Author response. The politics of accounting: The caseof the empresas recuperadas in Argentina

Alice Rose Bryer

Published online: 8 February 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

I am grateful for the thoughtful and constructive commentaries on my paper. The

following discussion develops concepts and aims introduced in the paper to respond

to some of the key issues raised by Kasmir, Vakulabharanam, and Weller. As the

commentaries highlight, an underlying concern of critical social theory is to challenge

assumptions that organizations are individualistic, uniform entities driven by a

universal, economic rationality. The critical project is then to identify and explain the

social, subjectively diverse, and contradictory, attributes of organizations, which embed

within and interact with conditions that are also collective, conflictive, and symbolically

nuanced. I share with many anthropologists the conviction that this task requires

an ethnographic understanding of the social ways in which ideas and aims take shape

within specific fields, and a methodology that can build ethnographic descriptions into

conceptual findings that connect with and potentially reshape existing concepts and

theoretical concerns. Through an ethnographic field study of the empresas recuperadasin Buenos Aires, Argentina (2006–2007), I was fortunate to collect ethnographic

material that emphasized the potential heterogeneity and dynamism of organizations

and their accounting practices. I found that a significant body of research in accounting

literature draws on social theorists such as Foucault and Bourdieu to theorize the

symbolical and constitutive capacities of accounting practices, thereby questioning the

traditional view that they mechanically reflect a definite economic reality (e.g., Ahrens

and Chapman 2006; Burchell et al. 1985; Hopwood 1987; Miller and O’Leary 1994).

This literature tends to divide between studies that emphasize the aggregation of practice

activity into a discursive, societal force that sets boundaries around the individual (e.g.,

Miller and O’Leary 1987; Scapens 2006), and researchers that seek to understand the

A. R. Bryer (&)

IE Business School, Madrid, Spain

e-mail: alicebryer@hotmail.com

A. R. Bryer

Goldsmiths College, London, UK

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Dialect Anthropol (2012) 36:63–66

DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9259-1

symbolical aspects of accounting practices at the organizational level (e.g., Ahrens and

Chapman 2006). What seemed to be missing was a way of identifying and explaining

the source of the narratives that accounting may transmit, that is, a concept of the

political that might allow us to draw wider insights into the possibilities and limits of

organizational and social change. A concern of my work is to address this gap by

mobilizing Marx’s anthropological concept of creative activity through which

individuals interact with and shape wider meaningful realities, potentially reshaping

their own values and needs (see also Avineri 1968; Ricoeur 1986).

Developing an open-ended theory of conscious human activity, rather than

borrowing Marx’s terminology of value, helps to avoid some of the confusion in

the Dialectical Anthropology paper, highlighted by the commentaries, focusing

attention on the importance of forming a detailed empirical perspective. My concern

is to move from a concept of organizational fields as consciousness and narrative, to

a framework for understanding organizational fields composed of real, living

individuals engaging with social conditions that are symbolical, contradictory, and

changeable. Kasmir highlights that the current global environment of economic and

political crisis reveals an even greater need to bring into focus the possibilities for

alternatives to capitalism and prevailing mentalities. I also agree with Kasmir’s

emphasis on the debate over what matters in organizational activity—profit-growth

or alternative kinds of investments—as being a political struggle. However, my

concept of the political is concerned with the social ordering of individual activities

and motivations, an approach that recognizes a vital role of accounting practices

within wider organizational and social dynamics, based on my ethnographic study

of the empresas recuperadas.

The paper in Dialectical Anthropology represents the emerging stages of a concept of

the politics of accounting as a conscious, social practice of representing the purposeful

activity of individuals, interacting with wider patterns of behavior and belief, such as

profit-maximization (Bryer 2011). Vakulabharanam highlights that what lies beneath

the concept of the politics of value creation is a theory of accounting as a practice

that embodies and expresses dialectics between the alienation and objectification of

individuals as social beings, that is, actors that learn about and develop themselves as

they shape collective realities. Such a theory enables us to replace conventional theories

of means, as material reflections of a universal reality, with an open-ended investigation

of motivation that may trace dialectical or mutually constitutive relationships between

individual agency and collective order, creativity and control. An ethnographic analysis

of the empresas recuperadas can therefore develop into a concept of the nuanced, social

dynamics through which individuals interpreted data on profitability, not as the full

expression of their social selves, but as an element of a wider network of human

accountability. This responds to Weller’s interest to consider how diversity within

rationalities of profit might relate to broader political discourses.

By conceptualizing accounting practices as representations of organizational

fields, constituted through the socially meaningful lives of individuals, we empha-

size that control is at bottom concerned with communication. As Vakulabharanam

points out, the ER case studies of El Mar and Hotel Bartel demonstrate that

accounting practices can represent symbolical structures of action that distort how

individuals understand themselves and their activity, but they can also push

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individuals to clarify their concerns and ideas as part of the creation of social

consensus. My concern is therefore to understand how accounting practices may

legitimate and constitute new organizational identities, meaningfully orientated to

emerging, alternative patterns of behavior and belief. I argue that theorizing the

roles of accounting in the move from distortion to legitimating and constituting

roles depends on a broad, ethnographically grounded concept of creative activity. It

also requires an ethnographically grounded concept of the social roles of particular

actors in shaping accounting practices that reveal wider patterns of behavior, as well

as something of the ideas and ambitions of the actual individuals engaged in

organizational activities. Key figures in El Mar, shaped accounting practices as

part of the construction of a Printer Federation, which communicated narratives of

social responsibility that subsumed individual aspirations for independence from

institutional power within the social pattern of profit-growth. Actors in Hotel Bartel,

involved in efforts to reconnect the empresas recuperadas to grass-roots organi-

zations, understood accounting and social responsibility as expressing an under-

standing of a mutually constructive relation between individuals and society.

To address the broad question of the transformative possibilities of worker

cooperatives, Weller offers a notion of their value as existing as a nexus of relationships,

reproduced through social action. This links to Kasmir’s emphasis on the importance

of studying the different political and social connections realized by the two ER case

studies in the paper, and on the tendency for contradictions and diversity within

cooperative social relations more generally. Vakulabharanam concludes by highlighting

that the question of whether worker cooperatives can enable self-realization remains

open. By addressing this question through an open-ended concept of creative human

activity, my concern is to draw broader insights into the collaborative and meaningful

aspects of conventional organizations from ethnographic studies of worker coopera-

tives. My interest in worker cooperatives, and organizations that define themselves

within the social economy, is that they tend to bring the social and symbolical aspects of

organizations and practices into closer contact, creating greater potential for contradic-

tions and heterogeneity. The case studies of Hotel Bartel and El Mar show how

decentralized management and accounting control practices fostered ambition among

organizational members for greater levels of autonomy and association, which

intertwined in different and changing ways with the need for profitability, and ambition

formed through wider activities to construct a social economy. Applying an open-ended

methodology of creative action to future research in the social economy, as an evolving

organizational field, could help us to understand the collaborative and meaningful

conditions through which accounting practices obtain greater correspondence to the

diverse meanings and motivations that underpin organizational activities.

References

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Handbook of management accounting research, ed. C.S. Chapman, A.G. Hopwood, and M.D.

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Argentina. Accounting, Organizations and Society 245–278.

Burchell, S., C. Clubb, and A.G. Hopwood. 1985. Accounting in its social context: towards a history of

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