Ação empreendedora na educação pública: uma abordagem integrativa para compreensão do empreendedorismo

Abstract

Entrepreneurial action stands out as a promising and increasingly relevant approach to investigating entrepreneurship in the public sector, as it allows for a broader, process-oriented, and relational understanding of institutional transformations that emerge from the everyday practices of public actors. Unlike traditional approaches, which tend to reduce entrepreneurship to an economic or managerial logic, this perspective conceives of it as a dynamic, situated, and collective social process, shaped by interactions, deliberate strategies, and specific contextual conditions. In the realm of public entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial action approach enables the analysis of how civil servants, administrators, and communities construct, sustain, or interrupt institutional innovations over time, revealing the tensions, challenges, and possibilities inherent in these actions. This lens is particularly valuable for understanding how public initiatives emerge from the bottom up and evolve in response to institutional constraints and opportunities. However, the literature remains fragmented, with limited articulation among its categories and stages - a gap that becomes even more evident when considering empirical applications in the public sector, particularly in education. In response to this gap, this dissertation aimed to develop an analytical framework of entrepreneurial action within the educational context, composed of four stages - opportunity perception, exploration, action emergence, and finalization - integrating human factors, social interactions, strategies, institutional contexts, and the impacts generated. By focusing on the public education context, the study seeks to understand how entrepreneurial actions are initiated, sustained, or discontinued by educational agents amid the institutional dynamics that shape everyday school life. The research problem was to investigate how the experience of public-educational entrepreneurship, represented by the case of CIEJA Novo Horizonte, can be understood through the lens of entrepreneurial action, allowing the construction of an analytical structure that captures all stages and categories involved in this phenomenon. CIEJA Novo Horizonte serves as a paradigmatic example of grassroots innovation in the public sector, and its trajectory offers insights into the interplay between agency and structure. To this end, the study adopted a critical realist ontology combined with a social constructionist epistemology, understanding entrepreneurial action as a relational process in which agents activate causal powers and bring about change. The research employed a qualitative case study approach centered on CIEJA Novo Horizonte, a public school for Youth and Adult Education (YAE) recognized for its pedagogical innovation and transformative practices. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and document analysis. The findings revealed that opportunity perception emerged from dissatisfaction with the traditional YAE model and from the agents’ ability to envision an alternative. Exploration involved entrepreneurial strategies to face institutional challenges and ensure continuity. Action emergence was facilitated by social acceptance and academic recognition, although full institutionalization remained incomplete, rendering the initiative vulnerable to political and administrative changes. The study proposes an integrative framework of entrepreneurial action applicable to the public sector, broadens understanding of public entrepreneurship in education, and provides insights for designing public policies to consolidate social innovations in unstable contexts.