Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social

Volumen 20, Número 1, 2020

Michel Foucault: análisis de las relaciones de poder en iniciativas emprendedoras e innovadoras en Brasil

Michel Foucault: analysis of power relations in entrepreneurial and innovative initiatives in Brazil

• Resumen
• Abstract

1 Introduction

The terms entrepreneurship and innovation are more and more present in the entrepreneurial and governmental discourses and agendas (Figueiredo, 2015) as a source of distinctive advantage, marketing, economic and social progress, materializing through individual and group creativity (Camargo, Cunha & Bulgacov, 2010; Chaston & Scott, 2012; Drucker, 2008; McClelland, 1972; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2005; Santandreu-Mascarell, Garzon & Hnorr, 2013; Schumpeter, 1982; Silva, Paiva Júnior, Leão & Fernandes, 2016; Tidd, Bessant & Pavitt, 2013) and by the appearance of an entrepreneurial activism that tries to validate the rights of a small number of investors, as an essential 20^th century’s ultimate phenomenon, accelerated by the neoliberal economists’ arguments that are somewhat ideological (Gomez & Korine, 2008).

That is the reason why there is a growing number of public organizations which are reframing themselves, giving new meanings to their tasks and fragmented skills (discontinued competencies and multidisciplinary teams that were dispersed) in the sense of obtaining, using, disseminating, evaluating and building knowledge through entrepreneurship and the innovation in search for a new public management (Silva, Lima & Gomide, 2017; Oliveira, 2015).

In this sense, here is the question: understanding that the power of Foucaultian comprehension means subjection and dominion exercised in an orderly and distributed way through a social web, how are the relationships of power, present in the implementation and dissemination of entrepreneurial and innovative initiatives in the public service, produced?

The aim of this study is to understand the relationships of power in the implementation and dissemination of entrepreneurial and innovative initiatives in the Public Service Innovation Examination in Brazil.

From the academic point of view, the research is justified by enabling the application of diverse philosophical intentions in the science of administration in order to understand, from a constructivist and relational perspective, the relationships of power through the Foucaultian analysis. Thus, we avoid the hyper-specialization of sciences (Bruyne, Herman & Schoutheete, 1991) just as we try to overcome the functionalist approaches hegemony in the organizational studies (Silveira, 2005). Besides, we intend to contribute with a view which tries to understand the reality in its interest biases which involve the institutional action in the entrepreneurial and innovative activity (Silva et al., 2016).

From the social point of view, the production of knowledge over the relationships of power is relevant to explicit the conflicts in the sense they are turned into problems, as well as allowing the discussion of a multifaceted, dynamic, complex and contradictory theme, thus enabling its investigation and teaching (Paz & Neiva, 2014). The contribution of this study also presents elements which cooperate with the deconstruction of the so-called types of knowledge, and with a better perception of the “self” in the “multiple” core of the constitutive units of power in the public administration.

2 Analysis Referential: Foucault and the organizations’ power

Power is a topic which pervades all Michel Foucault’s works. In its archeological phase, knowing was considered a composer of power forms, which were instituted into the social body; in its genealogical phase, power had a relational perspective with knowing and with the institutions, leading to the appearance of human mankind. In the Ethical domain, or methodologically denominated arch-genealogical, the relationships of power were presented before an ontology of the present to set aside the individual, their subjective constitution and the practices of freedom. Miguel Morey (1991) summarized the historical ontology of power in Foucault the following way: by knowing (being-knowing); by the action of one over the others (being-power); and by the action of each one over themselves (being-self).

To Foucault, the important point was to know how the processes through which the individuals presented themselves took place, and they are the results of the relationships of knowing-power; how the relationships of power happened within the institutions; how the captures, the divisions and the classifications took place. These reflections pointed to Foucault in his genealogical domain. Genealogy worked out in the intervals of documents which were presented, as parchments that were scratched and rewritten several times. Criticizing power means finding and capturing it in a microscopic and microphysical action. Power is, thus, an action over actions (Veiga-Neto, 2007). The social roles about who rules and who is ruled have never been established, but they are somehow alternated and sometimes simultaneous (Revel, 2011).

Therefore, as Michel Foucault opposes to the conception of power as locus, fixture and stabilization of an individual over the others, he deconstructs this notion and presents the concept of “power” as something fluid, disperse, relational, and which contains not only repressions but also resistances to its action (Heizmann & Olsson, 2015). According to Michael Foucault (1979/2014, p. 126):

The mechanism analysis of power does not tend to show that power is, at the same time, anonymous and ever-winning. On the contrary, it is about setting each one’s positions and action modes, the resistance possibilities and counter-attacks of one and all.

