Legitimidade do processo de avaliação da pós-graduação em administração: um estudo sob a ótica dos coordenadores de programa

Abstract

The evaluation of graduate education in Brazil was established in 1976 with the aim of identifying which programs were productive and presented scientific quality, in order to orient funding for the programs and institutional fostering by scholarships. The Higher Education Personnel Improvement Coordination (CAPES) is responsible for coordinating this evaluation, which is performed by peer review. The experience as CAPES manager during the years from 2008 to2015 gave rise to the following questions: how the evaluation process is interpreted by the Graduate Program coordinators of the Management Area? Do these actors consider this evaluation a legitimate process? What are the principles and mechanisms that support this legitimacy? Thus, the conceptual framework gathered theoretical contributions on Assessment, Organizational Institutionalism and Legitimacy. The research investigated the legitimacy typologies proposed by Suchman (1995) in its internal aspect (internal legitimacy: pragmatic and moral), in the perception of the graduate program coordinators of the Management Area. We adopted an explanatory case study with qualitative approach based on content analysis. Methodologically, the research was divided into two operational phases, containing, respectively, the analysis of official reports in literature and observations of the evaluation process, in order to characterize the phenomenon; and interviews with the coordinators, in order to identify the internal legitimacy accordingly to the typologies of Suchman (1995), as well as their perceptions of the process. This allowed us to understand the mechanisms that sustain the legitimacy of evaluation system for the studied area. We noted the presence of two types of internal legitimacy in the evaluation process, pragmatic and moral legitimacy (results and people). Pragmatic and moral legitimacies stood out with the highest number of disclosure. We must emphazize that the entire evaluation process suffers from criticism that can serve as enhancement for promoting adjustments, similar to what CAPES has done throughout the history of Brazilian graduate evaluation. Therefore, we conclude that the evaluation process of graduate education was perceived as a process with internal legitimacy, and its procedure legitimacy is still in development.