Volume (8): Issue (2)

One of the objectives of this article is to understand to what extent precarious employment is disseminated in European Union (EU) countries and to analyse if it is a conjuncture phenomenon or if it represents a structural reconfiguration of the labour markets. This analysis was carried out by comparing three generations in different periods of time. We used statistical information about precarious employment and comparisons within and between EU countries (Eurostat 1985; 1995; 2005) over the past 20 years, using a multidimensional method: principal components analysis for categorical data. We concluded that the labour markets in Europe are showing a structural change in the direction of defining a new salary relation, which we have termed neo-competitive. All the countries are moving towards a greater liberalisation of the employment relationship, through easier dismissal processes, or by the expansion of precarious employment or a combination of both.

University failure is the starting point of this article, which is based on a case study at the University of Lisbon. The objective is to discuss concepts constructing school failure as a problem in higher education systems, with special attention being given to contemporary debates on youth condition in strongly individualised societies. The study selects first-year students in the University of Lisbon’s eight faculties in 20032004, to establish a social characterisation of this group by applying an extensive survey to first-year students. A database was constructed and statistical treatment of the information undertaken. This article relates these findings to school failure indicators at the university and its various faculties. As a result, we expect to sketch a social portrait of new University of Lisbon students in 20032004 considered as a whole and in their internal diversity, and to illustrate links between their social trajectories and secondary school failure and success indicators.

Using data collected as part of the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences’ project Elites, single party and political decision-making in the era of fascisms: Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany, this article seeks to describe the socio-political profile of the Third Reich’s ministerial elite from 1933 to 1945, and to understand the recruitment variables that led to the appointment of these men to Hitler’s government, trying to provide a political description of the Nazi ministerial elite. Above all, the case of the Third Reich demonstrates the extreme diminution of the power of government, which was achieved by strengthening the Nazi Party’s parallel apparatus. In this way, the Nazi Party was transformed into practically the only recruitment source for the ministerial elite, taking control of the government while simultaneously diminishing the relevance of that elite.

In recent years, the introduction of the notions of dialogue and participation in European Union (EU) institutions’ discourse concerning science policy signals a change in both the vision of the sciences and of the science-society relation, not unrelated to the EU strategy to improve its legitimacy through the democratic implication of citizens in the knowledge society. But to what extent are current EU and member states’ policies translating these desiderata into practice? How significant has been the shift from the conception of science as objective knowledge to the conception of science as an open-ended process of research? How far has the move from pedagogical to dialogical methods of producing and popularising science and technology gone? In an attempt to answer these questions, this paper provides a comparative review of policies in the field of the public understanding of science (PUS) in six EU member states, based on the results of OPUS (Optimising the Public Understanding of Science), a European-funded research project. Our overview endorses the observation that, notwithstanding the EU’s homogenising discourse, significant differences remain in the conceptual framings, as well as in the practical efforts carried out at national level in this area.