Portuguese society cannot, once again, remain aloof from an important international debate, involving sociologists, businessmen, managers, trade unionists and "public opinion" itself, on the company, initiated more than two decades ago, and practically without echo among us1. If, in fact, the theme of the enterprise has been relegated to a secondary plan in the Portuguese context, academic and non-academic, so visible in the practices and discourses on today's Portugal, it is time, we might say, given the social and economic transformations we are going through, to put the theme of the enterprise back at the center of the social debate.