances on how to conduct ethnographies of mobile communities. These include “mobile ethnography” which involves participation in movement. From this approach, walking with informants, following them, and accompanying them are the key modes of participation. Under these conditions, field notes must be particularly attentive to time and space dimensions, registering variations of encounters with informants in multiple places. In my dissertation research, I used a similar approach and combined ethnography to netnography and followed my informants as they moved, geographically, back and forth from one city to another and from one country to another in order to find caches and meet fellow participants. I also followed participants online as they moved from discussion forums through chats, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, Flickr, YouTube, and from website or app to another.

I found that these community members never stop, nor go somewhere to be “in community” and engage in the social and cultural activities we are interested in observing. They do so wherever they are, with whoever happens to be available. The task of observing and participating in such a moving swarm requires energy, tenacity and patience.

I found that following (or moving with) my informants across platforms produced data in multiple formats, some of which have no equivalent in traditional ethnographic research and require new definitions (e.g. “likes” on Facebook; albums on Pinterest; Youtube videocasts; or the brief and broken text of “tweets”).

Moreover, new social media platforms emerge every day that create new challenges for researchers. Each social media platform demands a particular set of skills to create and evaluate content (making, editing, and uploading videos for Youtube vs. writing succinct posts for Twitter, for example). The networking etiquette and interaction features also differ between platforms, and researchers must be aware of these particular aspects in order not to put themselves, or their informants, in awkward situations. Is it be better to “friend” your informants on Facebook or to subscribe to their updates? To make matters more complex, conversations between participants and the development of collective action may happen across platfomrs, such as when participants answer to a “tweet” with a comment on a website the “tweet” links to, or when they add on Facebook their impressions of a Youtube video shared by a friend via e-mail. As I found by following my informants online, the social media principle of authenticity applies to social media research as well.

In order to fully participate in social media, researchers may need to disclose more personal information than they are comfortable with. Although privacy filters and account management features are increasingly allowing users to take control of who sees what in their social media profiles, managing additional research profiles or particular privacy settings only adds to the already substantial task of the social media researcher.

My research experience with online communities in the social media era suggests that, if once netnography was seen as a shortcut that would provide researchers with fast and easy access to all the data necessary to understand and explain a culture or community, this is no longer the case. As the complexity of the social media available to consumers increases, netnographies will be the task of research teams, who will be able to manage finding, tracking, and interacting with individuals who are everywhere, all the time, making culture. Researchers working in teams can divide the task of participating in different social media platforms, or of observing and interacting with fewer informants in their online activities across platforms. Research teams can use the same social media platforms to discuss and integrate data – and international teams could work around the clock to avoid missing important data among the immense volume of short-lived content that is posted, read, and shared online.

In this sense, what the new mobility paradigm proposes – following people or objects instead of attempting to identify one single place/space where a community is supposed to gather - might be a good idea. This “research in motion” shifts the focus of our attention from communities to networks.

Networks are flexible arrangements. They grow, shrink, move, and vary according to the connections individual members form to each other and to external elements. These connections are formed through fragmented and cross-platform interactions. Therefore, it is harder to identify and study networks than groups, for the researcher will need to engage in the same activities network participants do: she will need to “actively search, maintain, and mobilize [her] ramifying ties, one-by-one, to deal with their affairs.” Nevertheless, this might be just what it takes to find community in today’s web.

Frustrated Fatshionistas

In market driven economies, we typically assume that consumers will seldom experience a prolonged scarce supply of goods they are willing to pay for. Yet some groups of consumers – particularly those who have historically been socially stigmatized – often find that the marketers fail to meet their needs. For example, prior studies found that African American consumers living in or near impoverished neighborhoods routinely experience attenuated access to a variety of goods and services they both wanted and could afford. Four years ago, I started a research project with Eileen Fischer in which we look at one particular group that perceives that the market does not provide options that are adequate to their needs: consumers of plus-sized fashion. The article that reports our findings has recently been accepted for publication at the Journal of Consumer Research. You can read the full paper here, but let me tell you a bit more about the Fatshionistas (fashion lovers who wear plus-sized clothing) and their quest for more choice in the fashion market. The following quote from a blogger who routinely writes on this topic illustrates the frustrations these consumers experience:

