A sustentabilidade na percepção dos colaboradores que atuam no setor de contratações: o caso UFRRJ

Abstract

Sustainability has become an urgent and imperative issue of both private and public sector. However, the understanding of this category is not clear or consensual. In public sector, for instance, despite the existence of rules and standards to effectively implement sustainability through public policy instruments, like sustainable contracting, it is essential that the actors act in order to do so. Meanwhile at Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ) I have noticed an inexpressive number of such hires. The institutional actors’s role is fundamental to the achievement of such objectives. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to analyze and investigate the construction, negotiation and maintenance of the meaning of "sustainability", by understanding the interpretation of institutional actors involved in the UFRRJ contracting. Regarding methodology, this qualitative research is guided by a relational sociological and anthropological perspective, which aims to understand the exotic in what is familiar, through webs of meanings’s analysis constructed by the social actors who are responsible for the institutions’s implementation. The resources used to carry out my research included participant observation, semi-structured interviews and bibliographical research, looking for references regarding the meaning of sustainable development and sustainability, the aspects that have been highlighted in studies that covered sustainable public contracting and the search for an understanding of how culture influences the speech about sustainable development and sustainability. Thus, the way in which these social actors apprehend and understand social reality becomes a fundamental condition for this investigation. Therefore, through the possession of the map through which social actors classify, order and hierarchize social reality, we may have access to the logic employed in its construction. I have identified nine thinking categories that demonstrate how people define, apprehend, and react to sustainability. The results indicate that sustainability is present in the daily life of these subjects, coexisting among different configurations of values related to this subject. Sustainability, therefore, is an idea that seems to be gradually being discussed, negotiated and accepted in the actors’s reality, who act in the institution hiring, reflecting on their individual trajectories through actions and decisions that are recurrent throughout their social life.