Foucault understood it was possible to fight against models of behavior and thoughts but, to him, it was impossible to be released from the micro-relationships of power (Ferreirinha & Raitz, 2010), for power, like the neoliberal action, has a rationality as an underground characteristic that doesn’t leave the spheres of the human existence free from its influences (Laval & Dardot, 2010/2013).

Foucault’s intention was not to conceptualize power in a behavioral, dominant working group perspective, to classify power, to propose a scale or even to check its use in a certain organizational context, but to analyze power in its daily functioning, from the micro-practical level, from the political technologies in which our actions are shaped (Foucault, 1979/2014). Following this train of thought, Foucault studied power not to solidify a theory, but to identify the subjects who act over the others, their productions of truths, of subjectivities, of struggles and consequences, since power is something virtual and present in attitudes (Daldal, 2014) and in the disciplinary and bio-political behaviors which go over the state scope. It runs governments and behaviors through connections and compositions which are not formally fixed in an entity (Lemos, Cardoso Junior & Alvarez, 2014).

According to Foucault (1979/2014):

‘Dominating’, ‘driving’, ‘governing’, ‘power group’, ‘State machinery’, etc., is all a set of notions which demand analysis. Besides, it would be necessary to know how far power goes, through which relays and up to which instances, often insignificant ones, of control, vigilance, prohibitions, coercions. […] when I think of the mechanics of power I think of its capillary form of existence, of the extent to which power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other people (p. 74).

Power must be analyzed as something that circulates or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising their power and suffering its action; they are never the idle or assented target of power, they are always the center of transmission. In other words, power is not applied to the individuals; it goes right through them. (p. 103, original emphasis)

Thus, to Foucault, the notion of power is different from what we currently understand to be correct in the organizational studies, in which power is seen as a political and behavioral dimension, with approaches about the types of power (Mendonça & Dias, 2006; Raven, 1993; Weber, 1958); about the maximizing models of the underlying structural utilities which search for the use of power to integrate the internal policy with the transactional relationships (Risse-Lappen, 1994); about approvals and evaluations in the scales on power and its settings in the organizations (Paz & Neiva, 2014; Martins, 2008); about the organizational agents who enjoy resources to practice it as a possession requirement of means of production and of resources, localization, class or technical types of knowledge in knowledge sharing (Fahy, Easterby-Smith & Lervik, 2013); in the administration and as a source of conflicts (Giglio, Pugliese & Silva, 2012) in family organizations (Lopes, Carrieri & Saraiva, 2013); in the organizations’ policy (Santos & Claro, 2014) and in the gender relations (Arno, 2017).

The approach of power in Foucault is different, for, to him, power is not about something simply repressive, it is pulverized in the social tissue, in every instance, especially in the discursive productions, and these are the characteristics which found its ideology — as a fight for the control of its own identity (Freeden, 2013), typical of Foucault’s being-power phase.

What makes power remain and be accepted is simply that it doesn’t weigh down as one single force which says no, but that actually permeates, produces things, leads to pleasure, shapes knowledge, and produces discourses. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs from the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose focus is repression (Foucault, 1979/2014, p. 8).

In this sense, power is the producer of subjectivities, of other powers, of differentiation, of separation, but also of joining, of resistance (Lilja & Vinthagen, 2014) and of freedom (Santos, 2017). It is dispersed, rooted and capillarized, configuring into a micro-power that, in its thoughts, is more efficient than the power known as authoritarian and centralized, precisely because it is not traceable.

The constitution of the governability exercise involves analyzing the ways of rationality, the technical procedures and the instrumentation by those who are part of the formal exercise of power so that it is ensured and legitimated conveniently and, supposedly, on behalf of common good. This way, the objectives pursued by those who act over others’ actions ensure the maintenance of privileges, the accumulation of profits, the statutory authority operability, the governability, and the exercise of a task or profession (Scarparo & Eckere, 2015). Thus, the normative sanctions refer to the order enforcement, the hierarchic scale, the command devices and the acceptable and efficient behaviors’ prediction for the system maintenance.

What the market rationale wants to avoid is that people get organized, since, once that happens, they could appoint and report the power focuses, speak about them openly and name them. Naming who does it is the first step for other fights against the localized exercise of power. And, once the fight has begun, people go into a revolutionary process.

