Reestruturação Produtiva, Reengenharia e Educação no Trabalho: Universidade Corporativa para a Nova Fase do Capitalismo

Abstract

This present Thesis has as its general objective the demonstration that reengineering was the way conceived by the capital to consolidate productive restructuring at firms´ level, in the 1990´s, and as a second step, appropriating the processes of labor education, in order to provide conceptual support to the changes proposed. The methodology used is both bibliographic, utilizing empirical-descriptive cathegories, those fundamental to this Thesis, and heusristic-interpretative cathegories that help understanding the first ones, besides supportive operational concepts intended to make further topics of this Thesis fully understood. The analysis starts from the approach of productive restructuring of the capital as a process that allowed institutional and organizational changes in the relation between production and labor, as well as the redefinition of the rôles of national states and financial institutions, aiming at the recovering of the levels of profitability and wealth accumulation of post-WWII years. In order to apply the principles of productive restructuring and of toyotism, a Japanese practice aimed at labor intensification, the capitalism used reengineering, a tool designed by American school of business intended to restructure firms by prioritizing their essential processes. Reengineering has influenced a series of writings that were meant to support its model in the field of management knowledge, which simultaneously absorbed the approaches of a social behavior tendency called postmodernism. The produce of this field of knowledge, as the main elaborator of corporative educational processes, gave origin to a series of writings that were characterized, in one hand, by the defense of changes brought by reengineering, and in the other hand, by a growing superficiality in the treatment of serious questions related to business life. Upon receiving such contents from the fields of management knowledge, firms started to develop processes on labor education and to form their laborers under three dimensions: individual, by means of coaching and mentoring training methods; group, through team development; and collective, consubstantiated through corporative universities. In all the above dimensions, capital used inherent characteristics of the very processes of qualification to give conceptual support to the productive restructuring that was initiated in the decade of 1990.