The decontextualized importation of concepts as a linguistic-pragmatic phenomenon in the Management education in Brazil: another chapter “simplification” of our textbooks

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Organizational Theories (OT) as a discursive, historical and political construction of re-significations of knowledge, characterized by the importation of concepts from other areas of knowledge through analogies and metaphors. It analyzes management teaching manuals, used in undergraduate courses in Administration in Brazil, through the wittgensteinian concept of language game and the austinian conception of performativity. The analysis confirms that OTs are often constituted in external conceptual appropriations, in an epistemologically fragile and ideologically skewed process. We must continually and self-critically reflect on how we develop definitions, since nothing is gained by simplistic readings of complex phenomena. This extreme “simplicization” of organizational phenomena weakens the sense of Management education and the analytical quality of future professionals. There is a consequent social dissemination of instrumental logic, typical of work practices in organizations, and the elimination, in the definition of theoretical-conceptual objects, of the political bias inherent in human relations and the bureaucratic structure of organizations. For future research, it is suggested to add new titles to the corpus to confirm the pattern.