Otherwise, people will be divided, reinforcing a structure which distributes them equally according to their position of power in society. The truth is that the ‘power economy’, according to what was stated by Foucault (1979/2014), is based on the principle of simultaneously providing the growth of the dominated forces and the growth of the forces and the efficacy of those who dominate them.

Next, we have the methodological procedures’ clarification which guided this research.

3 Methodological Procedures

As to the problem approach, the research has a basic qualitative nature (Merriam, 1998), with an investigation fashion supported by the documental analysis (Cellard, 2008), and by the episteme reference board by Foucault (1995) in his work Microphysics of Power, systematized by Mônica Cappelle, Marlene Melo & Mozar Brito (2005) in five points of analysis: “differentiation system”, “types of objectives”, “instrumental modalities”, “institutionalization ways” and “levels of rationalization”, according to what is described in Table 1.

However, considering that power moves through the discursive, political, individual, group and organizational dimensions and through its interconnections, this research proposes the expansion of the table above, including the variable “status quo maintenance or transformation”, based on Foucault (1979/2014), as presented in Table 2.

The research data processing was done through the content analysis heuristic perspective, which concerns the attempt to find and explore the symbolic content (Bardin, 2009) present in the implementation experiences’ description and in the dissemination of entrepreneurial and innovative initiatives in the Brazilian public service, according to the following steps:

a) Pre-analysis: here we chose the documents to be submitted to analysis through universe restriction and sample definition. It was also the objective’s formulation phase to elaborate the indicators for the final interpretation.

In order to achieve this, we used a fluctuating reading, performed between May and September 2017, of the documents from the online repository of the Brazilian National School of Public Administration (Enap, https://inovacao.enap.gov.br/). We selected the three first awarded cases within 10 years (2006-2015), according to Table 3, totaling 30 reports of experiences out of a universe of 100 cases. The choice for the three first places was enabled by the same criteria of importance and of pertinence that are used as criteria in the Public Service Innovation Examination, which are: innovation, results and/or impacts, the use of efficient resources, partnerships, recipients’ participation, mechanisms of transparency and social control, possibility of re-applicability and level of sustainability (Enap public notice n. 15, 2016).

Subsequently, we aimed at analyzing the motivations contents related to power exercise, catalogued from theorizations by Foucault (1979/2014) and which are described in Table 4. These objectives are of fundamental importance to the research’s development and guidance, since they indicate the purpose of the work and the theoretical pole in which the obtained results were analyzed (Bruyne et al., 1991; Minayo, 2011; Mozzato & Grzybovski, 2011).

The third step in the pre-analysis phase, referencing/encoding, concerns the use of analysis points and their description as to the contents’ basis and interpretation used in the research. Under referencing, we used the frequency with which the analysis point context or its description appear in the text (Bardin, 2009), being recorded through electronic spreadsheets.

b) Matter exploration: the phase whose objective was that of operationalizing the codification (by clipping, grouping and by numbering; by consistency and content coherence, once it enabled the reach of a content representation) and the categorization (classification of constitutive elements in a set, by differentiation and by grouping). This phase also required the analysis points, the motivation and the description of the micro-relations of power based on Foucault (1979/2014; 1995); and,

c) Inference and interpretation: this phase allowed the establishment of charts which permitted the results’ processing by condensation, by intuition, by reflexive analysis and criticism (Bardin, 2009), striving for the objectives established in the research. It also dealt with the theme analysis phase, which consisted of the discovery of sense cores which compose the communication and whose presence or appearance frequency was significant to the research’s objective (Mozzato & Grzybovski, 2011; Ikeda & Chang, 2005).

The research’s duration and reliability were conducted through peer evaluation, through the researchers’ conference for the results’ determination and accuracy, the rich and dense description to transmit the results and the use of an external auditor with expertise on the study theme to review the research (Merriam, 1998; Mozzato & Grzybovski, 2011).

The research’s corpus was the Public Service Innovation Examination, with a temporal clipping from 2006 to 2015. The examination is organized annually by Enap along with the Federal Government’s Ministry of Planning, Development and Management (Mpog). Their objectives are: to promote the implementation of innovative initiatives which contribute to the improvement of the public services; to disseminate innovative solutions which can be of inspiration or reference to other initiatives and which collaborate to the advancement of the government’s capacity; and to acknowledge and value civil servants who perform creatively and proactively in their activities for the benefit of public interest (Enap, 2017).

