Brazilian International Public Relations: The Role of Aberje.
Sources of Information to Produce a Memorial
By Paulo Nassar1 & Gisele Pereira de Souza2
Abstract
Can we learn from the history and memory of the institutions and companies we interact with in our life trajectories? The daily experience inspires us to affirm that organizations are an expression of those who, in their times and spaces, led them. This article aims to bring information and reflections on the Brazilian Association of Business Communication - Aberje
- role with emphasis on actions in the field of International Public Relations, developed from the end of the 1960s.
Keywords: International Public Relations; Corporate Communications; Information Sources.
INTRODUCTION - AN OVERVIEW OF THE ROLE OF ABERJE
Throughout its history, Aberje has stood out as a critical protagonist in expanding knowledge and research on communication and relationships in fields strongly linked to Organizational Communication and Public Relations. To show these interconnections of communication and relationships in the actions and thinking of Aberje - and build a timeframe for them - we highlight here some pioneering fields that relied on unique organic action by the association, following a chronology: 1) Since the 1960s and 1970s, Aberje has promoted - in its interface with Journalism and Public Relations - a series of conventions, courses, and training activities, as well as international relationship actions with foreign associations and universities, aimed at improving thinking and the quality and effectiveness of business publications, as highlighted Torquato (1984, 1998, 2002), Kunsch (1997), Caldas Junior
(2005), Nassar (2001), Luchetti (1997), Aberje (1967-1978), Nassar, Santos, and Nakasone (2018), Savioli and Candeloro (1968), (WEISS, 1971); 2) Since the 1960s and 1970s, Aberje has promoted - in its connections with Business and Economics - numerous actions on the thought of human relations as guiding stories for business publications, as highlighted in Caldas Junior (2005, p.4), Nassar (2001), Luchetti (1997), Aberje (1967-1978), Nassar, Santos, and Nakasone (2018); 3) Since the 1980s and 1990s, Aberje has promoted several initiatives in its interface with Communication and Political Sciences aimed at discussing the role of the companies’ communication efforts during Brazil’s democratic transition (1985), and also their role in productive restructuring and internationalization, the environment, lobby activities and government relations, human relations, and relations with the press, among other themes, as shown in Nassar and Figueiredo (1985), Nassar and Bernardes (1998), Collection of “Comunicação Empresarial” magazine (1987) - first publication of the Brazilian Organizational Communication; 4) From the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s, Aberje - in addition to the numerous themes developed since its foundation in the 1960s -, has worked more emphatically on themes related to narratology, diversity, mobility, climate change, internationalization, and the development of the new technologies, as in Nassar, Janine Ribeiro, and Guttilla (2007), the collections of “Valor Setorial Comunicação Corporativa” (2008), “Comunicação Empresarial” magazine (1987), “MSG” magazine (2008), “BR.pr” Magazine. (first global publication of the Brazilian Organizational Communication) and the newsletter "Boletim BR.pr" (2016), as well as the collection of the award-winning cases of the Aberje Prize, the "FalAção" e "Na Ordem do Dia" (NOD)3 podcasts, and an extensive list of scientific papers produced by Aberje4, especially since 2000. As a source of content developed by Aberje, the Aberje Portal5 has been an open source of consultation since 1996. It also offers its Memory and Reference Center (Centro de Memoria e Referencia, or CMR Aberje), founded in 2007 - and the only information system specialized in Business Communication in Latin America (Souza; Nassar, 2010).
Starting from the chronology presented above, we will highlight below a cut of International Public Relations actions registered in the Brazilian and International Public Relations literature. They are understood here as a set of thoughts and practices of Communication and Public Relations, developed in contexts where cross-cultural relations practices are expressed, based on comprehensive knowledge of the territories of exchange, to overcome potential language, laws, and cultural gaps between organizations (Lattimore; Baskin; Heiman; Toth, 2007). The relational processes of these interactions between organizations of different cultural backgrounds, purposes, and geographic scales may result in synergies or conflicts (Hofested, 1997), express themselves in cross-influences and co- existences (Santos; Nunes, 2003), and produce transformative exchanges that overcome
stereotypes or narrative impositions, from an organizational power center, about what is right or wrong, good or bad. They make up a series of possibilities that, in many moments, can be highlighted in International Public Relations actions that are part of the history of Aberje and its associates - especially companies with international operations.
