Efeitos da pandemia nos papéis sociais de mães e de pais pesquisadores da área de Contabilidade no Brasil e em Portugal

Abstract

The present study aims to understand how the pandemic affected the different social roles of accounting researchers in Brazil and Portugal. The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered numerous challenges for the world population, social distancing measures were necessary in order to prevent the spread of the virus. Schools, colleges and universities were forced to suspend their activities to avoid crowds and the spread of the disease. This fact led to changes in these institutions, as they had to adapt to new methodologies, online platforms and quickly migrate to remote teaching. The way knowledge is generated and how it is reproduced or transmitted is explained by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's Theory of Sociology of Knowledge (2014). These authors claim that, through the process of socialization, the individual assumes different social roles, becoming the author and actor of the plots of social and organizational daily life. The role of each individual and the activities he performs are categories that complement each other, since the social roles of a teacher or an area of knowledge are formed by joint activities that are specific to them and that organize functions assumed by them in the social/professional context. In addition to representing the “role” of teachers/researchers in the professional sphere, these individuals have other attributions inherent to their personal and social function, in addition to other affective-family bonds such as (maternity/paternity), friendships, and other social relationships. Regarding the design of this research, the ontoepistemological alignment is in accordance with the anti-structuralist organizational theorizing approach of Hassard and Cox (2013). The methodological design of the research, through a collective case study (Stake, 2005), the organizational theorizing process (Cornelissen et al., 2021) and we explain the analysis process, according to Gioia et al. (2012) of how theory was generated from the data. Regarding the research subjects, a total of thirty-two professors were interviewed, twenty-three mothers and father’s researchers who work in stricto sensu Accounting in Brazil and nine who work in Portugal. Regarding the analyses, twelve sub-dimensions emerged, which were grouped into four central dimensions: (i) Institutional need for conduct; (ii) Role competition; (iii) Pressures on social roles and (iv) Changes in behavior patterns, which generated 13 propositional syntheses and, at the end, a theoretical explanatory scheme of the relationships that emerged from the empirical data. We also present the theoretical, practical and methodological contributions. As a theoretical contribution, this research relied on a theory that is little used in the area of accounting, to explore the phenomenon, emerging new insights into how this social reproduction of the role of the teacher/researcher takes place. As a practical contribution, we emphasize that it was possible to cover complexity from multiple dimensions, through a detailed explanation of this phenomenon in process. From the understanding of their own role, reflections may arise on how this process can improve the performance of these teachers/researchers. In addition, the research also showed evidence about the gender difference in the performance of the social role of teacher/researcher, which could encourage a re-analysis of the standards established in the processes of socialization and the search for a more egalitarian social construction between man and woman. woman for the representation of the social role in question. Finally, as a methodological contribution, we didactically describe the theorization process, exemplifying each step, so that it can help future works that may be carried out in a similar way.