O campo científico, os conflitos e relações de poder no trabalho de professores de uma universidade pública

Abstract

The main target in this dissertation is to identify the constitutive elements of the dynamic in the scientific field, standing out the experience and the point of view of professors on the conflicts and relations of forces. There was an approach to a postgraduate course on humanities of a renowned Brazilian public university. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted about life history and scientific academic trajectory. The professors were intentionally selected. Professors, who entered in the institution in different historical moments (before and after 1995), were interviewed. These professors were also in different stages in their careers and they also presented different hierarchical positions in the institution and also in the scientific field. There were also pilot interviews with a professor from another institution and two complementary ones, one of which with a university worker and another one with a student, which guided this research about the procedure and questions of the interviews. The analysis of the content of the interviews was made by reading, rereading and gradual building of analysis categories that allowed pointing inferences and interpretations. Two categories of analysis were indicated: work, sociability and subjectivity; and field, university practices and relations of forces. The analysis of the interviews was complemented with some documents (inter alia, meetings minutes, lattes CV, data from the institution website) that allowed us to consider, within the limits of the ethic commitment of not identifying the researched institution, some features of its institutional culture, its faculty profile and also of its sample. It was used as theoretical background Bourdieu‟s concepts of fields, capital and habitus, as well as studies on Brazilian public universities and also studies of other authors that approach themes related to the subject of our research. It started from the hypothesis of the reconfigurations of the public universities under the guidelines of the State Reform that took place especially after 1995. It was considered that could be worsening clashes and disputes in obtaining and also distributing the scientific capital due to the postgraduation model that is being consolidated. The results pointed out to the inseparability, contradictions and clashes between sociability and subjectivity under the mediation of work. It was pointed to epistemological and political conflicts in the scientific field and relations of forces permeated by competitiveness and individualism. The internalized provisions of the professors were understood as formed in a variety of their lifelong socialization processes and reconstituted in a more or less conflicting way from their insertion in the scientific field and in their current historical moment, in which the universities practices tend to be reconfigured under the aegis of the instrumental rationality of the evaluation model of the professors production performance and also of post-graduation programs. It was evident that there was a dialectical relationship between habitus and field, as the professors are constitutive part in the scientific field, the same way that they extract elements that influence their subjectivity, (con) forming it, according to each case, in different ways, to the productive sociability. The professors need to tacitly accept the rules in the scientific field and the established evaluation parameters of productivity, in order to remain therein, even that, many times, the subjectivity and the habitus clash with the productive sociability.