ABERJE AND INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
In the 1960s and 1970s, Aberje sought to respond to the organizational and communication policy guidelines produced in major global companies headquartered in the US and Europe with subsidiaries in Brazil. The international clashes between the Western World - represented by the United States and Europe - and the Soviet Union imposed the challenge of legitimizing multinational companies' activities in so-called underdeveloped countries. In this context, organizations faced the opposition of those who saw them as explorers of natural resources and cheap labor. The legitimation of companies and institutions is a theme rooted in the history of Communication and Public Relations. In the US, the great entrepreneurs of the second half of the 19 and early 20 centuries were forced to think and scale their businesses, considering how they were perceived by audiences such as employees, surrounding communities, unions, and the press, among other stakeholders. As these companies expanded beyond their original territories, this challenge gained an international dimension. In Brazil, the legitimization of the activities of Canadian Light resulted in the creation of a Public Relations Department in 1918, similar to what happened abroad. While clashing with the narratives of local opponents of Light's activity, one of the company's founders, Alexander Mackenzie, became the founding myth of Brazilian public relations (Flyyn; Nassar, 2017). In the historical contexts described - and from the Public Relations literature records - the search for legitimacy in other countries, societies, and foreign markets required extreme sensitivity to public opinion and exceptional attention to cultural, religious, political, and legal differences and similarities (Newson; Turk; Kuckeberg, 2004). In Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s - a historical period of intensive industrialization - the importance of these multinationals that settled in the country in communicating daily with Brazilian society, and reporting the benefits of their activities in the country, became even more evident. Gaudencio Torquato describes part of this process of integrating multinationals into Brazilian society:
The history of Organizational Communication in Brazil is the very history of economic, social, and political development in recent decades. Here's a little bit of it. In 1967, Aberje was founded in Sao Paulo. [...] In the beginning, it was the word, but the funds were missing. Then the words were multiplied, and the funds divided. It was more or less as soon as the history of Organizational Communication unfolded in the last 30 years. At the end of the 1960s, in the wake of Southeast Brazil's industrialization, the concept began to run loose, and the companies began to dialogue with more diverse audiences. Even then, a few companies realized a strong relationship between themselves and society. They were organizations concerned about telling employees that they should be proud of where they worked and demonstrating clearly to consumers that they manufactured good products and provided quality services. Therefore, they considered themselves honest and deserving of trust. [...] A look back reveals the initial steps of a long learning process (Torquato, 2002, p.. 2).
The need to develop effective communication in Brazil with employees and society - inspired by the work of European and US companies - is one of the reasons for Aberje's founding by a group of primarily foreign companies. Indeed, it is Communication within the beliefs, values, and technologies professed mainly by the Human Relations School of Thought, born in the context of US democracy in the 1920s and 1930s. Communication was based on the dialogue between managers and employees, carried out by direct conversation within the manufacturing sectors and featured in print media - newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. This work's effectiveness was highly dependent on workforce literacy - although Brazilian subsidiaries lacked educational data, unlike the US and European contexts. This first objective can be traced to the organization and foundation of Aberje, as well as expressed in dozens of business publications of the time and registered in "Resenha Brasileira de Comunicação Empresarial" (Brazilian Corporate Communication Review) between 1973 and 1974 by Luchetti. The companies mentioned in this Review are mostly multinational and have in Aberje a reference center where their experiences in Communication are disseminated and discussed through conventions, meetings, and courses. In addition to content focused on workforce education, the examination of a cut of the publications reveals topics aimed at promoting the legitimation of the work of these organizations in Brazil. Halliday (1987) deals with the theme of legitimation in a theoretical framework that the author calls the Rhetoric of Multinationals, seen at the time by developing countries as "personae non gratae."
From the 1950s, the International Public Relations action to legitimize the activities of the multinational companies took place from outside to inside Brazil, following the policies, plans, and tactics designed in the foreign companies' headquarters. The effectiveness of this effort brought a complete professionalization of the business communication activity. One of its primary conditions was the organization of the associative activity, as described below.
IN BOCCA AL LUPO
The efforts to consolidate the careers in Business Communication and Public Relations were carried out at the time by a group of communicators and PRs working in leading manufacturers located in the Brazilian industrial centers of the time; their primary fruit is the foundation of ABERJE on October 8, 1967. The institutional acronym represented the Brazilian Association of Publishers of Companies' Magazines and Newspapers (Associacaoo Brasileira de Editores de Revistas e Jornais de Empresas). In 1989, the association assumed its current name, the Brazilian Association for Business Communication.
