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

This work relates the first steps of a wider study about emotional antecedents of consumption. The authors consider a multidisciplinary approach to propose a framework for the feeling of shame that is useful to understand relations between consumers and marketing offers. Adopting an approach that consider consumption as a socially constructed discourse which is wider than that the simple act of making economic choices, the authors discuss the interactions between shame, consumption behaviors and marketing actions.

Due to the complexities surrounding the analysis on the public sector policies, managers apply formal models that help them in the decision–making process and evaluating eventual impact of their propositions on the public sector as a whole. Among these models, social judgment theory has being used to evaluate not only the managers’ decision-making process, but also verifying how such process can be improved fulfilling demands of the public sector. This article presents an introduction to the social judgment theory and it also comments some limitations and suggestions in terms of applying this theory in the Brazilian context.

This article analyzes some perspectives and limitations of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as formal mechanism for citizen’s participation in local and regional environment management in Latin America. First, the ethical basis of the independent voluntary work in underdeveloped countries democracies are analyzed in relation with the policy-maker decision process in the framework of economical globalization, mainly in public health and environment policies. Secondly, it is displayed a qualitative analysis of demographic, social, economical and environmental data that correlate the spatial references of the NGOs with the paradoxical social reality in Latin American. This paper tries to show that some governmental and corporate sectors stimulates the substitution of solidarity for philanthropic in the social politics and also this trend is coherent with the global reorganization of the capitalism. Qualitative analysis shows that mostly of the NGOs do not appear and prosper in poverty areas, but in the rich areas with high political and economical power concentration and correlate to Human Development Index. In this context, it is necessary to make a conceptual differentiation between civil society and the third sector, usually wrongly identified as synonymous. Finally, conclusions seek to lead on a policy-makers moral reflection about a political model that encourages no-political voluntary work instead of State responsibility in social areas, especially in public health and environmental management.

This article the result of a research that considers discoursive actions as foundations for the constitution and maintenance of power relations, for the ability of different social actors to deal with discoursive processess and for the struggle around the privilege of specific types of disourse over others. The central issue is to understand the contributions of the newspaper Zero Hora to the configuration of the public administration field in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The focus is the simbolic construction of the meaning of 'to govern' and 'governor'. After a presentation of the discourse studies field, of the main references adopted and a brief presentation of studies of Zero Hora, we present the methodologica procedures. The cricital analysis of discourse produced by Zero Hora during the coverage of the three last elections for the govern of Rio Grande do Sul, indicates the conception of to govern as an act of conciliation, and the image of governor as a modernizer manager.

The article explores the electronic government's contributions for the electronic governance in the Brazilian federal gov-ernment's context. Electronic governance is understood as a process that aims to the political manifestation and partici-pation of the civil society, close to the government, by electronic means, in the formulation, attendance of the implemen-tation and evaluation of the public policies, with the objective of citizenship and democracy development. The research was based in the opinion of 27 key informers from the four sectors that constitute the e-gov stakeholders: public sector, private sector, Third Sector and Academy. The qualitative research employed analysis content technique to verify the per-ceptions of the interviewees on the topics considered in the study, using Atlas.ti software to help with conceptual order-ing of collected data. The main results were that the electronic governance, in the federal level, is in its initial phase of de-velopment, with little participation of the citizens in the public policy formulation, that is, a weak influence of the civil so-ciety in the decision making, through the Internet, related to the public policies agenda setting.

This article derives from the perspective of the organizational economy to approach the theme of trust as an implicit con-trol mechanism within the companies. The main objective is to establish a relationship between the effects of institutional innovations that characterize a New Informational Economy and the possible variations of the trust levels within the IT and communication industries as well as other companies of more traditional industries of the Old Economy. The core hy-pothesis is that the lower levels of trust will probably be identified in these enterprises closest to the paradigm of the New Informational Economy. Therefore, the article implies a set of proposals for a later empiric investigation.

The 1988 Brazilian Constitution increased and strengthened the environmental mandate of the Tribunal de Contas da União - TCU, Brazilian Supreme Audit Institution. Since 1998, with the definition of its environmental strategy, TCU has been an increasingly important player on the assessment of federal government environmental policies. The execution of many operational audits in government institutions and programs has resulted in detailed diagnostics and relevant rec-ommendations towards increasing the effectiveness of environmental public policies. The paper describes and comments the evolution of TCU’s inspections in recent years over the environmental management in Brazil. Comments are made about the environmental performance of other countries’ Supreme Audit Institutions. TCU’s environmental strategy crite-ria are analyzed, as well as the determinations and recommendations of some recent decisions involving water resources management, environmental licensing and strategic environmental assessment. TCU’s environmental performance is as-sociated to the preventive, pedagogic and orienting model of control as opposed to the traditional a posteriori compliance model. To conclude, TCU’s environmental action is assessed as positive for society and its intensification is recommended.