The critical power of the social management concept

Social management is a new concept or approach that has been underway in Brazil since the 1990s. It found root in the experiences of Latin American professors in a training course offered by the Inter- American Development... [ view full abstract ]

Social management is a new concept or approach that has been underway in Brazil since the 1990s. It found root in the experiences of Latin American professors in a training course offered by the Inter- American Development Bank. In the Brazilian context, however, this expression gains a different meaning from the one originally proposed in the course. This new meaning has a critical dimension, refusing the initially proposed understanding of social management as management of social government programs with a neoliberal orientation. This refusal, however, admits the critical and propositional potential of the term in rethinking the management and administration of everything that concerns the public sphere and public action. At the end of the 1990s, at least three Brazilian research groups were working with this concept. Each one explored or helped build this concept by integrating it into their own lines of research: democracy, territory and the third sector. The concept of social management expanded very rapidly, winning over professors, practitioners, scholars and students, especially in the field of administration, who appreciated its refusal of more generalist explanations of decision- making processes. They also embraced its proposals for more dialogue- oriented and democratic management of state–society relations, as explained in theoretical essays on the increasing popularity of the term. The main evidence of this growth are the expanding national meetings of social management researchers held in Brazil every year since 2007, the academic courses now offered throughout the country on undergraduate and graduate levels, and the vast bibliographic production on the subject, including specialized periodicals and a dedicated dictionary. Faced with such growth, researchers have begun to discuss and question the nature of social management as a field of knowledge or as a discipline. Constructing an up- to-date map of this theoretical discussion is no easy task, but we can say it has two major starting points: on the one hand the concept of the public sphere, and on the other the concept of public action.