Participation in budgeting: A critical anthropological approach

Description
Accounting researchers adopting structural and post-structural interpretive approaches
have long criticized mainstream assumptions about the enduring economic aspects of
accounting systems, highlighting their roles in reflecting and shaping social realities that
are contradictory, diverse, and changing. The paper aims to develop this critique by inquir-
ing empirically and philosophically into the roles that constructing participation in budget-
ing might play in enhancing ‘ontological plurality’, that is, supporting actors’ perspectives,
abilities and concerns which are generally excluded by structuring action to maximize pri-
vate profits. It defines and elaborates a critical anthropological approach using Marx’s
notion of ‘social praxis’ and Latour’s idea of ‘modes of existence’ to highlight the theoretical
contribution of anthropologists exploring beyond traditional divides over social agency
through studies of grassroots participative responses to contemporary socio-economic cri-
ses. Drawing on ethnographic data collected through a multiple site case study of eight
worker cooperatives in Argentina, the paper analyses how reciprocal relations between
the actors’ levels of agency in wider associative actions, and their degrees of participation
in budgeting, caused gradual expansions in ontological plurality

Participation in budgeting: A critical anthropological approach
Alice Rose Bryer
IE Business School Madrid, IE University Segovia, Spain
a b s t r a c t
Accounting researchers adopting structural and post-structural interpretive approaches
have long criticized mainstream assumptions about the enduring economic aspects of
accounting systems, highlighting their roles in re?ecting and shaping social realities that
are contradictory, diverse, and changing. The paper aims to develop this critique by inquir-
ing empirically and philosophically into the roles that constructing participation in budget-
ing might play in enhancing ‘ontological plurality’, that is, supporting actors’ perspectives,
abilities and concerns which are generally excluded by structuring action to maximize pri-
vate pro?ts. It de?nes and elaborates a critical anthropological approach using Marx’s
notion of ‘social praxis’ and Latour’s idea of ‘modes of existence’ to highlight the theoretical
contribution of anthropologists exploring beyond traditional divides over social agency
through studies of grassroots participative responses to contemporary socio-economic cri-
ses. Drawing on ethnographic data collected through a multiple site case study of eight
worker cooperatives in Argentina, the paper analyses how reciprocal relations between
the actors’ levels of agency in wider associative actions, and their degrees of participation
in budgeting, caused gradual expansions in ontological plurality, moving the actors beyond
their particular tensions and broader structural con?icts. Exploring the notion of ‘ontolog-
ical movements’, the paper develops a continuum of participation and ontological plural-
ism in budgeting, which it argues contributes to the structural and post-structural
interpretive accounting literatures through historical, constructive, and participative
components.
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Accounting researchers adopting different theoretical
perspectives have yet to provide us with a plausible theory
and detailed knowledge of the tensions, con?icts, and
differences between people that can arise in and around
participation in budgeting systems. To address this long-
standing question the paper engages with strands of the
accounting literature that offer critical alternatives to
mainstream studies based on economic theory. According
to the mainstream perspective, participation in accounting
is merely as a politically neutral means of promoting
behaviour that supports supposedly natural and enduring
economic objectives, and of correcting so-called deviations
(Brownell, 1981; Merchant, 1998). Critical researchers,
however, now generally agree that budgeting is not a uni-
form, mechanistic tool, but is deeply embroiled in the com-
plexities of human ontologies, meaning that it shapes and
re?ects the symbolical structures that underpin our contra-
dictory and diverse organizational andsocial lives (Burchell,
Clubb, Hopwood, & Hughes, 1980; Child, 1969; Cooper &
Hopper, 2007; Covaleski et al., 2013). The paper extends this
critique by adopting a critical anthropological approach,
broadly de?ned as an empirical and philosophical inquiry
into the roles of participative budgeting in supporting
greater ‘ontological plurality’ (Latour, 2013), that is, their
roles in integrating actors’ goals, abilities, and perspectives,http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.07.001
0361-3682/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
E-mail address: [email protected]
Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
that typically are excluded by structuring action according
to dominant ontologies such as pro?t maximization.
1
It
develops this perspective through a case study of the Empre-
sas Recuperadas, cooperatives in Argentina created by work-
ers responding to widespread closures of small to medium
sized companies, and severe socio-economic and political cri-
sis and upheaval. Worker cooperatives offer us an important
arena because by collectivizing ownership they may resolve
traditional con?icts of interest (Toms, 2002), enhancing the
scope for alternative goals and values. Case studies of individ-
ual Argentinean cooperatives have found that participative
budgeting supported the actors’ different concerns to take
part in wider social life through actions including workshops,
demonstrations, and various cultural and educational activi-
ties (Bryer, 2011a; Bryer, 2011b). However, the single case
approach risks over simpli?cation for two main reasons. First,
although it allows us to explore the notion that the partici-
pants of budgeting act according to speci?c and varying
values and aims (Ahrens & Chapman, 2006), it limits our the-
orizations of the social scope for ontological pluralism, and of
the politics of enhancing this potential. Second, while indi-
vidual case studies provide insights into the historical context
(Covaleski and Dirsmith, 1988, 1995), they cannot provide
the necessary comparative perspective for re?ecting more
broadly on the potentials for making budgeting systems more
participative and pluralistic, and therefore for re?ecting on
the potentials for failure.
The paper’s critical anthropology addresses these con-
ceptual limitations, constructing a theoretical continuum
of participation and ontological plurality in budgeting
using data collected through a multiple site ethnographic
methodology, based on observations and interviews con-
ducted in eight Empresas Recuperadas between February
2006 and April 2007. It argues that the continuum high-
lights the theoretical contribution to critical accounting
of anthropologists studying grass roots participative
responses to the con?icts and limits of prevailing social
and political structures (Gledhill, 2013; Kasmir, 2005;
Schaumberg, 2008). Drawing on the structural and cultural
Marxisms of Braverman, Burawoy, and Bourdieu, this liter-
ature seeks to challenge dominant assumptions about the
universal economic character of human action by adopting
a comparative perspective, based on studies of how subor-
dinated actors in particular societies and moments can
collectively challenge dominant ontological boundaries
(Abram & Weszkalnys, 2013; Gledhill, 2012; Roseberry,
1997).
2
For example, Kasmir’s (1996) study of the Spanish
Mondragon cooperatives showed that some members
involved in wider actions with independent labour organiza-
tions developed radical concepts of their participation and
cooperation, which they mobilized to challenge the pro?t
maximization goals of directors by preserving pay equity,
and expanding the scope to pursue wider objectives through
participation in planning and control. However, often a
tension exists in the anthropological literature between
?ndings showing more pluralistic courses of action, and
theorizations of participation as simply re?ecting the effects
of prevailing social and political structures (Abram &
Weszkalnys, 2013; Gledhill, 2013; Kasmir, 1996; Kasmir,
2005).
The paper resolves this tension and develops the
anthropologists’ insights into a continuum by exploring
the relations between Marx and Engels (1962, 1963),
notion of social praxis and Latour’s (2005, 2013), concept
of modes of existence. Marx’s concept of social praxis is
the learning that actors do, through wider actions that
connect them to others, about the social character of their
concerns and skills. Marx and Engels (1962, 1963) theo-
rizes how actors come to develop a speci?c ‘‘need for soci-
ety’’, understanding and developing their relations with
others as both the source and content of their own goals
and capacities to achieve them, and therefore to question
their dependency on supposedly asocial and external
things such as money and pro?t (Avineri, 1968). However,
to understand the roles of participation in constructing a
more expansive collective unity, we need to connect social
praxis to Latour’s notion of modes of existence, which is
the learning that actors do, through interaction with
abstract and concrete tools such as budgets and reports,
about how to plan and realize progressively more hetero-
dox, far-reaching, and durable social actions.
3
Following
Latour suggests that greater social levels of participation in
budgeting, that is, involving more actors in more extensive
planning and control aspects, may enhance the scope for
integrating a wider range of perspectives in ontologies by
enabling the actors to develop their socially ‘‘re?exive
capabilities’’ and ‘‘sources of innovation. . . (in) ontologies’’
(2013: 292).
4
The paper develops and tests these interre-
lated hypotheses by using its eight case studies to explore
reciprocal relations between the actors’ social levels of
agency in wider associative actions, and their social levels
of participation in budgeting. Its continuum is therefore a
way of tracking these relations, and understanding them
as the socio-political forces that drive gradual expansions
in the range of actors’ goals, abilities, and perspectives,
structuring collective action.
