Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2018

The rapid urban growth had a strong impact on the living conditions of the inhabitants of the cities. Port Cities experienced significant urban growth in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Trade growth and technological changes in ships led to the construction of new port facilities that completely transformed the landscape of port cities. Portuguese governments hoped that the modernization of the port and the establishment of railways would enable transformation of Castile into a hinterland of the Lisbon port. Emerging problems in the early stages of this process were related to hygiene, traffic, safety and the urban image of the city. Due to their relations with the outside world, the impact of migration and the existence of a fluid labour population, port cities sometimes had the image of being dangerous and unsafe havens. It was difficult to survey the flows of population and to control for goods, people and diseases. The aims of this article are to assess the way in which Lisbon and its port followed this international path and to highlight why its actualization was far behind the authorities’ expectations.

The article examines the content and functionality of the concept of cultural networking, considering the context of dense social and institutional processes and recurring to available empirical data. The assumption is that fruitful sociological comparison needs the consideration of real and specific cases, if one wants to avoid the mimesis of administrative jargon or the ritual repetition of empty generalities. For this test, an interesting case can be found in Portugal. It points out a balance between two main uses of the concept and method of networking. One refers to ‘macro-policies’, defined and implemented, in a rather top-down paradigm, by national authorities. The other one relates to meso- or micro-practices and to bottom-up strategies, whose protagonists are mainly local authorities, cultural institutions and artists. In both ways, networking proves to be an efficient tool both for policy and to cultural agency.

It is relatively frequent within the social sciences, particularly the history of science, to recognize, with more or less focus, the role of institutionalization and professionalization processes in the development of science and technology. Differences between various scientific institutions are not yet sufficiently understood, including their profiles and the different historical contexts in which they have been created, reformed and/or recreated, which makes up different models and historical implications as regards the assumptions of national science policies. By studying comparative work in the history of the Portuguese science policy process the main purpose of this article is to understand, compare and differentiate the relevant national experiences related to different national science policies agencies, mainly across Europa and North America, during the twentieth century, but with particular focus on the inter-war period and afterwards.

This article looks at how Portuguese defence planning was executed in the years 1945–59, and seeks to assess to what extent this same planning was subject to constraints derived from the alliances established by the Portuguese government. During this period, Portugal was faced with internal and external issues of difficult resolution. Internationally, its interests and its obligations were focused on the Atlantic powers, the ones who had the necessary means and organization to counter the Soviet threat. At home, the Portuguese authorities considered that Portugal was first of all part of the Iberian peninsula and, as such, made common cause for its military defence with its turbulent and, at that time, less respectable Spanish neighbour.

This study aimed to analyse and explore through systematic observation the conflicts that occur among peers during the playground in elementary schools in Spain. The study followed a non-experimental descriptive design and all conflicts were observed in their natural context of 44 schools. Among the 1691 conflicts detected in a sample of 2529 students, significant differences were found among the different types of conflicts (verbal, physical, social exclusion and sexual harassment), which depended on the course and sex of the protagonists. Furthermore, a different pattern emerged in the reactions that other peers and teachers had to the initial conflicts. Additionally, findings were consistent with the findings in previous studies in the literature regarding the need to train and prepare teachers to prevent future conflicts in the scholar context.

The research on quality of work experienced remarkable resurgence during the noughties, partially as a result of the inclusion of the topic in European and international policy-making agendas. In the second half of the decade, the global economic crisis largely redirected the attention to the quantitative dimensions of labour market policy. Nonetheless, academic production on job quality has maintained its vitality over the years. As in many other relevant research topics, consensus over the conceptualization and measurement of quality of work has been difficult to achieve among academics and policy-makers. Apart from the lack of a commonly agreed definition, measurement also tends to be varied and supported by different methods. In fact, both academics and policy-makers claim the need for a more consensual definition as a way of improving the comparability between countries, sectors of activity or occupations. In this article, we compare the methodological designs of a selected group of quality of work studies to identify the degree to which there are significant discrepancies within the academic community and to assess progress regarding the challenge of conceptualizing and measuring quality of work. The article offers a review of the most-cited articles indexed at the Scopus database between 2000 and 2015, and a comprehensive analysis over the question of conceptualization and measurement.

The recent debt crisis has affected southern European countries particularly severely. One of its most negative effects has been the high level of unemployment. The ageing of populations complicates the functioning of social security systems, particularly owing to an increase in financial commitments to pay pensions. This creates pressure for larger budget deficits that, in turn, increase public debt, thus worsening the crisis and also the unemployment rate. Nevertheless, population ageing can also operate favourably in reducing the unemployment rate. Here we discuss the effects of ageing on the aggregate measures of labour market performance and call attention to the frequently forgotten positive direct effect of a change in the age structure of a population. We exemplify this with data from the period when Portugal was in crisis, Portugal being one of the countries that was not only affected by the severe debt crisis but also has a high proportion of elderly individuals in the population. In addition, we research the relative performance of the different age groups in terms of their labour market experiences.