Gradual institutional change and media influence: The case of Petrobras in Brazil

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1969
• Author: Arnaldo L. Ryngelblum,Gabriela A. Passos,Mayla C. Costa
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Date: 01 February 2020

ACADEMIC PAPER

Gradual institutional change and media influence: The case of

Petrobras in Brazil

Mayla C. Costa

1

|Gabriela A. de Passos

1

|Arnaldo L. Ryngelblum

2

1

Accounting Department, Federal University

of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil

2

Business Department, Universidade Paulista,

São Paulo, Brazil

Correspondence

Mayla Costa, Accounting Department, Federal

University of Parana, Lothario Meissner, 632,

Jardim Botânico, Curitiba 80210‐170, Brazil.

Email: mayla@ufpr.br

Funding information

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cien-

tífico e Tecnológico, Grant/Award Number:

421753/2016‐1

The media as a social actor emits discourses that reflect in the institutional context,

influencing the process of institutionalization of existing practices. One view

about the media in organizational studies is that it is a mechanism of organizational

complexity reduction, and in this way, it is the focus of the managers' attention to

certain aspects of the environment, which has implications for the way that everyday

tasks are accomplished in organizations. In this sense, an interest has emerged to

understand how the dissemination of information about the acquisition of a refinery

in Pasadena, Texas, by Petrobras was the embryo of an international corruption

scandal that compromised the organization's image but was also responsible for

the emergence of new organizational practices. The data and information used are

from secondary sources: the newspapers and magazines with the largest national

circulations. The findings reveal that the media sought to influence individuals by

elaborating its understanding of the context without being consistently coherent

over time. We propose an analytical model of how the media can act in the gradual

change of organizational and actors' practices.

1|INTRODUCTION

Organizational institutionalism was historically considered as a limited

theory of action, usually an effort to understand how meanings are

taken for granted in organizational arenas (Fligstein, 1997; Leca,

Battilana, & Boxenbaum, 2008). Most of the studies presupposed that

the negotiating and sharing of meanings were responsible for limiting

or determining which behaviour made sense to the social actors. In

order to bring action back to theory, however, researchers had

proposed the institutional entrepreneurship model (Fligstein, 1997),

institutional work (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2011), or institutional

logic, which influence the organizational identities and social practices

(Costa & Mello, 2017; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012).

The model proposed by Fligstein (1997), for example, is based on

the rationality of the individual actors and on economic game theory,

but action results from the type of social skill that enterprising actors

have, “in the process of building and reproducing an organizational

field, better understood through institutional theory”(p. 397). In this

way, the author emphasizes the importance of the social skills of these

strategic actors, whom he considers institutional entrepreneurs;

through the actions they take and the power they exert, they lead to

the production or reproduction of the current arrangements.

In this paper, it is proposed that strategically rationalized action

can be examined at a mesosocial level as we consider individuals as

microlevel and institutions as macrolevel, and then we conceive the

media as social actor in the mesolevel. Members of the media are con-

sidered both organizations and strategic actors that participate in the

process of construction and reproduction of current practices, as well

as in the maintenance and gradual change of those practices. The

media exerts influence not only on the reputation of organizations

but also on the very notion that instrumental rationality permeating

capitalist societies and the business world must undergo relevant

changes (Pirson, Gangahar, & Wilson, 2016). This position is in agree-

ment with Habermas (2012a), albeit with a distinct epistemological

basis: “It is considered that there is still a conceptual universe refined

enough to deal with the integrity of what is destroyed by instrumental

reason”(p. 671), and it is considered in our work that the media is a

central actor in the process of change.

The relevance of this study lies in the fact that the media has been

playing a fundamental role in the institutional environment and on the

Received: 8 April 2019 Accepted: 24 April 2019

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1969

J Public Affairs. 2020;20:e1969.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1969

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of10