The public relations teaching promoted in the context of the rationalization of work: a Brazilian historical perspective

Even before the creation of the first public relations higher education course in Brazil, in 1967, at the University of Sao Paulo, such activity was already taught in the country. The Institute de Organizacao Racional do Trabalho (IDORT), an agency that promoted the rationalization of work in the first half of the 20th century, was one of the main diffusers of public relations, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Through several public relations courses in this period, IDORT produced a series of handouts that established certain founding principles of this activity in Brazil. In view of this, the main objective of this article is to present certain communication prescriptions at work, which are the hallmarks of the public relations conception of the time, identified in this didactic material. This is a historical documentary research that is part of a broader research at the doctoral level.