Responsabilidade social: visões e perspectivas de empresários do segmento industrial do Rio Grande do Norte

The theme Corporate Social Responsibility is relatively recent both in the academic field and in the business practice. Because of the lack of socialization of experiences and precision of concepts, there are gaps regarding the understanding of the subject and, also, how to conduct operations. This study just seeks to investigate such matter, focusing applications of social responsibility in business. It takes, as empirical field, winners of the PSQT - SESI Prize of Quality at Work in Rio Grande do Norte (2002-2007) in order to systematize the various approaches on the issue, aiming to reveal subjective visions and perspectives of the theme. It is characterized as a qualitative study, carried out by structured interview. The universe was composed by 15 companies. It was used analysis of content categorical as an axis for the interpretation of the information. Three approaches guided the analysis: Business Ethics, (normative); Business & Society (contractual); Social Issues Management (strategic). The findings are related in three ways: 1) reasons for the CSR practice; 2) the results obtained; 3) the means of CSR. It was found that the award participation occurs, mostly, linked to SESI invitations, so, as an articulated movement of industrial corporations in Brazil it occurs, also, because of the organizational commitment with the society and the possibility of internal and social growths and because of the importance attributed to the report as an instrument of consultancy. There are no indicators to check impacts of organizational interventions, in spite of the existence of planning for the actions. Social responsibility appears as a tool to reinforce the organizational image and to increase satisfaction of the employees. There is a tendency of large and medium firms to a contractual commitment while the small and the micros firms are on strategic or normative level. The analysis of the perspectives of social responsibility future revealed trends towards for strategic approach

Avaliando a aprendizagem de língua inglesa em uma escola de ensino médio a partir de contribuições discentes

This study discusses the evaluation of the English language‟s learning developed in a public high school from Lajes-RN in 2011 starting from a qualitative evaluation proposal (SAUL 1988; CANAN, 1996; DEMO, 2008) aiming the production of knowledge about the evaluation process developed in the classes of English language involving the contributions from students. To diagnose and characterize the evaluation process of English language of the researched school, identifying the representations that students attributed to the evaluation, we have implemented the evaluation instruments suggested by students to perform the evaluation of language learning and allowed a reflection about the student‟s participation in the construction of the evaluation process of the English language, subject discussed by Sant‟anna (2002) and other theorists (CANAN, 1996; BRAZIL, 2002; PEREIRA, 2009). To conduct the research work, we use the qualitative approach with ethnographic basis, substantiate in authors like Bogdan, Biklen (1994), Mazzotti; Gewandsznajder (1998), Strauss, Corbin (2008) among others. The methodology was the action research (ANDRÉ, 1995; NUNAN, 2007; LANKSHEAR; KNOBEL, 2008) described as research of empirical basis which associates an action with a resolution of a collective problem, because in it, its researchers and employees are engaged in a cooperatively way (THIOLLENT, 1985). When we treat about the evaluation of English language‟s learning (ALMEIDA FILHO, 1993; SCARAMUCCI, 2009) practiced before and after the contributions made by the students of the second year of the refereed school, the study considers that high school students have a more critical and reflective conscience with regard to their evaluations, not just opining on the assessment of learning English but also about the assessment of other subjects from their scholar curriculum and so this research presents possibilities for performing the act of evaluation which consider the participation of students in decisions regarding this process, because we cogitate that when the teachers share the decisions with their students, teachers can add quality to the evaluation process

Entre a hegemonia e a polissemia: a Política de Educação e Desenvolvimento para o SUS no contexto do Brasil contemporâneo