The examination accepts initiatives developed by teams of civil servants who are actively effective in the Federal, State and District Executive Power, who act in the direct, autarchic and foundational administration, as well as in public enterprises or mixed-economy companies. The awarding takes place in a public event, through which the winning initiatives are granted: a trophy for the institution; certifications for the team members; and the right to use the Innovation Stamp on materials for press or electronic promotion (Enap, 2017).

The awarded experiences also become part of the Solutions Database (http://inovacao.enap.gov.br) and the Enap’s Institutional Repository (http://repositorio.enap.gov.br). Furthermore, the teams involved in the awarded experiences are able to take place in events organized or provided by Enap and their potential partners, with the objectives to value, improve and disseminate innovation in the public sector (Enap, 2017).

Therefore, the points of analysis (Tables 1 e 2), their description and motivations listed in Table 4 gave some support for the frequency, the codification and the categorization of the results in sense cores that were presented through a table, shown in the following section.

4 Results and Discussions

This research’s results show that the innovative actions instituted in the public service are tangled with micro-relations of power, as shown in appendix.

In accordance with what has been stated, and through Foucault’s work, it was possible to notice that the differentiation system of power relations is found in subtle and invisible details which try to strengthen the exercise of power, especially over the judicial difference bonds, privilege regulations, economic differences in the ownership of wealth and goods, the treaties with other governments, the government’s financial capacity and knowledge appropriation (Foucault, 1979/2014), and this is the spirit of the State’s exercise of power—– just like a parent’s dominion and coercion (Ferreirinha & Raitz, 2010; Scarparo & Ecker, 2015), constructed by the exercise from its need to maintain the market and the population’s welfare.

As an example of this analysis point, the initiative “Start-Up Program Brazil” was used, since it was awarded in the 20^th edition of the Public Service Innovation Examination and whose objective was first to contribute to the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem from the Information Technology (IT) sector. For such, the government, through the Department of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication, set goals which tried to boost the acceleration of a growing number of startups each year (up to 100 a year), placing new products and innovative services in the national and international markets, connecting technology-based companies with global trends and markets. On the other hand, and according to the content analysis of the referenced program, it was possible to see that the government, through its judicial differences and financing capacity, and with the objective to supplant its inefficiency in IT generations, used the innovation discourse to justify financial investments in startups and market innovation accelerators. Besides, it fostered partnerships between the government and private companies in order to smooth its technological risk, and conducted national and international events to bring together investors for the national market, thus enabling the issue of visas to professional foreigners in order to enter the country.

As for the types of objectives which permeate the micro-relations of power, they are present in the partnerships, in the public policies induction, in the legislation exercise, in the public workers’ position exercise, in the education institutionalization for work (surveilled education) (Foucault, 1979/2014), in the workers’ responsibilities strategies, among others. Generally speaking, the relations of power are intrinsic and interdependent in the governmental system, and, at times, they are designed by individual interests, exercising relations of force in which the subjects act one over the others (Heizmann & Olsson, 2015) aiming at privilege maintenance, profit accumulation and authority operability.

An example of this analysis point was the Project “Eco-University: An Environmental Plan for a university that is socially-environmentally correct”, awarded in the 17^th edition of the Public Service Innovation Examination, whose objective was to implant an Environmental Plan in a centenary public university. In this case, the micro-relationships of power were expressed when, through the exercise of functions of the Dean and the Pro-Dean of Planning and Management — through the statutory authority on a hierarchical scale —, an organizational infrastructure (network) was created with the imposition of order of people, processes and technologies to operationalize plans and programs of environmental actions, and or articulation to congregate partners for the financing of planned environmental actions. In this case, the created infrastructure enabled the growth of the forces and of the efficacy of those who master it (Foucault, 1979/2014).

The instrumental modalities condition the obedience system (disciplinary power) with individualizing effect in the micro-relations of power, and such obedience oftentimes is not followed by awareness or reflexivity, since the instrumentation shapes people’s behavior. It actually implies the entrepreneurship capacity, and people and governmental innovation, for, when there is reaction, it generally triggers imbalance and discomfort which can bring new ways of reflection about practice, endeavoring innovations. Therefore, the objective is to institutionalize an economy of power (Foucault, 1979/2014) in the whole social body, making its effects circulate efficiently in the issuing of fines, confiscations, the use of tools of threat (physical or verbal), the control mechanisms, the surveillance systems, the rules and norms, the software, the devices, the handbooks, and the laws, among others. This reflects as an instrument of ownership, a mean of coercion and a source of wealth which captures power all the way to its extremities and then, despite its location in the chain through which it circulates, performs interventions (Foucault, 1979/2014), pulling away, in these terms, from the characteristics of a new public management (Oliveira, 2015; Silva et al., 2017).

