Accounting for worker cooperatives?

The case of the Argentinean empresas recuperadas

Accounting for the social economy?

• Global context of crisis, social economy (SE) as ‘pole of social utility’: new social relations, values.

• ‘Institutional invisibility’.• Task: concept that fits with national accounting systems,

institutionalise and homogenise the SE: objective measure of a business entity’s capital and its profitability.

• The paper rethinks this by recognising; 1) how accounting constitutes profitability as a social need; 2) the ways in which particular actors used accounting ideas and practices to institutionalise alternative needs and values.

• Comparative ethnography of the Argentinean empresas recuperadas

The Argentinean empresas recuperadas (ERs)

• Grass-roots response: context of crisis, change, and self-organisation. Thousands of workers occupy and revive 180 abandoned companies.

• Paternalistic – cooperatives: assembly-based decision-making = new work relations

• National movement (MNER) formed in 2002: ‘horizontal power’ and ‘open-door politics’ = new institutional forms, relations with society

• However, by 2006, MNER fragmented, many ERs reduce assembly.

Fieldwork in Buenos Aires• 8 cases, diverse productive sectors (2006-2007).

Comparative perspective, multiple variables. Key findings: - New social relations limited by: institutional relations +

constraint of profitability = personalised financial management.

- Need for new kinds of control = informed by awareness of need for productivity (lowering of ambitions) + aspirations for radicalised form of citizenship (control by society).

- ‘Leadership’: historical, social complex state-society.- Two cases: important for maintaining decentralised work

relations, and accounting innovations, but different motivational frameworks.

- Both led construction of new organisations.

Cooperativa Graficas El Mar

Capital-centred social responsibility

• Purposive activity for productivity? • Instead of direct controls, accounting articulates

leadership morality of ‘social responsibility’.• Innovations (improved levels of disclosure) = Ideology

and reality - General role: increase awareness of need to cut costs, to

foster workers’ self-control: Similar to ABC- Also cultural: reconstructing Peronist work culture:

morally differentiating from former company, MNER, existing institutions.

- New Federation of coops, international connections = reduce costs and increase workers’ commitment through seminars.

Limitations of accounting for capital

• Institutional change: legalise cheaper wage labour. Informal/social economy. Weakens legitimacy.

• Workers unsatisfied with accounting for costs: expectations to control work activity + institutional participation.

• Alternative process of socialisation, emergent vision of social responsibility – meetings at Hotel Bartel.

Hotel Bartel

Human-centred social responsibility

• Also distinctive for purposive activity through horizontal work relations, and accounting change: underpinned by alternative leadership vision of ‘social responsibility’

• Emergent institutional activity, reviving momentum of self-organisation: connecting state and society in new ways.

• New values and ambitions / awareness of need for profitability.

• Assembly insufficient: demand for accounting changes emerges through meetings etc.

Democratic accounting

• Aim: better understanding of value-creating role, to maximise creation of new moral and institutional values: e.g. cultural and educational events, safety, support for social struggles.

• To identify limits set by need for profitability, to overcome them through new social relations, between workers and with society.

• 6 hour day, part of wider project for change – new movement.

• Institutionalising the social economy – new regulatory body: radical need for the unity of individual and society.

• Institutional role of accounting in social economies?

Conclusions: The politics of the social economy

• No definitive concept, but most accepted: ‘Orientating principles’ European Committee of Cooperatives, Mutuals, Associations and Foundations (CMAF): “The primacy of the individual and the social purpose over capital”, and “the coincidence of the interests of user members and the public interest”.

• How might such a motivational framework be institutionalised?• We must recognise how accounting practices constitute profitability as

social need, to explore whether social actors can use them to institutionalise values and needs centred on society.

• Critical accounting literature divided on constitutive role of accounting.• Reconciled through notion of ‘labour’ as dialectical process of creating

values connecting individuals to society.• Allows us to unpack social processes thru which actors purposively shape

organisations in potentially very different ways (Reconciles subjectivist/objectivist approaches on labour and value in anthropology).

• Ethnographic perspective on dialectics between meaningful action-systemic need in particular societal contexts (e.g Manchester coops).

Towards a self-regulating society?

• Concept of the social economy: internal socialisation of capitalism, and an institutional manifestation of new human needs.

• If societies can generate a certain level of needs, then they can also construct the adequate institutions and concepts to organise and regulate them. Humanity sets itself only those tasks that it can solve (Marx,1962: 363).