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The objective of this chapter is to outline an integrating picture of the situation, representativeness, contradictions, and challenges that the treatment of diversity assumes in Brazilian society and in its organizations. The aim is to reply to the research question: “How are public policies and organizational practices constructing ways of inserting and valuing the diversity of Brazilians?” We provide a brief background of the changes in the global and Brazilian contexts over the last few decades and analyze the demographic data presented in the 2010 Census and in studies on diversity that were published in the main periodicals in the Administration area in Brazil, between 2000 and 2014 with regard to the segments most widely studied in the academic literature: Afro-descendants, homosexuals, the elderly, Indians, women, and people with a disability. The conclusion reached is that, in a short period of time, Brazil has made great strides in constructing the mechanisms and legal devices for recognizing the rights of its diverse population and that private companies are in the initial stages of introducing diversity programs.

We analyze how Brazilian Black Movement organizations and banks deployed different mechanisms like cooperation, cooptation, and confrontation that generated affirmative action initiatives in the banking sector at the beginning of this century. Black movement organizations triggered an institutional change by connecting fields and exploring a constellation of strategies. However, Brazilian banks adopted defensive strategies aiming to accommodate their interests. We find that only piecemeal change occurred, as the field’s structures – resource distribution and power – remained unscratched. We conclude by noting how the success of social movement strategies can depend upon the framing and sense-giving work that social movements conduct in their continuous jockeying activity toward incumbents.

This conceptual paper examines and evaluates patronage and clientage as a system of interrelated dyadic exchanges between unequals through which goods and services circulate, flowing both up and down through stratified societies. The parties involved may be in different places socially and geographically.

Data are presented for Brazil from the period of the Old Republic beginning in the 1890s, through the end of the Military Dictatorship in mid-1980s, and finally to the present, ending with today’s conditional cash transfer programs. The data are examined against the background of a 15th century book, O Livro da Virtuosa Bemfeituria (The Book of the Virtuous Benefits), written by a Portuguese Prince influential in the expansion and discoveries as a guide for princes and great lords that is used in the paper very much in the way that Adam Smith’s writings are used for most economic behavior today.

There are striking parallels over this long historical period in the behaviors referred to as patronage and clientage that may be conceptualized as an older (traditional) way of ordering the flow of goods and services (distributing them), alternative and parallel to market mechanisms that have, and continue to operate in Brazilian society.

Patronage and clientage are often-misunderstood behaviors, sometimes referred to as corrupt, that alternatively may be explained and understood as part of a still viable and operational socio-cultural system that goes back to a period before the colonization of Brazil.

The community can be considered as an empirical category of thought and hope. This is how various understandings of real, imagined, invented, local, and global communities are created. Sociological studies give meaning to this heuristic category and its historical representations and its values centered around a world of proximity, primordial loyalties, solidarity, face-to-face communication, production, reproduction, knowledge, and environmental preservation. Community equally expresses the existence of a territory where populations reproduce; a place for a convivial exchange among generations, traditions, and respect to cultural heritages and ethnic boundaries. The rural community is seen as the guardian of present and past histories of groups identified by struggles for subsistence, resistance, and celebration of memories from ancestors. Community provides the foundation for sociability and sustainability. In the context of a fluxional, risky, and individualized society, community members are becoming more vulnerable as their pleas for solidarity and safety are unheard. Although the rural community described here has been an object of speculation and violence that affect our world, the concept of community is still desired. Accordingly, its relevance is renewed for a prosperous rural future in a globalizing world.

This chapter provides an overview of local government auditing in Brazil. The mandate of regional Courts of Accounts, which are public audit organisations, includes overseeing states and municipalities’ legal compliance and public policy performance, while the federal Supreme Audit Institution scrutinises fiscal transfers from the central to local governments. Each of the 32 regional Courts of Accounts is autonomous. However, all follow the Napoleonic audit model and are internally organised in three main functions: auditing (comprising investigation, fair hearing and adversarial phase, and accusation), prosecuting (comprising legal compliance analysis), and judgmental. Despite the comprehensive legal mandate and recent digitalisation efforts, Courts still focus on compliance audit. Due to their autonomy, the Courts lack central coordination, standardised audit techniques, and uniform procedural rules. Moreover, the Courts’ lack of independence and transparency may impair their capacity to promote democratic accountability.

There is a growing interest in the use of HR-based Industry 4.0 technologies for equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) issues yet the emerging trends of Industry 4.0 in EDI implementations and interventions are not fully covered. This chapter investigates the emerging themes regarding EDI and Industry 4.0 interaction through Google-based big data that show the actual interest in Industry 4.0 and EDI. Drawing on a web analytics method that tracks the real click behaviours of web users through querying combined sets of keywords, the study explores the trends and interactions between Industry 4.0 technologies and EDI-related HR practices. Our search engine results page (SERP) analyses find a high volume of queries and a significant interest between EDI elements and artificial intelligence (AI) only. In contrast to the suggestions of the extant literature, no significant user interest in other Industry 4.0 applications for EDI implementations was observed. The authors suggest that other Industry 4.0 technologies such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) for EDI implementations are in their early stages.