Quando fé e gestão se encontram: compreendendo uma ONG de filosofia protestante sob as lentes da prática e do Sensemaking

We find in Brazil the reality of religious pluralism. From the end of XIX century until now, the religious scenario became more diversified in a process of acceptance and legitimation of different religions. In the same period, the Third Sector was largely developed up until its current form: complex, broad and plural as well. In this context, we find non profitable organizations that provide services under a religious phylosophy. One in particular, placed in Uberlândia-MG, protestant, has the fearures of a big company and is the largest one among the ones that provide social services and receive public funds in the city: Missão Luz. Thinking about the organization, some questions came to mind: is there a noticeable influence of the religious orientation on practices? How do managers understand and make sense of their practices? Adopting Chanlat’s (1996) concept of management mode, the perspective proposed by the Practice Based Studies (GHERARDI, 2013) and the sensemaking studies (WEICK, 1995), I developed a research that intended to understand Missão Luz’ management practices. Three sources of data were used – documents, shadowing and interviews – to understand, in the most complete way, organization’s management practices, using managers’ perspective. Results pointed to a noticeable relation between faith and management. Ten practices were identified among managers: council decisions, appreciation for excellence, respect for authority figures, giving second chances to employees, desire to be a reference, results quantification, search for professionalization, organization, formalization and standardization. The first five practices were heavily influenced by religious principles, and the five last were influenced by instrumental rationality, usually found in the Second Sector. It was noticed that faith was also related to those last practices, justifying them for their contribution for achieving excellence e consequent action of glorifying God. Practices are maintained e passed by the cultivation of the Mission’s DNA, an organization’s way of doing things, and by the belief of the role of the leader maintaining this DNA. Associated to practices, sensemaking moments were analyzed, situations where there order was disrupted and managers had to make sense e act on this understanding. These situations were divided in three themes: “fly the flag of the company”, changes in schools’ management and God’s purpose and sovereignty. The paper is finished with some suggestions for future researches.

Identidade e imagem da marca: uma análise comparativa em uma empresa do setor de serviços de telecomunicações

In a highly connected society, avid for information and technological innovations, constantly changing the consumption patterns, the brand management strategy occupies a growing place. Allied with the increased competition among companies, the brand that can differentiate in consumers’ minds becomes strong. This aspect is even more important in the service industry, where the consumer experience, the definition and support of the brand’s values are vital to the continued strength of both your identity and image. These aspects are seen as a process of communication in which the way the image is developed in the minds of consumers comes from how identity is constructed and transmitted to them (DE CHERNATONY; DRURY; SEGAL-HORN, 2004). Considering the dynamic and complex scenario, this study aims to identify and analyze the possible convergences or divergences between the identity built by the organization and the brand image perceived by consumers of a telecommunications services company. To achieve this objective, the model proposed by De Chernatony, Drury and Segal-Horn (2004) was used as a theoretical basis, which addresses the transformation of identity in brand image, specifically under the perspective of Pontes (2009). For him, customers are more motivated to buy and consume products that they believe that take a complementary image that they have of themselves, and proposes the existence of multiple selves: the perceived, which refers to the employees and the organization’s management opinions on the brand; the ideal, which deals with effective brand identity thought by its leaders, the vision of what it should be; social, which shows how managers think that consumers see it; the apparent, formed by the image of the brand by customers; and finally the real self, that would be an integrated composite of all of these visions. In this regard, a case study was made in a telecommunications company with regional actions, from a qualitative and quantitative approach. It was identified the company’s vision through semi-structured interviews with marketing managers and analysis of documents related to the brand strategy. The point of view of consumers was addressed for text mining techniques applied to internal unstructured data coming from the collection of posts made on Facebook and Twitter, related to the brand, and customer interaction with the company through these social networks. The results showed the importance of the concepts of identity and brand image, and how they are interrelated. Moreover, the qualitative analysis it was shown that the vision of marketing executives is quite close and in line with the Brand Book, showing that there is a cohesive and well disseminated speech internally in the organization. On the other hand, when evaluating the customer's point of view there was no specific comments on the brand, and it was not possible to identify the evaluation of Algar Telecom image by consumers. Nevertheless, other relevant aspects could be identified for the consolidation of the brand identity, as the occurrence of a number of complaints, especially regarding the internet as well as the concern of customers for the quality of the provision of services.