Institutional Development in Civil Society Organizations: Social Management or Strategic Social Management?

In recent years, a theoretical and practical perspective called Institutional Development (ID) has emerged in the field of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Brazil. In addition to a merely technical and managerial improvement of organizations, the ID takes into account their positioning in the environment as well as their interventions to perform their functions in a relevant, justified and sustainable way. In this sense, the purpose of this article is to discuss whether the ID's proposal is in alignment with theoretical and conceptual assumptions of social management, whose the inherent purpose is the individuals' emancipation in organizations, or if it remains rested on the managerial dominant premises of strategic management. We argue that despite ID's actions have the potential to promote promising sites for communicative, reflexive and emancipatory practices, such a new theoretical-practical current is more closely affiliated to the strategic management perspective, tending toward the managerial orthodoxy.