Centro de Estudos da Metrópole

Comparing metropolitan dynamics

Intense transformations are taking place in the labor markets of major cities across the world, and new forms of occupation and unemployment are coming about. Current arguments try to infer a set of immediate effects caused by such transformations, both in terms of living and working conditions, as well as public policies.

While not ignoring the existence of such effects, this project actually runs countercurrent, and analyzes the mechanisms by which market dynamics pursue a different approach, by analyzing the mechanisms through which the dynamics of the market become socially embedded in our institutions, social behavior and subjective representations, refusing to yield to economic reason, and yet playing a decisive role in explaining it. To this end we reflect on the different forms of extra-economic embeddedness to which the relationship between the agents involved in the job hunting process in large labor markets are subject. These are: those seeking work, businesses that recruit workers, and agents that intermediate labor supply and demand (job and temporary employment agencies).

The study will be focus both on the mechanisms set in motion by those seeking work (within the context of intense occupational transition and recurring unemployment), as well as the mechanisms activated by employers (within a context of transformation in terms of headcount and job function, and new regulations governing labor relations).

Two different mechanisms to get out of unemployment (from the point of view of the worker), or to recruit labor (from the point of view of business) will be analyzed: (i) institutional mechanisms such as private, union and government job agencies; (ii) mechanisms that are not institutionalized in the system and that can explain how the players - those seeking work and those seeking labor - activate social networks, starting with their own social space (family, home or professional).

Coordinator: Nadya Araújo Guimarães

Research team: Flavia Luciane Consoni, Gisela Lobo Baptista Pereira Tartuce, Murillo Marschner Alves de Brito, Priscila Pereira Faria Vieira, Mônica Varasquim Pedro, Paulo Henrique da Silva, Felipe Monteiro, Jonas Tomazi Bicev, Milena Estorniolo, Monise Fernandes Picanço, Nathália Coelho Leobas

The last 15 years have witnessed important changes in the labor force of metropolitan Sao Paulo. There has been a continuous increase in the level of education, fewer young people in the ranks of the unemployed, more female and fewer migrants in the labor force, especially in the heart of the metropolis.

Business demand for labor has also changed dramatically, reflecting structural changes in economic activities developed in the area: technical-productivity restructurings, domestic and even formerly State owned companies pursuing international strategies, strong shifts in occupations from manufacturing industry to services and trade. All of these changes have been accompanied by a sharp rise in unemployment and an increase in non formal occupations.

Research tries to go beyond interpreting the result of this data as a set of shifts between the secondary and tertiary sectors - which could cloud very relevant sociological factors, such as the fact that inter-sector migrations do not mean the same thing for all professions, or that, in many cases, merely shifting jobs from industry to the service sector may not wipe out the effect of this shift in a process of accumulation of joblessness that still, to a large extent, is a phenomenon of manufacturing industry.

Coordinator: Alvaro A. Comin

Research team: Márcia Lima, Idenilza Miranda, Alexandre Abdal e Bruno Kawaoka Komatsu

The research seeks to understand the functioning of civil organizations which have assumed the role of intermediaries between different public agencies and beneficiary populations of public policies aimed at combating poverty.

The aim is to understand the modus operandi — policies of alliances, the attainment and use of resources — of civil organizations dedicated to administer public funds destined for poverty alleviation.

The projects seeks to carry out a comparative analysis — in Mexico City and in Sao Paulo — of the networks of organizations that act in the field of poverty relief, in local and/or focal administration of programs, in the design and/or in the supervision of policies, or in direct intervention with private funding. In order to do so, these network analysis will be used to further explore relational information available in the database of civil organizations produced in the research Rights, Representation and Popular sectors — CEBRAP/IDS.

Coordinator: Adrián Gurza Lavalle

Research team: Renata Mirandola Bichir, Graziela Castello

This project will incorporate an assessment of participative projects into the study of the relationships between politics and public policy. The guiding hypothesis is that, by including civil society in public health policy discussions will promote the exchange of information and enhance the transparency of the political process, thus expanding the changes or achieving a more equitable distribution of public healthcare resources.

