New forms of technology and work and more equality for women in professional life

Many authors, including Schwab (2017), in his book ‘The fourth industrial revolution’, and Rush, Bessant, Hobday et al. (2014), in ‘The evolution and use of a policy and research tool: assessing the technological capabilities of firms’, show that we are experiencing the 4th Industrial Revolution, which will change the way we live, work and establish relationships. The confluence of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, electric and autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, material science and quantum computing, among others, will bring about changes in society and in the forms of work and research.

As a result, new research topics have emerged, such as startups, the Brazilian innovation ecosystem, and venture capital funds financing and advising startups. Those are subjects touching large corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and IBM.

In this context, current research topics include online education and the use of new forms of technology, new software, artificial intelligence and social media in the classroom and for research and teaching in the field of administration.

As an example of this trend, in this issue of Cadernos EBAPE.BR, two articles bring studies that used intelligent software and social media as tools for data collection. In addition, a recent call for papers focused on these topics was launched, coordinated by professors Paulo Figueiredo (FGV EBAPE), Roberto Bernardes (FEI-SP) and Felipe Borini (USP), which will result in a special issue of Cadernos EBAPE.BR to be published soon.

Together with the study by Manuel Castells (Network Society) about of the information society, or the Domenico de Masi’s post-industrial society, or the so-called postmodern society explored by many other authors, the value of diversity and respect among all minorities are reaffirmed, in a perspective that everybody is, above all, human beings and citizens.

There are numerous works dealing with minorities and the importance of diversity. This is the case of studies on women.

In this issue of Cadernos EBAPE.BR, we publish two papers approaching the situation of women: one focusing on gender and public policies, discussing the creation of the Secretariat of Policies for Women and its effects in terms of research. The other is a guest article discussing the prejudices against women in the workplace, providing a critical analysis. Women with children, who take on a double workload between family and work, often are subject to prejudices regarding career promotion and their performance in leadership positions, regardless of their merit and their professional and contribution capacity. Do women pursuing positions of high leadership need to renounce the desire of building a family, in view of prevailing prejudices? What is the concept of social justice applied in this issue? How can enlightened social policies to end prejudices be developed? What are the main challenges for women in leadership positions? How can greater equality at work be achieved?

These are some of the topics covered in this issue.

We wish you a pleasant read,

PHD. Isabella f. Freitas Gouveia de Vasconcelos

PHD. Hélio Arthur Reis Irigaray

The guest article, Women and leadership: obstacles and gender expectations in managerial positions, by Lygia Gonçalves Costa Hryniewicz and Maria Amorim Vianna, shows that the representativeness of women in high positions has been increasing over the years, but difficulties persist. The article aims to identify the obstacles that arise during the career of Brazilian women and to understand how they see themselves as leaders, what their main challenges are and how they can overcome them in order to achieve equality - not only at work but also at home. The study uses field research and interviewed 15 women leaders in public and private organizations in Rio de Janeiro between 2014 and 2016. The results show that these women adopted a more androgynous idea of leadership than suggested by the literature and that they saw themselves as deserving of this role despite suffering various types of prejudice in their careers.

Article 1, The Quality of Carbon Management Accounting Reporting as Financial Barrier to Clean Development Mechanism Projects Development, by André Luiz Bufoni, Aracéli Cristina de Sousa Ferreira and Luciano Basto Oliveira, notes that recent works reveal that financial attractiveness represents a severe barrier for projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. In addition, the study shows that due to the collapse of carbon market prices since 2013, the importance of budgeting and project forecasting has increased. The article critically analyzes the obstacles faced by these projects pointing out their effects.

Article 2, The volitional nature of motivation and cultural creativity: an anthropological investigation, by Carmen Pires Migueles and Marco Tulio Fundão Zanini, presents an examination of the voluntary and non-rational nature of motivation and its impact on symbolic production at work. Based on long-term ethnography of a Brazilian special police force, the authors argue that institutional stability and symbolic frames of reference have been widely accepted in motivational studies, leaving aside the role of aesthetical demand in producing active symbolic elaboration at work, which reveals a fundamental paradigm shift.

Article 3, Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Brazilian version of the scale of Organizational Citizenship Behavior for Knowledge Workers, by Taís de Andrade, Vania de Fátima Barros Estivalete and Vivian Flores Costa, presents a study that consists of the translation, transcultural adaptation and validation of the scale “Organizational Citizenship Behaviors for Knowledge Workers”, developed by Dekas (2010) and Dekas, Bauer, Welle et al. (2013) to Brazilian Portuguese. The results indicate that this scale has validity and adequate reliability indexes, and can be used in future studies on Administration and related areas, which would increase the production of scientific knowledge on the subject.

