The article looks at the cultural conflict found in the Brazilian economic arena in the 90's, between the defenders of the industrial order and the proponents of an organizational system anchored in financial logic. Based mainly on interviews with industrial sector managers and engineers and on the intense "neoliberal" intellectual output of recent times, the author finds a set of personal ambiguities and social alternatives implicit in this debate and proposes a more active and conscious role for the social sciences in order to help society to identify and explain them.
Cultural conflict; Cognition; Managers; Middle classes; Economic Sociology