Previous Marxist and Latourian accounting studies have
generally disagreed about how to understand social agency
(Cooper & Hopper, 2007), that is, the relations that can
exist between individual actors and social structures, thus
mirroring a wider divide in the critical literature between
structural and interpretive/post-structural perspectives
(Ahrens & Chapman, 2006; Hopper et al., 1987). Whereas
structural Marxist studies conceive of an enduring binary
opposition at the societal level between material interests
spanning the entire capitalist epoch (Hopper et al., 1987;
1
As an ‘ontology’ is a symbolical means of guiding and organizing
collective action (Latour, 2013), and the dominant ontologies are pro?t
maximization and capital accumulation, a more ‘pluralist ontology’ is a
symbolic means of encompassing a wider range of actors’ goals, views, and
abilities, than the dominant ontologies normally allow.
2
Dominant ontological limits are therefore the social constraints to
actors’ concerns, aims, and abilities entailed by structuring action according
to pro?t maximization and capital accumulation.
3
Budgeting systems are therefore an example of modes of existence
when actors use and shape them to develop their skills for structuring
action in more ontologically pluralistic ways. Another possible example,
suggested in the conclusion for future research, is enterprise resource
planning systems.
4
Latour (2005: 88) acknowledges that his interest in actors’ abilities to
construct more pluralistic ontologies comes from Marx’s social theory.
512 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
Toms, 2002), post-structural, actor-network theory (ANT)
based interpretive studies, theorize temporary connections
between the differing worldviews of heterodox, individu-
ally driven agents (Briers & Chua, 2001; Preston, Cooper,
& Coombs, 1992). The paper argues that, by linking social
praxis and modes of existence, we can usefully overcome
this divide, using the anthropologists’ insights to theorize
how the controversies of participatory budgeting may
express and shape progressively more pluralistic kinds of
social agency. It therefore builds on suggestions that we
can advance critical accounting theories by adding to
post-structural Latourian work a concern with socially
material conditions of inequality (Chua & Degeling, 1993;
Cooper & Hopper, 2007), and by avoiding economically
deterministic, grand narrative readings of Marx’s theory
(Hopper et al., 1987). A key concept developed by the
paper for understanding the socio-political roles of partic-
ipation is the notion of ‘ontological movements’, conceived
of as progressive expansions in ontological plurality that
move the actors away from con?icts both over their partic-
ular social aims, and more general concerns about wages
and pro?ts. In tracking these movements, the continuum
demonstrates three main features of a critical anthropolog-
ical approach, which highlight the importance of the
anthropological studies for the related critical accounting
literatures.
First, to identify the start of the continuum, the paper
contributes a historical perspective to related theories of
the politics of participation (Child, 1969; Ezzamel,
Willmott, & Worthington, 2004; Grenier, 1988), that is,
an analysis of what history makes actors come to perceive
accounting as a means of resisting dominant ontological
limits. Building on Grenier’s (1988) anthropological analy-
sis of employee demands for participation in a US ?rm, the
continuum traces a relation between members in seven of
the cases attending actions with community groups and
other Empresas Recuperadas, and new aspirations to
participate in accounting. Identifying the ontological
movement underlying the initial extension of participation
by these organizations strengthens structuralist critiques
of mainstream studies of the effects of participation
(Hopper et al., 1987), which predict that participants will
identify with the apparently inevitable market-orientated
goals of an organization (Brownell and Hirst, 1986;
Merchant, 1998). It does this by showing that even aspects
of accounting that we might assume to be informed by nar-
row material ends, such as cost and wage determinations,
can enable actors to envision the social possibilities for
pursuing a wider range of goals.
Second, the paper adds a constructive perspective to
existing critical accounting knowledge of the roles of
participation in power and resistance (Hopper et al.,
1987; Knights and Collinson, 1987), and in political change
(Briers & Chua, 2001: Toms, 2002). Adopting a constructive
perspective means analysing how participation can
embody and encourage skills to increase the social sur-
pluses available for supporting more people’s goals and
capacities. By exploring how this ontological movement
took shape through the participative discussions of
budgets and reports in six of the cases, the continuum
highlights the importance of complementary ?ndings on
the social skills enhanced by participation provided by
Kasmir’s (2005) anthropological study of a US ?rm, and
Toms’ (2002) historical accounting analysis of the 19th
Century Lancashire cooperatives. It suggests that sustain-
ing resistance to broader structural con?icts may rely on
the actors constructively moving beyond tensions over
their speci?c social ambitions.
Finally, the paper reaches the end of the continuum by
analysing debates around the seemingly intractable prob-
lem of how to consolidate even more socially far-reaching
and durable actions, which informed the emergence of
open budgeting and reporting meetings that connected
the Empresas Recuperadas to community groups and other
cooperatives. Ruling out a de?nitive conclusion, the paper
argues that the dif?culties experienced by most of the
Empresas Recuperadas in making this ontological move-
ment point to need for a participative approach to our
research, that is, the need to re?ect on how our research
can take part in addressing the ongoing problematic of
ontological pluralism. This builds on Rodger’s (2005)
anthropological ?ndings on actors’ criticisms of participa-
tive budgeting in local government in Argentina, thereby
reinforcing recent contributions to debates on accounting
and pluralism (Brown, 2009; Dillard & Ruchala, 2005).
The paper concludes that studying actors developing high
levels of agency and participation requires critical
researchers to explore beyond the conventionally under-
stood distinctions between management accounting and
?nancial reporting, between organizations and societies,
and between theory and practice.
The following section develops the paper’s theoretical
framework in two stages. First, it highlights research gaps
that justify constructing the critical anthropological
approach, and then elaborates the research questions and
hypotheses using the concepts of social praxis and modes
of existence. Second, it formulates a set of propositions
about the potentials for participation and ontological plu-
rality in budgeting. ‘Research methods’ justi?es and
explains the methodology. ‘Ethnographic analysis’ uses
the materials to test and explore the framework. The paper
concludes by elaborating the continuum theoretically and
discussing the implications for future research.
Theoretical framework
Background
Following the participants of accounting beyond domi-
nant ontological boundaries means revisiting and attempt-
ing to reinvigorate an important critical tradition of
accounting research. Particularly during the 1980s and
the early 1990s, a body of accounting studies recognized
that redrawing theoretical and methodological boundaries
around accounting was a progressive political act that
could potentially support improvements in people’s well-
being and autonomy (Cooper & Hopper, 2007; Cooper &
Sherer, 1984; Tinker, 1980). Critical researchers, drawing
on structural Marxist perspectives, theorized participation
in accounting as manifesting the contradiction between
the collective work effort and the privatization of social
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 513
surpluses, which de?ned capitalist social and political
structures as a historical totality (Hopper et al., 1987).
For them, accounting was an ideological means of social
control, a means of ‘‘institutionalizing the subordination
of labour’’ (Hopper et al., 1987: 446), subordinating the
collective mass of people who sell their ability to work to
the minority that own the capital and therefore have the
social power to buy it (Armstrong, 1991; Bryer, 2006).
From this critical perspective, the organizational goals of
capital accumulation and pro?t maximization are ‘‘social
creations of a purely abstract nature’’, which had acquired
‘‘an existence and needs independent of individuals, and to
which individuals (had) become subservient’’ (Hopper
et al., 1987: 446).
However, attempts to reveal the human and historical
character of the effects of participation in accounting have
yet to answer the question of how to challenge the ‘‘taken-
for-granted reality of coercion, manipulation, and inequal-
ity that characterizes managerial regimes’’ (Knights and
Collinson, 1987: 474). Hopper et al’s (1987: 451) dialecti-
cal framework suggested, ‘‘dysfunctional behaviour as
expressed by management accounting convention might. . .
be resistance in reaction to inequities and contradictions’’.
Yet, much of the literature has focused on explaining why
the participants of accounting do not comprehend their
mutually con?icting class interests and mobilize collective
resistance (Hopper et al., 1987; Jönsson & Macintosh,
1997). The only route to progressive change, according to
this perspective, is through researchers somehow raising
the subjects’ consciousnesses, encouraging them to act in
their class interests (Galhoffer & Haslam, 2003). However,
by the mid 1990s, a growing internal critique, led by
researchers developing interpretive perspectives, argued
that structuralist theories of accounting were detached
from the speci?c and varying goals and values by which
the participants of accounting structured their everyday
actions (Ahrens & Chapman, 2006).
Interpretive accounting studies often show practitio-
ners informed by particular views and concerns making
decisions fraught with uncertainties (e.g., Ahrens and
Mollona, 2007; Briers & Chua, 2001). Many contend that
accounting has no pre-given roles (Burchell et al., 1980).
Some recast the mainstream notion of deviance as diver-
gence from the norms and values that speci?c participants
construct (Ahrens & Chapman, 2006). However, studies
often detach their actors’ compositions from an ‘‘analysis
of how. . . systems of belief are causally related to the
structure, relations and mechanisms present in speci?c
social formations’’ (see also, Hopper et al., 1987). Hopper
et al. (1987: 451) urged ethnographic researchers to recog-
nize the limited opportunities available to categorize cer-
tain forms of behaviour as acceptable or unacceptable.