Article 4, Isomorphism and variation of the school management of the Brazilian public elementary school network, by Ângela França Versiani, Plínio Rafael Reis Monteiro and Sérgio Fernando Loureiro de Rezende, brings the discussion on the homogeneity and the variation of the management in elementary schools of the Brazilian public education system. The theoretical framework is based on the contemporary debate of the institutional perspective that questions the homogeneity of the organizational fields. One of the research gaps is to reveal how the structural forms of a given organizational field are isomorphic and what their social consequences are. Faced with this, two propositions arise. The first, related to isomorphism, points out that there is a model of educational management disseminated in public schools. The second admits variations of this model associated with the performance of schools. In the methodology, the authors carry out a survey with 551 teachers of schools in the city of Belo Horizonte.

Article 5, The academic capitalism and neo-liberal reforms in Brazilian higher education, by Camila Furlan da Costa and Sueli Goulart, discusses the political economy of higher education by contextualizing and describing the main governmental programs developed by the governments of Presidents Lula and Dilma. The article defines and uses the category of ‘academic capitalism’ for an initial analysis of neoliberal reforms in Brazilian higher education.

Article 6, Immanuel Kant’s system of layers of institutional acculturation applied to Higher Education in Administration, by Francisco Cristino de França Júnior and Mônica Mota Tassigny, evaluates concepts developed by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) with the objective of constructing an instrumental theoretical model capable of recommending guidelines for the planning of Higher Education practices in Administration courses. The study describes the basic concepts about knowledge, reason and judgments, presenting an illustrative model in which some clarifications and fruitful interpretations for the revision and assembly of Administration courses are found.

Article 7, Gender and public policy: an overview of academic research in Brazil (1983- 2015), by Marta Ferreira Santos Farah, Ana Paula Rodrigues Diniz, Mariana Mazzini Marcondes, Laís Menegon Youssef and Maria Camila Florêncio da Silva, shows that public policies on gender, initiated in Brazil in the 1980s, gained greater centrality with the creation of the Secretariat of Policies for Women (SPM) by the Federal Government in 2003. This does not mean, however, that there is a consolidated research agenda on gender and public policy in the country. The objective of this study was to understand how these themes have been incorporated, in an articulated way, by academic research in Brazil. The methodology was an analysis of 349 scientific articles in the indexing systems SciELO and SPELL between 1983 and 2015.

Article 8, The process of public policy: literature review, theoretical reflections and suggestions for future research, by Lia de Azevedo Almeida and Ricardo Corrêa Gomes, contributes to the understanding of the political process based on the systematization of its main constructs, presenting theoretical reflections and notes for a research agenda. A literature review was conducted of three theoretical models known in the literature: multiple flows, advocacy coalitions and punctuated equilibrium; which have been increasingly applied in national research in Brazil. These theoretical models consider that the political process is the result of the interaction of several variables, such as institutions, actors, ideas and beliefs, assuming that public policy would be the result of these interactions over time. The study sought to investigate how these theoretical models understand the constructs change versus stability and actors’ capacity to influence.

Article 9, Urban processes and local management: the cases of Ribeirão Preto and Piracicaba, between the urban entrepreneurism and the City Statute, by Eliana Tadeu Terci, results from a comparative study of urban processes instate São Paulo since the legislation of the City Statute was in force (Federal Law 10,257/2001, regulatory framework of articles 182 and 183 of the Federal Constitution of 1988). The main variables considered in the study are: i) the urban impacts of the production restructuring of sugarcane agroindustry; and ii) the actions of the private groups and the municipal government in the urban configuration and in the management of the city. Through the analysis of demographic, socioeconomic and public expenditure data, it was observed that urban entrepreneurialism has been the hallmark of municipal management, disregarding the parameters established by the City Statute and the regulations established by the master plans, which have been systematically modified to meet economic imperatives and real estate expansion.

Article 10, The concept of service co-production: proposal for application in the Brazilian Judiciary, by Adalmir Oliveira Gomes and Walter José Faiad de Moura, presents a discussion on the judicial services based on the concept of coproduction, on the management and mechanisms models of participation of users and service providers. The purpose of the article is to encourage the co-production of judicial services in Brazil. The research shows how some judicial services are coproduced and how the process could be improved on the basis of the role of judges and managers.

Referências

• AVENA, B. Inovações Radicais e Organizações: Um estudo sobre o sistema de incentivos à startups através de corporate venture capital, Rio de Janeiro, TCC, FGV EBAPE, 2018.
• CASTELLS, M. A sociedade em rede. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1999.
• DE MASI, D. A sociedade pós-industrial. São Paulo: Senac, 1999.
• RUSH, H. et al. The evolution and use of a policy and research tool: Assessing the technological capabilities of firms. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, v. 26, n. 3, p. 353-365, 2014.
• SCHWAB, K. The fourth industrial revolution. New York: Crown Business, 2017.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jul-Sep 2018
• Date of issue
  Sept 2018