The Beliefs Disseminated By the Brazilian and North American Business Discourse: A Comparative Reflection about Getulio Vargas Foundation (EAESP/FGV) and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

In this paper, we intend to analyze the formation and maintenance of professional social networks from the understanding of how the school and work trajectories influence the behavior of the agents that compose them. Professionals, socialized through the same educational symbols, and who studied in the same institutions of higher education, maintain, many times by incentive of their own colleges, social networks, mainly, among the alumni. This contact happens by the building of institutional websites focused to integrate the academic community as well as the groups created in online social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook. The aim of this paper is to reflect about how these networks, formed in the same organizational and cultural environment (the university), can act in other segments of the market, configuring an specific type of "symbolic violence" that, for Bourdieu and Passeron (1992), consists in the imposition and the legitimation of the dominant culture by the dominated, a fact that conceals that the reality is natural, denying that this is a social construction. In this sense, social networks formed by these business and dominant educational "elites", composed by leaders of the “high echelon” professionals, perpetuate themselves as groups that promote distinction levels, social and symbolic domination. Empirically, we note that the Chicago Booth School of Business, as the School of Business Administration of São Paulo (EAESP/FGV) are two school of business (one in the USA and another in Brazil) ranked as two of the best business schools around the world. Looking for better understand the social space, in which EAESP/FGV is inserted and constantly seeks to expand itself, through international partnerships, we attempt to understand the possible interconnections that a study of the Chicago Booth could evoke to understand the dynamics of EAESP/FGV and the position of the management sciences in the formation of elites in contemporary Brazil. As it can be seen in its institutional website, EAESP/FGV has a partnership exchange with the Chicago Booth School of Business and, besides, it can be noticed the existence of EAESP professors who also attended the American institution, such as Prof.º Claudio Vilar Furtado. Anyway, having EAESP/FGV and Chicago Booth School of Business as the counterparts of this reflection, what we can point out is the importance of understand the interconnections between the discourses of the Brazilian and the North American managements in a way to comprehend how the Sao Paulo elites appropriates and re-significates their speeches and behavior in this relationship, or rather, as pointed out by Bourdieu (2002), it is worth understanding the direction in which circulates the symbolic capital, once the meaning and the function in these discourses are determined both by the receiving as the origin country.