The proposal of the Unified Health System Policy (SUS) has been considered one of the most democratic public policies in Brazil. In spite of this, its implementation in a context of social inequalities has demanded significant efforts. From a socio-constructionist perspective on social psychology, the study focused on the National Policy for Permanent Education in Health for the Unified Health System (SUS), launched by the Brazilian government in 2004, as an additional effort to improve practices and accomplish the effective implementation of the principles and guidelines of the Policy. Considering the process of permanent interdependencies between these propositions and the socio-political and cultural context, the study aimed to identify the discursive constructions articulated in the National Policy for Permanent Education in Health for the Unified Health System (SUS) and how they fit into the existing power relations of ongoing Brazilian socio-political context. Subject positionings and action orientation offered to different social actors by these discursive constructions and the kind of practices allowed were also explored, as well as the implementation of the proposal in Rio Grande do Norte state and how this process was perceived by the people involved. The information produced by documental analyses, participant observation and interviews was analyzed as proposed by Institutional Ethnography. It evidenced the inter-relations between the practices of different social actors, the conditions available for those practices and the interests and power relations involved. Discontinuities on public policies in Brazil and the tendency to prioritize institutional and personal interests, in detriment of collective processes of social transformation, were some of obstacles highlighted by participants. The hegemony of the medical model and the individualistic and curative intervention practices that the model elicits were also emphasized as one of the drawbacks of the ongoing system. Facing these challenges, reflexivity and dialogism appear as strategies for a transformative action, making possible the denaturalization of ongoing practices, as well as the values and tenets supporting them

Responsabilidade social: visões e perspectivas de empresários do segmento industrial do Rio Grande do Norte

The theme Corporate Social Responsibility is relatively recent both in the academic field and in the business practice. Because of the lack of socialization of experiences and precision of concepts, there are gaps regarding the understanding of the subject and, also, how to conduct operations. This study just seeks to investigate such matter, focusing applications of social responsibility in business. It takes, as empirical field, winners of the PSQT - SESI Prize of Quality at Work in Rio Grande do Norte (2002-2007) in order to systematize the various approaches on the issue, aiming to reveal subjective visions and perspectives of the theme. It is characterized as a qualitative study, carried out by structured interview. The universe was composed by 15 companies. It was used analysis of content categorical as an axis for the interpretation of the information. Three approaches guided the analysis: Business Ethics, (normative); Business & Society (contractual); Social Issues Management (strategic). The findings are related in three ways: 1) reasons for the CSR practice; 2) the results obtained; 3) the means of CSR. It was found that the award participation occurs, mostly, linked to SESI invitations, so, as an articulated movement of industrial corporations in Brazil it occurs, also, because of the organizational commitment with the society and the possibility of internal and social growths and because of the importance attributed to the report as an instrument of consultancy. There are no indicators to check impacts of organizational interventions, in spite of the existence of planning for the actions. Social responsibility appears as a tool to reinforce the organizational image and to increase satisfaction of the employees. There is a tendency of large and medium firms to a contractual commitment while the small and the micros firms are on strategic or normative level. The analysis of the perspectives of social responsibility future revealed trends towards for strategic approach

Eleição nas escolas: uma análise do impacto do diretor eleito sobre o desempenho educacional no Estado da Bahia

In Brazil, the selection of school principals is set in a decentralized manner by each state and city, such that processes may vary with time for a specific locality. In the state of Bahia, school principals were appointed by a higher political hierarchy until 2008, when schools under state administration started selecting principals by elections. The main goal of this work is to evaluate whether changing this specific rule affected students proficiency levels. This is achieved by using a panel data and difference-in-differences approachs that compares state schools (treatment group) to city schools (control group) that did not face a selection rule change and thus kept having their principals politically appointed. The databases used are Prova Brasil 2007, 2009 and 2011, the first one prior and the other two former to the policy change. Our results suggest that students attending schools with principals that are selected and elected have slightly lower mean proficiency levels both in mathematics and in portuguese exams than those attending schools with appointed principals. This result, according to the literature, could be related to perverse effects of selecting school administrators by vote, such as corporatism, clientelism and politicization of the school environment

Construção e aplicação de uma sequência didática para o ensino de trigonometria usando software geogebra

The present study aims to analyze the potentialities and limitations of GeoGebra software on what concerns trigonometry s teaching and learning processes. Taking the present resources of public school from the state of Rio Grande do Norte, the research intends to answer the following question: Could we use the current conditions of public school and the Geogebra software to optimize the trigonometry s learning and teaching processes situation? . To make it a possible to answer the question above, a module of investigative activities was created and applied. The methodological intervention was made among second year High School students from a public school in Natal, RN. The theoretical reference of Mathematics Didactics was taken was a base, adopting the conceptions of Borba and Penteado (2001), Valente (1999) and Zulatto (2002, 2007) about the use of Information Technology (IT) on Mathematics classrooms. In order to create the investigative activities helped us to understand how the students make their constructions and their visual perception through the process of dragging images on the computer screen. Furthermore, the activities done with the GeoGebra software s resources facilitate the resolution of trigonometry situations

