Success, business media, and management culture in Brazil

Abstract

The rationale of modern management practices has gone beyond the economic sphere and it has spread as a behavior model for other spheres of social life, in a process named management or management culture, heavily promoted after World War II. By expanding to developing countries, we argue that this process has brought, among other values, success models that spread through the business media. Media, understood as mass communication, enable the commoditization and circulation of symbolic forms. Given this context, this article presents the results of a survey with a constructionist nature that analyzes the repertoires used by the leading business magazine in Brazil, Exame, in order to talk about success, since its creation, in 1971, until 1998, when Você S/A was created, an emblematic magazine with regard to the phenomenon here discussed. Overall, we referred to 634 issues of Exame, from which 58 reports and 595 editorials were selected, which, then, underwent repertoire analysis. By making clear the model of executive and successful businessperson, the results show, over three decades, the process of spreading an idea of success in line with the rationale of market economy and the values of excellence and entrepreneurship as characteristics required from the individual, in the corporate world. Along with other Brazilian researches, this article evidences the process for spreading the values of management in the country.