Academic production in the human resources area in Brazil: 1991-2000

Abstract

The growth in academic research in Business Administration in Brazil since 1980 has been recently investigated and questioned in severalmeta-studies, as can be found in the areas of Organization Theory, Marketing, Information Technology and Public Administration. Following this trend, this paper evaluates the academic production in Human Resources area in de the 90s. Representative academic research was considered to be the articles published in the most important brazilian journals – RAUSP, RAP, RAE and RAC – and presented at the Enanpad. For the 127 articles published in the periodicals and the 290 presented at the Enanpads, the paper investigates 4 variables: themes of interest, epistemological basis, methodological orientation and authorship. The results indicate that, even though production has significantly increased, the area has some serious issues to worry about: the thematic scope has been more and more disputed with Organizational Behavior area; the functionalist paradigm clearly dominates the scenario; methodologicalbasis show problems as well, with an extensive utilization of single, illustrative case studies that merely replicates consolidated theory and that have, clearly, no intention of theory generation; low diversity in origin: more than 65% of the articles come from only 7 institutions.