A construção de posicionamento valorativo no cronotopo do PSV- 2008 da UFRN

Située dans le domaine de la Linguistique Appliquée (CELANI, 1998; MOITA LOPES, 2004, 2006, 2009), cette recherche documentaire fait partie d‟une approche qualitative-interprétative qui privilégie une perspective socio-historique (FREITAS, 2002, 2007; ROJO, 2006). Le but principal de ce travail est d‟analyser comment l‟interlocution a lieu dans les lettres argumentatives produites par 10 sujets-énonciateurs ayant participé au processus de sélection du «vestibular» d‟UFRN, appelé ici le chronotope du PSV-2008. Pour cela, les objectifs spécifiques qui guident cette recherche consistent à analyser les modes d‟assimilation du discours de l‟autre par le candidat, à identifier les positions axiologiques résultant des formes du processus interlocutif, et à construire une vision du sujet-énonciateur sur la base des choix de valeurs de l‟énonciateur et des relations espace-temps qui constituent l‟énonciateur et l‟interlocuteur. Quant à la théorie, la recherche est fondée principalement sur la notion de chronotope de Bakhtin une catégorie qui découle de la théorie du roman et problématisée par Amorim (2004) en articulation avec les réflexions théoriques de Geraldi (1997, 1999, 2006), Britto (2006) et Antunes (2005, 2006) sur le processus d‟écriture les relations dialogiques, la responsivité et les voix sociales (BAKHTIN, 1990, 2003, 2008; BAKHTIN/VOLOCHINOV, 2006) qui sont traversées par la conception dialogique du langage. L‟analyse nous a permis d‟identifier, principalement, deux débats dialogiques, dont le premier confronte le candidat à la dissertation et le second, à des interlocuteurs mentionnés dans la proposition. Les sujets ont formulé leurs énoncés sur un ton d‟indignation, en critiquant ce que l‟interlocuteur avait exprimé. Les candidats ont fait appel à la formation d‟un scénario d‟espoir, de crédulité, de respect et d‟éthique, conforme à la dignité de l‟être humain. Ces résultats mettent en évidence la façon dont des sujets multiples et hétérogènes, insérés dans la dimension de la vie, prennent position à l‟intérieur des pratiques discursives, face aux coordonnées d‟espace et de temps

O leitor universitário e a construção das práticas de ler e escrever textos impressos e digitais

The construction of a mapping of the practices of reading and writing printed and digital texts, declared by graduating students from the Bachelor s degree in Science and Technology (BCT), has provided us the analysis of the course they are making in such a socio-historical moment characterized by the revolution of the post-paper. In this sense, the general objective of this research is to understand how that construction works under the point of view of those graduating students. For this, our reflection has been guided by the search of answers for some questions which have presented to us: what reading and writing conceptions BCT graduating students have; what reading and writing practices those collaborators develop; what collections they declare to have access to; what differences they declare to have between printed and digital reading and writing along the different social roles they develop; what the reader/writer identity relations of those collaborators are. To achieving the plausible answers, we have gathered a corpus composed by texts of three genres of the argument order: academic profiles (or self-portrait), opinion articles and argumentative letters. Besides, we have made semi-structured interviews and questionnaires in the online tool of the Google Docs. The methodology which supports this academic work is the qualitative research (SIGNORINI; CAVALCANTI, 1998)of ethnographic direction (THOMAS, 1993; ANDRÉ, 1995) in Applied Linguistics (CELANI, 2000; MOITA-LOPES, 2006) and the theoretical contribution comes from the bakhtinian perspective of language conception (BAKHTIN [1929] 1981); the socio-historical writing construction (LÉVY, 1996; CHARTIER, R., 1998, 2002, 2007; COSCARELLI, 2006; CHARTIER, A., 2007; ARAÚJO, 2007; COSCARELLI; RIBEIRO, 2007; XAVIER, 2009; MARCUSCHI; XAVIER, 2010); from the studies of the pedagogy of the writing (GIROUX, 1997); from the literacy studies understood as sociocultural practice, plural and situated (TFOUNI, 1988; KLEIMAN, 1995; TINOCO, 2003, 2008; OLIVEIRA; KLEIMAN, 2008), from the studies about identity in postmodernity (HALL, 2003; BAUMAN, 2005). The results of the analysis have pointed at a multiplicity of reading/writing practices of printed and digital texts developed by the BCT graduating students due to the coexistence of the modality printed and that one derived from the new mobile devices. In that multiplicity, the prevalent idea of the collaborators is that there is a continuum between printed texts and digital texts (not a dichotomy), since the option of reading/writing printed texts or digital ones is always linked to specific communication situations, which involve participants, objectives, strategies, values, (dis)advantages, besides (re)creation of discursive genres in function of the mobile devices to which those collaborators have access in the different spheres of activities that they participate. All of that has caused a deep intersection in the identity traces of college students readers/writers in the 21st century which cannot be ignored by academic formation

