A tomada de decisão estratégica pela alta direção em uma perspectiva bourdiesiana na ótica da estratégia com prática

Abstract

This essay investigated the practices of strategic decision-making of top management (TMT) in a metallurgical company in Caxias do Sul using the sociological approach of Strategy as Practice from Pierre Bourdieu's perspective. Strategy as practice suggests an analysis of strategy in a sociological approach, intersubjective ontology that permeates meanings shared by social actors at various levels of the organization and between organizations, at the levels of praxis (practitioners' resources), practitioners (strategists) and practices. For this, the strategy as a practice used the sociological theories of epistemology and ontology close to the study of strategy, and in this work Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Practice was used which cites the habitus, the field and capital as an inseparable trilogy. This essay investigated how MCZ's senior management develops the decision-making process for the formation of strategies, and for this purpose it was analyzed how these social actors acquired and acquire capital, as their habitus influenced and influences this accumulation of capital and how capital is used in the field to define its positioning and consequently influence decision making. A focused ethnography was conducted to evaluate the strategic decision-making process of social actors for five months in the second half of 2017, and the habitus was identified through in-depth interviews with a semi-structured script obtained through a previous study of Schreiber (2015) and supported by Nvivo software. The primary source data came from interviews with principals and influencers who are directly involved in decision-making practice and / or influence the process directly. It was noted that MCZ has rules in which practitioners find it difficult to adhere because of practices of some practitioners such as unilateral decision-making, low interaction with other TMT members, lack of management skills and decision based on emotion and past experiences that go in disregard of their illusion (desired practices, but not necessarily introduced). The agents' practices generate doxas (everything that is the same) that are not always in sync with the rules of the company and the illusion of the agents of the company, generating negative impacts among the agents like conflicts and loss of capital. The financial difficulties of the MCZ company in recent years influence the agents' habitus in order to concentrate the decision making in this area, with a financial bias, causing one of the practitioners to use other means to make the decision in view of the lack skills in this area. The need to maintain the factory with a certain level of requests to remedy the financial problems leads practitioners to prioritize the customer who holds eighty percent of the demand, rendering the strategy of reducing its impact on the organization in view of the difficulty of negotiation payment terms and prices with this customer. In addition, there is a need to serve this client in a flexible way which creates internal conflicts of obedience to the rules, as well as practices that go in disregard of the illusion of practitioners. Finally, this study contributed to the understanding of strategic decision making at the micro level, from the practitioner's point of view, regarding the work of the strategist, and showed that the focused ethnography as well as the SasP was quite adequate to study the phenomena in the internal context of the organization, beyond which, the theory of practice of Pierre Bourdieu has adherence to the study of strategic practice.