“Uma grande solidão em meio à multidão”: histórias e memórias da arbitragem de futebol de Minas Gerais

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation was to apprehend the stories and memories of former soccer referees from Minas Gerais who were linked to the Minas Gerais Soccer Federation. The work was important given the possibility of expanding views on popular practices sometimes marginalized in management studies, shifting our attention to the multiplicity of social doing. To do so, we start from the conception of organized social life and, from historical studies, emphasize the role of memories in the development of knowledge in Administration. At work, we consider them as nostalgic works that allow the reconstruction of the past, meeting the interests and guidelines of the present time. Shortly thereafter, we held a brief historical discussion about soccer and presented the guidelines related to soccer refereeing. In our methodological approach, we adopted the congruence between the historical and qualitative approaches, resorting to oral narratives. We conducted 21 semi-structured narrative interviews with former soccer referees from Minas Gerais who were members of the Minas Gerais Soccer Federation. The narratives were complemented with the use of documents and our field notebook notes. For analysis, we worked with the analysis of narratives, presenting four main themes: the memories of the referee, his function and its pillars; the movements related to the search for professionalization of arbitration; the memories of amateur, professional soccer and their attempts at corruption; and finally the memories of the representative and organizing entities of soccer. Discussions of these themes involve stories of violence on the amateur fields, the dynamics of professional soccer, the impositions of the governing bodies of soccer, the relations with the representative entities of the referees, the details of the actions, the feelings connected to the experiences, the stories. the actions in the field and the movement for a professionalization of the activity and the referee's consideration as the one who is the manager of conflicts and interests, who creates given the impositions of the most powerful subjects in the relationship. Finally, working with the referees' memories allowed us to advance the historical knowledge in Organizational Studies as we raise social knowledge related to the experience of time, friendship, group, family and experience. It is in these unproductive nostalgic works in the eyes of capital, and productive for us, that we indicate possibilities for future research since we consider the objective memory work of the management field.