Romania's human resources in the European Union accession context

Human resources have always been mobile, and nowadays more than ever, this quality is essential. The migration of Romania’s human resources is, no more at its beginings. But if people want to work outside Romania’s borders, should know how to do it, legaly and professionallyhuman resources, migration, Romanian economy, EU accession

Desirable typologies of organizational culture in quality management implementation. Communicational findings

The authors of this article present the findings of a longitudinal research carried out in the years 2007 and 2008 in a production and service company active in the food & beverages industry. The goal of the research was to identify the one model of organizational culture perceived by the employees as the most appropriate for an efficient implementation of a quality management system. The research method used was the enquiry based on the questionnaire. The methodological means chosen was the Culture Type Identification Questionnaire developed by Charles Handy (1983) based on the typology elaborated by Roger Harrison. The analysis and interpretation of the obtained data converge towards the more general thesis according to which the diagnosis of the pre-existing culture type in a changing organization, correlated with the identification of the model the employees strive for, facilitates the process of adopting a new attitudinal, cognitive and behavioral pattern, in a relatively homogeneous and tension-free approach. Specifically, the research has confirmed the hypothesis according to which the type of task-oriented culture is more appropriate with the quality management desiderata, and the transition from an entrepreneurial culture to a quality-oriented corporative one strongly depends on what the employees perceive as being the real and the ideal state, and not on a formal infusion of values, norms, principles, policies or organizational strategies.organizational culture, communication, quality management, Charles Handy's typology, human resources, behavior, organizational change.

The weakness of social actors in CEE: exploiting or consolidating Trade Unions in post-communist Romania?

Trade unions in Central and Eastern Europe exhibit a difficult organizational development, a high degree of fragmentation and a lack of strength. Focusing on the Romanian trade union confederations, this paper aims to provide an alternative explanation of their influence during the democratization process. The study emphasizes that, in the Romanian case, the articulation and the consolidation of the trade union movements were directly dependent on the relationship created with the political arena. In its turn, the reconfiguration of the trade unions’ politicization entailed a change in their internal structures and in their strategies. The general mechanisms of Romanian unions' transformation are scrutinized in the last section of this article by mobilizing the case of the civil servants interests representation after 1989

When policies make (up for) politics: a view from Romania

The paper attempts to offer a rather sketchy analysis of Romanian postcommunist politics with the help of Theodore J. Lowi typology of political processes. The collapse of communism can be seen as a sudden disorganization of the patterns of both constituent and regulative processes set up during the communist rule, annihilating by the same token the redistributive capacities of the political system and reordering the logics of its distributive policies. Striving to rearrange the postcommunist constituent arena in order to become the political subjects of the new regime, parties in the making formulated a sequence of operational definitions of democracy while engaging in distributive processes as vectors of their own organizational production. However, these constituent blueprints proved to be constantly caught in the trap of the interplay of the other processes, especially in the collision of the regulative and the distributive ones. So, quite rapidly, Romanian party and democratic politics became less the agent of the transformation and more the byproduct of an erratic and ungoverned political change

Territorial dimensions of the Romanian parties: elections, party rules and organisations

The homogenisation of voting patterns within the territorial units constitutes one of the major features of the post-communist electoral contests. In the Romanian case, despite forecasts, the empirical analysis of voting behavior both in national and local elections unveils an exceptional trajectory. First, this study will scrutinise the evolution of citizens' political choices across the territorial units after the breakdown of communism, emphasizing the difficult process of party system nationalisation. Secondly, concentrating on state regulations and party organisational development, the paper aims at exploring possible justifications for the low levels of nationalisation. The conclusions will highlight the significance of more inclusive definitions of the institutional arrangements (introducing the impact of party regulations) as well as the importance of party development strategies, mainly from the perspective of political recruitment, in order to explain the post-communist electoral reconfigurations

The short communism's journey into democracy: an appraisal of Romanian democratization

Two decades after the demise of communism, one can draw a state of the art of democratization in Romania. The task of building democracy was not only an endeavor of institutional engineering, but also a re-conceptualization of the intellectual resources of politics, as well as a re-conversion of the instruments and modes of government. Romanian democratization meant simultaneously unraveling the state and the regime and separating the state and the society. Both processes were grounded in the make up of political parties which turned to be not only their authors, but also one of their chief products. Successful as they were, these two disengagements led unwittingly to a third one: between the political regime and the society reshaped by postcommunism

Searching for representation: Romanian parliamentary elites and their political roles

In the recent years, the Romanian Parliament became one of the main political battlegrounds. The continuous procedural reconfigurations, the MPs' interparty mobility and the lack of a robust legislative activity raised numerous questions regarding the quality of representation. In a general context described by a defective Parliamentary functioning, what is the meaning that can be ascribed to "political representation" in nowadays Romania? Starting both from institutional arrangements and MPs' opinions the present article seeks to investigate the different (contradictory) facets of the parliamentary mandates. The exploratory scrutiny of the parliamentary representation consists in four main section: after an overall investigation of the main meanings of political representation in the Romanian context, the following sections will pinpoint to the main contradictions in the comprehension of this process on three dimensions: the reconfigurations in the relationship between MPs and their (imagined) constituencies, the sinuous collaboration of these elites with their own parties, and the "clandestine" dimension of parliamentary activity. The conclusions of the study will pinpoint to fact that the Romanian MPs are not in the service of the people, nor they are party or constituency servants, but they are rather subjects of government

Democracy and parties in Italy after the 2013 legislative elections

The article provides a condensed overview of Italian politics on the eve of the 2013 elections, underlining the major changes affecting the format and the mechanics of the Italian party politics since the collapse of the First Republic

Pluralisme et representation: la definition ambigue des acteurs politiques de la Roumanie postcommuniste

If post-communism is to be seen as a political system change toward democracy, it should be analyzed as an effort to integrate several fundamentals of democracy that communism completely rejected or ignored. One of these fundamentals was pluralism. This paper tries to explore the way pluralism received a contradictory political meaning at the beginnings of Romanian post-communism, the way it informed electoral institutions and political actors and eventually failed in becoming a core value of the political system of post-communist Romania