Maria Caramez Carlotto: The Neoliberal Turn from a Latin American Perspective: The Expansion of Managerial Knowledge in Brazil as a Cultural Imposition in the Dispute over the State. [Abstract]

The article analyses the importation of managerial knowledge by Brazil from the first bodies dedicated to the subject, in the 1930s, through the creation of the first management graduate courses in the country, in the 1950s, through the Brazil-United States cooperation agreements for “administrative training” in the 1960s and 1970s, until reaching the expansion of higher education courses in management throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when management became the main course in the country in terms of number of enrolments. The main argument is that this process is inseparable from the US strategy for Latin America, which led to the deconstruction of more autonomous development policies, such as those that prevailed in Brazil between 1946 and 1964, in the name of a managerial vision of state action. In this sense, what was at stake in neoliberal turn, in the case of Latin American countries, was not so much the protection of a non-existent welfare state, but rather the deconstruction of political strategies for relatively autonomous development, especially through industrialisation processes.

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