RCAAP Repository

The dynamism and unpredictability of the environment raises a problem of adaptation of the company to the changes involved. The fast adaptation of the organization to changes can only be assured by flexible organizational structures, which is why the type of structure becomes extremely important. The flexibility of the structure depends on the diversification and type of production as well as on the method of structural synthesis. In this paper we consider the problem of organizational structuring from the standpoint of optimization, and present the method of "step-by-step" optimization, based on the use of cluster analysis algorithms. This method permits the structure to be optimized and estimate at the different levels of hierarchy during the process of structuring, and the process of reorganization to be initiated from any level of hierarchy. This makes it possible to quickly analyse the capabilities of adaptation of the organization to changes in functioning conditions.

Due to great changes that have been taking place, the traditional costing presents several limitations, such as: increase of fixed costs, product diversification and growing competitiveness. To overcome these limitations, the activity-based costing (ABC) comes up in the industry sector. Nevertheless, some conditions are required so that the ABC can be implemented in companies. It raises the following question: Will ABC be feasible in every company from industry, service and trade sectors? Comparing these sectors, different characteristics among them can be seen. It is important to notice that the same happens among companies, which belong to the same sector. After having reviewed bibliography, it can be concluded that the feasibility of ABC doesn't depend on the sector in which the company is implemented.

As a result of recent technological innovations, there has been a tremendous growth in the Electronic Music Distribution industry. In this way, tasks such us automatic music genre classification address new and exciting research challenges. Automatic music genre recognition involves issues like feature extraction and development of classifiers using the obtained features. In this study we aim to classify classical music in subgenres, through three independent classification problems. Therefore, we extract 40 features for each one of the musical segments and we use neural nets as classifiers. Afterwards, due to the quality of the obtained results, a prototype system for automatic music classification of entire songs (not only segments) was built. We use 10 extracts for each song, uniformly distributed throughout the song. Each song is classified according to the most representative genre in all extracts.

This essay summarizes and analyses the most important theoretical and empirical contributions to assess and understand the effects of education on the performance of countries in terms of economic growth. Two debates are approached: the controversial issue "first differences versus levels" as well as "micro-macro paradox". In this paper are shown the differences that come up when one try to develop models of education benefits, as well as the uncertainty of the empirical results. It is given, however, a clear support to the education effects in terms of economic productiveness and it is also expressed the conviction that the widest benefits of education may be many times underestimated.

After having placed the agros (agrarian sector) within the rural context, it was made an outline of Trás-os-Montes Agrarian Region’s land management based on ecological-agrarian criterion. It is also defined the study approach, emphasizing the traditional agrarian perspective. It follows an exhaustive, but summarised, recognition of the territory in Trás-os-Montes region as regards agro-natural resources and agrarian structures, within the framework of agrarian integration. Finally, it is approached the modernization of the agrarian system in Trás-os-Montes region concerning its sustainable multifunctionality.

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The considerations developed in this article seek to combine the following concepts: development and quality of human life. These two concepts help us see how these two realities intersect and engage in everyday life. Therefore, these lines are a reflection from which is possible, even if with some subjectivity, sometimes even ambiguous realities, on an adjusted understanding of the complementarities of these two topics and their importance to the development and quality of life for both people and society.

The present paper aims at delineating some of the themes of organizational leadership in Africa having as departure point a hermeneutical analysis of direct discourse. This investigation results from the content analysis of 30 semi-directed interviews with Mozambican and Portuguese organizational leaders working in Mozambique in two different towns, Beira and Maputo (Gomes, 2005). The interviewed leaders represent a highly diverse group of companies of different sizes, business areas, management systems and organizational cultures. This diversity helps bring together a variety of points of view, confront representations of leadership simultaneously from an emic and an etic perspective, and subsume a range of characteristics directly resulting from the analysis.

The author begins by defining what is meant by culture and then presents the stakes in culture and heritage as economic alternatives within depressed and abandoned interior. The article points to the examples of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the engravings of Vila Nova de Foz Coa, the theatrical village of Campo Benfeito, in the Serra do Montemuro and the Fluviário in the village of Mora, as investments that have changed the nature of these regions and made these places marshalling as poles of attraction. It ends by proposing the creation of cultural areas, citing as an example to implement immediately the Cistercian cultural area on the left bank of the River Douro.

This work, conducted in the 2007/2008 school year, intends to examine the levels of stress in the academic community of the Portuguese Catholic University (UCP) - Viseu, as well as the coping strategies developed to fight it, a theme that can contribute to the understanding of how students respond to changes at this stage of his life, full of new challenges and uncertainties, which may be the cause of imbalances and emotional exhaustion of students. Definitions of stress and coping strategies are presented, also addressing the changes in the transition to higher education and the tasks that need to overcome along the course. The methodological framework of the study is presented, with the characterization of the studied population, method of sample selection, objectives and hypothesis presentation and the information-gathering tool used. The analysis allows to determine the predominating stressors and coping strategies, as well as their relationship with the courses taken by students, being in the beginning or end of the course and the characterization variables sex, age and socio-economic level. Finally, the relationship between stress and related factors and coping and their strategies is determined.

