The foresight and scenario building methods can be an interesting reference for social sciences, especially in terms of innovative methods for labour process analysis. A scenario – as a central concept for the prospective analysis – can be considered as a rich and detailed portrait of a...

As a Norwegian sociologist pointed out recently at the Encontro Internacional de Vilamoura on Fishing, “the fisheries management is the management of people, not fish" This statement may surprise many specialists, but it puts once again a series of questions and problems in their true place:...

Currently distributed business process (re) design (resulting in components of business networks) basically relies on technical criteria. And that are the main purposes of most research projects supported by EC. Through the process of building a European Research Area, this means a strong...

The innovation in the employment behaviour is particularly clear in what concerns the sector composition of the employment changes: the persistent decrease of the industrial employment (even if within a framework of some recovery of the industrial product), a slight expansion in the employment...

The Portuguese National Action Plan for Employment (NAP) is the main instrument for the labour market policy. It was adopted in 1998. The NAP transposes to the Portuguese reality the contents of such guidelines, with the adequate adjustments required by the national specificities, establishing...

Some programs and research networks are dealing with topics associated to the automtive sector and they observe one of the most significative sectores of modern economies. Because of that is so interesting to forecast some possible changes in an horizon of 10 to 20 years. But this exercse must...

Science and technology (S&T) are considered to be a central source, or at least a basic medium, of societal and industrial innovation, while innovation is conceived to basically feed the regeneration of our welfare. The suppliers of S&T in Europe as well as the users of their „products“, are...

In this working paper are present the main provisional results of the first round of a Delphi survey held in Portugal on the automotive sector. It was done under the WorTiS project, developed by IET – Research Centre on Enterprise and Work Innovation, and financed by the Portuguese Ministry of...

This book organized by Alice Abreu, actual President of ISA-RC30 “Sociology of Work”, is a follow up of an international seminar on the same theme of the title, held in September 1997 also in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). In this book are published papers presented on Latin American case studies,...

This paper presents and discusses two case studies in the Portuguese motor vehicle industry – Salvador Caetano’s Ovar Industrial Division (SCOID), a ‘Brownfield site’ with minority Toyota ownership; and Autoeuropa, a ‘Greenfield site’ wholly owned by Volkswagen. Basically, it...