A natureza do conhecimento administrativo: uma busca pelo seu objeto

Abstract

The administration, while systematized knowledge, has exhaustively dedicated itself to the study of the work, developing more elaborated and efficient forms of management, searching the business success so important in a market society. Due to the appearing of the Organizational Studies, the analysis of the organizational phenomena has been on the spot, making the theoretical reflection about the organizations possible. The objective of this work is discussing the study of the administration using two perspectives of analysis: working management, when the subject develops in a more prescriptive way, and the organizational analysis, when it takes an analytical-explanatory attitude. It also considers the functionalism vision and the predominance of the instrumental rationality in the development of the administrative thought as a limitation for the understanding of its object. Finding an object that belongs to the own study of the Administration makes part of an effort to characterize it as a field of knowledge, it means giving the discipline a scientific status. The methodology used to accomplish this work was a review of literature and the content of the most important schools of the Administrative thought, from the Classic School, going through the Humanistic, Behaviorist, Structuralist, Systemic and also the Contigencialist Schools, represented by the most significative authors within each historical period. This work is therefore an essentially theoretical research. Hoping to contribute to the understanding of the role of the Administration in a complex and unequal society, this work proposes the retaking of the ethics and the substantive aspects of the human being and it is destined for those who, engaged in practical or academic work, search an Administration more compromised with the human development.