Any economic system will certainly be influenced in institutions and rules by the underlying political system. While the political processes are not carried out in the market, it can influence economic decisions related to consumption, saving, investment and exchange in no small way. Through the...

Eight out of ten leading international indices to assess developing countries in aspects beyond GDP are showing strong redundancy, bias and unilateralism. The quantitative comparison gives evidence for the fact that always the same countries lead the ranks with a low standard deviation. The...

A propose for this article is to present information on the emergence of the knowledge field of sociology of work and labor studies in Portugal. The period of 1974-1984 produced an interesting bibliography in the fields of social stratification, labor conflicts and social history. However, and...

This paper describes and analyses the results from a pilot study about the exercise of political representation at the local government level, from the viewpoint of city councilors. The key questions that guided this study were: What do councilors perceive as their functions? How do they...

The paper discusses the city and the region aiming at unfolding a synthetic panorama of the various ways of thinking and acting upon the spatial issue. We argue that a better understanding of how the different scientific disciplines with interfaces on the territory view and work with space...

This article examines the use and dissemination of the concept of participation in environmental and development policies, focusing on implementation of local councils in Brazil - especially those linked to socio-environmental issues. The hypothesis advanced here is that the current use of the...

In this research we assess the legislation on the basis of the horizontalization process, or horizontal decentralization, undergone by foreign policy decision making within the realm of the Brazilian federal Executive Power. This process entails a new institutional arrangement among the...

Ongoing pressure on prices for construction projects adds to the significance of cost estimation accuracy in building construction. Due to competition from Asian entrants, main contractors in the plant engineering industry are starting to face a similar situation. In the present paper, the cost...

Technology assessment (TA) had never been treated as a relevant topic within the International Sociological Association (ISA) before. The first steps towards establishing this association were taken in 1948, at the initiative of the Social Science Department of UNESCO. Its formal foundation was...

This article considers the relationship between centralised, exogenous institutions and the embedded, endogenous institutions of rural governance in Europe through an examination of the evaluation procedures of the European LEADER programme. LEADER is presented in the literature as progressive...