According to Covaleski et al., (2013: 339, 356), systemic
power is relevant to budgeting because certain ‘‘knowl-
edgeable, self-aware, calculative’’ actors can ‘‘in?uence
their situation rather than be in?uenced by it’’ by manipu-
lating the existing symbolical frameworks that de?ne
situations. Similarly, post-structural ANT studies of associ-
ations highlight the abilities of certain actors to construct
and deconstruct momentary, insecure, and self-motivated
kinds of support for their essentially personal translations
of dominant ontologies (Briers & Chua, 2001; Qu & Cooper,
2011; Robson, 1991). They use this notion of change as
cyclical and individualized to question notions of power
and social agency as uniform and unchanging (Preston
et al., 1992). However, studies have not developed the con-
structive component of the critique (Latour, 2013), by ana-
lyzing how extending participation in accounting systems
could broaden the opportunities for actors to in?uence
their ontologies, supporting more pluralistic forms of
social agency.
Studies of the participation of organized labour in
accounting during the 1970s and 1980s explored the plu-
ralist school of industrial relations (e.g., Maunders, 1981;
Owen & Lloyd, 1985), which holds that accommodation is
achievable between the con?icting parties (Fox, 1966).
Some researchers rejected this concept of pluralism
because the interests of capital and labour are diametri-
cally opposed (Owen & Lloyd, 1985). Recent post-struc-
tural contributions seek to broaden the debate, calling for
accounting systems that are ‘‘more receptive to the needs
of a plural society; one that is ‘multi-voiced’ and attuned
to a diversity of stakeholders’ interests and values’’
(Brown, 2009: 317, see also, Bebbington, Brown, Frame, &
Thomson, 2007; Dillard & Ruchala, 2005). These research-
ers see notions of dialogic and agonistic democracies as
advancing a critical project that recognizes ‘‘the ways in
which power intrudes in social relations so as to deny het-
erogeneity and privilege certain voices’’ (Brown, 2009:
313). However, these studies have told us little about the
speci?c politics of making accounting systems more partic-
ipative and ontologically pluralistic. The reason is the per-
sistent tendency to see power as invariably asymmetrical
and external (Dillard & Ruchala, 2005), which leads studies
to draw a distinction between a present of oppressive
monologic modes of accounting, and a future of emanci-
pated, dialogic forms (Brown, 2009; Thompson and
Bebbington, 2005). This theoretical commitment could also
explain the apparent contradiction between concerns for a
participative approach that captures people’s differing
views (Bebbington et al., 2007), and the scarcity of ethno-
graphic studies. To avoid these theoretical dead ends, and
address the gaps in critical accounting highlighted in this
subsection, what follows argues that we need to develop
the research questions, hypotheses, and propositions, of
our critical anthropological approach.
Research questions and hypotheses
The ?rst question the approach needs to answer is what
underlay the initial construction of participation in cost
and wage calculations by the Empresas Recuperadas,
including its incompleteness, variability, and con?icts?
Combining social praxis and modes of existence enables
us to question the mainstream assumption that participa-
tion emerges merely to satisfy narrow economic interests.
We can hypothesize that, by developing their agency in
wider associative actions with other grass roots actors in
Argentina, many members formed new capabilities and
concerns to in?uence their social lives in particular ways
rather than depend on wages, pro?t, or apparently
powerful actors. This historical perspective develops the
514 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
structuralist notion of accounting as a historical totality
(Hopper et al., 1987), linking it to the critical anthropolo-
gists’ emphasis on particular social histories of struggle
(Gledhill, 2013). It means that while worker cooperatives
may move away from the traditional opposition between
the material interests of capital and labour by collectiviz-
ing ownership, which in the case of the Empresas Recuper-
adas includes equalizing members’ incomes, we should not
assume the end of their accounting controversies, that con-
structing participation manifests their universal commit-
ment to maximizing their pro?ts. Nor do we reach only
the interpretive conclusion that accounting is in?nitely
?exible and heterodox (Ahrens & Chapman, 2006).
In seeking to understand the social scope for participa-
tion and ontological plurality in budgeting, and the politics
of enhancing it, a critical anthropological perspective
encourages us to trace relations between the actors’
agency in wider associative actions, and the general variety
of goals and values that characterize the participative
preparation and discussion of accounting calculations. It
highlights that explaining greater ontological plurality in
accounting may also entail delineating the actors’ knowl-
edge of past grass roots efforts to participate in politics
(Gledhill, 2013; Marx & Engels, 1963), which, as anthropol-
ogists have shown, is particularly important for under-
standing the social history of Argentina (Bryer, 2011a;
Bryer, 2011b; James, 1988). We therefore do not assume
that ful?lling the actors’ basic physical and economic con-
cerns, and encompassing aims and viewpoints traditionally
excluded, arises spontaneously or without effort. Instead,
we need to explore the view that consolidating ontological
movements requires combining actions in ways that create
and organize the necessary social surpluses (Latour, 2005;
Marx & Engels, 1963).
This leads us to the second key question, which is what
roles did constructing participation in the planning and
control aspects of budgeting play in the Empresas Recuper-
adas’ sustaining and developing more pluralistic courses of
action, and in their con?icts and variations? We can
hypothesize that the collaborative preparation and discus-
sion of budgets and performance reports, and long-term
surplus allocation decisions, supported and developed abil-
ities and concerns amongst the actors to consolidate
actions that were more heterodox and far-reaching. We
may therefore qualify the common post-structural conclu-
sions that unity and power inherently subordinate
diversity (Brown, 2009), and that individualized and
ephemeral worldviews necessarily motivate actors (Briers
& Chua, 2001). A critical anthropological approach enables
us to be constructive, exploring a concept of the roles of
participation in progressive change as widening the oppor-
tunities for different people to develop their creative
ontological abilities, that is, to encompass more of their
own and others’ views, abilities, and aims (Latour, 2005:
247–262; Marx & Engels, 1962). To theorize how these
opportunities come about, along with their controversies,
critical anthropology recommends that we adopt a partic-
ipative approach, in other words, we should investigate
actors developing their levels of agency and participation,
rather than prescribing what they should be saying or
doing. It argues that the texts we construct also participate
in politics because, as small and fragile as they may be,
they offer a provisional staging of the activity of construct-
ing more pluralistic social agency.
The paper therefore presents the narrative that follows
as a critical anthropological modi?cation and extension of
Knights and Collinson’s (1987: 475) conclusion that the
political, emancipatory, role of critical research is ‘‘only
the deconstruction of knowledge. . . and even then it will
always involve discourses that engage in a ‘partial complic-
ity with what (we) denounce’’’. It argues that critical
research is a partially complicit deconstruction of assump-
tions about the objective and uni?ed character of account-
ing, but one with potential for ?guring out, along with our
actors, how to support more of the multiple and varied
perspectives that are generally excluded. To make this
case, the paper constructs a set of propositions about the
potentials for participation and ontological pluralism.
These build on speci?c aspects of related accounting liter-
atures by articulating contributions from the anthropolog-
ical studies through the three main components of the
framework.
A historical approach to the politics of participation: cost and
wage calculations
Child’s (1969) sociological classi?cation of the politics
of participation highlighted the potentially radical implica-
tions of involving actors throughout an organization in
decisions about the broad objectives of their activities,
rather than only in deciding on the everyday means of
achieving them. For Child, this was a possible means of
overcoming general social constraints to the scope for
employees actively to develop their unique abilities, ideas,
and aspirations. He therefore sought a critical departure
from mainstream studies that see the positive effects of
participation as ultimately enhancing economic perfor-
mance (Brownell, 1981; Merchant, 1998).
5
However, the
lack of empirical studies revealing these radical ontological
potentials led Child to the conclusion that, in general, partic-
ipation supported conventional notions of social perfor-
mance, mitigating con?ictive organizational conditions by
meeting employee concerns for job security and status with-
out undermining economic performance (1969: 92–103).
Structural Marxist studies of the ideological and political
aspects of participation question this conclusion, theorizing
con?ict and consent around ?nancial rewards and personal
privileges as an irresolvable game, which diverts the atten-
tion of managers and workers from the privatization of
social surpluses (Burawoy, 1979; Burawoy, 1985; Ezzamel
et al., 2004). Yet, while Grenier’s (1988) anthropological
study of participation in a US ?rm adopted a similar frame-
work, it recognized that some workers involved in wider
associative actions contested managerial decisions that they
understood as geared to boosting investors’ pro?ts. This
?nding was historical, the study suggested, because the
actors saw participation as a means of increasing their
5
Some studies of the positive effects of participation have raised the
question of ‘cross-national generalizability’ (Harrison, 1992), but few have
questioned the underlying assumption that the universal end of organiza-
tional activity is pro?t maximization.
