The article analyzes the changes taking place from the 1990s in the rancher space of Rio Grande do Sul, in which the dominant agents see their positions threatened. The ranchers, great landowners and breeders of extensive cattle, are politically and economically weakened with the deregulation of the markets, the end of sectorial protection policies, and the democratization process in the country. These processes unbalance the hierarchy, as well as the notions of honor and recognition in that social space where other agents are becoming as powerful as or even more powerful than them. But if their socially successful trajectories are called into question, so are their calculations in terms of economic behavior and their ways of thinking in general and of thinking themselves in the social space.
Rio Grande do Sul; Rural employers; Ranchers; Economic calculation; Rural elites