As an example of the referenced analysis point, there is the initiative “Partnerships with the productive development of strategic supplies from the Unified Public Health System (SUS)”, whose objectives were the expansion of population access to strategic products and the decrease of the SUS vulnerability, besides the establishment of partnerships, with a consequent transfer of technology, aiming at reducing the Country’s productive and technological dependency in order to meet the Brazilian population’s health needs for short, medium and long-terms. This initiative was awarded in the 20^th Public Service Innovation Examination. Its content showed that the Department of Health institutionalized regulatory marks: monitoring, evaluation and control legislations; regulatory technical committees; regulation organs; the implementation of technical visits for control; and the creation of electronic systems of follow-up and control of its initiatives. Unlike what was premised by Foucault (1979/2014), these devices represent a wide instance of control, vigilance and coercions in the public administration scope.

The institutionalization ways of micro-power found in the research’s results represent what Foucault (1979/2014) called “governmentality”, that is, the art to govern the way to manage individuals and groups, resources and wealth on a State level, subsuming the individual and group controls of its own identity (Freeden, 2013). Thus, power takes on the role of society division because it is, forever more, an exercise in the education, in the technologies, in the judicial ways and, the more hidden, disguised and subtle it is, the more efficient to decrease power in society and to create a disciplinary order to reach economic efficiency and utility (Daldal, 2014; Ferreirinha & Raitz, 2010).

The training processes carried out, for instance, in the initiative Analytical Monitoring Strategy of the Brazil Without Misery Plan and in the programs from the Department of Social Development and Fight Against Hunger, awarded in the 18^th examination and whose objective was to create a system of indicators organized in a synthesized and more adequate way to the analytical use by the different managers in the three levels of government (local, state and federal), and the development of a monitoring platform were sequestration structures (Foucault, 1979/2014) to form, organize and put into circulation a piece of knowledge, or better, knowledge devices that are not group and fight ideology constructions. From the thesis by Clausewitz (Foucault, 1979/2014), the policy that leads such institutions is the “continuation of war by other means”, through ideological, political and economic devices (Lemos et al., 2014) instituted in this case through a Department to monitor the deviating behaviors.

Concerning the levels of rationalization, they try to establish the economic efficiency and utility (Ferreirinha & Raitz, 2010) to the government, and are exercised through instruments which seek for the result’s certainty, for rationality. It is basically a thorough system of coercion which is exercised over people and by people, processes, technologies, society, the government itself, between countries, territories, among others, in order to establish a sovereign — the government through the increase of power and efficiency of those who control it (Foucault, 1979/2014; Lilja & Vinthagen, 2014). This analysis point can be contextualized in the initiative “Follow-Up System of Transfer Contracts (Siacor)”, whose objective was to create Siacor to turn the consultation public to all the transfer contracts from the Department of Tourism (MTur). This initiative was awarded in the 19^th edition of the examination, in which, in order to establish the results’ assurance and provide economic use to the system, the Brazilian MTur established the information systematization in order to generate managerial reports swiftly by reflecting on the transfer of financial resources more quickly for the department’s structuring projects, and, through the system of information, it also allowed the decline of human-made mistakes.

As for the power capacity of people’s resistance to the innovative entrepreneurial actions, it was possible to notice, through this study’s results, that they are the least expressive ways of counter-power, since there are no signs of organization and of fight against power, for the fighting power of the workers’ resistance, according to Foucault (1979/2014), must happen constructively and collectively. The results show that society doesn’t force the government into its needs, its freedoms and expectations. This result may be the product of the government’s sedition capacity, which weakens the social movements, whereas it is reinforced, for instance, through its tribunals and partnerships with the market, keeping the marketing connection. Therefore, there is no forceful counter-power which causes the status quo transformation.

Therefore, there is the prevalence of class established in the places that produce the supremacy effects, since they dissociate the individual domain power. This happens when the government uses the employees one over the others as dominion and coercion to develop electronic tools for control of their own activities, just like it happened in the initiatives “Net telecare assistance for remote regions: improving the population access to specialized attention to health”, whose objective was to bypass geographical and economic barriers, making the access to health service more universal and egalitarian; in the initiative “E-Process: Digital Administrative Process”, whose objective was to promote the transparency of public acts, with knowledge management, allowing a higher autonomy and administrative decentralization; and, in the initiative “Virtual visit and judicial videoconference project”, for, in every case, the technological tools built by the employees themselves undermined their original objective and started to control the individuals and to subject them to accountability and punishments due to the governmental system’s efficiency and efficacy.

