Organizações e desenvolvimento regional : o processo de tomada de decisão em indústrias familiares de Santa Cruz do Sul/RS.

Abstract

The economic and productive transformations experienced by Santa Cruz do Sul, RS, Brazil, especially in light of the historical reconfiguration of the tobacco complex, have amplified the relevance of family industries in the regional economic and territorial dynamics. Within this context, this thesis aimed to analyze how decision-making processes, influenced by bounded rationalities, affect the trajectory of family industries in the municipality. The investigation is justified by the socioeconomic importance of these organizations for Regional Development and by the need to understand how their strategic choices are structured in the face of competitive pressures, market uncertainties, and contemporary territorial transformations. The theoretical framework is grounded in Herbert Simon's Theory of Decisions, particularly under the premise of bounded rationality, articulated with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's contributions regarding heuristics and cognitive biases, in dialogue with territorial approaches to Regional Development. Methodologically, the research is characterized as qualitative, interpretative, and descriptive, utilizing the case study strategy based on the organizational trajectories of Metalúrgica Mor, Mercur, and Xalingo. Data were produced through semi-structured interviews conducted with members of the strategic, tactical, and operational levels of the organizations, complemented by documentary research. The companies were selected based on their economic representativeness in the municipality, associated with historical permanence and the presence of family management. The results demonstrate that bounded rationality acts as an element of behavioral convergence among the analyzed organizations, guiding decision-making processes toward strategies primarily focused on survival, economic stability, and material preservation. Given the impossibility of fully controlling the variables of complex markets, decision-makers resort to satisficing criteria, heuristics, and loss aversion mechanisms, replacing idealized maximization models with pragmatic responses of organizational adaptation. Although they present distinct institutional rationalities, the organizations converge toward similar defensive mechanisms: Mor emphasizes productive efficiency, cost control, and market predictability; Mercur tensions traditional economic logic by incorporating ethical-socio-environmental criteria into decisions; while Xalingo evidences processes of strategic retraction and organizational isolation resulting from financial crisis and judicial recovery. The evidence indicates that organizational decision-making processes remain strongly anchored in the conventional logic of economic growth, limiting the organizations' capacity to promote broader and multidimensional territorial transformations. Thus, job creation, tax collection, and regional economic dynamization emerge more as indirect externalities of the pursuit of operational continuity than as deliberate territorial development strategies. The study concludes that the limits of rationality condition organizations to similar forms of adaptation to contemporary capitalism, restricting their margins of strategic autonomy and their capacities to induce deep structural changes in the territory. These results open space for future research aimed at investigating more plural organizational rationalities that are territorially committed and oriented toward the multidimensionality of Regional Development.