ESTUDIOS ORGANIZACIONALES EN AMERICA LATINA. UNA REVISI
| Autor | Ren |
| Cargo | Gesti |
ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICA. A LITERATURE REVIEW (2000-2014).
ESTUDOS ORGANIZACIONAIS NA AMÉRICA LATINA: UMA REVISÃO DE LITERATURA (2000-2014)
LES ÉTUDES ORGANISATIONNELLES EN AMÉRIQUE LATINE. UNE REVU E DE LA LITTÉRATU RE (2000-2014)
Introduction
Currently, scientific production is one of the most important tools in the development of a society within the perspective of finding answers to problems identified as essential for good cohabitation. Journal papers are crucial for communication at this level. Thanks to them, results are delivered to the public rapidly and reach a broader number of people due to the easiness of their diffusion in periodical publications (Viana de Souza, Corréa da Silva & Oliveira Araújo, 2013). In such a context, the current research emphasizes the analysis of several studies published in one area, in an attempt to identify their features and to specify the profile of a given academic production (Costa & Boente, 2012).
The organizational field both globally and in Latin America has been mediated by different theoretical perspectives, among which the following can be identified: a functional one, aimed at administrative problem resolution; a functional/positivist, focused on conceptualizing organizations as productive objects; and a critical perspective from the Social Sciences, leading to the understanding of organizational reality.
Keeping this heterogeneity in mind, and with the conviction that scientific judgments do not result from one single research, as they should consider the accumulation of knowledge from previous studies, a revision of Latin American literature in the administrative and organizational fields was made from the review of the top 10 Latin American journals published during the last fifteen years (2000-2014).
In order to meet this purpose, a selection of journals indexed by isi and Scopus databases within the specified period was made. In total, 3,210 papers written by 5,336 authors, members of 1,096 institutions from 78 countries were considered. For this, the journals, authors and institutions they are members of were examined. Such approaches have been used in previous studies as variables to identify the differences between trends in different fields of knowledge (Claver, Gonzales & Llopis, 2000; Lan & Anders, 2000; Lowery & Evans, 2004).
The revision was carried out in order to answer the following questions: What are the main themes studied by researchers in the organizational field? Who are the main authors and where do they publish the results of their studies? Which is the predominant theoretical perspective in the administrative and organizational fields in Latin America?
The results of this work suggest a reflection about the importance of a functional and pragmatic view that characterizes the study of organizations in Latin America on acknowledging the importance and the implications of publishing in co-authorship, and on identifying the main themes shared by authors in each of the theoretical perspectives as well as the collaboration network between authors and institutions in the publishing of papers.
The document is divided into four sections. In the first one, three conceptual perspectives and a cross-thematic axis are explained, from which the papers in the selected journals were classified. In the second, the methodological aspects related to data collection and analysis are presented. In the third section, the results of the revision are described and analyzed. Finally, in the fourth section, some brief considerations concerning the reality of the organizational field in the Latin American context are proposed, and the findings, limitations and pending themes for future studies are discussed.
Theoretical Perspectives and Cross-thematic Axis
The conceptual axes used for classifying the papers under analysis arise from a theoretical review of the existing frameworks for the study of organizations: Administrative Theory (AT), Organization Theory (OT), Organization Studies (OS) and Research and Education in Administration and Organizations (R&E). The latter brings together papers that take into consideration research and education as well as teaching tools and models. Notice that the foundations of this theoretical framework are shared with papers by: Ocampo-Salazar, Gentilin and Gonzales-Miranda (2016) and Gentilin, Gonzales-Miranda and Ocampo-Salazar (2016).
The study of organizations has been characterized by a technical-instrumental and prescriptive-oriented approach, relegating organizational problems to factors that must be solved under the criteria of efficiency and productivity. Consequently, an organizational isomorphism has been historically developed around the single axis of the company's efficiency, where: "The enterprise becomes the organizational benchmark, and its language, methods, tools and techniques increasingly contaminate the organizational world" (Vieira & Da Silva, 2011, p. 457).
