Values related to organizational competition and communicative action: a new look at the organizational making

Abstract

Organizations act in their daily life by means of their stakeholders, who relate to each other in interactions mediated by language in a strategic or communicative way. Values constitute an aspect underlying the actions of social entities. We define values related to organizational competition (VROCs) as socially constructed beliefs, meaningful to an individual or group, which drive social actions between stakeholders. This study aimed to understand how VROCs are reproduced in interactions between people who act as stakeholders in organizations operating in a market economy. The study was conducted according to the partial paradigmatic commensurability approach between symbolic interactionism and the communicative action theory. Configuring itself as a case study, with a descriptive, exploratory, and explanatory nature, it was conducted in one of the largest companies related to the Economy of Communion Project (EoC), in Brazil. Data were collected by means of interviews, participant observation, naturally occurring talks, through documents and the analysis and interpretation of results, inspired by pragmatics and hermeneutics. Vis-à-vis the theoretical frame, the results suggest the values related to organizational competition as deriving from the search for a dynamic balance between founder’s worldview – the world “as it should be” and “how it actually is” – and organization’s needs, sometimes favoring strategic actions, sometimes based on understanding. VROCs were defined considering different stakeholders and, at the same time they are produced in interactions, they reproduce the cultural aspects of societies to which stakeholders belong.