Managing Brazil’s participation in the 1970 football World Cup: meaning in the service of power

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the management of Brazilian participation in the 1970 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. It analyzes discourses in the press to critically discuss how power relations were combined in the construction of a consensus around the participation in the 1970 Cup, drawing on concepts of symbolic forms, power and ideology. This cup motivated a series of dramatizations of the social world, revealing relationships, values and ideologies in force and latent. Strategies of symbolic construction made use of football (as a symbol of unity, identity and collective identification) and of traditional management tools such as accounting and calculative practices to rationalize discourses and legitimate power relations. Through a holistic approach, the study contributes to understand the use of football by dominant groups in shaping society. In the economic and financial dimension, the paper also provides insights into the constitutive role of accounting by showing its contribution to establish and sustain relations of domination, and into its interlinkages with a broader popular phenomenon – football.