Economic crisis, human values and attitudes towards immigrants

Recent decades have seen some European countries experiencing a new wave of migratory rates that have sustained economic growth and simultaneously contributed to changes in the pattems of customs, life styles, values and religions. Alongside this new European setting, ambivalent positions in the attitude domain have emerged. This occurs because in contemporary democratic societies people are embedded within cultural environments that disseminate a social discourse stressing that good people are egalitarian and non-discriminatory.

Waiting for Godot? Welfare Attitudes in Portugal Before and After the Financial Crisis

Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portugal. The literature on social policy preferences predicts an increased polarization in opinions towards the welfare state between different groups within society – in particular between labour market insiders and outsiders. However the prediction has scarcely been tested empirically. A notoriously dualized country, Portugal provides a critical setting in which to test this hypothesis. The results show attitudinal change and this varies according to labour market vulnerability. However, we observe no polarisation and advance alternative explanations for why this is so.

Análise dos métodos de sensibilização dos programas de educação ambiental de três unidades de conservação do Distrito Federal

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Tecnologia, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Florestais, 2016.

Reality Effects: The Historical Novel and the Crisis of Fictionality in the First Decade of the Twenty-first Century

This chapter looks at the assumptions made about the 'fictionality' of prose fiction implicit in the contemporary historical novel. In particular it argues that the recent historical novel has developed a set of 'reality effects' which appear to look back to modernist writing, but in fact work to secure a disguised referentiality in the face of a loss of faith in the fictional.

At the end of the day: Macmillan's account of the Cuban missile crisis

Pre-publicity for the final volume of Harold Macmillan’s memoirs, At the End of the Day, stressed that it would provide the British side of the Cuban missile crisis for the first time. The Churchillian model chosen, changes required by the Cabinet Office and Macmillan’s desire to rebuke those political opponents who claimed that the crisis demonstrated a lack of British influence in Washington, however ensured a focus on his personal relationship with President Kennedy. His larding the text with contemporary observations from his diaries also skewed Macmillan’s account and, in particular, underplayed the significance of British moves at the United Nations in New York to secure a credible United Nations inspection regime and a US guarantee of the inviolability of Cuba. Careful reconstruction of Macmillan’s real-time experience of the Cuban missile crisis demonstrates the limitations of his own account of this event

Unnoticed apocalypse: the science fiction politics of urban crisis

The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committee's influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the text's anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?

Modifying “a very dangerous message": Britain, the non-aligned and the UN during the Cuban missile crisis

This chapter analyses the unfolding of the Cuban missile crisis in the context of the 17th General Assembly of the UN and shows that, contrary to earlier accounts, U Thant was responding to pressures from the non-aligned and the British in his attempts to handle the crisis.

Prime Minister and President: Harold Macmillan’s accounts of the Cuban missile crisis

This chapter analyses the successive ways in which Macmillan re-wrote his experiences of the Cuban missile crisis and in the process sought to re-configure the memory of the event in Britain.

Urban design, central London and the ‘crisis’ 2007-2013: business as usual?

London is changing, to a breath-taking extent. Beneath this fast paced activity, new patterns are forming and divisions that had been relatively unremarked before are now becoming increasingly visible. The ‘square mile’ of the City of London, which is now identified by some dramatically tall buildings, forms a contrast to the traditional urbanism of the City of Westminster, the majority of which is covered by conservation area legislation. This paper will consider this contrast from the perspective of urban design, examining both the wider development context for these changes and the separate design policies of these two historic organisations of local government. One of the key questions to be investigated is how these changes have impacted on the character of central London as a place. Moving on from the well-rehearsed debates about London’s skyline, the paper considers the significance of urban design in the context of a global urban spatial economy. It suggests that central London faces severe dilemmas about its future if the growth scenario continues.

Impact of the financial crisis on cross-border mergers and acquisitions and concentration in the global banking industry

The global banking industry has seen dramatic changes in the past 40 years. Most recently, the financial liberalization of emerging markets and the global financial crisis have significantly impacted the market share of banks worldwide. This article investigates the impact of the 2007–2008 financial crisis on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the banking sector and emphasizes the role of emerging-market banks in the postcrisis consolidation trend. Using M&A data and concentration data over the period 2000–2013, our analysis indicates that the financial crisis had a significant impact on worldwide M&As, especially on the direction of the transactions. Emerging-market banks appear to be major acquirers in the postcrisis period, targeting both neighboring countries and developed economies in Europe. We also observe an increase in bank concentration in developed markets most hit by the financial crisis, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, whereas bank concentration decreased in emerging markets.