The institutional framework of Aberje foundation is the output of a process of discussions on the quality and role of business publications - newspapers, magazines, and newsletters - especially in the human relations actions of large multinational and Brazilian companies, many of them attracted to Brazil by the development policies of President JK administration (1956-1961). At the time, Italian journalist Nilo Luchetti, a manager at Pirelli, led these discussions on the communication processes of companies and focused on the role of publications. Luchetti was responsible for "Notícias Pirelli," a magazine produced using references from the Human Relations School of Thought, including the idea of transforming factory workers – then usually former rural workers - by the reading activity. The idea of the "reader-worker" is represented in Aberje's first logo. In Pirelli's magazine, Luchetti reproduced excerpts from several classics of Brazilian literature, along with information aimed at improving daily industrial work, entertainment, and journalistic pieces to encourage good relations between co-workers. On Luchetti - a founding myth of the field of Brazilian Organizational Communication - Kunsch points out that "we must forever recognize the merits of a Nilo Luchetti, a tireless and passionate advocate of this cause, and of other pioneers who, starting from nowhere, glimpsed the promising horizon of Organizational Communication in Brazil" (1997, p.61). As for the perspective of the internationalization of the relations in the field, favoring of theoretical improvement and practice, Caldas Junior records that:
[...] worried about spreading new concepts, making the market grow, and preparing professionals to serve him, Luchetti met a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, Dimitri Weiss, with whom he established a relationship and exchange of information. [...] In 1972, in the work Contributions a lÉtude de la Presse d'Enteprise et Essai de Bibliografie, Professor Weiss cited Aberje and Brazil "as a parent endowed with relevant business communication, alongside the United States and Canada" (2005, p.6).
It is also worth remembering that still in its formation period, in 1968, Aberje produced the first research on the state of the art of Communication of Companies and Institutions, as
documented in the issue number 21 of the "Revista de Administracao e Economia" (RAE), published by Fundacao Getulio Vargas (Savioli; Candeloro, 1968).
The importance of Aberje's role as the protagonist in founding and developing the professional and theoretical framework of Organizational Communication in Brazil is firmly highlighted by Kunsch (1997, pp. 57-61). Using documental sources and testimonies, he claims that Aberje is the "Embryo of Brazilian Organizational Communication." Gaudencio Torquato (1984, 1998, 2002) – who was part of the initial boards of Aberje with other recognized scholars and experts, among them Manoel Carlos Chaparro, Wilson da Costa Bueno, and Waldemar Krohling Kunsch – values Aberje's pioneering role in the qualification of communication and relationships in the emerging Brazilian industrialization, having multinational companies, mostly from North America and Europe, as its principal agents.
Bocca al lupo was the expression Nilo Luchetti heard from his boss at Pirelli when he left Milan to come to Brazil. Luchetti's mission, driven by the good fortune wishes expressed in the Italian idiom, was well executed from the point of view of corporate powers. The legitimation of companies established in Brazil is expressed in dozens of publications from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In these publications
Brazil is a huge backyard where companies extend cables, plant factories, sponsor music corals and sports activities, and are honored with the visits of the heroes of the time, such as the boxing world champion Eder Jofre and a football hero of the national team, the three-time winner Rivelino (Nassar, 2001, p. 109).
In corporate publications and the narratives of its representatives, multinational companies are those economic and social entities that stand as friends of Brazil, generating jobs, paying taxes, and leading the country's development.
Torquato points out that
It must be remembered that Brazil was emerging from an authoritarian period. Fear reigned in the internal environments, and Human Resources structures began to control even the hired professionals. Thus, people lived under the sign of fear and supervised communication (2002, p.4).
Despite the purposes of humanizing labor relations advocated by Aberje and encouraged by the companies' headquarters, the climate of military dictatorship and the Cold War (1947-1989) was a wall that prevented the establishment of an environment of dialogue in factories and offices. The Brazilian version of the idiom "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it" continued to reign in the companies.
After analyzing an extensive set of publications on this business communication model that reigned in Brazil until the mid-1980s - and which are part of the collection of the Aberje Memory and Reference Center (CMR) - Nassar highlights:
In the internal media of 'the lead years' [the dictatorship years], employees are homogeneous beings without concerns or their interests. The information conveyed by magazines and newspapers only reflects the concerns of the top management. Their faces are frozen in standardized photographs in the fixed sections of internal publications to register births, marriages, and deaths. The reader-worker in business publications is merely a baby producer and a family builder (NASSAR, 2001, p.109).
Another critical aspect in dark times was the alignment of part of the narratives of business publications to the narratives of the military dictatorship. The "Brazilian Miracle" expressed in major infrastructure works, new airports, hydroelectric plants, highways, and ports, among other "miracle" symbols, painted the nationalist pride tone in newsletters, newspapers, and business magazines. The context suffocated both text and relationships.
