The Network Society - University of Massachusetts Amherst

Afterword 431
implementing integrated education programmes, particularly if, as has
been the case in Portugal, they have been negotiated and agreed upon
by the social partners for a long time.
A second problem that concerns me related with the question at
hand has to do with the low levels of cohesion (well below the European
averages) that characterize the structure of Portuguese society.
Contrary to that argued by certain critics, in his works, Professor
Castells has never neglected the excluding tensions related with economic
globalization and the transition to the information economy
and society. He dealt with this issue in a particularly expressive way in
the analyses he proposed on the distinction between generic
labour/self-programmable labour, illustrating to what extent the
processes in question contain the seeds of long-term unemployment
or irreversible segmentations and polarizations in the labour markets.
The exemplariness of the Finnish case is in part due to the particular
effectiveness of the Welfare State in containing excluding tensions, at
least those I referred to above.
In the Portuguese society, which presents considerably unbalanced
income distribution patterns, the institutional social protection structure,
essentially built up after the reinstatement of the democratic system,
continues to be faulty and lacks the degree of consistency
required for the systematic control of the risks of precarization and
marginalization that come with technological modernization.
Knowing that, in addition to this, the budgetary discipline imposed by
the Stability and Growth Pact will not, at least in the short term, allow
us any financial slack capable of bringing about significant improvements
in our welfare model, are we not faced with problems that will
be very difficult to overcome?
Part of the solution will no doubt come through improvement in the
efficiency of the public administration in managing its resources and in
better addressing the needs and legitimate aspirations of the citizens.
In this perspective, the idea that the model of governance has to
adapt to the need to provide responses to social problems, which,
being very multifaceted, interdependent and transversal, involve at the
same time citizens that are more and more informed, was raised several
times throughout this book. It is no wonder, then, that one also