As empresas familiares da cidade de Franca: um estudo sob a visão do Serviço Social

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

As relações públicas e a responsabilidade social empresarial: um estudo de caso da Empresa Júnior de Relações Públicas da Unesp Bauru - RPjr

The various changes occurring in society in the late twentieth century created a context of true technological revolution based on information. These changes resulted in three points: a new way to communicate with the emergence of new media and communication platforms; a new role assigned to organizations increasingly blamed for social problems, and a greater access to information by society, which forms more critical and demanding. The convergence of these three consequences observed strengthening of the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility and the importance of internal communication in their construction. This literature review and empirical research, based on a case study with the Junior Enterprise of Public Relations at Unesp Bauru, studied the role of Public Relations in the process of communication management as a facilitator of internal processes towards mobilization for Social Responsibility. It intent to see which are the main barriers to the inclusion of the concept too. The study shows the relevant current context itself, in which the concern with the changing social scenario should be seen as opportunities for growth. The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility should be inserted into the organizational DNA to its consolidation, characterizing itself as a cultural and dependent matter of internal restructuring. The role of public relations in this context covers the management of communication and harmony of the interests of all public organization

Explorando potencialidades para a criação de rede de apoio social a mulheres lusófonas que vivem com câncer de mama em Toronto, Canadá

Introduction: Health indicators tend to be altered due to the participation of people in social networks. Objective: To find out ideas of individuals belonging to Portuguese speaking communities in Toronto, Canada, about the possibility of creating a social support network for women experiencing breast cancer. Method: Nineteen participants of the present ethnographic and critical study answered to questions, providing their opinions regarding to the social support network and its positive and negative aspects. Also, the participants suggested other possible individuals who could participate and help in the creation of such network. Discussions were transcribed, analysed and coded using qualitative software called Atlas ti 6.0. Results: The main components for the creation of the social support network were: the demystification of breast cancer and its prevention, emphasis in health education, dissemination of the need of volunteers and a direct social support to those women. The positive aspects were the participation of oldest women as social leaders and the utilization of schools and religious institutions for publicity. Negative aspects that were perceived as barriers are: the belief that breast cancer is a disease lived by women, the lack of knowledge about its cure and rehabilitation, as well as a collective sensitiveness to it. Also, about the participation of community leaders, the suggestions were: diplomats, priests and pastors, schools directors and communication entrepreneurs. Conclusion: The creation of the social support network should consider the cultural sensitiveness and the inner diversity of the consulted Portuguese speaking communities. Due to the insufficient number of Angolan participants to sustain a major analysis, a special recommendation was that Angolan social leaders and professionals should be invited to design the structure of such network according to their specific cultural traits.

A Comparative Study of Central and Eastern European Social Policy Concernig Mental Disability

The main goal of this project was to identity whether an imported system of social policy can be suitable for a host country, and if not why not. Romanian social policy concerning the mentally disabled represents a paradoxical situation in that while social policy is designed to ensure both an institutional structure and a juridical environment, in practice it is far from successful. The central question which Ms. Ciumageanu asked therefore was whether this failure was due to systemic factors, or whether the problem lay in reworking an imported social policy system to meet local needs. She took a comparative approach, also considering both the Scandinavian model of social policy, particularly the Danish model which has been adopted in Romania, and the Hungarian system, which has inherited a similar universal welfare system and perpetuated it to some extent. In order to verify her hypothesis, she also studied the transformation of the welfare system in Great Britain, which meant a shift from state responsibility towards community care. In all these she concentrated on two major aspects: the structural design within the different countries and, at a micro level, the societal response. Following her analyses of the various in the other countries concerned, Ms. Ciumageanu concluded that the major differences lie first in the difference between the stages of policy design. Here Denmark is the most advanced and Romania the most backwards. Denmark has a fairly elaborate infrastructure, Britain a system with may gaps to bridge, and Hungary and Romania are struggling with severe difficulties owing both to the inherited structure and the limits imposed by an inadequate GDP. While in Denmark and Britain, mental patients are integrated into an elaborate system of care, designed and administered by the state (in Denmark) or communities (in Britain), in Hungary and Romania, the state designs and fails to implement the policy and community support is minimal, partly due to the lack of a fully developed civil society. At the micro level the differences are similar. While in Denmark and Britain there is a consensus about the roles of the state and of civil societies (although at different levels in the two countries, with the state being more supportive in Denmark), in Romania and to a considerable extent in Hungary, civil society tends to expect too much from the state, which in its turn is withdrawing faster from its social roles than from its economic ones, generating a gap between the welfare state and the market economy and disadvantaging the expected transition from a welfare state to a welfare society and, implicitly, the societal response towards those mentally disabled persons in it. On an intermediate level, the factors influencing social policy as a whole were much the same for Hungary and Romania. Economic factors include the accumulated economic resources of both state and citizens, and the inherited pattern of redistribution, as well as the infrastructure; institutional resources include the role of the state and the efficiency of the state bureaucracy, the strength and efficiency of the state apparatus, political stability and the complexity of political democratisation, the introduction of market institutions, the strength of civil society and civic sector institutions. From the standpoint of the societal response, some factors were common to all countries, particularly the historical context, the collective and institutional memories and established patterns of behaviour. In the specific case of Romania, general structural and environmental factors - industrialisation and forced urbanisation - have had a definite influence on family structure, values and behavioural patterns. The analysis of Romanian social policy revealed several causes for failure to date. The first was the instability of the policy and the failure to consider the structural network involved in developing it, rather than just the results obtained. The second was the failure to take into account the relationship between the individual and the group in all its aspects, followed by the lack of active assistance for prevention, re-socialisation or professional integration of persons with mental disabilities. Finally, the state fails to recognise its inability to support an expensive psychiatric enterprise and does not provide any incentive to the private sector. This creates tremendous social costs for both the state and the individual. NGOs working in the field in Romania have been somewhat more successful but are still limited by their lack of funding and personnel and the idea of a combined system is as yet utopian in the circumstances in the country.

