Academic Dependency and Brazil's Trade Deficit in Management Knowledge: Foreign Influence in Graduate Management Education at Public Universities in Brazil

Informações

Código: EPQ1883
Divisão: EPQ - Ensino e Pesquisa em Administração e Contabilidade
Tema de Interesse: Tema 09 - Estudos Históricos, Reflexivos ou Críticos sobre as Áreas de Administração e Contabilidade

Autores

Eric Ford Travis

Resumo

The world of management education is definitely bipolar: rotating around the axisbetween the USA and Europe. This article stems from an inductive study of foreign influence ingraduate management programs at Brazilian public universities. The study followed GroundedTheory (GT), gathering significant data through in-depth interviews, as well as using participantobservation and document analysis. GT focuses on emergent theory, rather than basing researchon existing theory. This allows concepts and theory to emerge directly from data. Rigor in datacollection is paramount when using this approach. The interviews were thorough and meticulous,having over 160 free response questions and lasting up to 6 hours each. 54 interviews wereperformed from August-November 2009, 42 were transcribed, and over 322 discrete codes wereproduced. A total of 8 graduate programs were analyzed: UFRGS [Universidade Federal do RioGrande do Sul], UFPR [Universidade Federal do Paraná], USP [Universidade de São Paulo],UFRJ [Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro], UFMG [Universidade Federal de MinasGerais], UFBA [Universidade Federal da Bahia], UFPE [Universidade Federal dePernambuco], UNB [Universidade de Brasília]. These universities were selected due to theirprominence and comparability: they are all public, highly regarded academically, have Ph.D.programs, and are the locations of the majority of current management Ph.D.’s in Brazil. Eachhas a different history, culture and character. The respective faculties are also distinctive,displaying different educational origins, networks and aspects of endogamy. Virtually all of theprofessors interviewed, both those with domestic and foreign PhD’s, gave some evidence ofacademic dependency. From a phenomenology and interpretivist standpoint, it is significant inand of itself that most of the professors believe there exists a dependency; above and beyond thereality of the phenomenon. The levels of foreign material, and foreign language materiel, used ingraduate level classes alone would qualify as a dependency. Brazilian management educationdoes exist in a state of intellectual dependence, but it is an evolving process, not a permanentstate of being. The current and historical context of Brazilian management education has a directinfluence on the nature of this dependency. For example, the author believes that, based upon theresearch results, the more internationalized a program becomes, the less dependent it is. This is aparadox that is based upon the nature of dependency. As long as the management programs aremerely recipients of foreign management literature, theory and practices, the knowledge tradebalance is 100% negative. However, the more the program internationalizes, the more theknowledge deficit can be reduced, because the connection becomes more two-way than one-way.

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