The research had as a general objective the description and analysis of the decision process that makes people spontaneously leave the organizations where they work in search of a new activity outside the bureaucratic realm. This work takes a look at the life histories of five individuals who at some moment in their lives decided to make such a change. Analyzing the bureaucracy as a sphere of domination based on power, control and alienation, this work attempts to provide a critical perspective on organizations and its sophisticated practice of manipulation and submission of the individuals to bureaucratic functional rationality. Such rationality, whose priority is in the utilitarian calculation of consequences and focused on results, was opposed to the concept of substantive rationality, where the self-accomplishment, ethical judgment, the values of emancipation and autonomy are preponderant elements. From a qualitative methodology, the extracts of the interviews of life histories were structured into analytical categories. The interpretations emphasize the presence of a substantive logic in the decision taken by the individuals, towards the concept of parenthetical man proposed by Alberto Guerreiro Ramos.
Bureaucracy; Functional rationality; Substantive rationality; Life Histories; Parenthetical man