Beyond double consciousness: Social Management and the epistemological anterooms

Abstract

Through the notion of double consciousness, observed in the work The souls of black folk (1903), by W. E. B. Du Bois and used as a discursive meta-reference, this article, as a theoretical essay, aims to establish an epistemological reflection that contributes so that Social Management does not relapse in the pathology of double consciousness – a management, in the form of social action, which names itself as normatively emancipatory, but which represents in life materiality, in a contradictory way, the continuity of an oppressive social reality. For this, after identifying the axiological sense assigned to Social Management and pointing out the main difficulties, limitations, and criticism mapped in the specialized literature, we brought forth two themes poorly explored in the Social Management domain – power relations, substantiated on the concept of power coloniality, and the relationship man/nature, delineated by the aspect of ecology – in order to demonstrate that such management, a problem-management, not a response-management, must develop the ability to discuss itself, feel itself as a problem, and think through unexplained issues of its own. In the end, after exposing a set of epistemological features, it was shown that Social Management, in order to avoid suffering from the epistemological gaps observed in Strategic Management, breaking with the trend to constitute an epistemological anteroom, by selectively filtering the observable and significant realities, and, this way, keeping the social cohesion provided by the ideology of hegemonic management, it must constitute the plural possibility of other kinds of management, through situated knowledge and practice.