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The ideological role of intergovernmental organizations in the promotion of international tourism has caused controversies as governments try to balance regional objectives with national self-interest. This chapter uses content analysis to investigate the most significant declarations and propositions of the main intergovernmental organizations regarding international tourism during the past 50 years, assessing their ideological dimensions. The findings support the assumption that the discourses of intergovernmental organizations sustain the ideological nature of international tourism whilst promoting topics, products, practices and tourism models that contributes to an unequal interdependence between the different societies at stake, benefiting the most developed ones.

http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt One interesting problem that urban search and rescue (USAR) robots face is the process of climbing stairs. In this paper, an algorithm for the autonomous stair climbing is presented, using only pitch and roll angles, as measured by an accelerometer sensor. A skilled human operator is required to climb stairs manually, therefore, doing so autonomously allows for a more efficient robot operation in search and rescue scenarios. Tests were made using RAPOSA, a tracked wheels USAR robot, and results have shown that the proposed control algorithm was capable of climbing several kinds of stairs. An empirical evaluation comparing it with human teleoperation showed an overall more reliable and faster operation in the majority of the tests. This difference is even more significant when the human operator is limited to the robot's eyes.

Abstract:Teaching in universities, especially in management schools, is today orientated to solving-problems and operational skills' development, short-term productivity gains and to a vocational perspective. This represents an impoverishment of a deeper learning, an obstacle to the development of competences in a broader and integrative sense and the absence of a critical thinking practice. These are important tools to enhance in students and future managers, as specific social actors, abilities to act in a conscious, autonomous and long-term efficacious manner in society. This essay's objective is to problematize the role that sociology could assume in the overcoming of that impoverishment, namely within the curricular unit of organizational behavior in two ways. First, teaching the social and macro dimensions that contribute to explain organizational structuring and behavior. Secondly, enhancing reflexivity and contextualization on the practices and discourses of all social actors involved and disassembling the dominant ideological, naturalized and simplistic individualized view on the reality of labor, employment and organizations. This is especially relevant in hospitality management studies because the dominant discourse about hospitality organizations hide, under a hegemonic paradigm of naturalized and individualized explanations, the macro-social dimensions of its organizational culture, work conditions, employees' behaviors, management styles and market labor.

Currently, COVID-19 is perceived as an epidemic, a new «plague», referring to the matrix metaphor of the pestis expressed in the series contagion – death – fear – isolation. This article aims to understand the multiple collective challenges posed by plague epidemics. The analysis of these challenges may contribute to the reflection on several dimensions that shape the COVID-19 pandemic threat. Individuals interpret the different pasts aiming to solve the problems they face in the present. The collective challenges that the political and medical «management» of the plague place are shaped by circumstantial coalitions of diverse interests, enabling the recognition, demarcation, and legitimisation of actions regarding its public management and control, materialised in concrete health policies, such as the development of several specific devices (isolation, health cordons, lazarettos, quarantine), thus intervening in the configuration of «collective management» of epidemics.   Received: 20 November 2020 / Accepted: 22 March 2021 / Published: 10 May 2021