The end of the military dictatorship and the country's re-democratization meant a certain degree of freedom to business communication and Brazilian public relations. Multinational companies such as Goodyear, 3M, GM, and Rhodia inserted new topics and relational areas into their communication efforts. As an example of this freedom movement, in 1988, the outlet for employees of Goodyear do Brasil - called "O Cla" - dedicated a special issue to AIDS, a subject still fraught with prejudice. To unravel the complex theme, the company communicators had as a consultant Doctor Drauzio Varella, not so famous at the time but then head of the Clinical Immunology Service of the Cancer Hospital of Sao Paulo. The group produced a publication in which each page explained AIDS according to educational topics: "What is It," "The Virus," "How It Acts," "The Symptoms," "The Effects," "Where It Attacks," "In Homosexual Relations," "In Hemophilic Patients," "In Transfusions," "In Women," "In Children," "What Society Thinks," "The State," "The Church," "The Legislation", and others. The social importance of the special outlet was recognized throughout Brazil, which led to the Goodyear Public Relations Department, directed by Cyrill G. P. Walter, to print the publication several times to meet the thousands of requests for copies from popular organizations, schools, and churches, among others (Nassar, 2009, p. 149-150). The president of Rhodia in Brazil, Edson Vaz Musa, commented on this alignment of part of the companies with democracy and the issues under discussion in Brazilian society in testimony to Damante:
When I took on the presidency of Rhodia in early 1984, Brazil was leaving that phase of the exception regime where the manifestation of society was reduced to nearly zero. Companies were focused on themselves, especially the multinationals, led by foreigners, who had a lot of difficulties expressing themselves on national issues. Coincidentally, it was precisely during the period of political openness that I became the first Brazilian to take on the leadership of a multinational in Brazil. [...] [due to an] opportunity in the media, I started a policy of "open doors," asking our people to have contact with society (2004, p. 6).
Companies with "truly open doors" positioned themselves in communication approaching themes such as ethics in government relations, relationship with consumers, community responsibility, and care for the environment, showing that democracy has lowered the walls of companies and brought them closer to Brazilian society. Such moves are reported in numerous cases praised in outstanding awards focused on the social development and communication of companies, among them the American Chamber of Commerce for Brazil's ECO Award, and the Aberje Awards
INTERNATIONALIZED ECONOMY, ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION, AND INTERNATIONALIZED PUBLIC RELATIONS
In the historical arc that began in the democratic transition, Brazilian Organizational Communication and Public Relations were protagonists of a process of trade opening, privatization of government companies, deregulation of numerous economic activities, massive acquisitions of national companies by global groups, a strong movement of business mergers, new consumer protection legislation, and gradual integration of the country into the global market and the bloc of South American countries. The emerging communication and information technologies were crucial tools for managing regional and international production and trade operations, which enabled, according to Nassar and Bernardes,
the joint action of the broader public in economic and political terms in a range that covers the national and foreign press, consumers on a global scale, communities, shareholders, unions, suppliers and authorities, among others. These audiences, described in the business plans of previous years only as targets, are now strategically important, as follows: 1) Consumers can, at the time of purchase, press companies for issues that exceed the basic parameters of product, price, market, and marketing communication; 2) The engagement of workers relies on the success of numerous management goals, such as quality certifications and re-engineering; 3) Members of communities, NGOs, and political parties claim information about the company's relationship with the environment, among others; 4) Shareholders of all profiles press for all sorts of data; 5) Regulatory bodies charge public service companies for efficiency and quality (1998, p.30).
That political scenario full of macro and micro-economic transformations involving society and companies included the workers – which, in turn, needed to legitimize before society through communication and relationships. At the same time, new organizational models
- such as Post-Taylorism, the Industrial Condominium, and the Modular Consortium - began to transform markets and companies, turning them into diversified and alternative. In practice, as Nassar and Bernardes (2018) highlight, it meant a radical change in habits and rituals (Bordieu, 1983) of daily work. It included preserving, forgetting, and even erasing stories and memories of companies (Nassar, 2012) while adopting modern organizational techniques, outsourcing practices, re-engineering processes, and Japanese techniques of lean production, and communicating them using innovation brought by research, development, products, and procedures.
