Social management: a review of Brazilian experiences

Social Management has mobilized several authors in the Academy in Brazil, being the concept still under construction, as have being pointed out by many authors. Taking as starting point the well-known theoretical construction made by Fernando Guilherme Tenorio based on the deliberative democracy of Habermas, the goal of this article is to examine whether some experiences of the so-called social management have been found in practical terms in the Brazilian context. The methodology adopted in this article lies on analyzing experiences taken by their authors as belonging to the field of social management. The results, however, show that these authors themselves cannot identify social management in the theoretical way they support. The article points out that social management in the hegemonic theoretical way demands a society more developed in terms of democracy than the Brazilian one is. In order to achieve this, the article considers approaches made by authors who have seen the construction of the Brazilian democracy in a critical perspective. This being so, such social management is too far from its theoretical basis as from an effective implantation in the Brazilian context.