The 'equalizer' administration: Managerial strategies in the public sector.

摘要

A review of administrative reforms in Brazil is carried out from the perspective of the mainstream organizational design conceptual framework. It highlights the complex dynamics of a constant search for differentiation and flexibilization subject to patterns of advances and reversals, due to the centrality, strength and pervasiveness of the bureaucratic model. It is concluded that in no single given moment, a public manager and his team, may count on a formal organizational design what meets the "congruency" criteria, as devised by organizational design conceptual frameworks, to explain organizational results in different environmental settings. Although this conclusion may explain failure in the public sector, it cannot provide understanding on the many instances of significative success attained by government operations in spite of inadequate formal administrative structures. This point calls for a better understanding, from the interpretivist approach, of how public administrators, strongly associated with good organizational results, engage into transformative action, in order to separate administrative structures flaws and dysfunctional cultural patterns of conduct, structurally present and constantly reproduced, in vigorous developing countries, such as Brazil.; The dissertation transcribes the testimony of four outstanding public administrators, doing a deep incursion in the managerial real world of public administration, as subjectively defined by them and transformed by their engagement into action. Through the thematic version of the oral history methodology, full segments of the complete interviews are categorized into the thirty-two managerial strategies captured which are presented on a recategorized manner under eight main strategies: (1) Interchanging Frames of Reference; (2) Exploring the Formal Limits; (3) Playing the Bureaucracy Game; (4) Inducing the Inclusion of Others; (5) Promoting Internal Cohesion; (6) Creating Shields against Transgressions; (7) Overcoming Internal Restrictions; (8) Letting the Structures Blossom. Each one of these eight blocks of strategies presented, deserves further reflexive interpretation by the author, on the light of the interpretivist approach to organizational design.; A final effort is made, in terms of theory building, for improving understanding on this issue. In order to find a significant meaning underlining all the strategies extracted from the "practical consciousness" of the interviewers as revealed in their report, the author resorts to a metaphor. This metaphor contributes to: (1) better describing and understanding a not adequately treated phenomenon, namely, good results under inadequate structural social and organizational conditions; (2) revealing the logic and the meaning underlining all the strategies adopted to generate results under these unfaithful conditions; (3) naming, according to the nature of the managerial transformative social action involved, an open ended class of managerial interventions of a pragmatic sort driven by an ethics of results much common to good managers, that is, the concept of "managerial equalization"; and (4) giving back to public administrators, represented by the interviewees, to be incorporated in their "discursive consciousness", something the most effective and experienced public managers already have as tacit knowledge built in their "practical consciousness", and so, help the education and development of new talents. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)