Social management: epistemology of a paradigmKeywords:
social management; epistemology; deliberative democracy
Palavras-chave:
gestão social; epistemologia; democracia deliberativa
Palabras clave:
gestión social; epistemología; democracia deliberativa
Keywords:
social management; epistemology; deliberative democracy
Palavras-chave:
gestão social; epistemologia; democracia deliberativa
Palabras clave:
gestión social; epistemología; democracia deliberativa
First published in 2013, the book Gestão social: epistemologia de um paradigma [Social Management: Epistemology of a Paradigm], authored by Airton Cardoso Cançado, Fernando Guilherme Tenório, and José Roberto Pereira, stands as one of the most influential works in the theoretical consolidation of what has come to be known as “Social Management” (Gestão social). The third edition, published in 2022, revised and expanded, including the addition of Chapter 7 (“Social Management as a Counterpoint to Strategic Management”), which is the subject of this review, represents the continuation of an endeavor devoted to solidifying the theoretical and scientific foundations upon which the Social Management paradigm has been built. In this regard, the use of the present perfect in “has been built” underscores the repeated or ongoing action that began in the past and continues into the present, denoting the field’s perpetual formation.
Although affiliated with different higher education institutions (the Federal University of Tocantins, the Getulio Vargas Foundation, and the Federal University of Lavras, respectively), the three authors share a commitment to extensive research on Social Management, particularly in its characterization as a dialogical and socially inclusive managerial model within the field of Public Administration. Indebted to Tenório’s pioneering studies in the 1990s - a period in which the very managerialist currents that Social Management seeks to counter were emerging - the book by no means represents, and the authors themselves acknowledge this “unpretentiousness” on several occasions, the culminating point in the epistemological maturation of this management model. After all, as Marx noted in the preface to the first edition of Capital: “Every beginning is difficult - this holds in all sciences” (Marx, 2023, p. 112).
Indeed, the structure of the work reflects the authors’ effort not only to articulate a conceptual framework capable of capturing the fundamental theoretical elements and analytical categories of Social Management, as an organizational axis that stands in opposition to the hegemonic paradigm of utilitarian rationality in strategic management, in the terminology employed by Tenório and Araújo (2020), grounded in the defense of a substantive logic that strengthens rational debate (Ramos, 1981), but also to delineate the epistemological boundaries that would allow Social Management to be situated as a distinct field of scientific knowledge, albeit one still under construction. It is no coincidence that the introductory section reveals that the guiding questions of the work are centered on ascertaining whether “Social Management constitutes a field of scientific knowledge” and to exploring “what the theoretical foundations of Social Management are” (Cançado et al., 2022, p. 26).
Thus, guided by the twofold purpose of demonstrating the consolidation of Social Management as a science and of articulating its underlying theoretical foundations, the work adopts a deductive and dialectical argumentative approach, drawing on broad frameworks from the philosophy of science, as well as wider theoretical constructs concerning deliberative democracy, to delineate the contours of the subject under investigation.
The first part is thus devoted to presenting the matrices of thought concerning the demarcation criteria that distinguish common sense from scientific knowledge. In this regard, scientificity is delimited through an exploration of the structural change in scientific knowledge, in light of general notions about Kuhnian paradigms, Popperian falsificationism, Lakatosian scientific research programs, Paul Feyerabend’s theoretical anarchism, Alan Chalmers’s aim of science, the double epistemological rupture described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and the notion of discussability advocated by Pedro Demo. It is through the systematization of such theoretical perspectives and their respective explanatory categories that the authors intend to discuss, and to test, the scientificity of Social Management, which presupposes, however, a task of contextual analysis and conceptual delineation that the work carries forward in the subsequent chapters.
