The importance of decolonial narratives: the case of work psychology in Rio De Janeiro

This paper aims to discuss the importance of decolonial narratives in general and in the field of history of psychology in particular. For this, we take as the starting point the initial results of a recently published empirical study, which investigated different styles of management within the scope of labor in Rio de Janeiro between 1949 and 1965 through the analysis of publications of the journal Arquivos Brasileiros de Psicologia. Such results pointed to an inadequacy between the interpretations of the management styles that are used, on the one hand, in the English and North American context and, on the other, in Rio de Janeiro. The discussion of this article focuses on this inadequacy, underlining the differences between how colonial and decolonial narratives conceive the relationship between empirical data and intelligibility matrices and the historiographical and methodological consequences of this relationship.