AN INSTITUTIONAL POLICY OF INTERNATIONALIZATION
Faced with these issues presented to companies and entities from the return of democracy in the country and the economic, social, cultural, and technological transformations that changed the experience of communication of society and people in their relations with organizations, Aberje has established a policy and institutional actions aimed at insertion as an institution in the global scenario. The policy's main objectives are establishing cooperative relations with associative institutions, universities, researchers, and renowned Communication and Public Relations professionals and their interfaces abroad. From 1997, at Aberje's invitation, some of the professionals who visited Brazil to conduct workshops and courses and participate in meetings organized by the association include Abraham Nosnik (Mexico); Cees van Riel (Netherlands); Javier Puig and Joan Costa (Spain); Paul Tompson (England); Maria Russel (US); Gianni Vattimo, David Ravassi and Stefano Rolando (Italy); Victor Baltasar (Portugal); and Pierre Lévy and Terry Flynn (Canada). This tree of relational activities has produced substantial branches, such as the agreement with the University of Syracuse in the United States. The alliance created in 2006 the International Business Communication Course, with classes in Sao Paulo and New York, allowing international training for more than 250 communication leaders in top companies operating in Brazil.
The documental sources of this historical process that has intensively changed the identity and image of Brazilian Organizational Communication and Public Relations in our country and abroad have been registered by Aberje in its set of publications. They include "Revista Comunicacao Empresarial" (1987), "Acao Aberje" newsletter, "Revista MSG (2008)" and outlets written in English aimed at a global audience: "BR.pr Magazine," "BR.pr" newsletter (2016), and "Revista Valor Setorial Comunicação Corporativa" (2008), produced by a partnership between Aberje and the financial daily "Valor Economico" in Portuguese and English. Since 2010, these publications and content promoting ideas and actions of international Public Relations are supported by the Brazilian Corporate Communications Day meetings. The conference is a global initiative of Aberje launched in New York, and later held in 17 editions in Berlin, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Detroit, Lima, Lisbon, London, Milan, Mumbai, New York, Paris, and Santiago de Chile. Most of these places were chosen for their city and country's economic and cultural relations with Brazil and the impacts of such ties in Organizational
Communication and Public Relations. They are featured as global cities, as conceptualized by Saskia Sassen (1996), and constituted by ethno-landscapes and financial landscapes (Appadurai, 2004) from Aberje's point of view. Also, they were territories suitable for showing good Communication and Public Relations practices carried out by companies in Brazil. Pereira, Ribeiro, and Modesto (2014, p.256) highlight the following characteristics of this international action:
The Brazilian Corporate Communications Day has an important educational role and can be understood as a public relations practice to promote interculturality, having as main objectives: Promote the relationship and exchange of knowledge and experiences between Brazilian professionals and countries visited; provide information about Communication in the context of business in Brazil for both business press and professionals, state representatives, as well as local research centers; promote the image of Brazilian companies through the exhibition of good practices and successful strategies in business communication.
Pereira, Ribeiro, and Modesto also highlight that
Throughout the various editions of the "Brazilian Corporate Communications Day," Aberje has been working to promote the contact between people of different cultures and shared symbolic universes, providing a space for establishing a relational dynamic between people and organizations, a central assumption of interculturality. The results are many and realized by establishing an extensive network of partners and supporters worldwide, among companies, media organizations, universities, associations, institutes, and communication agencies. Thus, it can be said that it reached the status of a global Brazilian initiative (2014, p.256).
Among the fruit of Aberje's international action, we also highlight: a) Integrating Aberje into the board or associative life of organizations such as the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication, Fundacom, and the Arthur Page Society. Nowadays, Aberje coordinates the Global Alliance's actions for Latin America; b) Implementing since 2015 a program to welcome researchers from other countries focused on Communication and Public Relations developed in Brazil. The program received as visitors Professors Terry Flynn (McMaster University, Canada) and Beatriz Garcia (University of Liverpool, England); and c) Creating in 2009 the International Aberje Award, which awards annually, initially in the North American context, the best paper focused on Brazil and Latin America.
Aberje's purpose to contribute, since 1967, to the dignity of Brazilian Organizational Communication and Public Relations on the international stage is based on its past achievements and expressed clearly in its current set of ideas, highlighted in its updated vision of working to be "a global reference think tank in Communication and Relationship."
1 Full Professor of the School of Communications and Arts of the University of Sao Paulo. Coordinator of GENN – Study Group of New Narratives of ECA-USP. CEO of Aberje - Brazilian Association for Business Communication. E-mail address: paulonassar@usp.br.
2 M.A. in Information Science from ECA/USP. Undergraduate in Librarianship. Coordinator of the Memory and Reference Center of Aberje - Brazilian Association for Business Communication. E-mail address: cmr@aberje.com.br
3 All episodes of the podcasts FalAção and Na Ordem do Dia are available at https://www.aberje.com.br/podcast/ .
4 The complete list of Aberje papers is available at: https://www.aberje.com.br/pesquisas/ .
5 Aberje institutional and informative website provides content and discloses initiatives of the association and its members. Available at https://www.aberje.com.br .
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