This article identifies the dimensions in which the Brazilian government and the media have shaped the macroenvironment for liquid biofuels through time, and tests the similarities among these means of expression of the society in the macroenvironmental setting. It conducts a documental research of the news on liquid biofuels published by the press and of official documents of the Brazilian government about the same subject. Electronic written documents covering a 10-year period (1997 to 2006) were collected and the information from them was extracted through text mining applying a specific analytical framework containing the macroenvironmental dimensions and their respective 'd-words', which were defined from the most frequent words in the knowledge areas related to each dimension. The results show that the configuration of the macroenvironment for liquid biofuels differs in the press and in the government. The setting of the macroenvironment also presented variations throughout the period. Similarity, adherence and homogeneity tests confirmed the existence of differences between the press and the government. The article discusses the implications of the results for the activity of macroenvironmental scanning related to the strategic planning of the organizations in general and of the liquid biofuels specifically.
environmental scanning; strategic planning; text mining; macro-environmental dimensions; d-words
