a literature review

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020Despite having been one of the first countries in Europe to introduce provisions in the labour law to promote virtual work and having made strong investments in ICT infrastructure, the adoption of virtual work in Portugal lags significantly behind most European countries. This paper examines the literature, official documents and databases to understand this lag. We found that, notwithstanding the difficulty to measure virtual work, it is possible to say that there were 1.8% of workers in 2005 involved in virtual work. In 2010, less than 3% were involved in virtual work, and in 2015 it grew to 8.2%. The paper identifies two main factors hindering the growth of virtual work: the legal framework and the organisational aspects of work.publishersversionpublishe

The positive impacts (potential benefits)

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020This paper intended to provide a vision on the potential consequences of the introduction of emerging air transportation system which was based on a section of the thesis to contribute to the forming of public and policy opinion.Especially this paper tried to understand whether there were enough positive social and environmental impacts in terms of potential benefits to continue the efforts.The negative impacts are beyond the scope of this paper. Limitations of the current ground and airline transportation systems, increasing congestion, poor block speed, combined with expanding population and demand for affordable on-demand mobility are driving the development of future transportation technology and policy. The third wave of aeronautic,e VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and landing) Air Transportation System, is envisioned as the next logical step in the natural progression and could bring about great new capabilities for society that would bring aviation into a new age of being relevant in daily lives. Considering door to door block time, e VTOL Air Transportation System has the potential to achieve anotherfive-fold increase over the auto today as the auto provided ten-fold increase over the horse, and a daily mobility reach of 125 to 250 miles.The main benefits will be on-demand, point-to-point,safe travel, further and anywhere in less travel time with almost zero environmental impact for general people. Besides, a successful implementation and sustainable transition will depend on overcoming technological hurdles, regulatory frameworks, operational safety, cost competitiveness, and sensibilities of the affected communities.publishersversionpublishe

New Manufacturing Environments with Micro- and Nanorobotics

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020The convergence of nano-, bio-, information, and cognitive sciences and technologies (NBIC) is advancing continuously in many societal spheres. This also applies to the manufacturing sector, where technological transformations in robotics push the boundaries of human–machine interaction (HMI). Here, current technological advances in micro- and nanomanufacturing are accompanied by new socio-economic concepts for different sectors of the process industry. Although these developments are still ongoing, the blurring of the boundaries of HMI in processes at the micro- and nano- level can already be observed. According to the authors, these new socio-technical HMIs may lead to the development of new work environments, which can also have an impact on work organization. While there is still little empirical evidence, the following contribution focuses on the question whether the “manufacturing (or working) life” using enhancement practices pushes the boundaries of HMI and how these effects enable new modes of working in manufacturing. Issues of standardization, acceleration of processes, and order-oriented production become essential for technological innovation in this field. However, these trends tend to lead to a “manufacturing life” in work environments rather than to new modes of work in industry.publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Processos de mudanca tecnologica e organizacional da industria portuguesa

One pretends to develop the knowledge of manufacturing systems trends, the perception of the Portuguese situation relatively to those trends, the knowledge of paradigmatic cases of technological and organizational innovation, the study of the different implications associated to the introduction of automated systems in engineering, the analysis of new theoretical and methodological problems of industrial Sociology and to contribute for its 'theoretical growth'. It was tried to know if with the introduction of new automated systems appears a stronger Taylorist division of labor, or, on the contrary, if the work content in flexible manufacturing systems tends to have a systemic character in the sense of changes in values systems and changes in the social practices. It seems that, however, the introduction of automated systems in the Portuguese industry does not produce only a type of social and cultural implications: those implications vary with the labor organization model where those systems are introduced. As research methods we use not only the qualitative method, but also the quantitative method. The preferentially adopted research techniques were the documentary analysis, the interview, as well as the direct job observationAvailable from Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Servico de Informacao e Documentacao, Av. D. Carlos I, 126, 1200 Lisboa / FCT - Fundação para o Ciência e a TecnologiaSIGLEPTPortuga