This paper discusses the organizational practices of hip hop groups from Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, as they appropriate foreign experience and rationally guide their social action. The aim of this work is to investigate these practices, based on the formulations of Brazilian sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, as they are enunciated in the works The Sociological Reduction and The New Science of Organizations. This approach offers fruitful material to broaden the theory and may be subsidiary to this kind of socio-cultural study, explaining why it is pertinent in this field. In this sense, the hip hop movement can be viewed as valuable when it comes to understanding phenomena which, due to (and in spite of) being originally transnational, or even "foreign", act or interact worldwide. Examining the organization practices and social action of these groups also helped identify a concern with the production of cultural artifacts that represent and form a symbolism that is historically and culturally located. Another issue that was broached concerns the market since for those groups it is not a category absent from their struggles and actions, but the economic criteria are incidental in relation to their members' motivation.
hip hop; sociological reduction; social systems delimitation theory; organizational studies
