Search results

Actuellement nombreuses compagnies provenants des pays développés réexaminent la géographie de l'«outsourcing» (externalisation). La focalisation durable sur la productivité, l'efficience opérationnelle et la posibilité d'une future extension de l'emplacement, l'emportent sur la diminution de coûts à court terme. L'arrivée des grandes STN (sociétés transnationales) dans les pays de l'Europe Centrale et de l'Est marque le début d'une tendance ample, qui tient non seulement des opportunités de faire économie à long terme, mais aussi d'une possible perspective pour ces pays de devenir leaders dans l'attirance des investissements.

The present study investigates the major problems and challenges faced by the Romanian educational system during the last years of Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime. My main focus is on the so-called "polytechnic" education as a mean to reform and improve the system, and the debates it generated starting with the late 1970s. Consequently, the paper also examines the evolution of the debate and the top-down and bottom-up projects and initiatives to reform the educational system during the first decade following the collapse of the communist regime in Romania in December 1989. The aim is to present the clashing visions of different actors over the idea of reform and the urge to implement it, nonetheless to reveal the long term deadlock generated by this situation within the Romanian educational system.

The paper provides the ideal-typical narrative of European integration manufactured by Romanian intellectuals and the official national Church (Greek-orthodox), that could be summarized as follows: in the realm of the spirit, Europe would have survived mainly in the East, shepherded by such intellectuals as the Romanian ones and by the spiritual legacy of the Orthodox Church; in political and economic terms, European Union is monitored according to secularist and relativist guidelines by the bureaucracy in Brussels. Whatever the latter, together with their Romanian counterparts, may have realized in the course of European enlargement is of little concern for the former. Both the Church and the mainstream intellectuals are engaged now in an operation that should have defined them long before the fall of state socialism: to boost intellectual non-conformity with respect to the political dominant discourse as a way of refusing the debate by taking it seriously. And they do it by means of the same narrative device that kept them silent under communism: they tell the story of the prevalence of culture and the spiritual over everything political.