Mining reinvents itself: A study on the discursive ethos of Brazilian mining companies

Abstract

This article is based on the preliminary explorations of the research that investigates the symmetries and asymmetries that mark the communication of the sector and stress the theoretical limits of the Excellence Theory in Public Relations. The research tries to understand the strategies of visibility and inviability of the mining companies in the State of Minas Gerais (Brazil). Aligned with the perspectives of the New Theory of Strategy and Strategy as Practice, it argues that strategy is a communication practice and that public relations are a culturally and socially conformed construction - and that acts in the reconfiguration of such contexts. From this understanding, it presents how the statements made by the Brazilian Mining Institute try to conform a discursive ethos of its own, showing its strategic effort to set new meanings for the sector, from the analysis of one of its institutional videos called Mining reinvents itself.