When I [damage] my clothes in some way, I tend to panic about it a little bit… This, my friends, is a side effect of living with style scarcity. Because I really don’t have any reason to believe I’d find something like the dress [that is torn] ever again. Now, no longer being in possession of a particular dress is not exactly a hardship; certainly not on the level of not having a place to live or enough to eat. But the panic bubbles up anyway, because I can’t just run to Anthropologie or H&M or where-ever the ladies several sizes down from me do their shopping and pick up another. Fat style is a scarce resource. (Lesley Kinzel, Two Whole Cakes, January 21, 2009)

In thousands of online posts like this, bloggers who are self-styled “Fatshionistas” indicate their view that the mainstream market provides them with too few fashionable clothing options. In principle, such behavior is consistent with pursuit of the right to consumer choice that is enshrined by law in many market-based economies. In practice, consumers frequently remain relatively disengaged from seeking greater inclusion in markets where they feel under-served. Consumer researchers have previously noted that even when they believe their marketplace choices are unduly restricted, consumers often fail to take action. So in our study we ask: When will marginalized consumers mobilize to seek greater satisfaction in mainstream markets? And how will they do so once they become mobilized? We develop answers to these questions studying Fatshionista bloggers and their followers who desire a greater range of fashionable plus-sized clothing choices. We find that mobilization is triggered by three factors:

• The first is the emergence of a collective consumer identity among members of a market segment; we observe plus-sized consumer embracing and identifying with the Fatshionista identity. • The second is the identification by that collective of “institutional entrepreneurs” (people who appear to be able to change the system) from whom they draw inspiration; in our context, the singer Beth Ditto who is both plus-sized and a fashion icon is one such inspiring institutional entrepreneur. • The third is the appropriation by consumers’ of logics from other fields that legitimate their desire for greater market inclusion, such as the logic of human rights, which Fatshionistas borrow from the Fat Acceptance Movement.

We also identify three strategies that consumers may employ to attempt to gain greater inclusion in a market, and more offerings from mainstream marketers:

• One is appealing to institutional logics within the market; Fatshionistas invoke the logics of art and of commerce that prevail in the fashion when trying to persuade established actors to serve them better. • A second is publicizing desirable institutional innovations and persistent institutional impediments; Fatshionistas help publicize the offerings of marketers who do try and meet their needs, and they call out marketers who make feeble attempts to offer plus size clothing and retreat without giving their experiments time to succeed. • A third strategy is allying with more powerful institutional actors; Fatshionistas take every opportunity to interact with influential designers and retailers in order to persuade them to do more to serve their needs.

Our theoretical contributions include a framework that can help us better understand how consumer (il)legitimacy affects market dynamics. When we consider how consumers are perceived in, and what consumers want from, the mainstream market in conjunction, we can anticipate four different kinds of dynamics.

Consider the case of Stigmatized Seekers, consumers like the Fatshionistas we studied who lack legitimacy in mainstream markets, yet who want more or better offerings from them. In such cases, the pace of change in markets may be slow and uneven, as institutionalized practices in the market and in the wider society have allowed marketers to ignore the aspiring segment. Though upstart marketers may try to meet these consumers’ needs, the mainstream will be slower to do so, and will find reasons to retreat from serving the segment even when tentative forays have been made. In contrast, Comfortable Collaborators (consumers who like mainstream offerings and who are courted by major competitors) can trust that marketers are ever vigilant to their wants and needs. In markets like these we can expect steady, if incremental, evolution as corporations endeavor to keep consumers contented, and to profit from that contentment by increasing sales within the segment. Consumers will have little need to be pro-active agents of market change, except in cases where they form attachments to offerings that marketers deem unprofitable. In contexts where consumers are Mainstream Malcontents who are legitimate in the mainstream market but who intensely dislike marketers’ practices, we expect that those whose profitability is threatened by the desired market changes will resist the institutional reforms desired by consumers. As part of this resistance, they may attempt to partially undermine the legitimacy of consumers. Nonetheless, in such contexts, compromises between past practice by marketers and changes desired by consumers may be part of the unfolding market dynamic. In contexts where consumers are Resistant Rebels who lack legitimacy in an institutionalized market setting, and who seek fundamental changes to the market logic, we expect very limited market change. Mainstream marketers either ignore their critics, or make minimal gestures in acknowledgement of their concerns. In general, we believe that unless Resistant Rebels can mobilize consumers regarded as legitimate by mainstream producers, or become legitimate themselves, then market dynamics will entail at most minor and/or temporary modifications to practices.