Eleição nas escolas: uma análise do impacto do diretor eleito sobre o desempenho educacional no Estado da Bahia

In Brazil, the selection of school principals is set in a decentralized manner by each state and city, such that processes may vary with time for a specific locality. In the state of Bahia, school principals were appointed by a higher political hierarchy until 2008, when schools under state administration started selecting principals by elections. The main goal of this work is to evaluate whether changing this specific rule affected students proficiency levels. This is achieved by using a panel data and difference-in-differences approachs that compares state schools (treatment group) to city schools (control group) that did not face a selection rule change and thus kept having their principals politically appointed. The databases used are Prova Brasil 2007, 2009 and 2011, the first one prior and the other two former to the policy change. Our results suggest that students attending schools with principals that are selected and elected have slightly lower mean proficiency levels both in mathematics and in portuguese exams than those attending schools with appointed principals. This result, according to the literature, could be related to perverse effects of selecting school administrators by vote, such as corporatism, clientelism and politicization of the school environment

Avaliação dos impactos do programa bolsa família na renda, na educação e no mercado de trabalho das famílias pobres do Brasil

This study aims to verify the impact of the Bolsa Família Program (BFP) in income and school attendance of poor Brazilian families. It is intended to also check the existence of a possible negative effect of the program on the labor market, titled as sloth effect. For such, microdata from the IBGE Census sample in 2010 were used. Seeking to purge possible selection biases, methodology of Quantilic Treatment Effect (QTE) was applied, in particular the estimator proposed by Firpo (2007), which assumes an exogenous and non-conditional treatment. Moreover, Foster- Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) index was calculated to check if there are fewer households below the poverty line, as well as if the inequality among the poor decreases. Human Opportunity Index (HOI) was also calculated to measure the access of young people / children education. Results showed that BFP has positively influenced the family per capita income and education (number of children aged 5-17 years old attending school). As for the labor market (worked hours and labor income), the program showed a negative effect. Thus, when compared with not benefiting families, those families who receive the BFP have: a) a higher family income (due to the shock of the transfer budget money) b) more children attending school (due to the conditionality imposed by the program); c) less worked hours (due to sloth effect in certain family groups) and d) a lower income from work. All these effects were potentiated separating the sample in the five Brazilian regions, being observed that the BFP strongly influenced the Northeast, showing a greater decrease in income inequality and poverty, and at the same time, achieved a greater negative impact on the labor market

Análise de retorno de escala e tamanho do mercado no desempenho de equipes de vendas aplicando análise de envoltória de dados DEA: um estudo em empresa de Telecomunicações no Brasil

This Master s Thesis proposes the application of Data Envelopment Analysis DEA to evaluate the performance of sales teams, based on a study of their coverage areas. Data was collected from the company contracted to distribute the products in the state of Ceará. Analyses of thirteen sales coverage areas were performed considering first the output-oriented constant return to scale method (CCR-O), then this method with assurance region (AR-O-C) and finally the method of variable returns to scale with assurance region (AR-O-V). The method used in the first approach is shown to be inappropriate for this study, since it inconveniently generates zero-valued weights, allowing that an area under evaluation obtain the maximal score by not producing. Using weight restrictions, through the assurance region methods AR-O-C and AR-O-V, decreasing returns to scale are identified, meaning that the improvement in performance is not proportional to the size of the areas being analyzed. Observing data generated by the analysis, a study is carried out, aiming to design improvement goals for the inefficient areas. Complementing this study, GDP data for each area was compared with scores obtained using AR-O-V analysis. The results presented in this work show that DEA is a useful methodology for assessing sales team performance and that it may contribute to improvements on the quality of the management process.