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Nas sociedades contemporâneas, obtemos informação, conhecimento e cultura quando lemos livros, jornais e revistas impressos ou on-line, ouvimos rádio e podcasts, vemos filmes e televisão, visualizamos mensagens e imagens em smartphones e tablets, e preservamos histórias, ficções, músicas, investigações, documentos e fotografias em computadores, entre muitas outras formas de comunicação. E interagimos uns com os outros quando, por exemplo, falamos ao telefone, enviamos e-mails, textos e fotos pela Internet ou lecionamos, estudamos e fazemos encomendas através dessa rede. Vastos domínios da comunicação estão, pois, enquadrados, abrangidos ou inclusivamente dependentes de máquinas, sistemas tecnológicos e instituições a que chamamos média e plataformas tecnológicas. O propósito principal deste ensaio é elaborar uma reflexão sobre o processo de longa duração, desde o nascimento dos média modernos à Internet, que alterou profundamente a comunicação humana, desincrustando-a das relações sociais. Que nexos e estruturações são possíveis de encontrar entre as invenções tecnológicas na esfera da comunicação, as instituições que se desenvolveram a partir das suas potencialidades e as condições sociais, económicas e políticas que são o seu contexto? Existem tendências discerníveis relativamente às implicações para a comunicação do seu envolvimento pela tecnologia, pelos média e pela economia? Ao longo deste percurso, quais foram os significados da comunicação que se estabeleceram?

The current European Union reapproval procedure for glyphosate is developed as a case study testing whether the 12 precautionary lessons identified by European Environment Agency research as needed to avoid unnecessary harm to society have been incorporated into current regulatory approaches. The working hypothesis that those lessons have not been learnt to a significant degree could not be falsified. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

"This paper considers the financing of productive public goods and social benefits through different types of taxes in a model with unemployment. We incorporate unemployment, caused by the wage-setting behaviour of a monopolistic union, in a neoclassical growth model which integrates a quite detailed structure of taxes used to finance productive public expenditures and social transfers and parameterizes the inefficiency of government to transform taxes into public goods or transfers. The main conclusion is that the relationship between unemployment and labour taxes critically depends on the degree of government efficiency and the unions' perception on how taxes determine the welfare state. If unions internalize that transfers and social benefits are closely related to labour taxes, they do not pressure for higher wages in response to higher taxes. This result offers an alternative explanation to the lack of a positive and robust correlation between unemployment and labour taxes in most OECD countries and periods, whereas the empirical evidence for 21 OECD countries support the effects on unemployment rates of the interaction between taxes and government inefficiency." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Abstract

The decision to incinerate hazardous industrial waste in cement plants (the socalled 'co-incineration' process) gave rise to one of the most heated environmental conflicts ever to take place in Portugal. The bitterest period was between 1997 and 2002, after the government had made a decision. Strong protests by residents, environmental organizations, opposition parties, and some members of the scientific community forced the government to backtrack and to seek scientific legitimacy for the process through scientific expertise. The experts ratified the government's decision, stating that the risks involved were socially acceptable. The conflict persisted over a decade and ended up clearing the way for a more sustainable method over which there was broad social consensus – a multifunctional method which makes it possible to treat, recover and regenerate most wastes. Focusing the analysis on this conflict, this paper has three aims: (1) to discuss the implications of the fact that expertise was 'confiscated' after the government had committed itself to the decision to implement co-incineration and by way of a reaction to the atmosphere of tension and protest; (2) to analyse the uses of the notions of 'risk' and 'uncertainty' in scientific reports from both experts and counter-experts' committees, and their different assumptions about controllability and criteria for considering certain practices to be sufficiently safe for the public; and (3) to show how the existence of different technical scientific and political attitudes (one more closely tied to government and the corporate interests of the cement plants, the other closer to the environmental values of reuse and recycling and respect for the risk perception of residents who challenged the facilities) is closely bound up with problems of democratic legitimacy. This conflict showed how adopting more sustainable and lower-risk policies implies a broader view of democratic legitimacy, one which involves both civic movements and citizens themselves.

Neste arquivo apresentamos o dossiê: "A sociologia como ontologia do presente: teoria, metateoria e análise crítica".