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 515
power over their working lives and building on collective
memories of working class struggles in the US.
To understand more about what makes actors in partic-
ular settings and moments perceive accounting as a way of
questioning and resisting dominant ontological limits, we
need to add a historical dimension, that is, study their
social histories and classify their levels of agency in wider
associative actions through time along a continuum. As we
will see, this can extend from attending actions organized
by another group through to themselves organizing actions
connecting multiple groups and perspectives. Differing lev-
els of agency may encapsulate and shape ontological
movements that are unstable, contested, and varying over
time and space. Despite this messiness, we should be able
to discern ethnographically the new, more varied perspec-
tives and goals in the extension of participation. From this
historical perspective, our ethnography will be able to
reject the conventional view that social goals are only
those things that ?t within the apparent totality of pro?t
maximization. It will show that we can modify and extend
the structuralist notion of participation as inherently con-
tradictory by theorizing ways for actors to envision combi-
nations of actions that encompass more of their speci?c
concerns and abilities. We will see these positive budget-
ary effects, the actors’ sustained resistance to the power
that reduces them to precarious economic and material
concerns, may demand further extensions of participation
into areas of planning and control.
Constituting resistance: preparing and discussing budgets and
reports
Studies of accounting systems as social control have
recognized possibilities for actors to resist dominant power
relations (e.g., Bryer, 2006; Cooper & Hopper, 2007;
Hopper et al., 1987), but we still know very little about
how participation might enable resistance that is more
socially durable and far-reaching. For example, to address
this gap, Hopper et al. (1987: 451) suggested that employ-
ees could see an unfavourable variance as a more favour-
able distribution of effort or income. Knights and
Collinson’s (1987) study of a UK plant closure found that
its workers understood unfavourable variances as con?r-
mation of their insecure material interests, attached to a
traditional working class identity that accepted the remu-
neration package, as well as con?rming their lived experi-
ences of production problems. Oakes and Covaleski (1994:
579) suggested that resistance fails to sustain wider objec-
tives when dominant political structures limit the levels of
participation, thereby structuring the actors’ ‘‘objectives,
and the way these objectives (are) pursued and legiti-
mized’’. Their historical case study of pro?t sharing in the
US pointed out that workers were not ‘fooled’ by the ideol-
ogy in any simplistic sense. Kasmir’s anthropological study
of participation in US manufacturing adopted a similarly
deconstructive approach, revealing the pro?t maximizing
drive and the cynicism amongst many employees toward
the corporate ideology. However, Kasmir also suggested a
constructive perspective, which was that new ideas, moti-
vations, and con?dences amongst employees involved in
organizing wider actions enabled them to open up a debate
about investing pro?ts in a variety of employee and com-
munity-related concerns.
Helpful for developing this constructive perspective is
Toms’ (1998), Toms’ (2002) historical accounting study of
the 19th Century cooperative communities in Oldham.
His evidence suggested that participative reporting
encouraged members to ?nd ways of increasing surpluses
because it supported a more pluralist ontology of producer
cooperation and employee control, fostered through active
connections with community groups. Toms also indicated
that decreases in the levels of participation related to
reduced involvement in wider activities and the resurfac-
ing of individualized power struggles. Toms (2002) theo-
rized that collective ownership drives democratic modes
of organizing social action or socialization, in tension and
opposition to private ownership, which drives hierarchical
modes. However, this theory does not help us to under-
stand the antagonisms that may arise from moving away
from traditional con?icts of interests, or the ways in which
actors might deal with them. Resistance through account-
ing does not end with challenging the unequal distribution
of resources, because sustaining this challenge may require
the actors to ?nd ways of advancing beyond tensions and
debates amongst themselves about how they want to
shape their common social lives. According to the
constructive component of our framework, collaborative
discussions of budgets and performance reports, and
related initiatives such as subcontracting or internal pro-
cess improvements, can enable participants to satisfy a
wider range of perspectives and aims. However, our eth-
nography will suggest that consolidating a more pluralistic
social agency may require coordinating broader actions
with other organizations through participative, longer-
term surplus allocation decisions.
A participative approach to a more pluralistic social agency:
allocating surpluses
Because ethnography allows us to participate in the
actors’ construction of their social worlds, Ahrens and
Chapman (2006) argued that we should use it to broaden
the social ?eld of accounting research, where de?ning the
?eld is an explicitly theoretical act. We can develop this
view by connecting to recent dialogic theorizations of
pluralism and accounting. Brown (2009) draws on Freire’s
(1970, 1985) concept of re?exive learning as a means of
emancipation to formulate the dialogic accounting princi-
ples of ensuring effective participatory processes and
enabling accessibility for non-experts. These ideas ?t with
wider calls for theories that engage us with emerging
forms of collective activism, rather than leaving us
detached and pessimistic (Cooper, 2003; Cooper &
Hopper, 2007). Attempts to formulate dialogic models have
mainly focused on surplus allocation and ?nancial report-
ing, with some studies questioning conventional distinc-
tions between management and ?nancial accounting
(Cooper & Hopper, 2007). However, many conclude that
actors will be uninterested in, or unable to adopt, dialogic
accounting models because of the dominant role of
accounting methods in distributing surpluses through cor-
porations and the state (Brown, 2009). Rodgers’ (2005)
516 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
anthropological ?eld study of local government participa-
tory reporting initiatives in Argentina used a similar theo-
retical approach, arguing that the involvement of grass
roots organizations supported prevailing power relations.
Yet, it also re?ected that many of the actors, while critical
of the shortcomings of the budgeting, perceived that they
were building a more participatory society by learning
about the perspectives and concerns that were still
excluded, and devising ways of potentially encompassing
them.
Since pluralism is not something objective and external
that we can pre-determine or prescribe, we need to
develop our theories of the politics of more participative
and pluralistic accounting by engaging with the active the-
orizing of an increasingly broad and varied range of partic-
ipants. This participative approach requires a theoretical
framework that gives us the con?dence to investigate
empirically how actors learn to resist dominant ontological
limits, and to create ways of combining activities that are
more durable and ontologically expansive than prevailing
modes. Fig. 1 summarizes the possible reciprocal relations
between the actors’ social levels of agency in wider
associative actions (column 1), their social levels of partic-
ipation in budgeting (column 2), and their ontological
movements (column 3).
During the ?eldwork members of the eight cases devel-
oped their agency in a variety of wider associative actions,
including political demonstrations, public meetings, and
diverse cultural and educational activities. The compo-
nents of column 1 re?ect this diversity as a continuum that
ranges from the minimum agency entailed in attending
actions organized by others, through organizing the
actions of a speci?c group, to organizing actions connect-
ing multiple groups. The components of column 2 map this
continuum of agency to a continuum of participation in
budgeting that ranges from participation in cost and
income calculations, through participation in the prepara-
tion of budgets and reports, to participation in decisions
about surplus allocation. The components of column 3
map the reciprocal interactions of columns 1 and 2 onto
a continuum of representative (modal) ontological move-
ments ranging from resistance to dominant ontological
limits at a minimum, through moving beyond individual-
ized con?icts over the actors’ social aims that related to
broader social con?icts, to debates around how to consoli-
date more far-reaching and diverse actions.
The paper classi?es greater social levels of agency and
participation according to the collective opportunities they
opened for gaining skills and knowledge for shaping
actions that included a variety of perspectives. For exam-
ple, it classi?es a company in which a signi?cant majority
of its members are involved in organizing wider associa-
tive activities (e.g., a workshop or a political demonstra-
tion) as having an increased social level of agency than a
company in which the signi?cant majority of members
only attend actions organized by others.
6
Similarly, a signif-
icant majority of members preparing and discussing budgets
for developing diverse external actions counts as a greater
level of participation than if they only participate in deter-
mining departmental cost targets.
Relations between increasing social levels of agency in
wider associative actions and participation in budgeting
(columns 1 and 2) are clearly not the only socio-political
forces that embody and shape ontological movements (col-
umn 3). Fig. 1 is not a closed analytical structure. Rather, it
Fig. 1. Participation and ontological pluralism in budgeting.
6
A signi?cant majority means 60% or above (as indicated in Methods). In
most cases, members gradually rotated the participants of budgeting,
ensuring that they could sustain work activities, and also share knowledge
about how to compute and prepare the accounting data.
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 517
provides an analytical map that connects social praxis and
modes of existence to address gaps in critical accounting
from a comparative perspective. The paper uses this criti-
cal anthropological map to locate the speci?c ?ndings that
emerged from gathering and analysing data collected from
the eight cases (the three components of each column). Of
the eight cases, seven provided evidence of level 1 agency,
participation and ontological movement (row 1), six in
addition provided evidence of level 2 (row 2), but only
two provided evidence of level 3 (row 3).
