POLITICAL AWARENESS AND PARTICIPATION: AN ANALYSIS IN SOLIDARITY RURAL CREDIT COOPERATION
Name: SUELLEN NASCIMENTO DOS SANTOS
Publication date: 15/12/2021
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| LETICIA DIAS FANTINEL | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: Solidary economy credit cooperatives are classified as financial institutions that follow the rules and procedures of the Central Bank of Brazil (Bacen), but are part of the cooperative movement. These cooperative organizations face difficulties in operating and reaching the social objective they aim to achieve, due to diverging interests, lack of participation and the Bacens own norms. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyze how the political awareness of cooperative members generates a predisposition to participate in the management and/or collective actions of the cooperative and the cooperative movement. It adopts as a theoretical framework a conceptual model of political awareness from Brazilian political psychology, based on pragmatism and symbolic interactionism. This is a qualitative research that uses the Grounded Theory on Constructivist Data, whose data were obtained through documentary research, observation, notes in the field diary and semi-structured interviews, during the preventive quarantine to Covid-19. Nineteen interviews were conducted, 14 with cooperative representatives from the agencies of the Association of Cooperatives in Support of the Family Economy (ASCOOB Sisal) in Bahia-Brazil and 5 with representatives of the cooperatives administrative structure. The results allowed the elaboration of a theoretical scheme found from the Constructivist GT, which expresses meanings of the political conscience of the cooperative member at ASCOOB Sisal, suggesting the existence of a common sense conscience, in most of the partners, for revealing a critical social understanding limited by routine. The results also showed an incipient cooperative education, which does not allow knowledge of the cooperative movement, the identification of its interests, problems, expectations and struggles, and the formation of a political awareness of the partner as an ASCOOB Sisal cooperative, implying a low predisposition to participation of this. These results reveal the imbalance regarding the dual nature of the cooperative, arising from the lack of a policy for the formation of political awareness aimed at the cooperative movement and at ASCOOB Sisal. It is concluded that the political conscience of the cooperative members is signified, above all, from individual interests, and the predisposition to participate in the cooperative occurs mainly for economic reasons. The academic relevance of the study lies in the critical discussion of the dimensions that make up political consciousness and the feelings and emoticons embedded in it, reflected in pragmatism and symbolic interactionism; leading to the proposition of a theoretical-methodological framework aimed at the cooperative movement for social intervention. The social relevance is found in the presentation of a diagnosis and in the proposal of a policy for the formation of critical and participatory political awareness, in tune with the cooperative movement.
