Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2013

This article concerns the unexpected role of Portuguese troops in Lord Wellington’s army during the years of the war of diversion in the Peninsula, forcing the French to keep a large army in place. After the defeat of Masséna’s campaign over Lisbon in 1810–1811, Portugal and Portuguese men, replacing the failed alliance with the Spanish, remained an essential component of the British army during the campaigns in Spain and France from 1811 until 1814. The statements of Marquess Wellesley are clear about the intentions of the ‘Peninsular party’.

This article develops along four sections. In the first section, after presenting some results of a sociological survey of teachers carried out by Manuel Braga da Cruz in 1989, I conclude that theirs is a growing social group, mostly female, that sees itself as underpaid and having little social recognition, politicized, unionized and deeply involved with the Catholic community, and that, at the time of inaugurating a new legal statute for the profession, the group has divided and contrasting opinions on the existing career model, where progression is mainly based on seniority, and a hypothetical selective and pyramidal model, based rather on an actual evaluation of the professional abilities of the teacher.

In the second section I endeavour to describe the professional regulations that were in place when the PS (Socialist Party) government took over, in 2005, and the assessment I then made of the professional career of teaching. In the third, based on a book report recently published by the former education minister, I identify the measures that changed the professional situation of teachers, focusing particularly on the teaching career statutes and performance evaluation. Finally, in the fourth, I follow and discuss the analyses made by the sociologist Alan Stoleroff on the developing conflict between government, unions and teachers that marked that incumbency.

I conclude that the professional power of teachers – still noteworthy in spite of their attrition and loss of authority – combined with the resentment they feel due to their poor social recognition and the assets made possible by an above-average social capital (skills of erudition and communication, integration in the ‘real world’, middle-class relational networks), determines, on the whole, that this professional group should resist, in this conjuncture, the ‘temptation’ to evolve into an occupational model that is internally more differentiated, more competing and more ‘professionalizing’, and should instead hold to the egalitarian model of security and predictability proposed by the union.

In response to the predominance of heteronormativity in the studies on household work, this article explores how this work is organized and shared in same-sex couples. For this purpose, a qualitative study (twenty interviews with homosexual couples) was carried out, examining the imbalances, negotiation process, level of satisfaction and gendered family legacy in the current organization of household work. It was concluded that the absence of the difference in sex in the couple contributed to a more flexible and egalitarian form of negotiating the organization of the tasks. The women tend towards greater specialization in the tasks and the men towards greater delegation – a reflection of gender socialization.

Social or generalized trust has been identified as one of the most important attitudinal elements of social capital and social cohesion, or even described as a social lubricant, which allows the wheels of society to run smoothly. An attempt is made in this article to measure levels of generalized trust in Greece and explore its association with various demographic and socio-economic factors.

Data draw upon a specific survey conducted in 2007, where a sample of 822 inhabitants of Greece, men and women aged 18 and above, were interviewed. For the purposes of this article, the ‘generalized trust’ question was explored and associated with various demographic and socio-economic variables. Responses were analysed by Chi-square tests, where the relationship between control variables and the dependent one was explored. At the second stage of data analysis, a Logistic Regression Model was used.

Statistical analysis of the generalized trust question revealed significant association of generalized social trust with educational level and marital status. More specifically, better-educated individuals tend to exhibit higher levels of trust and the same seems to apply for the divorced, widowed or those living in cohabitation. As far as age is concerned, results partly confirmed prior surveys, where generalized trust follows a U-curve pattern, with the youngest and the oldest individuals exhibiting higher levels of distrust. In particular, a simple Chi-square test reveals nuclear statistical significance between age and social trust, while a Logistic Regression Model excludes the former from the final equation. On the other hand, no significant effects were found for other control variables, i.e. gender, employment status and income.

This article analyses People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA) strategies for making social noise, a form of public communication that is sufficiently attention grabbing to be ‘heard’. A common social noise tactic is shock advertising. It has a magic-bullet effect; when PETA resorts to graphic video recordings of animal abuse, it instils feelings of ‘shock’ to get its point across. Unlike many other studies on PETA and its advertising strategies, this analysis is distinctive in that it mostly bases the principle of shock advertising on the theory of social noise. The latter adds fresh insights to our understanding of visual legitimacy in the twenty-first century.

HEADHUNTING AND COLONIALISM: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CIRCULATION OF HUMAN SKULLS IN THE PORTUGUESE EMPIRE, 1870–1930, RICARDO ROQUE, (2010) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 342 pp., ISBN: 9780333919088

SOBRE A POBREZA, AS DESIGUALDADES E A PRIVAÇÃO MATERIAL EM PORTUGAL/POVERTY, INEQUALITIES AND MATERIAL DEPRIVATION IN PORTUGAL, INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ESTATÍSTICA, (2010) Lisbon, Instituto Nacional de Estatística, 200 pp., ISBN: 9789892500812, 5 euros.