Building a continuum means that we do not treat
insights into the roles of participation in these cooperatives
merely as isolated ‘exceptions’ or ‘experiments’, but
instead that we explain them in a way that helps us to
rethink the socio-political roles of budgeting more gener-
ally. We can for example relate the levels of Fig. 1 to the
main aspects of existing critical accounting theory impli-
cated in the paper’s ?ndings. Level 1 has implications for
structuralist critiques of mainstream effects of participa-
tion; level 2 for ANT studies of associations and structural
studies of resistance and social change, whereas level 3 has
implications for dialogic accounting theory.
Fig. 1 does not represent the grand claim that the move-
ments we trace in the remainder of the paper delineate the
path towards pluralism that all organizations will eventu-
ally follow. On the contrary, the overarching aim of explor-
ing this framework is to leave open all of the multiple,
speci?c potentials that may exist for making accounting
more participative and pluralistic. The following section
argues that this depends not only on our theoretical con-
structions, but also on our methodological choices about
research sites, and methods of data collection and analysis.
Research methods
Site selection
The central purpose and contribution of adopting a
multiple site ethnographic methodology to study worker
cooperatives is to understand the contradictory and
diverse character of extending participation in budgeting
using the critical anthropological framework outlined in
the previous sections. Previous ethnographic accounting
studies have explored the notion that participants of
accounting act according to different values and aims
through a focus on one or two case studies of private or
publicly listed companies (see for reviews, Ahrens and
Mollona, 2007; Jönsson & Macintosh, 1997). They have
yet to develop a methodology for systematically exploring
the possibilities for ontological plurality, and the politics of
expanding them. Some studies have recognized limits in
the form of central organizational objectives (Ahrens and
Chapman, 2004; Jönsson & Macintosh, 1997), but few have
investigated how actors might push them back, making
accounting progressively more participative and ontologi-
cally pluralistic. Post-structural ?eld studies of the con-
struction of new accounting techniques have stressed the
temporary and partial character of boundaries (Briers &
Chua, 2001; Preston et al., 1992). Studies of the roles of
accounting in reforming the public sector in particular
highlight the exclusion of actors’ interests and concerns
by regimes of pro?t maximization (Chua & Degeling,
1993; Preston, Chua, & Neu, 1997). Yet, missing from this
literature is an analysis of how the extension of participa-
tion in accounting could support the inclusion of more
people’s perspectives and views. On the other hand, critical
anthropological studies of participation have provided
insights into courses of action informed by a range of per-
spectives that do not ?t within dominant ontologies (e.g.,
Kasmir, 2005; Narotzky and Smith, 2006). However, none
has developed a continuum of the potentials for ontologi-
cal plurality beyond dominant limits by investigating orga-
nizations developing differing collective levels of agency in
wider associative actions, and constructing varying social
levels of participation in budgeting practices.
The paper’s study and theorization of relations between
social action, participation, and ontological plurality in
eight of the Empresas Recuperadas responds to these gaps
in ethnographic accounting and anthropological research.
By selecting six manufacturing companies and two service
sector companies and varying the sizes from small to med-
ium sized companies (from 25 to 170 members), the sam-
ple resembled the diversity and mix of sectors, and sizes, of
the Empresas Recuperadas more generally.
7
In common
with the majority of the Empresas Recuperadas, workers
formed each of the cooperatives between 2001 and 2003.
Table 1 below indicates the sectors of the companies, the
year of their formation, and their sizes.
Mode of access
The initial mode of access was through contacts pro-
vided by a colleague in the PhD program at the University
of Manchester who had already conducted ethnography in
Buenos Aires. To compose the sample, I followed connec-
tions between the organizations by attending associative
actions such as press conferences and meetings involving
other Empresas Recuperadas. I located cases that were less
active in the actions by spending time in semi-industrial-
ized neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires,
8
obtaining directions
from people living and working in the area. During the
research, my social position in each of the cases was as a
researcher interested to study the scope for developing
alternative, more socially diverse courses of action through
a focus on the roles of accounting. It is probable that the
actors responded, at least to some degree, to this interest.
However, I attempted to reduce biases and address the
research questions by reporting and interpreting the differ-
ences, tensions, and disagreements that I could discern in
and around the budgeting activities. I conducted ?eldwork
in the eight case studies successively, and combined this
with shorter, parallel return visits to each case. The eight
Empresas Recuperadas each provided access to observing
shop ?oor decision-making, break time interactions and
conversations, and meetings. However, my access to
7
Estimates of the total number of Empresas Recuperadas in Argentina
vary between 200 and 280. Approximately 70% are manufacturing compa-
nies and 30% are service sector companies. The Empresas Recuperadas are
all small to medium sized companies with an average of 50 members.
8
Living in one of these neighborhoods during the ?eldwork facilitated
this method of case selection.
518 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
observing the preparation and discussion of accounting data,
budgets, and reports, depended on the participative charac-
ter of the accounting in question. For example, if members
generally participated in cost and wage determination dis-
cussions, then directors permitted me to observe these
activities. The scope for observation therefore expanded
when the organizations constructed greater social levels of
participation during the ?eldwork.
Data collection
A combination of interviews and observations was nec-
essary to explore the hypothesized reciprocal relations.
Conducting semi-structured interviews was an important
means of grasping members’ differing understandings
and concerns not encompassed by dominant ontologies.
Open-ended interview questions elicited members’ under-
standings of their wider actions, their interpretations and
experiences of budgeting, and their understandings of
themselves and their social environment more generally.
This entailed inquiring into how members perceived the
state of the economy (including issues such as price ?uctu-
ations) and conventional businesses (and their pro?t mar-
gins). It involved soliciting perceptions of the government
and related institutions, particularly the of?cial coopera-
tive body (the IDEP), which is associated with the domi-
nant political party in Argentina, the Peronist Partido
Justicialista Party, and with the main professional account-
ing body (the FCPSEA). Finally, it also involved asking
members about their perceptions of grass roots organiza-
tions of the past and present. I was able to contextualize
collective memories of struggles by grass roots labour
and community organizations in Argentina by studying
aspects of a vast literature on the subject (Godio, 1980;
James, 1988).
I tape-recorded interviews lasting between one and two
hours with roughly 10 percent of members in each case,
though the exact proportion varied depending on mem-
bers’ willingness and availability.
9
The actors of the eight
case studies were mainly in their mid to late 40s and had
typically worked for over twenty years on the shop ?oor of
the former private companies. Interviewees included actors
who varied in their levels of agency in new associative
actions, and participated to differing degrees in the
organizations’ budgeting systems (including directors and
members in departments throughout the organization).
Though the emphasis was on capturing collective shifts in
thinking, to understand their controversial character, as well
as to reduce biases, I solicited interviews from those mem-
bers who expressed views that were more conservative or
con?icted with the general movement. Observations were
necessary to identify the extent to which the management
and accounting practices manifested the speci?c and varied
perspectives and aspirations expressed by individual
members. They allowed me to track how the extension of
participation could reveal variations in the general range
of goals and values structuring the organizations’ activities.
I conducted regular observation sessions in each case study
lasting between three and six hours, which I recorded as
?eld notes. As noted above, my access to observing the prep-
aration and discussion of accounting data depended on the
changing participative character of the budgeting systems
in each case.
Data analysis
By listening to the taped interviews and repeatedly
rereading the ?eld notes, I structured the materials chro-
nologically around the three interrelated dimensions: (1)
the actors’ social levels of agency in wider associative
actions, (2) their social levels of participation in budgeting,
and (3) the degree of ontological pluralism (ontological
movement), selecting representative passages and quotes
and translating them. First, to develop a classi?cation of
differing levels of agency in new associative actions, I iden-
ti?ed the forms of social activity engaged in by the actors.
This meant paying attention to the variety of groups and
perspectives involved (e.g., a demonstration connecting
several Empresas Recuperadas and unemployed worker
organizations). I also traced the extent of the actors’
involvement in the action (e.g., attending the action), and
its breadth, how many members were obtaining a similar
level of agency. I recorded differences in the social levels
that typi?ed the cases (focusing on a signi?cant majority
of 60% and above that obtained the level), and how these
changed over the course of the ?eldwork. This allowed
me to track the speci?c histories developed by organiza-
tions along a continuum. Second, to discern varying social
levels of participation in budgeting, I identi?ed what
aspect the actors were involved in doing (e.g., cost calcula-
tions), the proportion of actors who took part (again, focus-
ing on a signi?cant majority of 60 percent and above that
Table 1
Basic features of the cases.
Case Year formed Productive sector Number of workers
Gra?cas Katerina 2002 Manufacturing (printer) 50
Gra?cas Horacio 2001 Manufacturing (printer) 50
Gra?cas Belgrano 2002 Manufacturing (printer) 50
Gra?cas Gallina 2002 Manufacturing (printer) 25
Hotel Cordoba 2003 Services (hotel) 170
Editorial Soria 2001 Services (editorial company) 40
Helados Argentinos 2003 Manufacturing (ice-cream factory) 90
Polande 2003 Manufacturing (Metallurgy) 150
9
Members of the Empresas Recuperadas were generally keen to discuss
and share their experiences with researchers, seeing this as a further
manifestation of their move away from a former situation of subordination
and dependency.
