Abstract:
There is a large Brazilian bibliographical production from the 19th century, quite representative
of the national socio-political, historical and economic context, with data related to great
Brazilian entrepreneurs, leaders and managers. Rui Barbosa stands out from others Brazilian
authors who left extensive textual production representative of the national context of those
times. It was intended, through this research, to extract elements of his work that could compose
an original frame of his thought on issues related to management and leadership in Brazilian
context. This research aimed at systematically seek in Rui Barbosa's work elements of his
thinking that can be organized into a consistent set of reflections on leadership and
management. The methodological procedures of this exploratory and documentary research
were drawn from the methodology of content analysis of Bardin and followed three
complementary paths: queries in the database of Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, applying
OCRBdigital tool; studying two selected volumes from Rui Barbosa Complete Works; and text
clustering by the Reinert method (top-down hierarchical classification), with specific software
support (IRaMuTeQ). The results of each step were analyzed separately and then consolidated
according to the content analysis methodology. The results suggest that the writings of Rui
Barbosa address several management and leadership issues and that in some points the themes
are even brought to the focus of the narratives; for example, when the central themes of the
texts involve management models for public administration, provinces autonomy, decision
making models, systems and structures, leadership styles, and flaws and virtues of leaders. It is
also suggested that Rui Barbosa's work could be a documentary source for research on history
of public administration and memory of organizations in Brazil.
