Looking the organization's "backstages": political leadership in health organizations

Although leadership investigation has become for the last years an election topic with major relevance on organizational studies and accepting peacefully the general idea that organizations are freeland for politics, all these acceptances run against a kind of “fear” from the academy scholars on approaching the political leaderships’ singularities on organizations. Indeed, when we cross over both phenomena we verify that the absence and weaknesses towards the unique characteristics of political leadership on work scenarios are becoming sharped regarding to their predictors, their workers and their organizations, even if we left aside its moderator variables.

East of Suez and the imaginary tangles of space and self

Drawing on postcolonial studies and the theorization on imperial gothic, this paper centres on three texts: The Hosts of the Lord (1900) by Flora Annie Steel; East of Suez (1901) by Alice Perrin, and The Way of an Eagle (1912)by Ethel Dell. These three texts highlight in different ways the discursive mediation of the Other and its destabilizing effects on the identity of the European-minded colonizer, thus foregrounding the multifarious nature of the British imaginative engagement with India. In this context, it is particularly relevant to examine the political and ideological implications of representing anywhere East of Suez as a locus of primitivism and chaos vis-à-vis the colonizer’s ambivalent reactions. Thus we seek to demonstrate the power of two distinct practices or modes of representation – namely, the power of a metaphorical discourse versus metonymic discourse- within the proces of constructing the East for a vast Western readership.

James W. Carey as critical theorist of the information age

This paper suggests that the thought of the North-American critical theorist James W. Carey provides a relevant perspective on communication and technology. Having as background American social pragmatism and progressive thinkers of the beginning of the 20th century (as Dewey, Mead, Cooley, and Park), Carey built a perspective that brought together the political economy of Harold A. Innis, the social criticism of David Riesman and Charles W. Mills and incorporated Marxist topics such as commodification and sociocultural domination. The main goal of this paper is to explore the connection established by Carey between modern technological communication and what he called the “transmissive model”, a model which not only reduces the symbolic process of communication to instrumentalization and to information delivery, but also politically converges with capitalism as well as power, control and expansionist goals. Conceiving communication as a process that creates symbolic and cultural systems, in which and through which social life takes place, Carey gives equal emphasis to the incorporation processes of communication.If symbolic forms and culture are ways of conditioning action, they are also influenced by technological and economic materializations of symbolic systems, and by other conditioning structures. In Carey’s view, communication is never a disembodied force; rather, it is a set of practices in which co-exist conceptions, techniques and social relations. These practices configure reality or, alternatively, can refute, transform and celebrate it. Exhibiting sensitiveness favourable to the historical understanding of communication, media and information technologies, one of the issues Carey explored most was the history of the telegraph as an harbinger of the Internet, of its problems and contradictions. For Carey, Internet was seen as the contemporary heir of the communications revolution triggered by the prototype of transmission technologies, namely the telegraph in the 19th century. In the telegraph Carey saw the prototype of many subsequent commercial empires based on science and technology, a pioneer model for complex business management; an example of conflict of interest for the control over patents; an inducer of changes both in language and in structures of knowledge; and a promoter of a futurist and utopian thought of information technologies. After a brief approach to Carey’s communication theory, this paper focuses on his seminal essay "Technology and ideology. The case of the telegraph", bearing in mind the prospect of the communication revolution introduced by Internet. We maintain that this essay has seminal relevance for critically studying the information society. Our reading of it highlights the reach, as well as the problems, of an approach which conceives the innovation of the telegraph as a metaphor for all innovations, announcing the modern stage of history and determining to this day the major lines of development in modern communication systems.

Transitional justice in the judiciary: lessons from the portuguese democratisation

The nature of the Portuguese transition to democracy and the following state crises (1974-1975) created a ‘window of opportunity’ in which the ‘reaction to the past’ was much stronger than in the other Southern or even of Central and Eastern European transitions. In Portugal, initiatives of symbolic rupture with the past began soon after the April 25, 1974, coup d’état and transitional justice policies assumed mainly three formulas. First, the institutional reforms directed primarily to abusive state institutions such as the political police (PIDE-DGS) and political courts (Plenary courts) in order to dismantle the repressive apparatus and prevent further human rights abuses and impunity. Secondly, the criminal prosecutions addressed to perpetrators considered as being the most responsible for repression and abuses. Finally, lustration or political purges (saneamentos, the term used in Portugal to designate political purges) which were, in fact, the most common form of political justice in Portuguese transition to democracy. This paper deals with the peculiarities of transitional justice in Portugal devoting a particular attention to the judicial, a key sector to understand the way the Portuguese dealt with their authoritarian past.

Action, reaction and protest by publishers in 1960s Portugal: books and other publications in the Catholic opposition

The authoritarian regime of the Portuguese Estado Novo (New State), the longest dictatorship in twentieth-century Western Europe, suffered one of its most serious threats during the late 1950s and the whole of the following decade. An array of events and dynamics of opposition to the regime and condemnation of the political and social situation in Portugal appeared at that time. One of the core groups that displayed their dissidence in the 1960s, with the awakening of their critical conscience, originated in Catholic sectors that rallied the laity and the clergy to express their disagreement or even break with the government of Salazar (and, later, Marcelo Caetano). This article aims to establish the role of print culture and, in particular, publishing in the opposition’s mobilisation of Catholics who criticised the Estado Novo. It will also closely examine the contribution of certain publishers to the formulation of the terms of this mobilisation, in publishing new authors and topics and creating new printed forums (e.g. periodicals) for discussion and reflection. The most detailed case will be that of the publishing house Livraria Moraes Editora, under the command of the publisher António Alçada Baptista.