Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The objective of this article is to discuss the possibilities and the limits of social intervention and of job satisfaction in the work done by health professionals. Within the boundaries of capitalism, it tries to understand what makes the working conditions of health workers, educational workers and production workers similar, and why. For this purpose, the text discusses the double face of work as a producer of both use values and exchange values, a dialectic relationship that makes up a totality by contradiction. It is this double face that simultaneously denies the human character of the worker, when it creates alienating social relations, and produces it, when it considers him an individual and part of humanity. In contemporary capitalism, marked by flexible accumulation, the demands for better-qualified health and educational workers make this contradiction even greater due to a very peculiar characteristic of their work: its non-material nature. Based on this discussion, the article shows that, as it happens in education, if the progressive commercialization of the health services - with its peculiar forms of organization and management - on the one hand, accentuates the dimension of suffering at work, on the other, due to the practical character of the work, it permits the development of strategies in the struggle against social inequalities.

Using as reference São Paulo's clothing industry and in the context of the restructuring of production processes, this article discusses the recent changes in labour relations and labour conditions. For this purpose, the text looks closely at the division of labour among the companies within the productive chain and at the labour relations prevailing in its various levels, with special emphasis on home-based workers. The analysis reveals that, as the out-contracting process advances, the number of jobs decreases in the virtuous end of the productive chain - that is, in the leading companies, where labour is better qualified, earns higher salaries and has more stability; and increases in its precarious end - that is, where work conditions and labour relations are worse, and where there is a majority of unskilled, low-paid and less stable jobs, often without a proper work contract. The article also discusses how these work conditions, brought back to life in a new context, affect female workers much more than male ones, clearly showing the social exclusion of the more vulnerable sectors of the labour market.

This article deals with the relationship between a certain approach to work (as "industrious activity") and the manipulation of the essential coefficients of economic and social management. We suggest that there is a need to equate these two things more deeply because of the difficulties that are increasingly appearing in the so-called "service sector". From this point of view, the growth of services could be an opportunity to generally rethink the way management coefficients are designed. Clearly, in order to make use of the notion of activity it will be necessary to carry out a brief investigation of the history of this concept, particularly after its ambivalent use by Marx. Finally, in the text, we expand the idea of "values without dimensions" in so far as the articulation - always able to be renegotiated and in a very problematic way - between quantifiable values and the so called values without dimensions (that operate initially in a universe alien to measurement instruments) seems to us an essential and critical point in the matrix of historicity in the social space. And there we find once more the operational challenges of these conceptual questions: what impact will they have on the type of management that experiments with new ways of building economic coefficients, as it considers these "complex negotiations of efficacy-efficiency"?

Despite the fact that in Brazil, in the last 15 years, secondary education is the educational level with the highest relative increase in student numbers (232%), there is still an almost total lack of studies attempting to analyse governmental funding for this educational level. This is particularly surprising when one considers that the highest percentage of growth occurred in the public sector, with a huge impact on government's expenditure on education. In this article, therefore, we intend to offer an overview of the subject. Initially, with the help of Inep's and IBGE's figures, we present and analyse the indicators of expenditure per student in the state schools, comparing the differences between the country's administrative divisions and various regions. Next, we present the main findings of a cost-per-student survey done by the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC). Finally, we estimate the financial resources that would be necessary to guarantee a higher standard of teaching in accordance with the quantitative and qualitative aims established by the National Education Plan (PNE).

Some elements in the evaluation of social policies are discussed. The central argument is that, despite the improvements in evaluation methods in recent years, the conception that the specific objectives of programmes and projects should be assessed - rather than the actual policies - still prevails. This differentiation has special relevance when dealing with social policies, since they occupy a specific place in the set of public policies. This is particularly so in the Brazilian case, where a powerful social security structure coexists with astronomical levels of inequality and exclusion. First we indicate some of the characteristics of the type of evaluation we refer to in the paper. Then we discuss the possibility of evaluations that will go beyond programmes and projects. Finally, we present a preliminary and brief survey of the present challenges found in the evaluation of social policies.

This article outlines and analyses the curricular trends in the schools providing professional technical education for the Brazilian Health System's workers (Sistema Único de Saúde - SUS). With the help of a close survey of the literature on curricula, it analyses the organization, selection and hierarchical gradation of knowledge, all of which are connected with the struggle between educational projects. For the study, the fact that professional education is called to respond to the issues originating in the labour world is highly significant. In this sense, we attempted to rescue the contradictions existing in the educational field, such as, for instance, the idea that, even if it is true that "experience is the best teacher" and an important stage in the learning process, it is also important to criticize an exaggerated faith on the everyday experience and the presumption that experience can, by itself, provide qualified learning.

O trabalho em saúde: olhando e experenciando o SUS no cotidiano. Emerson Elias Merhy, et al. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2003, 296 pp.

The text uses as a starting point a discussion on the contribution made by the Bakhtinian thought to the human sciences, in particular with regard to discourse, activity, subject and history. In the light of this universe, the essay analyses the intersection between otherness, identity and consumption as a result of a discursive work that is characteristic of our times.