Protean bureaucrats: career articulations within and beyond the public sector

The way the careers are built in the private sector has been object of a massive amount of investigation over the last twenty years or so (Bendassoli, 2009; Chanlat, 1995, 1996). Comprehension of the way this has occurred in the Brazilian public sector constitutes a gap in the current literature on the theme (Bresser-Pereira, 1996; Saravia, 2006). This article aims to understand how high-level technical civil servants build their careers, in light of different perspectives of careers as articulated in current social context. It delved to identify the existence of protean features exhibited by civil servants, in order to characterize a possible change of attitude, something more commonly associated with the private sector (Hall & Moss, 1998). Two groups were selected, one with current civil servants and another with former civil servants, all from a Brazilian state's Department of Human Resources. The subjects, all with college degrees in different fields, were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. Resulting data was subjected to Content Analysis (Bardin, 1979; Minayo, 2007). A disruption of the logic of building a career in the public sector was observed, with servers searching for careers without boundaries, but linked to their personal perspectives; a logic commonly observed in the private sector.