Custos da eficiência: A banalidade do mal e a premência de um modelo pós-burocrático

Abstract

The recent Brazilian economic crisis deteriorated the state's financing capacity, crowning a decade of the public sector's inability to achieve fiscal balance (2011-2020). The literature focused on several causes of this imbalance, pointing mainly to economic, institutional and political issues. However, it still necessary to understand, from the organizational theory perspective, how conducts that deepen the fiscal crisis happened in specialized bureaucracies, aware of technical aspects and able to foresee its consequences. The problem under discussion comes from the understanding that, in bureaucratic organizations, the rigid segmentation of responsibilities added to the hierarchical stratification promotes the dissolution of responsibility, creating a fertile environment for the occurrence of banal evil. In this context, this article discusses the limits of the bureaucratic-Weberian organizational model under the Arendtian perspective of banality of evil, focusing on the fiscal context of Minas Gerais. The usefulness of post-bureaucratic model characteristics is raised as a hypothesis to relativize the bureaucracy's dependence on the direction that the powers that use the apparatus confer on it. The methodology adopted was qualitative, combining theoretical review and documentary analysis. The limitation of the scope to one state raises future studies, allowing comparisons and deepening capable of contributing on postbureaucratic models’ debates.