Men at risk The Physical, Mental and Social Health of Men in Massachusetts

In 2009, Clark University was accepted as the university to represent Massachusetts in the National Policy Institute for Family Impact Seminars at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (http://familyimpactseminars.org). Family Impact Seminars are a series of annual seminars, briefing reports, and discussion sessions that provide up-to-date, solution-oriented research on current issues for state legislators, their aides, and legislative support bureau personnel. The seminars provide objective, nonpartisan research on current issues and do not lobby for particular policies. Seminar participants discuss policy options and identify common ground where it exists.

Social Support Quality in Internet Based Information and Communication: From "Digital Divide" to "Voice Divide"

National and international studies demonstrate that the number of teenagers using the inter-net increases. But even though they actually do have access from different places to the in-formation and communication pool of the internet, there is evidence that the ways in which teenagers use the net - regarding the scope and frequency in which services are used as well as the preferences for different contents of these services - differ significantly in relation to socio-economic status, education, and gender. The results of the regarding empirical studies may be summarised as such: teenager with low (formal ) education especially use internet services embracing 'entertainment, play and fun' while higher educated teenagers (also) prefer intellectually more demanding and particularly services supplying a greater variety of communicative and informative activities. More generally, pedagogical and sociological studies investigating "digital divide" in a dif-ferentiated and sophisticated way - i.e. not only in terms of differences between those who do have access to the Internet and those who do not - suggest that the internet is no space beyond 'social reality' (e.g. DiMaggio & Hargittai 2001, 2003; Vogelgesang, 2002; Welling, 2003). Different modes of utilisation, that structure the internet as a social space are primarily a specific contextualisation of the latter - and thus, the opportunities and constraints in virtual world of the internet are not less than those in the 'real world' related to unequal distribu-tions of material, social and cultural resources as well as social embeddings of the actors involved. This fact of inequality is also true regarding the outcomes of using the internet. Empirical and theoretical results concerning forms and processes of networking and commu-nity building - i.e. sociability in the internet, as well as the social embeddings of the users which are mediated through the internet - suggest that net based communication and infor-mation processes may entail the resource 'social support'. Thus, with reference to social work and the task of compensating the reproduction of social disadvantages - whether they are medial or not - the ways in which teenagers get access to and utilize net based social sup-port are to be analysed.

Book Review of “The Origins of Social Work: Continuity and Change”. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, by Malcolm Payne

Malcolm Payne’s latest work proposes to survey the continuity and change in social work from its inception and origins, up until the present day. In order to do justice to the theme, its author could have concentrated on developing a narrative of a national enterprise, or restricted himself to a regional analysis (Western European Social Work) or opt instead for a more narrowly focused cultural exploration, White Anglo-Saxon Social Work (WASSW). One can only infer that limiting himself in this fashion would have struck the author as parochial, or rather, that only a truly global enterprise could satisfy his capacious mind. One is left to marvel at the invocation of Darwin’s great work and wonder what was the process of the author’s “natural” selection of this material.

Enterprise Integration of Smart Objects using Semantic Service Descriptions

Integrating physical objects (smart objects) and enterprise IT systems is still a labor intensive, mainly manual task done by domain experts. On one hand, enterprise IT backend systems are based on service oriented architectures (SOA) and driven by business rule engines or business process execution engines. Smart objects on the other hand are often programmed at very low levels. In this paper we describe an approach that makes the integration of smart objects with such backends systems easier. We introduce semantic endpoint descriptions based on Linked USDL. Furthermore, we show how different communication patterns can be integrated into these endpoint descriptions. The strength of our endpoint descriptions is that they can be used to automatically create REST or SOAP endpoints for enterprise systems, even if which they are not able to talk to the smart objects directly. We evaluate our proposed solution with CoAP, UDP and 6LoWPAN, as we anticipate the industry converge towards these standards. Nonetheless, our approach also allows easy integration with backend systems, even if no standardized protocol is used.

