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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop understanding of the ways in which actors may resolve the contradictions between the social and private aspects of accounting. It pursues this aim by developing theory and knowledge of the roles of belonging in the politics of budgeting.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the paper develops a Latourian anthropological theory of belonging as a social practice. It shows how this makes a significant departure from actor-network Latourian studies, shifting the focus onto the emotional and cognitive capacities that may enable actors to work through and gradually overcome the socio-political conflicts that budgeting can provoke. Second, to identify such a practice, it studies a Spanish cooperative involved in collective responses to socio-economic and political instability.FindingsThe study finds that the emotional and cognitive work by which the actors assembled their collective practice of belonging was influenced by their interactions with budgets, and, in turn, mediated the way they dealt with budgets, giving rise to more enabling roles and effects. It traces, for example, how planning and cost reduction supported abilities to relate the actors’ problems and anxieties to broader social problems, fostering more positive emotions including empathy, enthusiasm, and respect.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings offer a complementary, but alternative view of the socio-political character of budgeting techniques to prior studies, which advances understanding of how actors could shape more enabling roles and effects.Practical implicationsInvolving budgets in discussions and meetings can increase the scope for work that leads to greater freedom, social cohesion, and wellbeing.Originality/valueThis is the first study to demonstrate how belonging can be actively assembled through budgeting. It has particular value for understanding how alternative organizations can use accounting to avoid fragmenting and degeneration.

This paper offers an ethnographically grounded analysis of the transformative possibilities of the Argentinean empresas recuperadas (ERs), which speaks to current debates on the 'social economy'. The ERs emerged in a context shaped by the crisis of neoliberalism and of the Argentinean political system and a huge upsurge in popular self-organisation. In response to widespread factory closures, thousands of workers occupied abandoned companies, forming cooperatives and often introducing assembly-based decision-making. By 2002, they established a national organisation, which connected workers' struggles to a wider movement for institutional change. However, by 2006, the organisation had fragmented and many ERs had reinstalled traditional control methods. Much of the literature divides between idealistic and deterministic interpretations, which conceive as a technical material process. The paper proposes an alternative, a concept of labour as a process of creating value—subjective needs and values, and surplus value—which links organisations to society. Conceiving the 'politics of value creation' highlights continuities within the financial management and institutional relations of many ERs, but most importantly, it also recognises the different ways in which emerging social identities articulated a new need for control. Through two case studies, the paper explores the social processes through which these actors shaped their cooperatives in very different ways—highlighting innovations in accounting techniques and state-society relations. This reveals why a focus on accounting can enable anthropologists to recognise the general limitations of cooperatives and also their specific cultural diversity. In conclusion, the paper reconciles current discussions on the concept of the social economy by theorising it as the internal socialisation of capitalism and as an institutional expression of new cultural needs.

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).

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.

The author responds to comments by Sally A. Weller, Vamsi Vakulabharanam and Sharryn Kasmir on her article \"The politics of the social economy: a case study of the Argentinean empresas recuperadas\" (same journal issue). Adapted from the source document.

This thesis presents a theoretical and ethnographically grounded analysis of the empresas recuperadas (ERs), worker cooperatives established during Argentina's 2001 socio-economic crisis, to explore whether cooperatives can be transfonnative modes of social production. It develops Marx's analyses of alienation and the labour process to identify and explain the widely different experiences of individual ERs. Responding to the effects of neoliberal restructuring, thousands of workers revived bankrupt or abandoned companies across Argentina, often using assembly-based decisionmaking. The literature often adopts a postmodern approach, which sees the ERs as achieving autonomy through new social relations from below. A wider literature promotes cooperatives as part of a social economy, which reinvigorates profitability through new social relations of solidarity. Despite differences, uniting these positions is their failure to recognise limits, that is, their erasure of alienation. By focusing on relations in production, they overlook their embeddedness within relations of production, depoliticising the labour process as a valuecreating process and denying the possibilities for self-realisation. To recapture these possibilities and explore the limits, the thesis proposes the concept of the politics of value-creation, which it defines as the dynamic social embeddedness of purposive economic action. Exploring this idea through the lens of cooperatives will show that the socialisation of relations in production tends to increase workers' subjective awareness of relations of production - and that this is central to understanding their transformative potentials. Through eight case studies, the concept of the politics of value-creation develops into an expanded theorisation of capital to explore how struggles over the material and valuecreating dimensions of production interacted with wider changes in state-society relations. Conceiving class as workers' experiences and response to capital highlights how social sUbjectivities also shaped and were shaped by their linkages to state and civil society, within the changing institutional field of Argentina. Analysis of this particular context shows that cooperatives can contain new elements and reshape the detennining limits of the system even as they reproduce its contradictions. The thesis explores the transfonnative institutionality of Peronism as a decentralised form of state power and social movement, which historically has blurred the boundaries between state and society. It examines the emergence of the ERs as a political force organised by a Peronist leadership that consciously sought to reshape institutional frontiers. The concept of the politics of value-creation theorises how these wider dynamics affected variation in the labour processes. It identifies two divergent dynamics of class - conceived as 'capital-centred' and 'worker-centred' socialisation - and shows the particular ways in which they interacted with changing institutional contexts. Analysis shows that the financial management of many ERs reproduced individualising elements of the state. Yet the most innovative cases sought to overcome this through changes in their accounting and the state's regulatory apparatuses, towards building new kinds of societal control. The thesis concludes that only by understanding the socially objective limits of cooperatives can we also see their potentials. It develops the idea of a self-regulating society to provide a critique of the social economy as the internal socialisation of capitalism as an objective economic system and as an institutional response to the creation of new human needs.

RECENTLY, our school captain Anna Dickinson flew to America to attend a national SRC conference.