Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2012

In Portugal, two levels of public policy implementation are relevant: the national, under government responsibility, and the local, under the responsibility of municipalities. The importance of municipalities in defining cultural public policies has grown, given the expense and the responsibility in launching and managing cultural equipment and arts support. The growing significance of municipalities in the cultural-public-policies scene takes place along with the growing importance of culture in the context of their development policies. The two movements cannot be dissociated. This review considers some critical issues, from the perspective of academic research and planning: namely, the autonomy of local policies in a country marked by the territorial concentration of resources; the interaction between public policies and structural properties of urban areas; the suitability of municipal policies to new cultural forms, audiences, consumer practices and cultural production; and the local challenges in plans of social support, financial resources, governance and sustainability.

Drawing on the conceptualization of meritocracy as an illusion, we argue that perceptions of merit and fairness of sex quotas in politics are influenced by gender ideology, specifically gender symbolical asymmetry, which equates men with individuals and the universal reference of ‘person’, and women with a sexed category. A total of 311 Portuguese participants read one of eight scenarios manipulating the sex and political competence of two candidates for an electoral list where only one would be selected. According to the experimental condition, either the female or the male candidate was presented as more competent or both candidates were presented as equally competent. In the control condition no such information was provided. Participants rated the merit of the selected candidate and the fairness of quotas. Results show that men take mostly only the candidates’ competence information into consideration. Reflecting gender symbolic asymmetry women were also influenced by the fact that the selected candidate was male or female. Results are discussed in the light of the gender symbolic asymmetry model.

This article presents several results of the author’s ten-year research into the world of work at the end of the twentieth century and at the dawn of the 21st, and is also a contribution to the sociology of modern work. The article focuses on current divisions and boundaries in the sociology of work, reflects on the post-Taylor paradigms in modern work, work in the digital age and work in networks, and depicts the logic and organization of modern work in services. The article ends with a reflection on the current issues involved in a specific phenomenon: the ‘servicelization’ of modern work.

What is the position of the Portuguese administrative elites in terms of professional autonomy and politicization recruitment patterns? In Portugal there prevails a pattern of professional autonomy at central government; however, this pattern has certain clientelist traits at the local administrative level. The Portuguese case also reveals a new kind of politicization in public administration agencies – in line with what happens in other Western democracies. Portugal has a hybrid administrative elite recruitment pattern, containing elements of professional autonomy at the central government, elements of political control at the agencies level and even clientelist elements at the state local branches.

This article uses the magistracy in early modern Portugal to show a distinctive character in the Portuguese imperial experience that resided in an intense circulation of agents between the kingdom and the colonies. By stressing its early bureaucratic nature, which comes from the notion of royal service, it starts by sketching the institutional framework established during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in the kingdom and in the colonial domains. It draws a profile of the magistrates that served the crown in this system, emphasizing their heterogeneous character. Finally, using methodologies borrowed from social network analysis, it tries to map the bureaucratic network created throughout the period in an effort to identify recurrences in the movement of agents as well as the absence of movement between given places. The result is a map of judicial bureaucracy in the Portuguese empire.

This article analyses the Portuguese government’s political approach to Zambia between 1967 and 1968. During this time, South Africa was assuming its strategic preponderance in southern Africa while Zambia was the country most affected by the sanctions imposed on Southern Rhodesia. This provided the Portuguese government with an opportunity to persuade the Zambian prime minister Kenneth Kaunda to reject the presence of African liberation movements in Zambia in exchange for transport facilities during the boycott of Southern Rhodesia. However, Kaunda refused to collaborate in this way. Kaunda did not want Portuguese involvement with South Africa and Rhodesia in Angola and Mozambique and sought to offer his good offices in an attempt to end the war in those territories. The firmness of his decision was down to three main reasons: he did not want to be branded a collaborator with the ‘white redoubt’; he did not want Angola and Mozambique to become ‘new Rhodesias’; and he was absolutely sure of the unconditional support of the United Kingdom and the United States.

Sociology of Professions: Continental and Anglo-Saxon Traditions, L. G. Svensson and J. Evetts (eds) (2010) Gothenburg: Diadalos, pp. 209, ISBN: 9789171733160

A Hora Da Liberdade: O 25 De Abril, Pelos Protagonistas/The Hour of Liberty: 25 April by its Protagonists, J. Pontes, R. S. Castro and A. Afonso (2012) Lisbon: Bizâncio, pp. 496, ISBN: 9789725305041, €15.30