Page 1 of 21 BRAZILIAN 'CRITICAL ASSIMILATION' IN AMERICAN CASE STUDIES OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT, AND OF COMMUNITY POLICING Laís Silveira Santos 1 Luis Antônio Pittol Trevisan 2 Gaylord George Candler 3 ABSTRACT: In this essay we clarify the conceptual bases and theoretical-empirical method of ‘sociological reduction’, developed by Alberto Guerreiro Ramos. To do this, we introduce the historical and contextual concepts of epistemic colonization and epistemic nationalism. These justify Guerreiro Ramos’s warning about the need for the critical assimilation of foreign scholarship, in order to construct a Brazilian social science more likely to contribute to good social and economic outcomes. Our hypothesis is that the maturation of both Brazilian theory and practice has made over-reliance on foreign sources much less necessary, as well as provided ample opportunity for the critical assimilation of ideas from elsewhere. To discuss this question, the essay reports on two case studies of comparative field research by Brazilian scholars in the United States (Florida) and in Brazil (Santa Catarina), to assess the relevance of these epistemic concerns, nearly three- quarters of a century later. One case study is about moral dilemmas and ethical decision-making in emergency management related to natural disasters and the second is about community policing and co-production. After the presentation of the cases, we discuss the state of the Brazilian public administration literature of a) emergency management and ethics, b) moral reasoning, c) community policing, and d) co-production, in light of Guerreiro Ramos’s sociological reduction. Keywords: sociological reduction, moral dilemma, emergency management, community policing, co-production. 1. INTRODUCTION By the mid-20 th century it was widely argued that Brazilian administrative practice (and what theory there was) derived from the Portuguese inheritance, which was deficient in having missed the scientific and political revolutions of the previous centuries. Classic works note the authoritarian, family-based individualism of Brazil’s early settlement, including patrimonialism, and clientelism, coupled with the debilitating socio-cultural impact of slavery (Candler, 2014, p. 1074-5). Given the weakness of the Portuguese model and intellectual legacy, French sources tended to dominate cultural and intellectual discourse into the 20 th century. North American influences began to filter in at least from the 1950s (Wahrlich, 1965, p. 62), leading to concerns of epistemic colonization: the indiscriminate adoption of foreign administration theory (e.g. Guerreiro Ramos, 1965; Serva, 1990; Carvalho Júnior & Vergara, 1996; Alcadipani & Caldas, 2012). More broadly, 1 lais.ssantos@yahoo.com.br 2 luis.apt@gmail.com 3 g.candler@unf.edu