Volume (6): Issue (3)

The Gulbenkian Commission Report (1996) on the restructuring of the social sciences disavowed anachronistic disciplinary divisions, Western universalism and methodological positivism, and instead proposed the unification of all scientific knowledge under what it called pluralistic universalism. It exposed its own scholasticism, however, in failing to address for whom and for what is scientific knowledge produced. With these two questions as points of departure, this article develops a disciplinary division of labour, and thereby distinguishes among professional, policy, public and critical knowledge. Examining the form and relations among these four types of knowledge allows one to recognise the real basis of divergences among disciplines, and within disciplines across nations and history. A global perspective on the social sciences today examines the specific responses to market fundamentalism from different disciplines and different places in the world system.

When a dictatorship is overthrown and a transition to democracy begins, the police force’s place in the new regime becomes a contested issue. Can they be trusted? Are they to be held responsible for having enforced the dictatorship’s rules? The April 1974 Carnation Revolution put an end to Europe’s longest right-wing dictatorship. The Armed Forces Movement, in order to consolidate its power after the revolution, dismantled the political police (PIDE) and imprisoned its officers. Other police forces were ordered to remain in their headquarters and wait for democratic reorganisation. During the two revolutionary years that followed, the provisional governments could not count on the police and did not exercise effective authority: workers occupied factories, shanty town dwellers occupied empty houses and angry mobs destroyed the headquarters of political parties. How could the new authorities deal with the people’s disruptive mobilisations if repression was the mark that stigmatised the overthrown fascist dictatorship? The post-revolutionary governments had to devise a new interpretation of the police’s repressive practices, learning to distinguish which were a mark of fascism, and which could simply be understood as the exercise of ordinary public order duties.

While North-Western Europe remains the principal destination for Portuguese emigrants, post-millennium flow has seen the United Kingdom (UK) and Northern Ireland (NI), in particular, emerging as a focal point. As part of a changing labour market demand and supply process, several thousand migrants have now been recruited by agencies to work in the region’s rurally based food processing industries. This article quantifies the resurgence of Portuguese emigration trails, explores their recent distribution patterns, and evaluates the role of employment intermediaries in facilitating the flow. Using qualitative discursive techniques the experiences of these players are examined before determining their impacts on the local labour market. Results show that benefits have been brought to a number of localised economies suffering from shortages and working patterns based on substitution and segmentation have been fundamentally altered. At the same time, some small towns have struggled to adapt to this influx and concerns have been raised in relation to work-based problems and the pace of developmental change associated with the growing numbers of Portuguese emigrants in Northern Ireland.

Using Lijphart’s framework concerning different models of democracy, the objective is to provide a very brief overview of the main social and political divisions in Portuguese society, and to present the main institutional features of Portuguese democracy and the possibilities they offer for minority representation. The article starts by looking at the main social and political divisions in Portuguese society. Then, the main institutional characteristics of Portuguese democracy, as regards the executive-parties dimension and the federal-unitary dimension, and the opportunities they offer for representation of minorities in Portugal, are presented. The article uses a perspective which is both longitudinal (1974 to the present) and comparative (Portugal in the context of Western Europe). The article ends with some brief conclusions.

Who governs southern Europe? Regime change and ministerial recruitment, 18502000, Almeida, P.T. de, Pinto, A.C. and Bermeo, N. (2003) London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 242 pp., ISBN 0714682772 (pbk), 75