How does coordination affect the quality of Boundary news? case study: Folha de São Paulo

• Ano de defesa: 2012
• Autor(a) principal: Regra, João Nuno Salgado
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Palavras-chave em Português: Coordination; Communication; Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA); Newspaper
• Link de acesso: https://www.repositorio.insper.edu.br/handle/11224/803

Resources have been described in the literature as one of the main sources of a firm’s competitive advantage. This study puts emphasis on the organizational ability to exploit its resources highlighting how a company should coordinate itself in order to make the best out of its resources. Poorly coordinated resources do not usually produce efficient results, especially when those resources are individuals with their own freewill, justifying why it becomes harder to coordinate journalists when compared to other types of resources. This study aims at understanding how the level of coordination impacts the quality of boundary news. This type of news is based on different departmental knowledge making it increasingly important to understand the impact of coordination. I decided to carry on this study at Folha de São Paulo - one of the oldest newspapers in Brazil and the biggest newspaper in São Paulo’s state, because the company implemented in 2010 a departmental restructuring internally called Reforma Agrária (Agrarian Reform). However, this restructuring assumed inter-departmental collaboration, which does not seemed to be a premise at Folha. In order to conduct this research, I spent six months at Folha observing meetings, collecting material and interviewing journalists. Subsequently, I analysed thirty-one pieces of boundary news with editors, in order to conduct a comparative case analysis. I used QCA (Qualitative Comparative analysis) to identify necessary and sufficient conditions that explain high and low quality. My findings show (1) that inter-departmental communication is rare; (2) incentives to journalists may have been wrongly designed; (3) there are some conditions, for instance privileged information, that when present, give news a large probability of being high quality and therefore coordination is not required; (4) there was no negotiation of restructuring, making journalists’ practices different from what they used to be, lacking previous discussion and negotiation. I conclude by emphasizing Folha’s main challenges and possible lines of action.