Seeking then to establish a position for the field of Social Management within the specific context of the paradigms that reflect the development of the social sciences (which denotes, at this point, the adoption of Kuhn’s analytical lens), the book draws an approximation, by similarity, between Jones’s (1993) model of central paradigms of the social sciences and the diagram of sociological paradigms (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). Considering the paradigmatic incommensurability that precludes the positioning of Social Management within these paradigms carries implications that draw it toward the quadrant of “radical humanism”, whose description, according to the objective and subjective dimensions that compose Burrell and Morgan’s sociological diagram, is linked to both the “structural conflict” and “interpretive” paradigms addressed in Jones’s framework.
Beyond the positioning within the field of applied social sciences, the contextual analysis of Social Management also traverses its insertion into the historical and theoretical panorama of the relations among State, Market, and Society. Once the dynamics of interaction among these institutions are understood from the standpoint of the ruptures that shaped management as the exercise of power and the administration of resources in society, the authors highlight three milestones: (a) the absolutist State, within which the centralization of state power in the figure of the monarch prevailed, exercised through patrimonialist management, despite distinctive features between the public and private domains; (b) the first rupture of centralized power, enabling the emancipation of the bourgeois class and the development of the capitalist market (in this context, the need to confer security and predictability upon mercantile operations gave rise to the definition of a bureaucratic arrangement to guide the administration of the Modern State); and (c) the second rupture of power, with the formation of a democratic society constituted by autonomous public spheres, emancipated from the State and the Market, having Social Management as a dialogical form of administration of democratic power through deliberative processes aimed at achieving the non-state public interest and the realization of the common good.
Once Social Management has been situated within the paradigmatic perspective of the social sciences and from the historical standpoint of the models of state apparatus management, the work delves into the substantial portion concerning the description of the theoretical foundations that provide the supporting basis for understanding this type of management. In this regard, reference is made to the theoretical approximation, which embodies the systematization of the conceptions and characteristic elements developed thus far in the literature. Although the authors give only discrete emphasis to this point, it concerns a genuinely Brazilian construct, approached from a historicity proper to post-abyssal thought (Santos, 2007), taking into account the structural conditions of development in Brazil, including for the purpose of responding to the objection raised by Pinho (2010) regarding the educational deficit that hinders the implementation of the Habermasian framework in the national conjuncture.
Within this conceptual sphere, notwithstanding the fact that the initial theoretical treatment of Social Management associated it with the management of social programs - far less as an autonomous area than as a generic label for public policies -, the gradual consolidation of debates in the academic arena was unveiling the boundaries of an alternative to the positivist hegemony centered on instrumental rationality. In this regard, despite the absence of consensus as to its meaning and the danger of trivializing its use as a mere counterpart to so-called “traditional management”, Social Management appears as “collective decision-making, free from coercion, based on the intelligibility of language, on dialogicity and enlightened understanding as a process, on transparency as presupposition, and on emancipation as ultimate goal” (Cançado et al., 2022, p. 134).
As in an artisanal endeavor, the authors gradually sculpt theoretical categories underlying this initial approximation, until they arrive at a complete analytical framework capable of accounting for the epistemological boundaries of the field of Social Management, such that they may test it according to the demarcation criteria set forth in the first chapter.
Thus, the flow of the dialogical dynamics that constitute Social Management is articulated in a sequence of a point of departure, a communicational infrastructure, and a point of arrival. The point of departure is the notion of self-interest well understood, rooted in Tocqueville, which translates into the interdependence between the collective interest and the individual interest, insofar as the realization of the latter would converge toward the fulfillment of the former, in a coexistence grounded in solidarity and sustainability. It is in the wake of this enlightened self-interest - directed toward the common good - that the communicational processes giving expression to and embodying democratic dialogue would develop. This presupposes the existence of an intermediary category such as the public sphere, at the core of which it would be possible to promote deliberative democracy, according to a logic of substantive rational action, guided by dialogicity and intersubjectivity, enabling collective decision-making free from coercion. Ultimately, in the terms of the framework designed by Cançado et al. (2022), the operational structure of Social Management does not dispense with a teleological component, embodied in the purpose of social emancipation of the free and equal citizens who engage in the deliberative process, as a measure of liberation that reinforces and approaches the initial point; here the connection is attributed to the reviewers, to the neo-republican identification of freedom as non-domination or non-subordination (Skinner, 2012).
