A razão de ser rico: marketing multinível e discurso neoliberal

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the study of narratives in organizations, aiming at the study on life stories, which are oral narratives, of short duration, through which experiences and lived trajectories are told. According to Linde (1993), life stories are told through sentences that describe the events that the speaker considers important to demonstrate who he is, as if that subject revealed his identity to another person through his past. In this way, many speakers use these stories as a means of negotiating their identities with their audience. The use of these narratives is recurrent in organizations as a means to obtain new members and assimilate newcomers to the culture of the organization. This practice in these organizations raises questions as to whether its implementation would not be a discursive control strategy. This questioning gave rise to this work, being one of its objectives. One of the organizations to adopt this strategy is Deoni (fictional name of the enterprise) a company that is characterized by the implementation of multilevel marketing, a rewarding system of network bonuses that needs constant recruitment to be successful. Created in 1988 as a small family business, it has grown considerably in the past decade, thanks to this business model. In order to attract the largest number of new participants, Deoni representatives use life stories as a propaganda strategy. This work proposes the analysis of this content, from the transcription of lectures and training available online through the internet, using Linde's (1993) perspective on life stories as methodology. For the author, these narratives need to have some coherence to be convincing and, consequently, produce the effect desired by the speaker. Coherence can be seen as cooperation between interlocutors, in an effort to understand each other. Therefore, it is necessary that the story to be told be understandable and attract the listener’s attention. This dialogism points to the importance of studying the language in use and the social aspects related to the production of meanings in the text. In this way, the transcribed stories will be analyzed taking into account the socioeconomic context in which they are inherent, and the relationship between the presented discourse and neoliberal thought that I will observe. Neoliberalism, according to Dardot and Laval (2016), is governed by the universal principle of competition, which becomes a norm for business conduct and a management model. I analyze the influence of this normativity in the narratives studied.