The Brazilian Jeitinho Technique

The jeitinho unlocks, with creativity and warmth, what rigidity had made impossible, while preserving the relationship. Its limits: it rests on a flexibility towards the rules that can drift into dubious dealing, and it disconcerts cultures attached to strict formal application.

Invaluable in Brazil and in the relational, flexible cultures of Latin America. A reminder that a rule-based “no” often conceals a creative solution, provided the relationship is there.

• Unlock a situation frozen by a rigid rule or procedure by obtaining a personalised exception rather than confronting the norm head-on.
• Draw on the relational and emotional register (warmth, reciprocity, rapport) to turn a gatekeeper into an ally who “sorts out” the file.
• Find a creative, pragmatic way around when the official route is too slow, too costly or blocked.
• Preserve the face of both parties: one does a favour without going back on their word, the other obtains satisfaction without humiliating or threatening.
• Create a debt of reciprocity that can be drawn on later in a long-term relationship.

Everyday life · The “impossible” file unlocked at the counter: A member of the public turns up at an administrative counter just before closing; he is missing a document and the rule forbids processing any incomplete file. Rather than demanding his rights or threatening an appeal, he adopts the register of the jeitinho: he acknowledges the clerk’s constraints, jokes about the queue, explains his personal situation and asks, warmly, whether there is not “a little arrangement” to be had, submitting today and regularising the document by email. The clerk, treated as a person and not as a cog, offers a middle-ground solution that the service tolerates. A representative scenario illustrating the mechanism: the rule is not attacked, it is circumvented through the relationship.

Sales · The “between us” pricing exception: A buyer runs up against a price list presented as non-negotiable by a salesperson who has no control over prices. Instead of standing firm on a demand for a discount (which would hit the hierarchical constraint), he works the relationship: he flatters the seller, builds rapport, then looks with him for an exception that does not touch the listed price, free delivery, an extended warranty, an accommodating payment schedule, something the salesperson can “wave through” without putting himself in an awkward position. A representative scenario: you do not bend the rule, you invent together a lateral way out that is acceptable to the rule’s gatekeeper.

• Confusing the jeitinho with corruption: offering or accepting an undue advantage (a bribe, an illegal favour) tips the tactic into criminal wrongdoing and destroys the relationship as much as the reputation.
• Instrumentalising relational warmth in a transparent, cynical way: if the other person senses the manipulation, feigned warmth turns into distrust.
• Putting the other person in a difficult position: asking for a bending of the rules that exposes the clerk to a sanction means burning the ally for good instead of protecting them.
• Believing that the technique transposes as-is outside its cultural context: in highly legalistic cultures, or ones with a low tolerance for the informal, the same request looks like a suspicious attempt to get around the rules.
• Abusing the reciprocity created: asking for too many favours, too often, exhausts the relational capital and turns the obliging party into an evasive one.

The jeitinho is ambivalent by design, and Brazilian sociologists, Roberto DaMatta foremost among them, have analysed it as such rather than as a national charm. Its bright side is real: finding a creative arrangement where the rule is absurd, inapplicable or simply forgotten is practical intelligence, and rigidity is no virtue when it serves no one. The dark side rests on a question that must be asked each time: does this rule protect someone? A safety standard, a tendering procedure, an accounting control are not obstacles to be flexibly circumvented, they are safeguards whose beneficiary is an absent third party. Getting around it “with a little charm” does not remove it, it displaces it: someone will pay, and it will be neither you nor the person across the table. One must add the slippage that the word makes painless: as soon as the arrangement involves a public decision-maker, you leave resourcefulness behind for the illicit favour, then the offence, and France’s Sapin II law applies to French companies wherever the facts occur. Sorting things out where the rule is absurd is intelligence; getting around the rule that protects is an illicit favour.

• Roberto DaMatta (1991) Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma University of Notre Dame Press
• Lívia Barbosa (2006) O jeitinho brasileiro: a arte de ser mais igual que os outros Editora Campus/Elsevier
• Robert B. Cialdini (2009) Influence: Science and Practice Pearson Education