There are considerably fewer bloggers discussing plus-size fashion in South America, but consumers are not less dissatisfied here with the available offers in mainstream fashion markets than in North America and the UK. Poderosas Gordinhas (Powerful Fatties) and Grandes Mulheres (Big/Great Women)are two examples of blogs discussing the lack of options in plus-size clothing in Brazil, while La Pesada de la Moda (Fashion Heavy) is a hub for Spanish-speaker Fatshionistas. In Argentina, laws have been approved to apply heavy fines on local clothing manufacturers and stored that do not expand the numbers and sizes available to meet standards defined by legislation, which includes sizes from 36-50. However, media reports have pointed that business still provide skewed measures to avoid fines, and consumers who need larger sizes are still unable to find ready-to-wear clothes on the market.

Justin Biebering in Social Media

I never thought I would say (or write) this, but I have watched “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.” Twice. Considering that I am not a 13-year old, I don’t have a 13-year old daughter, I do have better things to do, and the film is rated 1.6 on IMDB (I bet his fans haven’t discovered the site yet), you might be wondering why on Earth I watched it. Twice.

It just happens that Justin Bieber is a social media product. And the movie is and excellent depiction of how his team of agents/coaches/marketers has used social media to turn a 14-year old boy from a small Canadian town into the Bieber phenomenon. The movie starts with scenes of a very web 2.0 behavior: screenshots of e-mail exchanges pop-up in which people share links to cute or funny or interesting videos that others have uploaded on to YouTube. We did that all the time before we could share links on Facebook, right? In February, 2008 someone uploaded a video of Justin Bieber singing one of Chris Brown’s songs on YouTube, the video went viral, and the rest is history. That video has been watched 40,662,907 times and Bieber’s official channel on YouTube has 1,597, 435 subscribers as of today. As Bieber and his agent started to tour radio stations trying to get them to play Bieber's first single, the boy tweeted to let his YouTube fans know which radio station he was at. Scooter Braun, Bieber's manager, recalls: “First 20 kids, then 40 kids, then 50 kids then hundreds of kids starting lining up just to get a glimpse of him.” The movie also shows Bieber tweeting to his fans he had a sore throat – and then some of the hundreds of thousands of instant replies and good wishes he received in return- making it clear that for Bieber social media is personal.

Bieber is also a smart boy and acknowledges the importance of social media in his celebrity status. When the Tribeca Film Festival honored Bieber–and his manager–with a “Disruptive Innovation Award” in April, for having shaken up the traditional gatekeepers of the music industry, Bieber was quoted saying that he feels the fans connected to him through social media: “I take time out of my day to retweet fans and really care. I don’t think I would be here without the Internet.” He also made it to the cover of Forbes Magazine last month where he teaches us all a bit on the relationship between social media marketing and ROI. So it’s not just me saying this.

It is also easy to see a connection between the Bieber phenomenon and some of the latest theory developments in the field of Marketing. In their forthcoming paper “Positioning person brands in established organizational fields,” Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber draw on Bourdieu’s work and look at models competing for work in the fashion field to identify four brand positioning practices relevant for person brands: “crafting a portfolio, cultivating and demonstrating upward affiliations, complying with occupation-specific behavioral expectations, and conveying field-conforming tastes.” As with models, in the Bieber case (and, I suspect, in most cases in the music field) an agent played a key role in educating the young singer on how to craft his portfolio: a YouTube playlist before his career jumpstarted – and then carefully selecting songs to record. The agent also guides Bieber on how to cultivate and demonstrate upward affiliations. In the movie, Scooter is shown video-recording an arranged encounter of Bieber with Usher, in which Bieber, hoping to get his first record deal, sings to the already established American R&B artist. But I also see that Justin developed connections to the public before reached out to “patrons,” as Parmentier et al. define a powerful actor in the organizational field that may lend prestige to work postulants and help advance their careers. Once he started to build connections with more powerful actors in the music industry, Bieber already brought with him a small but constantly growing hoard of fans who had learned about him in social media. In fact, Scooter (the agent) affirms in the movie that Bieber’s fans are as loyal as they are because they found Bieber before the media and industry did.

When discussing how models have to comply with occupation-specific behavioral expectations in order to fit it, Parmentier et al. do not mention that even established organizational fields have moments of instability, when norms and behavioral expectations are shaken and, for a moment, open to questioning and change (Galvin, 2002). The advent of the Web 2.0 and the popularity of social media caused turbulence in many established organizational fields, including the music industry.

