Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2013

The research on wage policies has been triggered by the interest in identifying whether labour market or institutional forces shape wage settings inside firms. This article draws on linked employer-employee data and uses a fuzzy c-means clustering analysis to identify the typical wage policies of medium and large firms in Portugal. Empirical evidence suggests firms are segmented into four clusters that can be labelled according to wage rules as regulated, asymmetric, hierarchical and discretionary. The first two clusters comprise low wage firms, and are highly responsive to market conditions. The firms belonging to the latter clusters take advantage of discretionary power to differentiate the workforce. Our findings therefore illustrate different dimensions of wage flexibility. Furthermore, we found that employment flexibility and wage adjustments can co-exist, and this affects female, young and blue-collar workers in particular.

This article provides an empirical analysis of wage policy at the firm level. Based on cluster analysis applied to a sample of medium and large Italian firms and their employees, this article classifies the wage policy patterns adopted, provides preliminary evidence on the dynamics of wage policy at the firm level and outlines the drivers underpinning the identified patterns. The results of the empirical analyses show that identified wage policy patterns present a mix of hybrid characteristics rather than alignment with the ideal types of the internal and the external labour markets hypothesized in the literature. The wage policy models adopted by sampled firms display significant dynamic patterns between 1989 and 2004: 28.9 per cent of the firms sampled in both years switch to a different wage policy, with an overall increase of firms providing leading pay rates.

This article aims to study the role of reward practices in fostering the creativity process and the innovation performance of academic spin-offs. We start from the extant literature on the promotion of creativity and innovation in companies, stressing the role of rewards and other human resources management (HRM) practices. Then we conduct empirical research using purposely collected data on eighteen spin-off companies, whose parent organization is Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), a Portuguese engineering school. The results indicate that reward practices are mainly associated with the individual components of creativity (skills and processes) and that its positive effect on innovation is usually moderated by other practices of HRM, namely selection, teamwork, training and performance appraisal.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the gender wage gap in Portugal by applying the counterfactual decomposition method employed by Machado and Mata (2005). In order to obtain a measure for wage discrimination at different quantiles, wage function estimation is based on quantile regression analysis (Koenker and Basset 1978), using datasets from the Inquérito ao Emprego (IELFS – Portuguese Labour Force Survey) of 1998 and 2007. The decomposition of gender wage inequality shows potential wage discrimination by gender due to the differences in the returns of working men’s and women’s characteristics. This discrimination increases across the whole distribution, for both 1998 and 2007. Although differences in the working men’s and women’s characteristics declined, the results show empirical evidence of the persistence of the discrimination effect in 2007 – at the same level. In addition, Oaxaca-Blinder’s standard decomposition approach, developed in 1973, was applied. The results confirm the average gender wage gap does not reflect the reality observed throughout the wage distribution, inasmuch as it overestimates what happens in lower-level quantiles and underestimates those of the higher levels.

Electoral studies remain relatively underdeveloped in Portugal, but there is some consensus about the reduced impact of values on the vote. However, the previous studies used very limited sets of indicators. Because they included an extensive battery of ‘position issues’, the recent Portuguese National Election Studies, 2005–09, allow us to further the debate. Moreover, perhaps because it is embedded in the cleavage structures, research about the impact of values on the vote is scarce beyond Portugal. Thus, the present article allows us to integrate the Portuguese case into the western debate about the impact of values on the vote: the impact that is embedded in cleavage structures, and the impact that is independent of citizens’ social location. It is shown that by using the appropriate indicators for the position issues, we find a significant impact of values on the vote: citizens who favour income equality, more state intervention and who are more libertarian in their lifestyles are also more likely to vote for the left; while the opposite trend is true for right-wing voters. Additionally, we show that only part of the values’ impact on the vote is embedded in the cleavage structure; like in other more advanced polities, a significant part is not, thus showing that ‘value voting’ is also present and important in the Portuguese case.

Over the last decades, a number of empirical studies have approached representation essentially on the basis of descriptive analyses of political or ideological deputy-voter congruence. Only a few studies have attempted to explain why parties are more or less correspondent to their electorates and none has adopted a comprehensive theoretical approach to that explanation. Trying to respond to this lacuna, this article begins by assessing the levels of policy preferences among Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and their voters using a set of eight policy issues (characterizing the left-right and libertarian-authoritarian dimensions), and then explores what may explain policy congruence by testing models working at the individual, party and party system levels. Three regression models are run corresponding to each of these levels. Each model regards the eight policy issues under study. The study looks at the political parties of the 27 countries of the European Union (EU) which ran in the 2009 European Parliament elections. The findings reveal that party congruence is generally moderate (no significant differences seem to emerge between left-right and libertarian-authoritarian issues) and that the individual model (namely voters’ education and intra-party polarization) and party-level model (MEPs’ and voters’ left-right and libertarian-authoritarian attitudes within parties) are those which best explain party policy congruence.

A Guerra Secreta de Salazar em África: Aginter Press: Uma Rede Internacional de Contra-Subversão e Espionagem Sediada em Lisboa/Salazar’s Secret War in Africa: Aginter Press: An International Counter-Subversion and Spy Network in Lisbon, José Duarte de Jesus (2012) Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 257 pp., ISBN: 9789722049351, Paperback, Є14.90

A Diplomacia de Salazar (1932–1949)/Salazar’s Diplomacy (1932–1949), Bernardo Futscher Pereira (2012) Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 591 pp., ISBN: 9789722050814, Hardback, Є29.90