O jogo jogado no campo acadêmico-universitário brasileiro : uma análise bourdieusiana de um Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação

Abstract

This research used Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and the concepts of habitus, capital and field to understand the dynamics of strategy adoption by a graduate program and the professors involved, in order to accumulate capitals valued in the academic field to win positions. The specific objectives established were: a) identify the capitals that are valued in the Brazilian graduate education field; b) characterize the capitals valued in the graduate program studied, it being a micro sphere of the scientific field, and identify the weight of each form of capital; and c) analyze how the objective conditions of action, i. e., the academic and administrative structures of the Brazilian graduate system, of the institution and of the program studied, influence the decisions of the professors concerning their several academic activities and the performance of the program. The data collected refer to the years 2017 and 2018 and were extracted from the Lattes Platform, institutional reports on the professors’ activities and from interviews conducted with six of them, including the coordinator at the time. Our historical review of the Brazilian academic field constitution showed that it has been historically permeated with struggles that go beyond its own, with the intrusion of external capitals and rules. Thus, this study confirmed the decreasing autonomy of the field as well as the tendency to a non-reactive posture of the universities, which have been pointed by researchers of the Brazilian higher education. At the graduate level, that is a result of the evaluation system, which imposes a market logic to the programs and ties together financial resources and scores. As a result, the agents show an ambiguous posture. On the one hand, they condemn that logic and, on the other, subjugate to it in order to guarantee the existence of that social space, which occurs due to the incorporation of the illusio of the field. At the macro level of the field, the study verified the weight of the following capitals: economic, translated into resources for the system maintenance and into research financing; political, closely related to the occupancy of recognized official positions; and the “pure” form of scientific capital, mainly related to the academic titles and to publications in prestigious journals. Besides those capitals, whose value reflects locally on the program studied, the research indicated advantages to those professors who accumulate more time in the field and more social capital, this being a form of political capital. The results also showed internal advantages in terms of scientific authority and peer legitimation, for the agents whose academic studies have always focused on the educational area or whose careers have always been closely connected to it. The study verified the effort of the program, as well as of its professors, to meet the criteria demanded to keep operating, although lacking forces in the power field. Among the obstacles identified in its social objectified conditions are the intensification of workload, a disproportionate time reduction for deadlines, aggravated by a deficient infrastructure, and, lastly, its geographic position, which inhibits the consolidation of social networks and the visibility in the field.