As an objection to the idea above, Ailon (2006, p. 885) states that "the last two decades have been marked by a growing number of critical voices that directly affect the foundations of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking", which is expressed in the questioning of canonical texts regarding their underlying assumptions and normative commitments. This is due to the organizational complexity and to the fact that the study of organizations is going through a period of multiple approaches that favor the analysis of various phenomena from various perspectives (Vieira & Rivera, 2012).
This diversity of approaches to the study of organizations is reflected in the four proposed axes, which are subject to debates and controversies. Some authors, for instance, differentiate the first three (Bédard, 2003; Gonzales-Miranda, 2014; Gonzales-Miranda & Gentilin, 2012; Montaño-Hirose, 2004; Ramírez-Martínez, Vargas & De la Rosa, 2011); others, instead, include AT, OT and OS under the umbrella term of organization studies (Sanabria, Saavedra & Smida, 2013); others consider at and OT (Vieira & da Silva, 2011), and OT and OS (Hatch, 1997; Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2005; Westwood & Clegg, 2003) in a similar way; while other authors make a radical distinction between at and OT (Scott, 2003).
The conceptual classification used for this work is not intended to delve into this debate, still unfinished, but to propose theoretical foundations that enable distinguishing one axis from the other in order to classify the papers.
Administrative Theory
Administration is first seen as a social practice--empirical in nature--(ChanlAT, 2004; Déry, 2004), without its own discourse (Jurado, 2015). Administration involves an administrative knowledge; not a practice in itself, but an administrative knowledge in the organizational practice, disassociating it from the category of Science (De Mattos, 2009). Over time, and thanks to the systematization of the works of some classic authors such as Taylor and Fayol, a discursive practice (Jurado, 2015) arose. This can be understood as a knowledge or AT in the field.
Administration has been the subject of various controversies regarding its scientific status (Bédard, 2003, 2004; MarínIdárraga, 2012; Muñoz, 2011; Podestá & Jurado, 2003), its definition and limits (Aktouf, 1998; Dávila, 2001), and its object of study (Hernández, Saavedra & Sanabria, 2007; López, 1999). Without delving into these debates, criticism is mainly based on pragmatism, which reaffirms its functional purpose in the application of models developed in very different contexts from those in Latin America (Vieira & Da Silva, 2011) that have been embraced as unique, true and universal (Bédard, 2003), to the point of being replicated without a lot of thought (Bédard, 2004).
Administrative practices, in their ambivalent and still controversial status for academics, are founded on reason as a philosophical category that has oscillated between two logics: an objective one, where the observer is an external entity; and a subjective one, which uses the particular interest of the technique with a utilitarian-instrumental purpose (Marín-Idárraga, 2007). Within the latter, administration is understood as a practice-oriented knowledge.
That rationality has been behind the approaches of the most prominent thinkers and supporters of AT, such as Taylor (1961) and Fayol (2003), who recognized in humans their desire to maximize profits and, consequently, their administrative and professional capacity. According to Jurado (2015), the writings of both authors represented a separation from what administration had been for centuries: "a social and cultural practice without a theoretical discourse" (p. 132). This allowed going beyond the practice in order to form a corpus or theoretical knowledge, leaving a legacy of the work within organizations and saving what otherwise would remain personal, fragile and ephemeral memories "whose existence did not go beyond the life of their bearer" (p. 130).
De Bruyne (1973, pp. 39-40) classifies the great theoretical approaches to at as follows: (i) it is studied in a descriptive way, reducing it entirely to the results obtained or to the synthesis derived from many observations; (ii) it is studied from a normative approach, where it conditions reality based on some abstract principles to channel the results into the fulfillment of pre-defined objectives; (iii) it is studied from a psychological point of view, emphasizing its human content and the interpersonal relationships of individuals in relation to behavior; (iv) it is studied from a sociological approach, where attention is paid to the forms of formal and informal organization, conceived as institutions or systems of social relations. Thus, in AT, conceptualization and theory might seem to be a few steps behind practice and action, fostering excessive pragmatism and consequent hostility to intellectual activity (Dávila, 2005). Nevertheless, efforts on creating...
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