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 519
obtained the level), and traced the extent of any in?uence
this had on planning and control of organizational action.
Finally, assessing changes in the degree of ontological plu-
rality as an ontological movement entailed identifying
what kinds of goals and views typically manifested them-
selves through the preparation and discussion of account-
ing data, budgets, and reports. My concern was to ascertain
whether dominant ontologies encompassed them, what
differences might exist in the general variety, and what
the main points of con?ict were. For example, were mem-
bers mainly debating their worries about wages or pro?ts
or did they discuss actions related to their speci?c interests
and ideas to in?uence their social world (e.g., organizing a
workshop about how to become involved in independent
media)? Did the focus of debates change? If so, how and
why did it change?
What follows uses the materials to explore the paper’s
continuum. The ?rst subsection develops the historical
component of the framework by examining the ontological
movement that characterized the initial construction of
participation in cost and wage calculations in seven of
the cases. The second subsection explores the movement
that underlay the extension of participation into planning
and control aspects by six of the cases, thus developing
the constructive dimension. Finally, the third subsection
develops the participative component by tracing the move-
ment that took shape through the implementation of open
budgeting and reporting by the most active and participa-
tive case.
Ethnographic analysis
A historical perspective: from life ‘under a boss’ to the
messiness of calculating costs
‘‘Life under the boss (bajo patrón) was keep the patrón
happy so I get my wages. It wasn’t much of an existence
because I felt dependent on the patrón, his accounts,
and his caudillo (political elite) ‘friends’. We said it
was ‘digni?ed work’, but nothing was certain. Maybe
you only learn what dignity is when you participate in
society, like with my workshops. At least now I have
some power over my wages. Plus working out our costs
gives me con?dence because I know that I don’t have
to rely on the caudillos, and there’s scope for my
workshops’’.
These re?ections made by Carlos, in an interview con-
ducted on February 20, 2006, help to explore the historical
component of the framework. Carlos was a member of Edi-
torial Soria, an editorial Empresa Recuperada that edited
?ctional books for small publishing houses in Buenos Aires.
During the ?eldwork, Carlos attended and organized work-
shops about creating the Empresas Recuperadas. The
notion of ‘digni?ed work’ that he criticized was tradition-
ally articulated by the Partido Justicialista Party, portraying
workers’ collective existences as limited to dependency on
wages and support provided by the patrón and the Peronist
state (Bryer, 2011a). Carlos’ critique suggests that the
patrón’s control of the accounts in the former company
played a part in limiting his social existence. However,
his recognition of a new sense of his own power and con-
?dence suggests a relation between his participation in the
cost and wage calculations of the Empresa Recuperada, and
a movement to questioning these limits – a move that was
not smooth and de?nitive, but rather was uncertain and
incomplete. We cannot identify and explain this relation
if we limit our view of the effects of participation to the
market economy (Brownell, 1981; Merchant, 1998) that
we understand as a natural unity. Yet, the critical view that
con?icts will invariably persist around narrow, material
and economic concerns (Burawoy, 1979) also appears
inadequate. To investigate how some actors learn to see
participation as a means of resisting the subordination of
their views and aims, and why others do not, we need to
explore their agency in wider actions, along with their
knowledge of past grass roots struggles. Identifying this
ontological movement thereby develops the historical per-
spective suggested by Grenier (1988).
During the ?eldwork, a signi?cant majority of members
in seven of the eight cases became involved at least in
attending actions organized by others, such as demonstra-
tions or workshops.
10
In each of these cases, a signi?cant
majority of members also participated at least in cost and
wage calculations. Gra?cas Gallina, which produced educa-
tional textbooks for small editorials, was the only case that
did not construct this social level of participation. Instead,
its six directors prepared and discussed accounting data in
separate meetings.
11
Only ?ve of the cooperative’s 25 mem-
bers regularly attended wider associative actions during the
?eldwork. In interviews and casual chats, comments made
by several members revealed a faint but perceptible relation
between their particular interests in new associative actions
and aspirations to participate in accounting. Yet, they gener-
ally acknowledged an overriding and persistent sense of
their subordination and dependency on wages, af?rmed by
directors through budgeting. In an interview conducted on
March 13, 2006, Janis, a Gra?cas Gallina member, gave the
following explanation of why she was not involved in wider
associative actions:
‘‘Personally, I’d like to get involved in the media side of
things. That’d take time and money, which might be
do-able through a budget, in principle, but in practice,
the budgets the directors make show that I have to keep
working to earn wages right now. Then there are the
caudillos at IDEP (the of?cial cooperative body) and
the FCPSEA (the of?cial accounting body) to think
about. . . you could say it’s not that different from when
we were bajo patrón’’.
Gra?cas Gallina members described in interviews and
during casual chats the connections between directors
and political elites who worked for IDEP and the FCPSEA,
suggesting that not much had changed. Yet, this re?ecting
was not simply passive or uncritical. Rodrigo, who worked
in graphics, often referred to the past struggles of grass
10
Some of these actors also developed agency in organizing the actions of
groups, rather than only attending them, as Section ‘Constructing resis-
tance: preparing and discussing budgets and reports collectively’ notes.
11
Directors of Gra?cas Gallina were elected by other members every two
years, which was common practice in the Empresas Recuperadas.
520 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
roots labour and community organizations in Argentina. In
an interview conducted on March 14, 2006, he com-
mented: ‘‘Some people think we should have a say in what
we do with our pro?ts, so we can build on our history of
struggle (lucha). It’d be great to do a workshop about the
Cordobazo
12
for example, things like other Empresas Recu-
peradas are doing. . . (.) But that happening seems a long
way off somehow’’. This suggests how knowledge of the
wider actions of others, both past and present, could encour-
age actors’ re?exivity about their capabilities and interests.
However, criticisms occasionally expressed in interviews
or amongst members during break times did not lead to col-
lective resistance during the ?eldwork. The following
describes a short extract from a meeting that took place
towards the end of ?eldwork (April 29, 2007). Ignacio, a
director, was reading from a performance report of the pre-
vious month (Exhibit A).
Concluding, Ignacio said, ‘‘We need to get serious about
the unfavourable variances we’ve been seeing consecu-
tively over the past three months and increase our mar-
gins. Carlos Mendez at IDEP is only going to back
pro?table companies. Fortunately, we’ve calculated that
by extending working hours to 11-h shifts, we should be
able to reduce overall costs and meet competitors’ turn-
over times’’.
13
There followed a moment of silence, then
some members began talking anxiously amongst them-
selves, but successfully cutting any potential intervention
short, Katerina, another director, demanded, ‘‘Quiet please!
There’s a lot to get through so everyone knows what they
need to do to’’.
By contrasting Gra?cas Gallina with Gra?cas Horacio,
we can substantiate our concept of the roles played by col-
lective levels of agency in challenging dominant ontologi-
cal limits and constructing social participation. Gra?cas
Horacio printed advertisements for several corporate cus-
tomers. A signi?cant majority of its members attended
associative actions during the ?eldwork. In June 2006,
the cooperative implemented departmental discussion
meetings through which a signi?cant majority of members
participated in cost and wage calculations. What follows
describes an extract from a meeting preceding this devel-
opment, held on May 30, 2006. Paulo, a director, had just
informed the others of budgeted targets for the upcoming
month (Exhibit B).
Juancito, a member who often attended meetings orga-
nized by independent media activist groups, responded,
‘‘Paolo, listen, we’re unhappy about not participating in
calculating this data. Every week I hear about another
group’s been co-opted by IDEP and the caudillos’’. ‘‘Are
you saying we’re ?xing the data?’’ replied Leo, a director.
Yolanda, a member who also attended the activists’ meet-
ings, ventured, ‘‘We’re all capable of taking part in working
out what wage we can take home, and some of us want to
invest in other stuff, like the independent media meet-
ings’’. ‘‘I know people have been complaining about this
for a while’’, responded Bergoña, a director, ‘‘but right
now the main issue is increasing our pro?tability, the rest
will have to wait’’. There followed debates between several
participants about whether wages or pro?ts should be the
focus, and about what their possibilities were for partici-
pating in society. An intervention from Mariela, a member
who sometimes attended and organized workshops at a
local cultural centre, gained support and moved the discus-
sion forward. She argued, ‘‘I think we all agree we’ll be able
to reduce costs if we’re all involved. We know our jobs
after all. But we also know that it’s no answer just to work
with our heads down to make wages or even just a pro?t,
we just argue and get de-motivated’’. Several participants
voiced their agreement and Mariela developed her point,
‘‘We’re living a chronic instability that stops us realizing
our potentials, so we need to start planning how each of
us can take part in our society more systematically.
