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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the outcome of an interdisciplinary discussion on the concepts of profit and profitability and various ways in which we could potentially problematize these concepts. It is our hope that a much greater attention or reconsideration of the problematization of profit and related accounting numbers will be fostered in part by the exchanges we include here. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts an interdisciplinary discussion approach and brings into conversation ideas and views of several scholars on problematizing profit and profitability in various contexts and explores potential implications of such problematization. Findings Profit and profitability measures make invisible the collective endeavour of people who work hard (backstage) to achieve a desired profit level for a division and/or an organization. Profit tends to preclude the social process of debate around contradictions among the ends and means of collective activity. An inherent message that we can discern from our contributors is the typical failure of managers to appreciate the value of critical theory and interpretive research for them. Practitioners and positivist researchers seem to be so influenced by neo-liberal economic ideas that organizations are distrusted and at times reviled in their attachment to profit. Research limitations/implications Problematizing opens-up the potential for interesting and significant theoretical insights. A much greater pragmatic and theoretical reconsideration of profit and profitability will be fostered by the exchanges we include here. Originality/value In setting out a future research agenda, this paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism in the research community focussing on problematizing profit and profitability in various settings. The discussion perspectives offered in this paper provides not only a basis for further research in this critical area of discourse and regulation on the role and status of profit and profitability but also emancipatory potential for practitioners (to be reflective of their practices and their undesired consequences of such practices) whose overarching focus is on these accounting numbers.

This chapter focuses on one crucial site of accounting practice: the multinational professional service firms, and the historical studies that have examined their emergence and development. Firm histories provide some insight into the work of early accountants. One of the most frequently cited pieces of work on the origins of audit - Watts and Zimmerman - puts forward the thesis that audit arose as a solution to the problem created by the separation of ownership and control. The Lancashire cotton mills, the 'Oldham Limiteds' of the late nineteenth century, operating on the principle of one shareholder, one vote, had widely dispersed share ownerships, amateur shareholder auditors and intense investor involvement in their governance. Jones shows that from the beginning of the twelve century medieval administrative and accounting systems in Britain drew on a battery of internal control mechanisms, including accountability, supervision and audit. The Westminster-style of administration of public finance was exported to the British colonies.

This study explores how morality is constituted into accounting objects and how accounting becomes a moral mediator. We retrace the moral practices that subtend the field-level construction of a Principal-Agent incentive algorithm in a Big Pharma company, with particular focus on the inscribing work through which different communities of knowledge, internal and external to the organization, try to realize particular moral principles for the performance measurement system in the making. The study draws upon Science and Technology Studies (Latour, 1989; Jasanoff, 2015) to explore performance measurement systems as existing in Moral Imaginaries, ethical visions that positions accounting devices, and their material features and technical functionalities, as embedding and enacting ‘moral’ and ‘just’ viewpoints. We show how performance measurement systems emerge as moral calculating devices that are shaped by, and struggle with, the contrasting moralities of heterogeneous designers, but also act as moral mediators that reshape human actors’ moral imaginaries as their algorithmic constructions and data outputs perform. In so doing, we contribute to Science and Technology Studies by highlighting how the constitution of who / what is an “Agent”, and its actantiality, is embedded upon movements in which morality circulates, is claimed by actors and attributed to others, and finally objectified in material technologies.

The study focuses on an Italian composting plant and aims to investigate the impact of the presence of plastic impurities in the collected biowaste on the environmental and economic performance of the plant. The study is divided into two main steps: firstly, a material flow analysis was conducted to quantify the number of impurities (e.g., conventional plastics and compostable plastics) before and after the composting process. Secondly, a life cycle assessment (LCA) and a complementary life cycle costing (LCC) of the composting process were conducted. The results of the material flow analysis confirmed the initial assumption that conventional plastic remains almost constant before and after the composting treatment, while compostable plastic almost disappears. As far as the life cycle analyses are concerned, the most environmentally damaging phases of the process were the shredding and mixing phases, while the operating costs (OPEX) contributed the most to the total annual costs of the company. Finally, a further scenario analysis was performed, assuming that the plastic contaminants in the treated biowaste consisted exclusively of compostable plastics. The comparison with this ideal scenario can support decision-makers to understand the potential improvements achievable by addressing the presence of plastic impurities in the biowaste. The results show that the treatment of plastic impurities causes relevant environmental and economic impacts, being responsible for 46% of the total waste to treat at the end of the process, almost 7% of the total annual costs covered by the plant owners, and about 30% of all negative externalities.