However, we still know very little about participative processes and the social networks that link these segments to bureaucracy and elected officials, and how these arenas could influence the decision making process.

To expand our knowledge of the dynamics between the different players, and assess how each can contribute to reversing the distribution distortions revealed in previous studies, we will systematically analyze data regarding the distribution of public health services in the city of Sao Paulo, and the processes involved in implementing, operating and managing local health councils.

Coordinator: Vera Schattan Coelho

Research team: Fabiola Fanti, Ligia Rubega, Meire de Paula Ribeiro

Recent studies based on the analysis of social networks have advanced our understanding of internal State processes, shining a light on the relationship between the State and its immediate political environment, especially politicians and business. The result of these studies revealed the importance of these networks to effective deployment of public policies.

Given the specificities of the study policies, these investigations did not significantly contribute to our understanding of the relationship between internal State networks, the associative network and the public that uses such policies. On the other hand, the literature on social inequality in the city focuses primarily on the so-called street-level bureaucracies and citizen organizations.

To fill this gap, this study will focus on housing policies over the course of the past 5 administrations in the city of Sao Paulo. Housing policies are extremely important to urban inequality, and have their own set of important organized groups and bureaucracy, and will contribute to our understanding about the State and its role in reproducing urban social inequality.

Coordinator: Eduardo C. Marques

Research team: Renata Rocha Gonçalves

The project examines budget revenue and expenses in the city of Sao Paulo, and investigates spending priorities and their spatial distribution. In addition, it looks at the behavior of municipal finance, investigating the relationship between political parties and municipal spending by function and region between 1993 and 2004. The project will contribute to investigating the relationship between party ideology and the implementation of public policy.

The objective is to investigate how much knowledge there is about the patterns of municipal spending, and look at the inductive role of federal guidelines, the degree of local government autonomy, the role of political parties and the weight of previous spending decisions.

Coordinator: Marta Arretche

Research team: Daniel Vazquez, Vera Viviane Schmidt

The research investigates voting behavior in the metropolitan region of Sao Paulo. The objective is to identify patterns, comparing voting results in space, time and for different disputing offices. The database brings together information about elections occurring since 1994, aggregated by ballot boxes which include 500 voters on average.

This investigation follows naturally from ongoing studies and past results. It will go forward in two parts. In the first we will further explore the meaning of those patterns already identified, trying to distinguish the effect of the socio-demographic variables traditionally studied in the Electoral Sociology of Space.

If in fact, space has an independent role in explaining voting behavior; we will further discuss the implications of these findings to voting behavior theory. The same applies to socio-demographic variable.

The second phase will look at individual votes and how voters coordinate the different votes.

The election calendar in Brazil is such that, at each election, voters must chose their candidate for anywhere from two (municipal elections) to seven (general elections that include two Senate seats) offices. In general it is assumed that parties are less relevant and that voters make their decisions based on purely individual and personal preferences. Exploratory investigations thus far show that voter preferences are, in fact, party based.

Coordinator: Argelina Figueiredo, Fernando Limongi

Research team: Sérgio Simoni, Lara Mesquita

During the first phase, we developed evaluation activities of public policies in projects with Municipal governments. In 2004, we applied a survey to the poorest 40% of the population in Sao Paulo, based on similar research carried out by CEBRAP in 1991, comparing the results of the two surveys and also expanding the information collected since then.

Following this same path, this project will describe the spatial distribution of the different social groups to find out what type of access the poor have to social policies and public services, with a particular focus on educational tools, bearing in mind their quality and evolution in time, and analyzing their social, cultural and political determinants.

