Banca de DEFESA: MARÇAL JOSÉ CAVALCANTI SILVA JÚNIOR

RATIONALITY IN TELEWORK IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: BETWEEN THE SUBSTANTIVE AND INSTRUMENTAL PERSPECTIVE

Remote work; public organizations; substantive rationality; instrumental rationality.

The research addresses the theme of rationality in the terms proposed by Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, based on his work The New Science of Organizations. It focuses on the context of administrative practices in the public sector by telecommuting. Its main objective is to investigate the rationality in the management of a telework program in Public Administration. It is segmented into two articles that complement each other and structure the specific objectives of the research. The first is a literature review and systematizes interests and research objects in telework in the Brazilian Public Administration – based on an inventory in the Capes Catalog of Theses and Dissertations. The results were, in their entirety, from research carried out in master's courses, mostly in public universities. Research in public educational institutions, at the federal level and from the Southeast region prevails, addressing the implementation of telework and its impacts, focusing on advantages, disadvantages, challenges and potential. The strong influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on the interest in the subject was highlighted and gaps that could be the subject of further studies were identified. The second article is a theoretical-empirical study with the objective of analyzing tensions between the substantive and instrumental rationalities, prospecting useful information for the feedback of the telework program in the Public Administration, taking the Ministério Público da Paraíba (MPPB) as the empirical environment. A qualitative methodological approach was adopted, applying the case study with data collection through documents and semi-structured interviews with managers of the MPPB's telework program. The results came from content analysis, based on the analytical framework proposed by Serva (1997), adapted to the case with the addition of attributes presented by Santos (2012). Tensions were identified between the rationalities in the organizational processes “hierarchy and rules”, “control” and “tasks division”. In conclusion, with application purposes, possible actions were suggested for the management of the telework program in relation to each of the analyzed tensions.