The Brazilian social organization and managerial experience - an attempt to sociological analysis

Abstract

Brazilian managerial experience will be better understood as a bureaucracy, and not in the specific conceptual context of management, in which it should be seen as a recent phenomenon (from the "50s). Under such a focus, the managerial function transcends its condition of a technique of control while manifestation of power, thus becoming understandable as an organizational element of Brazilian society and of its foundations.

Immersed in primary relations of patrimonial order, management has grown in the building up of the nation as an aspect of the cultural transfer of liberalism, limited by the character of the State's construction.

The emergence upon the historical stage of an internal market and of new actors have propitiated the establishment of a market society (utilitarian order) and the expansion of managerial experience. Organizational patterns, transplanted from central economies, have been affected by impositions from peripheral conditions of the environment considered internally, and from attitudes and values structured in colonial times. Foreign  investments from hegemonic countries, made through big corporations and founded on an unprecedented technological development, possibilitated a large-scale production of goods and led to the production of consumers, that is, to a mass society.

This new social order, also induced, entailed several distortions, among them the adoption of imported managerial techniques that, mechanically applied under the notion of this universality, are deprived of the social bases supportive of administrative phenomena. With the new managerial standards, therefore, coexist patterns and values of patrimonial and utilitarian orders, varying in accordance with the economic space and segment.