Transformações na educação superior no Brasil e seus impactos na estrutura, estratégia e governança: o caso de três universidades federais de Minas Gerais

Abstract

This study aims to delineate the joints and interfaces of the Brazilian public universities, considering the triad state, market and academic oligarchy, in seeking to know and deepen the conflicts and interests involved, and to assess the impacts on the structure, strategy and governance. Specifically, get it to unravel, through the discourse of managers as they explain the reality of the university organization, concerning the modernization and advancement of management in a context of greater interaction with society. To achieve these purposes will be presented the historical development of universities in Brazil, explaining the changes, the process and achievements in governments Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, especially as regards the new interactions that the universities have been given to the environment. In this context, the studies will be redeemed in Clark (1983), Drèze & Debelle (1983) and Kerr (2005) which offered evidences for a critical comprehension of the concepts of university, its multiple interfaces with the environment and for those that act on them, their influence on management and organization. It was used also theoretical contributions on the structure, strategy and governance in the perspective of authors such as Mintzberg (1987, 1995), Hardy & Fachin (2000), Mintzberg et al. (2000, 2002), Timmers (2000), Whittington (2002), Marques (2005) and Ésther (2007). The empirical reality focused at work refers to the multiple case studies conducted at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF) and the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU). The sources were obtained in interviews with managers and review of relevant documents collected in the universities. The results indicate that Brazilian universities suffer intense coordinated action of the State, and, but in the process of expansion of its interactions with the market. With regard to the structure, the classic concept of professional bureaucracy is present in the configuration of all the universities studied. For strategy, the IFES surveyed transiting between deliberate and emergent. The power of the State causes, systematically, emerging actions to be implemented by the universities in their efforts to achieve social change. With regard to corporate governance, empirical studies have revealed the existence of efforts in the universities studied for implementation of procedures for control and transparency, requiring advances. In short, this study shows how the State stablish macro policies that enable the universities to interact with society and the market and the academic oligarchy, which provides the possibility of liberating them from conservative moorings. When the market demands the knowledge and powers of the university, there is thus the conditions for a new act of universities, based on new conceptions of structure, strategy and governance.