Desenvolvimento da capacidade de absorção do conhecimento externo em pequenas cooperativas agropecuárias

Abstract

This thesis aimed to analyze the main procedures and practices of external knowledge absorption in small agricultural cooperatives located in the northeast region. Cooperatives are important productive organizations in countries like Brazil, given the existence of great social and economic inequality, as they gather around themselves small farmers, most of whom lack material and technological resources. In this scenario, the cooperative emerges as the main alternative for these producers to be able to expand their resources through cooperation, in order to survive and even expand their activities in the market. There is no doubt that one of the main resources for the survival and competitiveness of companies in the contemporary economic environment is knowledge - from the most sophisticated and related to new technologies and innovation in products and services - to the most traditional, such as knowledge about production, marketing , finance and people management. Small agricultural cooperatives face numerous challenges in this field of knowledge, due to their limitations in building internal knowledge and even renewing it. For this reason, these actors need to seek outside their environments for external knowledge capable of helping their members in the battle for survival. In the early 1990s and in the years that followed, the notion of capacity to absorb external knowledge was developed, from which different frameworks that intended to express processes of acquisition, assimilation and appropriation of external knowledge were examined and consolidated. Evidently, these frameworks that represented the absorptive capacity were, for the most part, located in the environment of large companies and would not be applicable in the case of cooperatives. On the other hand, they served to express references of what would be necessary to build the capacity to absorb external knowledge. It is based on the references of the frameworks about this capacity to absorb external knowledge that, in this research, the conditions that exist in certain agricultural cooperatives to exercise this role are examined. From a qualitative approach, the empirical research was carried out in six cooperatives of the agricultural segment located in the northeast region, in the state of Paraíba. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 19 people from partner organizations of the cooperatives, as well as managers and members of the cooperatives. Data analysis was based on content analysis in the thematic category. The results show that agricultural cooperatives have external knowledge as an important strategy for the renewal of internal knowledge. The main sources of external knowledge were OCB/Sescoop, Senar, Sebrae, Empaer and educational institutions. The acquired external knowledge is predominantly informal, poorly structured, but there is an intertwining of this knowledge at the individual, collective and organizational level, which has contributed to the development of new individual capacities, and enabled these cooperatives to have minimum conditions to adapt and survive in the face of increasing market competitiveness.