Personally, I’d like to see the possibilities to run my
workshops’’.
The above evidence suggests that constructing partici-
pation may enable actors involved in attending wider
actions to identify scope for pursuing aims beyond pro?t
maximization, galvanizing resistance, and moving away
from con?icts over wages and pro?ts. We therefore cannot
assume that participation is merely ideological in the sense
of concealing and perpetuating structural con?icts
(Burawoy, 1979). Mariela’s perspective led to a general
agreement to implement a system by which members
throughout the organization discussed and prepared data
on the controllable costs for their departments, for exam-
ple, the total paper costs of the binding and cutting depart-
ment, which directors used in preparing the monthly
Graficas Gallina
Performance Report
April 2006
Budgeted Actual
Total Costs 300,500 301,100
Total Revenues 420,000 419,850
Gross Margin 119,500 118,750
Percentage 28.4 28.2
Exhibit A.
Graficas Horacio
Budget (June 20 06)
Budget
Total Costs 320,500
Total Revenues 520,000
Gross Margin 199,500
Percentage 38.3
Exhibit B.
12
The Cordobazo refers to a popular uprising that brought together broad
sectors of society during the ‘resistance period’ of Argentinean history
(1955–1976).
13
The average working day amongst the cases was 9 h.
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 521
departmental budgets and the general budgets and
reports. Directors then presented these to the other mem-
bers in monthly meetings, which aimed to provide them
with an opportunity to participate in discussing wages,
understood as labour costs calculated as a percentage of
total revenues.
14
The following narrates an extract from a
graphics department discussion that took place on April 6,
2007, which helps to delineate the characterizing ontologi-
cal movement. Horacio and Bernado sometimes attended
meetings with other Empresas Recuperadas, while Pedro
frequently helped to organize workshops at his local cultural
centre with unemployed worker (piquetero) organizations.
Bernado: ‘‘We’ve worked a good few extra hours this
month and improved our material costs, maybe we
could think about a small rise? I know it’s unlikely
though, with the recession, but what about participa-
tion? I’d really like to help out with those piquetero
workshops’’.
Horacio: ‘‘Hold on, I’m not sure we can afford the
costs’’.
Pedro: ‘‘Horacio come on! We can’t be worrying about
wages or beating our competitors, we know that way of
doing things is just one big contradiction that will take
us back to depending on the government or IDEP,
surely?
Horacio: ‘‘It’s not that simple, I mean, participation in
society isn’t just an idea. I’d like to do stuff with the
neighbourhood assemblies, you know, but it’s not easy’’.
Pedro: ‘‘No, we need to organize ourselves much better,
in fact, I think that we can reduce our costs by another 8
or 9 percent next month if we work on reducing the ink
waste and machine hours. That’s why I wanted to pro-
pose the cultural centre meeting with the piqueteros.
But it’s tough not doing our own budgets and reports. . .
I think we need that to make things more coherent, so
we can move forward’’.
We could not understand the con?icts and variations of
participation examined in this subsection if we assumed
that the actors were destined simply to reproduce prevail-
ing ontological limits. An expansion in the variety of goals
and values that actors can envision and seek to pursue is
evident in the debates around participative cost and wage
calculations. Gaining this historical perspective from
studying ontological movements means that we cannot
reduce the positive effects of participation to conventional
notions of social performance (Child, 1969). We can under-
stand ‘progressive’ social change as potentially encompass-
ing a wider spectrum of actors’ unique interests and social
skills, rather than simply af?rming uniform class interests
(Gledhill, 2013). However, the evidence does not support
the conclusion that simply extending participation is suf?-
cient for the sustained pursuit of a greater variety of objec-
tives, gaining autonomy from physical and economic
concerns. Rather, a continuum allows us to explore the
speci?c importance of constructing participation in more
extensive planning and control aspects, rather than only
in cost and wage determination, for enabling actors to sus-
tain their resistance.
Constructing resistance: preparing and discussing budgets and
reports collectively
Having traced relations between the actors attending
wider associative actions, their abilities to question pre-
vailing ontological limits, and the initial extension of par-
ticipation, we can explore the constructive dimension of
the framework. This requires us to examine the extent to
which extending participation in the planning and control
aspects of budgeting can support participants’ actively
accumulated abilities to expand the ontological borders
of collective activity. By building on ?ndings provided by
Kasmir (2005) and Toms (2002) in this way, we can modify
and extend post-structural theories of pluralism (Brown,
2009), theorizing how forms of unity and power may
develop that do not repress diversity to the same degree,
as well as what limitations might emerge. We can add to
existing critical accounting knowledge of the roles of
accounting in resistance (Toms, 2002), highlighting how
the collaborative preparation and discussion of budgets
and reports can help to move beyond debates over people’s
different aspirations to shape their societies, understand-
ing this as vital to moving away from traditional con?icts
of interest. Our analysis of this ontological movement
thereby seeks to revise previous structural (Toms, 2002)
and post-structural (Briers & Chua, 2001) framings of the
roles of accounting in political change.
During the ?eldwork, a signi?cant majority of members
in six of the cases became active in organizing the actions
of particular or multiple groups, rather than only attending
those organized by others. Each of these organizations also
constructed social participation in the preparation and dis-
cussion of departmental budgets and performance reports,
and in monthly general meetings to discuss the general
budgets and reports, often in relation to members’ propos-
als for developing their associative actions. For example, in
Gra?cas Katerina, a printer that produced books and mag-
azines for several large editorials, a signi?cant majority of
members took part in departmental discussions to make
the departmental budgets of controllable costs, and collab-
orated with the directors in composing the general budgets
and reports. These actors sometimes disagreed about the
actions that they wanted to support through making cost
savings, leading to evident frustration and the resurfacing
of concerns about wages and pro?ts. Nevertheless, those
members developing greater levels of agency often used
the departmental budget discussions to encourage others
to contribute their ideas to proposals that gained support
because they met a wider variety of perspectives. Agree-
ments and coherence in the budgeting were not uniform
or complete, nor did they result simply from temporary
14
During the ?eldwork, each of the cooperatives maintained a steady
average rate of pay of 3600 pesos per month. This was above the average
manual labourer salary of 3200 pesos per month (INDEC Incidencia de la
Pobreza de la Indigencia en el Gran Buenos Aires. URL:http://www.indec.
gov.ar/ (6/2008)), but lower than the average managerial salary in
Argentina of 4900 pesos per month. The practice of equal income
distribution was widespread in the Empresas Recuperadas. Some did
introduce differentiation between directors and ordinary members
(Howarth, 2007), but none of the cases examined.
522 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
manipulations of prevailing ontologies (Covaleski et al.,
2013), whereby particular actors asserted their views more
strongly (Briers & Chua, 2001). Concerns and issues raised
through discussions led Gra?cas Katerina to extend
participation in longer-term surplus allocation discussions
in May 2006. To trace the ontological movement that
this development embodied and shaped, what follows
describes a dialogue between members of Gra?cas Kateri-
na’s graphics department around their departmental per-
formance report for April 2006 (Exhibit C), which took
place on April 25. Natalia sometimes took part in environ-
mentalist meetings at her local cultural centre. Antonio
and Paulo both frequently organized actions that con-
nected various student and environmentalist activist
groups and the Empresas Recuperadas. They were discuss-
ing cost reductions achieved by subcontracting machines
used for the graphic design with other printer Empresas
Recuperadas including Gra?cas Belgrano:
Natalia: ‘‘Seeing this variance is de?nitely reassuring
and I think the guys from Gra?cas Belgrano are inter-
ested in mobilizing an action against the mining com-
panies the government’s supporting. It might seem
too ambitious though when we’re in an economic crisis
still, and won’t other people have other plans?’’
Antonio: ‘‘I actually think we can have more con?-
dence. We’ve made these cost savings, and you guys
know I’ve been meeting with the activist groups in Bue-
nos Aires and Cordoba for a while now, right? We want
to do a demonstration’’.
Paulo: ‘‘Good, but I think we should be trying to con-
nect what we’re all doing, so we save more time and
money, and build on each other’s ideas. How about a
round of open discussions? Then you can gain more
support’’.
Antonio: ‘‘Well, I think Hotel Cordoba would give us the
space for free. Natalia, what do you reckon?’’
Natalia: ‘‘Actually, the theatre group who do stuff at my
centre would support this, they might put on an event’’.
This suggests how actors can see variance as revealing
the social scope to encompass a wider range of goals and
perspectives, and therefore to move beyond their contro-
versies. In the subsequent meeting, Natalia, Paul, and Anto-
nio presented their proposal along with their April
performance report and some basic data about expected
costs and revenues of the activity (Exhibit D).