For the 2006-2008 phase we will further explore the analyses already underway in along three directions First we will look at the role of housing to explain living conditions and access top public services, and identify the role housing plays in social segregation and social networks, as well as any environmental inequalities that may exist. From the point of view of methodology, we will explore statistical models, among those spatial models, to test past results and develop new hypotheses.

Finally, we will pursue our political assessments, trying to develop new methodology and analyze policy impact, expanding the policies already addressed and incorporate income transfer policies.

Coordinator: Haroldo Torres, Argelina Figueiredo

Research team: Sandra Gomes, Thais Pavez, Eric Daniele

The project is divided into two analytic dimensions. The first aims to comparatively analyze social integration mechanisms produced by primary and associative networking, such as religious, familial, neighborhood relations, civil associations and how they intersect and share feedback.

The hypothesis is that these connections are conditioned by social inequality, as is the case for certain migration processes. However, they can also act as virtuous mechanisms to attenuate social vulnerability in that, in additions to the benefits they bring, these connections also serve as a mechanism to access the labor market and public policies.

The second dimension looks at how people organize their urban experience based on cultural capital, social practices, their network of relationships, uses of the city and the symbolic markers that structure their space. In other words, we will explore how the dynamics of the metropolis interfere specifically on the day-to-day lives of different social groups. In some dimensions the investigation will focus more specifically on the transformations of the religious group, primarily in major urban centers.

Coordinator: Ronaldo de Almeida

Research team: Daniel de Lucca, Maurício Fiore e Tiarajú D'Andrea

In recent years a consensus has grown as to the relevance of social dynamics to understand the different manifestations of poverty within a given society. Poverty may be marked by cumulative trajectories of material and symbolic loss, where combinations of events weaken the insertion of citizens into the labor market, as well as their socio-familiar insertion, but families and individuals are also unevenly equipped in terms of their ability to use vehicles to confront and even reverse the harmful effects of accidents outside their control.

Our knowledge of the effects of these dynamics in terms of causing poverty is still incipient. This project will contribute to our understanding of how poverty comes about in the city of Sao Paulo, by a comparative and quantitative analysis of the different contexts in which poverty exists, isolating and analyzing the different effects of (i) interpersonal relationship that are, to a greater or lesser extent, direct and included within the sphere of primary sociability and the extended family, (ii) the standards of behavior governed by the rules of reciprocity and trust based relationships, and (iii) shared interests and membership in associations, including those of a religious nature.

The project is conceived as a complementary effort to the ethnographic analyses to be conducted in Cidade Tiradentes and in the downtown area, as well as those that may be done in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador.

Coordinator: Adrián Gurza Lavalle, Haroldo Torres, Alvaro Comin e Graziela Castello

Comparing urban aspects in different areas of São Paulo.

In recent years a consensus has grown as to the relevance of social dynamics to understand the different manifestations of poverty within a given society. Poverty may be marked by cumulative trajectories of material and symbolic loss, where combinations of events weaken the insertion of citizens into the labor market, as well as their socio-familiar insertion, but families and individuals are also unevenly equipped in terms of their ability to use vehicles to confront and even reverse the harmful effects of accidents outside their control.

Our knowledge of the effects of these dynamics in terms of causing poverty is still incipient. This project will contribute to our understanding of how poverty comes about in the city of Sao Paulo, by a comparative and quantitative analysis of the different contexts in which poverty exists, isolating and analyzing the different effects of (i) interpersonal relationship that are, to a greater or lesser extent, direct and included within the sphere of primary sociability and the extended family, (ii) the standards of behavior governed by the rules of reciprocity and trust based relationships, and (iii) shared interests and membership in associations, including those of a religious nature.

The project is conceived as a complementary effort to the ethnographic analyses to be conducted in Cidade Tiradentes and in the downtown area, as well as those that may be done in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador.

Coordinator: Adrián Gurza Lavalle, Haroldo Torres, Alvaro Comin e Graziela Castello

Research team: Miranda Zoppi, Maria Encarnación Moya Recio e Igor Pantoja