PurposeExamine and understand how an informal volunteer’s goals and actions develop from the moment they first learn about a disaster.Design/methodology/approachWe examine informal volunteerism (the activities of people who work outside of formal emergency and disaster management arrangements) through the theoretical lens of entrepreneurial effectuation to explain informal volunteer behavior and cognition and gain insight on how they develop their disaster relief ventures.FindingsWe find that informal volunteers follow an effectual logic, relying on available means to take advantage of opportunities as they are recognized or created. Application of effectuation vs causation processes depended on whether the informal volunteers were categorized as traditional, emergent or extended volunteers.Practical implicationsInformal volunteers’ disregard for the Affordable Loss Principle task governments and disaster relief organizations with the important challenge of managing and assuring the safety and well-being of informal volunteers. Their entrepreneurial behavior also invites the establishment of formal processes to counsel and guide informal volunteers, helping them fill out the necessary paperwork and funding applications to develop their efforts.Social implicationsThrough their experimentation and flexibility, informal volunteers accelerate disaster recovery, recognizing opportunities, working around bureaucracy and other roadblocks that hinder the efforts of established organizations. They also demonstrate entrepreneurial behavior that helps revitalize and jumpstart the local economy, making for stronger and more resilient communitiesOriginality/valueThis study borrows from Effectuation Theory from the entrepreneurship field in order to bring a much needed theoretical lens to the topic and greatly assists informal volunteerism research, moving from past efforts that simply define and categorize the concept.

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The main objective of this work is to explore how ventures have adapted their commercial proposals after the changes brought upon by Covid-19. We selected The Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants list as a case study, (1) due to it being an international ranking that unifies and selects the best restaurants in a specific geographic sector, (2) each of the restaurants in the list have a tradition of providing a service that is consumed or experienced locally as it allows them to control all aspects of the dining experience, (3) prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, given the differentiated offer of products offered by each restaurant, the restaurants did not work with food delivery applications (4) prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, their menus were printed on paper and not in a digital format through the use of mobile technology, (5) the preparations and presentations offered prior to the Covid-19 pandemic were intended for consumption at the point of sale service and not delivery. To conduct the study, an analysis was carried out, comparing various variables that subsequently made it possible to assess whether mobile technologies were opportunities to the ventures in our sample. We found that the offerings of this type of restaurants had to adapt to the new scenario, moving from seeing mobile technology as a simple marketing tool to a new commercial ally, adapting to the needs of each of these technologies and therefore adapting their respective product mix and packaging.

The present study aims to explore how spaces designed with ancestral and vernacular architecture can become a heritage, tourist and cultural resource. The analysis of the stilt houses and the route of the 16 UNESCO heritage churches of Chiloé, Chile has been selected as a case study, since: (1) it is an ancestral and vernacular architecture unique in the world, (2) they are part of the cultural and patrimonial tourist offer of the Chilean Patagonia, (3) has a balance of patrimonial and intangible material conservation that has managed to keep the gentrification and identity of the territory under control, (4) its 16 churches have been declared patrimonial by UNESCO. The methodology is developed through the analysis of a complete palafito from the constructive and architectural point of view, together with a church part of the patrimonial route. Followed by an analysis of press headlines and interviews, based on established parameters that allow understanding the link between architecture, transformation into a cultural and tourist resource together, and gentrification. It is concluded that the vernacular architecture of stilt houses and churches in Chiloé configures a valuable contemporary heritage resource that must be preserved and asserted in balance with the tourist dimension that it attracts thanks to its uniqueness.

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