Information, with all its potential and limitations, is a resource that should be managed in order to contribute to the achievement of professional goals. It is essential to have a strategic information plan adequately articulated and consistent with the mission and objectives of the institution where the professional action is developed. The confidentiality of information in the context of multidisciplinary teams and the possibility of the breach thereof, frequently raise ethical and legal issues, implied in expressions such as: What should I know?, What should I do with what I know?, and What aspects of my knowledge should I share? The concern regarding ethical manoeuvring in the course of processing and communicating personal data that lead to information, ought to obey a strict code of conduct regarding human rights and freedoms as well as guarantees enshrined in the law and constitution. Professional ethics should rely on a process of awareness which does not emerge from a void that needs to be filled. Instead, it should derive from a willingness and real conformity between thought and professional behaviour. (Professional Project).

This article aims to understand the crisis and the reconfiguration of the welfare state. A crisis related to the employment system and with the disappearance of the integrative function of labor, leading to a conversion of the employment crisis in social crisis. In this context there are new problems and challenges that suggest a transformation in the social question of modernity itself, requiring a reconfiguration of the welfare state. Among various alternatives highlight those that replace the state as a key actor in the reforms – incentive State, encouraging State, propelling State - able to share, under the principle of subsidiarity, with the private sector to develop public policies. In this sense, are binding, in actuality, a redefinition of the welfare state to make it more efficient and able to face the old and the new social risks, to ensure social justice.

Educational and Training Courses as a response to Academic Failure and Dropout: Study conducted in the Southern Douro Region. The Educational and Training Courses (CEF) emerged as a way to combat academic failure and school dropout, by offering young people academic and training choices that make it easier for them to follow career paths more in line with their interests and expectations, thus allowing them to complete their mandatory education. This study was performed in 14 schools in the 10 municipalities belonging to the Southern Douro Region, in which 235 teachers and 544 students were interviewed. The results obtained allowed us to conclude that the CEF are a real response to combat academic failure and dropout in this region, since in a population of 601 students registered in the academic year 2008/2009 and of the 544 students interviewed, 260 (47.79%) responded that if they had not attended a CEF, they would have already dropped out of school and 503 (92.50%) stated that their grades improved after attending a CEF.

Looking beyond the virilian discourse, in this paper it will be our intention to develop some reflections about the way how acceleration and technicization of the experience in the late modernity has been coming, on one side, to introduce mutations at the level of the uses that the human did of the memory and, on the other, generate the proliferation of the accident, proliferation that, ultimately, demands the creation of a museum of accidents with the intention of avoiding the forgetfulness of that negativity that is present in ours actual experience.

The organizational culture has become one of the most recurring topics in the congresses, texts and lectures of the business schools, in the course of the last 30 years, without the subject having been, however, properly unveiled to the professionals and the scholars that work on it. Its popularity, as management fad, emerged in the 1980s, from the interpretation of American scholars on the success of the Japanese management, as a result from the adaptation to the national contingencies of the Anglo-Saxon beginnings of the scientific management of businesses, and, in particular, of the Taylorism associated to the measurement of quality. In this paper, the main authors are reviewed and it is proposed an integrated definition and reading grid, in order to be able to read, within a single interpretative matrix, the determinants of the national, professional and organizational culture. It was, thus, opted to revert the natural tendency to the polissemic of the more complex subjects, proceeding, naturally, to questionable options at various titles. The proposal reflects our conviction that, in an era marked by the organizational differentiation, the culture plays an integrating role, substituting more archaic figures of construction of internal cohesion, within the organizations, as is the case of the hierarchy or the market. From a few empirical studies it is proposed, also, a reading key of the Portuguese organizational culture, characterizing it on the basis of an approach preferentially clinical and ethnographic. It is risked, at last, an anchor idea/value of the Portuguese organizational culture. We designate it as adaptive culture instead of pointing towards the culture of rules as support of the cultural edifice of the Portuguese organizations. The virtualities of this cultural anchor, integrating the ability of empathy and the inventiveness of the Portuguese, due to the weak appetence towards the planning and management by process, may lead us, as a people, in the quest of the hope of making that cultural anchor one of the intangible assets more determining of the management of people in our country.

Since their emergence, services have taken a vital role in our lives. Recently, with the appearance of new technologies and the diffusion of the Internet, multichannel services received a considerable attention in the relationship between customers and organizations. This article provides a synthesis of the literature about multi-channel services, with special emphasis on its advantages and limitations and on quality issues. It is concluded that in general the benefits outweigh its limitations and that quality issues and inherently linked to the design and control of multi-channel services. This paper is also a call for further research in this area.

This article presents the results of a study conducted with 153 nurses-in-chief and nurse specialists in charge of service and had as main objective to identify the leadership style they showed in the management of hospital services. Starting from Fiedler's (1967) model and scale of L.P.C. we conducted a exploratory, descriptive and correlation study, using the methods of quantitative research. The results suggest in terms of leadership style, that depending on the increases of service time, time management and age, nurses tend to have greater focus on the relationship. Just as the mental health specialty nurses are more oriented to the relationship than the medical-surgical nurses. On the other hand, men manifest in terms of leadership style, greater motivation towards the task, than women.