Volume (1): Issue (2)

High status groups in Portuguese society constitute a social context in which familial relations are of great importance, both at the level of family members’ daily agency and on the far broader scale of their social and professional relations. The author analyses in this article the way familial relations become important processes by which an elite social position may be maintained. The argument is based on fieldwork carried out by the author on seven leading business families in Lisbon who own large firms in operation for at least three generations. This research has showed that the processes by which these families manage to remain majority shareholders and in the top management position in the large companies they have owned for several generations is due, to a great extent, to the fact that these economic investments are considered the symbolic materialisation of a familial project. It is by means of carefully managing familial relations that those involved in these projects are able to ensure and reproduce their belonging to Portugal’s financial and social upper set. This argument is illustrated throughout my research into the processes by which the leading families in Portugal’s economic setting before the democratic revolution in 1974 have recovered their top financial and social positions in Portugal today.

An analysis of some socio-psychological processes of discrimination against black people is presented. This analysis is framed on the hypothesis according to which cultural categories are now functional equivalents of racial categories. Folk-cultural categories offer criteria that allow the organization and the accentuation of differences between human groups, and sustain the implicit process that transforms the difference into inferiority (the process of hetero-ethnicization). In favour of this hypothesis, the first part of the paper analyses the main elements of social representations of differences between human groups based on the idea of human races, and then the representations of differences based on cultural classifications. Empirical arguments are then presented. The authors revisit data showing that white Portuguese who accentuate the differences between themselves and black people are more discrimination-oriented than non-differentialists. In this same vein, a study carried out on young black people living in Portugal shows that those who most believe they are perceived to be culturally different by white Portuguese are also those who most believe themselves to be discriminated against.

This article addresses Salazarism’s attitudes towards women and women’s organizations, providing some elements that may be used in comparisons with the other dictatorships (e.g. Italian Fascism) that inspired, to some extent, some of the Portuguese New State’s institutions.

António Costa Pinto, The Blue Shirts: Portuguese fascists and the New State, Boulder: Social Science Monographs (2000), 271 pp. ISBN 0-88033-982-9 (cloth); João de Pina Cabral and Antónia Pedroso de Lima (eds.), Elites: choice, leadership and succession, Oxford: Berg (2000). ISBN 1-85973-399-9 (paper), 1-85973-394-8 (cloth); Anna Bosco, Comunisti: trasformazioni di partito in Italia, Spagna e Portogallo, Bologna: Il Mulino (2000), 334 pp. ISBN 88-15-07900-9