Therefore, through the last analysis point studied, it was noted that the State searches for the status quo maintenance when it provokes the extinction of judicial processes against itself; when it uses artificial intelligence and the management indicators in order to map the determinants to punish beneficiaries; when it establishes advisors for the beneficiaries’ capture, follow up and control in social projects; when it suggests a controlled environment for the development of software with the objective to benefit; and when it invests in agriculture with the objective to avoid the rural exodus and the overcrowding in the big cities, for example.

Through these results, it was also possible to notice that the State is at capital’s service when it associates with and when it privileges the national market with the speech of economic strengthening; when the government fosters (invests and finances) the national market through business connections abroad through triple-helix partnerships (State, market and society); when it fosters social credit in order to keep the bank system collection goals and profitability; when it fosters productive chains and scale economies in industrial complexes to strengthen the market with public resources. Therefore, the capitalist logistics builds and defines the essence of innovation in the public administration (Laval & Dardot, 2010/2013).

Thus, we notice that power is rooted and exercised among the workers (servants) and toward their managers, and between themselves and the workers in operational, tactic and strategic levels; in the management structure institutionalization between nations; between public organizations; between the market and the State and vice-versa; through the scientific research results; in the information and communication chains; in the processes; in the infrastructure capacity, in the legislation and their auxiliary devices of discipline in society, organization, federal entities, territories, programs, projects, actions and strategies, among others. Since these are its alternations and instances, without a chronological order, micro-power spreads out and is more efficient than the power known as authoritarian, for power is a virtual bio-political and networked technology (Foucault, 1979/2014) which is not found formalized/centralized (Lemos et al., 2014).

The micro-relations of power are techniques which produce and allow the accumulation of knowledge about the object or the individual, aiming at organizing space, controlling time, promoting continuous, everlasting and unlimited surveillance, as well as continuously registering knowledge (Foucault, 1979/2014).

The effort to create an entrepreneurial and innovative culture in the public service through the Public Service Innovation Examination is a key factor for the New Public Management (Vieira, 2016), but it represents the State’s sovereignty institutionalization about the society-market partnership.

5 Conclusions

In consistency with the research’s objectives which guided the results section, we have: the entrepreneurial and innovative actions in the public service, through the Public Service Innovation Examination, are permeated by micro-relations of power which promote control, coercion, punishment, more power, economic differentiation, among others, for wherever there is subject/institution, power is exercised. The domain chains and the exploration circuits are covered; they support and interfere in one another in order to set each one’s positions and acting ways, the resistance possibilities and the counter-attack of one and all.

Through the results’ discussion, it was also possible to notice that power is so interlaced with services and processes that it becomes a multifaceted and multi-referenced practice, which is found in the core of procedures, indicators, documents, partnerships, technologies, among others, without, however, demonstrating its polarization. On the other hand, we see little resistance from people as for entrepreneurship and innovation on public service, which shows a State dominion over the micro-practices of power which also unfold by the non-investment in people and in knowledge management.

This perception crumbles any possibility of fight from workers (servants) against the economy of power and any social management, since the technological, administrative, bureaucratic, patrimonial, managerial and legal rituals, among others, still achieve and produce an individuality orchestrated between the institutional machinery and the normative sanctions in which they are inserted.

The research is restricted as for the limiting time of its approach, since it followed Michel Foucault’s sole discussion, mainly focusing on the relations of power in its exercise, maintenance, discipline, strengthening, institutionalization, efficiency and resistance. In this sense, therefore, it is necessary to widen the study, for power also resides in the social control and innovation (Andion, Ronconi, Moraes, Gonsalves & Serafim, 2017), in which the public organizations are inserted and which also go through social promotion, including the new points of analysis, such as the problematization on the plural and not always balanced chain between market and society (Brito & Castro, 2019).

Thus, we recommend the deepening of this study through the theories by Pierre Bourdieu in the perspective that power acts according to its agents’ habitus, acquired along their lives and through socialization ways exercised by the institution and the social environment where they live. Another perception is that the theoretical referential on entrepreneurship and innovation on public service resembles the consolidation of themes in the private sector, causing a conceptual lethargy to be consolidated.

6 Acknowledgements

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

7 Appendix: Micro-relations of power in entrepreneurial and innovative initiatives in public service