As an entrant to the field in such a moment of instability, Bieber was able to set new standards as he worked to stand out while fitting in. Personal and on-time communication with fans through social media is now expected by the public; as it is that an artist will share content (clips, songs, backstage videos) online; welcome feedback; act generously when meeting fans, and engage in random acts of kindness towards fans. These new expectations and behavioral norms can be associated with the fact that, through social media, the public has as much ability to generate and spread brand-related content as the artist does. Now, I don’t feel I know enough about popular-teenage music in order to analyze the logics and tastes of the field and to and check whether Bieber conforms to these or not. But I can always watch “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” again, because, let’s face it - the kid is as cute as one can be.

SOURCES: Galvin, Tiffany L. (2002), “Examining Institutional Change: Evidence from the Founding Dynamics of U.S. Health Care Interest Associations,” The Academy of Management Journal, 45 (4), 673-696. Parmentier, Marie-Agnès, Eileen Fischer, and Rebecca Reuber. “Positioning person brands in established organizational fields,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, forthcoming. DOI 10.1007/s11747-012-0309-2

Open Space Technology

A couple of weeks ago I attended a workshop promoted by the Center for Excellence in Teaching at my school. The email invitation gave attendants one task in preparation to the session: to think about “What are the ideas, questions and possibilities I want to explore about enriching the classroom experience?”

The professor who facilitated the session used Open Space Technology – a technique to run meetings or classes where participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme. Our theme for the session was “enriching the classroom experience”. As it usually happens in these events, I learned a great deal from exchanging classroom tips, stories, and practices with other participants. Nevertheless, discovering Open Space Technology - and the myriad of its potential applications - was the highlight of the meeting for me.  

Chairs were disposed in a circle, and there were flip charts around the room. There were signs posted on the walls with quotes like “Whoever comes is the right people” and “When it’s over, it’s over.” Cute pictures of bees and butterflies also decorated the walls of what is usually a neutral, impersonal meeting room. An appetizing table with sandwiches, fruits, deserts, and refreshments was set for participants to serve themselves at the back of the room. Before starting, we received handouts and a brief explanation of how the technique works. The pictures and quotes on the walls started to make sense after this introduction, and in a couple of minutes we were all “shopping” in a marketplace of ideas which would later develop to fill in pages and pages of the flipcharts spread throughout the room. As bumblebees, some of us moved from group to group, cross-pollinating discussions with ideas generated elsewhere. As butterflies, others stopped by one chart or by the refreshments table, listening, thinking, and condensing information. In the end, everyone moved back to the circle and we made sure to have  identified, explored and addressed all of the most important issues, gathered new ideas, resources and people and connected them to these issues, documented all of this in notes, and established strategic themes, clear priorities, immediate actions steps.

I left the seminar (re)energized and action-ready! Right after the meeting, I did some research on Open Space Technology and discovered a worldwide community of practitioners and plenty of online resources to support those who want to learn more about the technique.  Here is an article that is a good start for anyone interested: “Working in Open Space – a guided tour”

This can be a great tool to use in the classroom for the analysis of complex business cases, for example, or to identify issues of interest to students in an elective course. It has been applied to healthcare, participatory planning, organizational change, corporate strategy development, and leadership among other contexts, and it has been the focus of research in several disciplines.

Let me know if you have an experience with OST or know any other interesting and innovative way to facilitate learning and idea generation. I will love to hear about it!  

The gold mine of e-books

 [Jeff Stahler]

I had just finished reading the good news kindly sent by Amazon in a promotional email today (the first version of their cute wireless reading device, the Kindle, is on sale) when another nice email popped up in my inbox. One of the members of the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list (which is great - you can subscribe here) posted a link to the most complete list of websites offering free e-books I've ever came across. Of course I'm passing it forward here :)
I love print books and I usually spend a couple of hours every week browsing the university library shelves, but sometimes one just wants to scroll the screen instead of flipping pages, I guess. I have browsed most of the websites for academic business, consumer culture or other related topics, and there are not many books available. Still, some of the websites are really good and there are lots of interesting readings in many different categories.
So here's the list with some comments (the ones in italics are mine) and the link to the original post at Hongkiat.com.
Enjoy!

1. Free Ebook Download Links

Free Ebook Download Links intends to provide links for downloading books available free in different format.The books are published online by their authors for free viewing and printing for non-commercial proposes only. Credit: Raj + Don't get disappointed by the small number indicated beside each category. When you click on Zen (1), for example, 18 titles come up as a result. 

