Market Rationality Inside Voluntary Sector: An Analysis of Five Organizations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

What we now understand as rational and logical in today’s world provides a mental scheme to take action, based on a framework
of premises and values. These rules aim to maximize the utility of consequences, despite of any subjective value. Weber (Economy
and Society, 1978) classified this scheme as an “instrumental rationality”, characterized by being guided by the goals, means, and consequence
of the action. On the other hand, he also defined “substantive rationality”, postulated on the values of the subject, and
not guided by any consequences of action. This study acknowledges that NGOs (non-governmental organizations) must belong to
a field other than that of economic businesses, because they are based on different rationalities, especially when they encompass
the observation in organizations that work for social transformation. A field study was made with five nonprofit organizations
whose stated goals were social transformation, seeking to identify influences that the adoption of instrumental rationality
imposes on accomplishing the expected objectives for these organizations. Contingencies were found that benefit from using
instrumentality in such organizations, such as the need for self-subsistence, the area where they work, size of the organization,
influence of the leader and so on. The conclusion is that the lack of consciousness of the market’s influence on them very
often causes them to uncritically and bluntly absorb the typical organizational dynamics of economic business, which has strong
potential to corrupt their conceptual motivations, when guiding them strategically through the consequences of actions.