A importância da certificação do sistema de gestão ambiental para a melhoria do desempenho das empresas operadoras de resíduos em Portugal

A crescente preocupação e consciencialização do pensamento global, acerca dos problemas ambientais, por sua vez associados à rápida depleção dos recursos naturais, criaram uma forte aliança entre as pressões legais, sociais e políticas e a necessidade das organizações em preservar a sua imagem face a uma opinião pública cada vez mais exigente e atenta a esta problemática. Como resposta a este propósito, diversas organizações e entidades internacionais viram-se forçadas a criar padrões internacionais de qualidade ao nível ambiental. Nessa medida, a International Organization for Standardization (ISO) criou a família de normas ISO14000 como forma de procurar garantir aos legisladores, aos clientes e ao público em geral, produtos e/ou serviços ambientalmente mais sustentáveis. Para as empresas e organizações, este combinado de normas surge como uma ferramenta estratégica capaz de proporcionar a identificação, controlo e a melhoria contínua do seu desempenho ambiental. Por outras palavras, visam a implementação de um Sistema de Gestão Ambiental (SGA) mais eficiente. Atendendo a este contexto, a implementação da ISO 14001, e respetiva certificação, têm vindo a adquirir uma importância crescente dentro das organizações. Motivo pelo qual este trabalho teve como objetivo primordial estudar e avaliar a relevância da certificação através da norma ISO 14001 no sistema de gestão ambiental das empresas operadoras de resíduos em Portugal. O resultado deste estudo contribuiu para edificar o conhecimento dos motivos que levam as empresas a adotar esta norma, identificar os benefícios e dificuldades daí resultantes, bem como avaliar possíveis impactos na melhoria contínua do desempenho por parte das organizações, após a obtenção da certificação ambiental. Para almejar tal objetivo, realizou-se uma análise dos resultados obtidos através da aplicação de dois inquéritos por questionário, constituídos por questões autoresposta que fizeram face ao objetivo do estudo e que permitiram dar resposta ao mesmo. O inquérito por questionário, direcionado às empresas, foi enviado à totalidade das empresas operadoras de resíduos em Portugal, certificadas segundo a referida norma. A amostra estudada foi constituída por 22 empresas. A análise aos inquéritos por questionário direcionado aos colaboradores destas mesmas empresas decorreu de 429 inquéritos válidos. Sendo a aplicação dos mesmos efetuada via correio CTT, durante os meses de dezembro de 2013 e janeiro de 2014 e a respetiva análise com recurso ao Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). Tornou-se, ainda, possível efetuar um conjunto de recomendações destinadas a orientar e facilitar o processo de adoção de sistemas de gestão ambiental neste setor. Conclui-se que a obtenção da certificação ambiental é potenciada pela melhoria da imagem pública da empresa e a melhoria do desempenho ambiental da mesma. Esta melhoria reflete-se no aumento das preocupações ambientais, ou seja, a minimização/eliminação dos impactos ambientais decorrentes das atividades destas organizações. No entanto, e apesar da possibilidade de obtenção de benefícios e ganhos esperados, entre os quais se incluem o aumento da consciencialização sobre os impactos ambientais entre os funcionários, a melhoria no desempenho da empresa e a influência positiva em algum processo de gestão interno (melhoria na otimização dos fluxos processuais), convém destacar que o processo poderá ser dificultado pelo aumento da quantidade de documentação interna da empresa, pela exigência de uma elevada formação pessoal dos colaboradores e pelas dificuldades inerentes ao próprio cumprimento da legislação ambiental. Mais do que explicar quais os fenómenos que levam as empresas a convergir na adoção de Sistemas de Gestão Ambiental, este estudo releva que as empresas detentoras da certificação ambiental exercem uma cultura ambiental que possibilita influenciar os colaboradores acerca das decisões a albergar em relação às práticas ambientais do quotidiano.

Responsabilidade ambiental: análise das divulgações ambientais das empresas do PSI-20 comparativamente com empresas não cotadas

Orientador: Mestre, António Pinto Marques

Estudo do impacto energético, económico e ambiental da penetração de veículos eléctricos num sistema isolado

Dissertação para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica Ramo de Energia