If such categories represent the logical and structural elements of the theoretical proposal for Social Management, the design is further permeated by a methodological thread that “binds together the elements” of the conceptual framework, pertaining to dialecticity, whose operationalization axis is guided by Adorno’s negative dialectics, which suppresses from the dialectic the pursuit of a synthesis so as to prevent totalizing views that would hinder the continuity of the rational effort to overcome the status quo and to engage in discussion around already established precepts. One may even assert that the very foundations of Social Management operate in coherence with this Adornian dialectic, as they tend not to reach a definitive synthesis that would bring to a close the full delimitation of the meaning of Social Management.
It is with this theoretical-analytical apparatus, engendered in the form of a Weberian ideal type, that the authors submit the epistemological foundations of Social Management to the demarcation criteria set forth in the first part, in order to test the scientificity of this field of knowledge. Through the examination of the compatibility of each theoretical line with the state of the art concerning Social Management, it is noted that it meets the criteria defined by Popper, Feyerabend, Chalmers, Santos, and Demo.
On the other hand, notwithstanding the constitution of a disciplinary matrix whose elements guide the consolidation of what may be predicated as normal science practiced within the scientific community, in addition to the presence of negative and positive heuristic models that reinforce the methodological pathways of this theory, Social Management has not yet structured a first paradigm, nor has it constituted itself as a scientific research program, in the terms of the criteria established by Kuhn and Lakatos, although it is advancing considerably along this path. In this regard, one may, in agreement with Cançado (2013), take Social Management, for the time being, as an anomaly to the hegemonic traditional management, informed by a business ontology and instrumental logic, whose construction may gain substance to the point of becoming the paradigmatic expression of a scientific revolution in organization theory.
As a great number of theorists - from Brecht to Foucault - have already maintained, emancipatory politics always requires that the appearance of a “natural order” be dismantled: it must show that what is presented to us as ineluctable is, in truth, mere chance or the persistence of an entrenched status quo, and it must bring about the perception that what once seemed impossible is now seen as attainable.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank the reviewers for their careful reading and dedication to the review process of this work.
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» https://periodicos.ufba.br/index.php/nausocial/article/view/31252 - Cançado, A. C., Tenório, F. G., & Pereira, J. R. (2022). Gestão social: epistemologia de um paradigma (3a rev. ed.). MC&G Editorial/Universidade Federal do Tocantins.
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» https://gestaosocial.paginas.ufsc.br/files/2011/07/Gest%C3%A3o-Social_Pol%C3%ADticas-P%C3%BAblicas_Desenvolvimento.pdf - Ramos, A. G. (1981). A nova ciência das organizações: uma reconceituação da riqueza das nações (2a ed.). Fundação Getúlio Vargas.
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Santos, B. S. (2007). Para além do pensamento abissal: das linhas globais a uma ecologia de saberes. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, (78), 3-46. https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.753
» https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.753 - Skinner, Q. (2012). Liberty before liberalism Cambridge University Press.
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Tenório, F. G., & Araújo, E. T. (2020). Mais uma vez o conceito de gestão social. Cadernos EBAPE.BR, 18(4), 891-905. https://doi.org/10.1590/1679-395120200105
» https://doi.org/10.1590/1679-395120200105
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[Translated version] Note: All quotes in English translated by the article’s authors.
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RESEARCH DATA AVAILABILITY
The entire dataset supporting the results of this study has been published within the article itself.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE USAGE
The authors report that generative artificial intelligence tools were used to support grammatical revision.
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PEER REVIEW REPOR
The peer review report is available at https://periodicos.fgv.br/rap/article/view/97420
Edited by
The entire dataset supporting the results of this study has been published within the article itself.