Micro-blogging adoption in the enterprise: an empirical analysis

Given the increasing interest in using social software for company-internal communication and collaboration, this paper examines drivers and inhibitors of micro-blogging adoption at the workplace. While nearly one in two companies is currently planning to introduce social software, there is no empirically validated research on employees’ adoption. In this paper, we build on previous focus group results and test our research model in an empirical study using Structural Equation Modeling. Based on our findings, we derive recommendations on how to foster adoption. We suggest that micro-blogging should be presented to employees as an efficient means of communication, personal brand building, and knowledge management. In order to particularly promote content contribution, privacy concerns should be eased by setting clear rules on who has access to postings and for how long they will be archived.

Modeling microblogging adoption in the enterprise

Despite a broad range of collaboration tools already available, enterprises continue to look for ways to improve internal and external communication. Microblogging is such a new communication channel with some considerable potential to improve intra-firm transparency and knowledge sharing. However, the adoption of such social software presents certain challenges to enterprises. Based on the results of four focus group sessions, we identified several new constructs to play an important role in the microblogging adoption decision. Examples include privacy concerns, communication benefits, perceptions regarding signal-to-noise ratio, as well codification effort. Integrating these findings with common views on technology acceptance, we formulate a model to predict the adoption of a microblogging system in the workspace. Our findings serve as an important guideline for managers seeking to realize the potential of microblogging in their company.

Combining Bottom-up and Top-down Generation of Interactive Knowledge Maps for Enterprise Search

Our research project develops an intranet search engine with concept- browsing functionality, where the user is able to navigate the conceptual level in an interactive, automatically generated knowledge map. This knowledge map visualizes tacit, implicit knowledge, extracted from the intranet, as a network of semantic concepts. Inductive and deductive methods are combined; a text ana- lytics engine extracts knowledge structures from data inductively, and the en- terprise ontology provides a backbone structure to the process deductively. In addition to performing conventional keyword search, the user can browse the semantic network of concepts and associations to find documents and data rec- ords. Also, the user can expand and edit the knowledge network directly. As a vision, we propose a knowledge-management system that provides concept- browsing, based on a knowledge warehouse layer on top of a heterogeneous knowledge base with various systems interfaces. Such a concept browser will empower knowledge workers to interact with knowledge structures.

A Case for CDN-as-a-Service in the Cloud: A Mobile Cloud Networking Argument

Content Distribution Networks are mandatory components of modern web architectures, with plenty of vendors offering their services. Despite its maturity, new paradigms and architecture models are still being developed in this area. Cloud Computing, on the other hand, is a more recent concept which has expanded extremely quickly, with new services being regularly added to cloud management software suites such as OpenStack. The main contribution of this paper is the architecture and the development of an open source CDN that can be provisioned in an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model thereby enabling the CDN as a Service paradigm. We describe our experience with integration of CDNaaS framework in a cloud environment, as a service for enterprise users. We emphasize the flexibility and elasticity of such a model, with each CDN instance being delivered on-demand and associated to personalized caching policies as well as an optimized choice of Points of Presence based on exact requirements of an enterprise customer. Our development is based on the framework developed in the Mobile Cloud Networking EU FP7 project, which offers its enterprise users a common framework to instantiate and control services. CDNaaS is one of the core support components in this project as is tasked to deliver different type of multimedia content to several thousands of users geographically distributed. It integrates seamlessly in the MCN service life-cycle and as such enjoys all benefits of a common design environment, allowing for an improved interoperability with the rest of the services within the MCN ecosystem.

Time pressure, social work stressors and blood pressure in a team of seven IT-workers during one week of intense work

Background. In the field of information technology (IT) time pressure is common. Working with tight deadlines together on the same task increases the risk of social stressors referring to tensions and conflicts at work. Purpose. This field study tested both the association of time pressure and social stressors with blood pressure during work. Method. Seven employees – staff of a small IT enterprise – participated in repeated ambulatory blood pressure measurements over the course of one week. Time pressure and social stressors at work were assessed by questionnaire at the beginning of the study. Results. Multilevel regression analyses of 138 samples revealed higher levels of time pressure to be related to marginally significant increases in mean arterial blood pressure at noon and in the afternoon. In addition, higher levels of social stressors at work were significantly associated to elevated mean arterial pressure in the afternoon. Conclusion. Findings support the view that threats to the social self play an important role in occupational health.

Fostering networking behavior, career planning and optimism, and subjective career success: An intervention study

The present study evaluated personal resource-oriented interventions supporting the career development of young academics, working at German universities within the STEM fields. The study sought to foster subjective career success by improving networking behavior, career planning, and career optimism. The study involved a quasi-experimental pre-post intervention with two intervention and two control groups (N = 81 research associates). Participants of the first intervention group received networking training; participants of the second intervention group received the same networking training plus individual career coaching. Participants of both intervention groups were female. Participants of the control groups (i.e., male vs. female group) did not participate in any intervention. As expected, path analyses, based on mean differences frompre-test to post-test, revealed an increase in career planning and career optimism within the networking plus career coaching intervention group, that was indirectly positively related to changes in subjective career success. Contrary to our expectations, the networking group training alone and in combination with the career coaching showed no effectiveness in fostering networking behavior. Results are discussed in the context of career counseling and intervention effectiveness studies.