Os desafios da gestão da pós-graduação em administração no Brasil: uma pesquisa-ação para o planejamento estratégico no PPGA/UFLA

Abstract

What is relevant to define a country's performance compared to other nations? Economy? Technologies? Innovation? Probably, many would respond to these questions in different ways, but in Brazil, whatever the answer, there is certainly behind it the essential presence of universities with their decisive role in the construction of these elements, because most of the research and national scientific production are developed within Brazilian universities, especially through graduate programs. Due to such relevance, the academic-scientific community has shown a growing concern with the social impact that teaching and research institutions have provided to society. As a result, CAPES has recently made changes to the PPG evaluation process, which requires changes in the programs. Faced with this context, the research questioned: how is the Graduate Program in Administration at the Federal University of Lavras restructuring itself to respond to current and future challenges? Assuming that programs will need to reinvent themselves, the research defends the thesis that the restructuring of postgraduate programs in Brazil, induced by the new CAPES evaluation system, must be built through a collective process of changes, which allow rethinking in a participatory way, the possibilities and potential of the programs in local, regional, national and global terms. Thus, the objective of the Thesis is to contribute to the restructuring of the Graduate Program in Administration at the Federal University of Lavras using the Action-Research methodology, the epistemological precepts of Social Constructionism and the Interactionist ontology to carry out its strategic planning. The research corpus was built with data collected from official documents, workshops, questionnaires and interviews with an open script. Content analysis was chosen as an interpretation technique. A total of twenty-five interviews were carried out, eight of them with pioneer teachers and former coordinators with the purpose of knowing the history of the PPGA and the other seventeen interviews with active teachers who work directly in the Program. Among the twenty-five interviewees, there were professors from the program's three lines of research, permanent professors and collaborators, and PPGA graduates. In total, there were almost thirty-eight hours of recording, with an average of almost two hours each interview. After the recordings, transcripts were made in full (705 pages with single spacing) and returned to the interviewees. The students also participated by giving their contributions to the self-assessment, via questionnaires. Based on the analysis of this research corpus, the PA team began work with the construction of the PPGA strategic plan. The action-research presents the Program's strengths, bottlenecks and defines the Program's action strategies for the future. The Thesis presents its contributions by situating the historical context of an almost 50-year-old program based on the story told by its creators and innovates by uniting PPGA's organizational management practices to its own research practices in a process that aims at a shared restructuring in a new strategic plan.