Discursos sobre la diferencia: Lo moderno y lo barroco en la gestión de organizaciones colombianas en la región de cauca

Abstract

This research aims at enhancing how diversity is handled in organizational management in a cultural context strongly influenced by the Afro tradition, since the understanding of sociological, psychological and historical-cultural aspects. Authors of Latin American thought, such as Eduardo Ibarra Colado and Bolívar Echeverría, highlight the contradictions between the Modernity (management) and the baroque characteristics of social dynamics. The empirical study was developed in two organizations in the region of Cauca, Colombia, designed as a focused ethnography, in which there were two different groups: managers and workers. Hence, It is a qualitative study, whose data were collected through an in-depth interview, along the year of 2015, with a participant observation technique and the bibliographic and documentary review. The data analysis was developed through the discourse analysis by Greimas, who proposed a series of narrative states, which structures people's valuation to their actions. We mainly found that, regardless of the organization scope, management models usually do not consider aspects of diversity in their search for unification of subjectivities; that was one of the reasons managers often face conflicts. A methodological contribution of this paper is to investigate the diversity from its historical, psychosocial and sociological construction as a practice that deconstructs the Modernity project of organizations.