2. eBoook3000

A library of free ebook downloads with over 17 categories available. Credit: Myo Kyaw Htun + Most titles relate to internet, networking, web development and programming. There are some interesting titles in Political and Social category, but most of the links I've tried were broken. 

3. SlideShare

SlideShare is the best way to share your presentations with the world. Let your ideas reach a broad audience. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to create a webinar. Credit: La Ode Adam

4. PDF Search Engine

PDF Search Engine is a book search engine search on sites, forums, message boards for pdf files. You can find and download a tons of e-books by searching it or browsing through the full directory. Credit: iphoner + No categories to browse, so it works better when you're looking for a specific title. It has PDF on the title, but you get books as .doc too :) 

eSnips


eSnips is the one place where you can share anything you want, about any topic: your thoughts, your photos, your music, your videos, your flash files, stuff you find on the web, and many other media types. You can search and download for free documents in eSnips as well.Credit: sandeep, syokkahwin, Suresh

Book Gold Mine


Book Gold Mine serves a large collection of quality e-books, lectures, notes, and other kinds of documents at no cost to the user.Credit: Gio

eBooks-Space


Free downloadable ebooks for computer IT, programming lauguages, software development, tutorial, database design in PDF-CHM file format.Credit: mongther +Again, most titles are internet related, and the yellow text on red background is a bit overwhelming. 

5. drebooks

The vision of the founder was to provide an online space where Medical Students and Doctors could gather to share and collaborate their information and ideas about medical books. Credit: peter

6. E-Books Directory

E-Books Directory is a daily growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes found all over the internet. You can submit and promote your own ebooks, add comments on already posted books or just browse through the directory below and download anything you need.Credit: Stam +I like its browsing system. Check their Computer and Internet Culture category, it has some neat titles. It also includes its own list of links and resources for e-books related websites.  

7. UFindBook

UFindBook offers free ebooks download more than 200,000 titles categorized in format of pdf, chm, html. Credit: sobookee

8. Books-PDF

Books-PDF provides free ebooks for .Net, 3D animation, accounting, AJAX, algorithms, ASP.NET, AutoCAD, C#, C++, Database and etc.Credit: ganesh

9. PDFoo

PDFoo.com was developed for free services to provide resources of PDF files. All files based on popular section and it short by number of the most download by people. Browse through the category section will lead you find the PDF files that you are looking for. Every time people download, or system will counting how many times it has download by people. Credit: Delaserna

10. Free Ebook Down

Free Ebook Down offers over 10,000 free ebooks in 22 categories. Credit: ebook

11. eBooks Download Free

ebooks download free is One of the biggest books sharing websites that contains large collection of pdf and chm books free download you can download free books in many categories: Computer books like free php ebooks to download, ADO.NET, AJAX, java, ajax, photoshop, javascript Exchange Server, Sharepoint , ASP.NET XML free books downloads, c# and c+ books. Credit: bookm

PDFGeni


PDFGeni is a dedicated pdf search engine for PDF ebooks, sheets, forms and documents.

12. CHM PDF

A collection of general interest and technical ebooks.

13. eBook-X

eBook-x lets you to download popular free ebooks, classical free ebooks, new releases and more.

14. Spotbit

Spotbit.com provides paperless solution to publishing industry which end result is an E-Book make available in a unique and standalone digital format that is different from most formats available in the current market.

15. Ebook Share

eBook Share provides free ebooks download in torrent format.You can search for an ebook in categories like magazine, programming, graphic design, networking, business and investing and the others. On the original post there was also a link for "Free e-books Canada", a website that is not accessible. I couldn't locate it on Google either. If anyone knows this website, let me know!

More Free eBook resources

1. PlanetPDF – A small collection of classic novels all in PDF format.
2. DailyLit – Read books online by daily email and RSS feed.
3. Wikibooks – Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit.
4. Dwalin – Free novels in text format.
5. Project Gutenberg – Free ebooks from producers.
6. Adobe Free eBooks – In Adobe’s Free eBooks area, you can download, unlock, and read electronic books on your personal computer or reading device.
7. Alive & Free – A page of links to some recent books from living authors available free online.
8. Franklin – Thousands of free titles in text and HTML file formats.
9. Read Easily – An ebook online library which has been designed to provide you an adaptive reading experience!
10. PDFbooks – This new site offers around 4,700 downloadable public domain e-books.
11. Witguides – An online source for a wide range of useful e-books that are completely free with no need to sign-up or buy anything.
12. Diesel eBooks -Offer free ebooks formatted for both Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket.
13. Free eBook Miners –
    Free eBooks for your education, research or amusement.
14. Planet eBook –
    Free classic literature to download and share.
15. e-Library – Plenty of free ebooks available for download.
16. BookBoon – Provides free ebooks for students and travelers in PDF format. No registration is required. 

