This article presents the evolution of the adoption of corporate governance principles on company business in Brazil as being a difficult process of assimilation, since there are cultural barriers based on social actions that generate irrationalities on the national scene. Thus, the analysis is performed under Weberian perspective from secondary data on recent cases of non-rational use of good governance practices that resulted in losses and bankruptcies any corporations over time. The article also reports the state of the art research on corporate governance literature in order to confront with situation of Brazilian reality. The central question of the governance problems in Brazil is detected from evolution of the thinking of the business community, given its strong link with tradition set in a base of patrimonial domination, whose essence is social action affectual and traditional. Therefore, research indicates that the corporate governance has been inserting as an important mechanism to ensure the survival of organizations in the long-term run in parallel with a process of bureaucratization of the companies, which imposes a rational instrumental and substantive rational.
corporate governance; instrumental and substantive rationality; social action