And...there's more!

1. Filebook – Free eBooks download in zipped format.
2. ebooksboard – Free eBooks download portal.
3. Computer-Books.us – Highest quality computer books all of which are available for free download.
4. 76eBook – Free ebooks download for IT, business and multimedia.
5. Linux Related Free Ebooks – 68 Linux Related Free E-books.
6. TechBooksForFree – Free books on technology subjects.
7. Wowio – WOWIO is passion for FREE BOOKS + FREE MINDS.
8. Freeebooks – Free ebooks are divided into different categories from business, art, computing and education.
9. Witguides – The premier online source for a wide range of useful e-books that are completely free with no need to sign-up or buy anything.
10. Issuu – Issue lets you find and share the web’s most interesting publications.

Read more: 20 Best Websites To Download Free E-Books, Part II  

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/20-best-websites-to-download-free-e-books-part-ii/#ixzz0uFKA9NeM

Fordlandia and Belterra

Currently, there are two ways to get to Fordlandia, the city build by Henry Ford in the middle of the Amazon jungle: departing from Santarém by boat (a 12-hour trip) or by car (330km of hell roads, great option for someone looking for a 4x4 adventure). Nearby is Belterra, the second village built by Ford after abandoning Fordlandia in 1934. Belterra’s rubber plantation actually reached the rubber-production stage around 1941, but the village and plantation were also abandoned in 1945-6, when the project was proved unprofitable. Both, Fordlandia and Belterra survive down to the present day, being administered by the Brazilian federal government after Ford’s exit.

In a series of email exchanges, I learned from Mario Pinheiro, who was born in Belterra, that all employees who worked for the Ford Company in both villages were admitted as employees by the Brazilian agriculture ministry department. After unsuccessful attempts by the Brazilian government to promote cattle raising in the area, the few employees who were still living in the villages were transferred to larger cities to work in governmental departments.

For decades, the Federal government administered the cities, requiring that consent was obtained for any local development, which probably hampered the growth of the two villages. It was only in 1997 that Belterra became an independent township, while Fordlandia is currently considered a subdivision of another township, Aveiro.

Belterra, Aveiro, and two other townships are part of the “Floresta Nacional do Tapajós” (Tapajós’s National Forest), a 550,000ha national conservation area. While being part of a conservational area imposes limits to external investments in the area, having an independent administration and budget has allowed Belterra to advance the local economic development and also to preserve its history. Belterra’s beautiful river beaches attract many visitors to the city, so tourism is currently an important source of income to local dwellers. In contrast, Fordlandia seems to have stopped in time, and its early buildings are in a pitiful state of conservation. Few families still live in the place, practicing subsistence agriculture, and receiving their income from government retirement pensions.

Fordlandia and Belterra were failures in terms of generating profits though rubber plantation, but the social aspects of Ford’s envisioned cities can be said to be more successful. Participants on the Fordlandia online community seem to be nostalgic of the city and its “good times”. As Mario, one of the participants, explained, in contrast to most of Brazil’s northern region, both villages had excellent infrastructure, with sewage and water treatment, electricity, schools, a hospital and a movie theatre, all of which have positively influenced the cultural development of the local population.

Many people got to know each other while living in the villages and working for the Ford Company. This was the beginning of families who, to the date, populate both places. Belterra and Fordlandia are frequently visited by researchers, journalists, and film makers. Dona Olinda, one of the few remaining people who have worked for the Ford Company in Belterra, has given countless interviews. Her 100th birthday, celebrated last month, was a community affair, as she is considered the one who keeps the city history alive.

That’s it! I might be planning a visit to the area in my next trip to Brazil... If you want to know more about Fordlandia, here’s an article published a couple of years ago in the Brazilian Rolling Stone (If you don’t read Portuguese, take a look at the article’s picture gallery) and a short documentary in English from the History Channel, which was part of a larger program called "Amazon Adventures". The link was posted by Scott Chandler, who recently came back from a two-month research trip to Fordlandia and Belterra.

All pictures on this post were taken by Mario Pinheiro - thanks Mario!