Chris, a director, summed up concerns voiced by some
others, ‘‘It’s an interesting project, but what happens if
your revenue sources fail? We need to make sure we’ve
got the surpluses to earn a liveable wage. Plus, why should
we invest in this rather than in Luckas’ cultural centre pro-
ject?’’ Natalia answered, ‘‘Well, we’ve shown you the
favourable variances’’. ‘‘Plus I think we can be fairly sure
about building new connections and commitments with
other groups through the discussion day, so we all gain
new perspectives on what we’re doing’’, commented Nuria,
a director with experience organizing meetings of Empre-
sas Recuperadas. She added, ‘‘We can also reduce labour
and advertising costs, for example, Belgrano will certainly
print ?yers for the event and help organize the talks.
Luckas’ project could be part of those efforts, right?’’ This
evaluation helped to reduce tensions over the different
projects and concerns about securing a stable income.
Some members from the paper cutting and binding depart-
ment highlighted plans to reduce waste that furthered a
sense of agreement and con?dence amongst participants.
However, Tomas, who was involved in a previous sub-con-
tracting initiative, highlighted potentials for failure, ‘‘Actu-
ally, I think we should all be thinking about the broader
surplus allocation implications; every action has to ?t
within a broader matrix of actions, otherwise it could all
still come apart. Sub-contracting and improving what we
do as a company has been ok, but it’s too internal still’’.
Carlos, who worked with Tomas on the subcontracting,
developed his point, ‘‘Ok, so participation means that we
need everyone to take part, but most Belgrano members
aren’t involved in their budgeting, Mabel and Dina (Belgr-
ano members) told me they haven’t been able to get their
workshops off the ground. I’ve heard similar stories from
the guys in Polande’’.
After some meetings to debate the issue of extending
participation with directors and members in Belgrano, in
August 2006, a group of Katerina members conducted
three training sessions to support the implementation of
budgeting discussions and meetings. In practice, Belgrano
members sometimes disagreed about their different pro-
jects, and over concerns about wages and pro?ts. Yet, con-
sistent with the notion of ontological movement, they also
managed frequently to move beyond these controversies
by including as many perspectives as possible in the
actions under discussion. For example, in a budgeting
meeting held in January 2007, Freda who worked in paper
cutting, and other members from paper cutting and print-
ing departments, proposed a participation webpage,
including in the proposal basic data about expected costs
and revenues (Exhibit E):
Freda summarized the intentions of the project: ‘‘We
?gured that we need to facilitate new connections so we
can all develop our interests and not worry so much. For
example, some of the piqueteros told us they want to
debate the question of whether to make cooperatives.
Indymedia keeps down costs and some of us are learning
April 2006
Graphics Department
Performance Report
Budgeted Actual
Materials 8,500 7,000
Labour Costs 10,000 10,000
Machines and miscellaneous 12,020 9,010
Total Costs 33,520 26,010
Exhibit C.
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 523
how to do the upkeep of the site’’. Marta, a director,
expressed doubts, ‘‘My worry is the advertising; won’t it
just be another sell-out social networking site?’’ Some ten-
sions arose and other members attempted to advocate
alternative proposals. Barthos, who was involved in the
project, helped to refocus the discussion by suggesting,
‘‘Maybe it would help if we clari?ed the surplus allocation
plans?’’ This prompted others to voice their support and
comments. Paul, a member who rarely participated in dis-
cussions, ventured, ‘‘That might help some of us to see how
we could contribute to the plans, and not worry so much
about our basic issues’’. Following further discussion, Bar-
thos drew together people’s points, ‘‘So the problem seems
simple enough, the question is how everyone can partici-
pate. We might be able to answer that if we’re all talking
about investing on a bigger scale. Right now, were debating
too much over our own projects, and we’re trying to save
money in ways that are too narrow’’.
A continuum that recognizes the development of peo-
ple’s creative ontological abilities rather than relying on
traditional social categories is important because the roles
of accounting in resistance and political change therefore
include widening the opportunities for this development.
We can understand this as central in enabling the redistri-
bution of resources in ways that do not simply reaf?rm
asymmetrical forms of power. For example, some partici-
pants, particularly those involved in organizing actions
connecting multiple perspectives, were apparently capable
of shifting the focus away from individualized frictions and
involving less assertive members through the discussion of
proposals that included more perspectives and were more
far-reaching. We can therefore qualify the post-structural
ANT theory that participants will invariably disagree or
attempt to co-opt each other to af?rm their particular
ideas and aims. Studying ontological movements also
emphasizes the importance of rejecting any prescriptive
approach to political change (Cooper, 2003). For example,
we have begun to delineate shortcomings that would have
been otherwise imperceptible. Rather than encourage
political apathy, the analysis has pointed to a growing rec-
ognition amongst the actors of a need for broader initia-
tives than measures such as internal process changes or
sub-contracting, potentially realizable through extending
participation in long-term surplus allocation decisions.
Open budgeting and reporting: participating in a more
pluralistic social agency
The case of Hotel Cordoba, a medium sized hotel, helps
to explore the ?nal movement described by the paper’s
continuum, which took the form of debates about how to
consolidate increasingly broad and varied associative
actions. Hotel Cordoba ‘completes’ the continuum because
its members had generally developed the greatest level of
agency, with a signi?cant majority of members regularly
involved in coordinating various actions connecting multi-
ple organizations including the other cases. Consistent
with our hypothesized relations, Hotel Cordoba had con-
structed the most participative budgeting system, involv-
ing a signi?cant majority of members in budgeting and
long-term surplus allocation decisions, and implementing
open budgeting and reporting meetings. The case helps
to re?ect on how our research can take part in the chal-
lenge of ontological pluralism, by encouraging us to be
cautious about attempting to formulate a de?nitive theo-
retical model of pluralistic accounting (Brown, 2009). It
enables us instead to develop the notion of broadening
the accounting ?eld (Ahrens & Chapman, 2006), analyzing
how constructing more expansive connections between
organizations and societies may relate to bridging manage-
ment and ?nancial accounting (Cooper & Hopper, 2007).
Our participative approach thereby develops Rodger’s
(2005) anthropological study, highlighting how studying
actors developing high levels of agency and participation
can help us to connect critical accounting theory and
practice, thereby redrawing the ontological borders of
accounting.
In interviews and casual chats, Hotel Cordoba members
recognized that they had developed knowledge and under-
standings of the dif?culties of their activities, and how to
move beyond them, through increasing levels of participa-
tion in budgeting. For example, in an interview conducted
on June 7, 2006, Stefan commented,
Discussion day:
Politics of environmental crises
Budget
Total Costs
(Labour hrs, advertising, food and
beverages)
8,000
Total Revenues
(Ticket sales, food and beverages
sales)
7,400
Exhibit D.
Participation webpage Budget
Total Costs (Developers) 6,700
Total Revenues (Advertising)
(First 3 months)
14,700
Profit Margin 8,000
Exhibit E.
524 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
‘‘I think budgeting discussions gave us that push to stop
?ghting over wages or pro?ts, but we disagreed about
all the things we wanted to do, participating in society.
So, I guess we all needed to make longer-term alloca-
tion decisions to involve more perspectives in our
everyday work too, to see those connections, like open-
ing up the hotel’s salons for grass roots organizations to
use them free of charge’’.
This suggests that collaborative surplus allocation dis-
cussions enabled members to perceive and build links
between their daily work activities and their wider asso-
ciative actions. In a casual chat about the grass roots orga-
nizations that often used the hotel spaces for meetings
(November 25, 2006), Fernanda commented, ‘‘They collab-
orate in other ways, so, in the end you save costs and
engage with new perspectives. We try and plan for that
through investment discussions. What holds us back
sometimes though are our own egos, we think we can tell
everyone what they should do’’. Tensions and disagree-
ments that sometimes arose in monthly surplus allocation
meetings indicated concerns amongst many participants to
reject any prescriptive understandings of their relations
with other groups. For example, during a meeting held
on December 20, 2006, a comment from Leonardo, a mem-
ber involved in a proposal for organizing a trade fair
(Feria), that members should ‘‘show people how they
should be participating’’, provoked several criticisms. ‘‘Leo-
nardo, let’s not put ourselves on some pedestal, we’ve
learned how to develop participation by doing, it’s not
something that you can ram down people’s throats’’,
responded Tobias. Vivien, a director, added, ‘‘I agree, and
we’ve also re?ected on what we’ve done through our bud-
geting, otherwise we couldn’t learn, no? We don’t want to
end up being another IDEP that people depend on’’.
Exactly, so maybe we need to involve other people in our
meetings, like the guys working on the Feria?’’ suggested
Tobias.
During the following week, some members shared inse-
curities and doubts about Tobias’ suggestion. Jeronimo
commented to Zeta, ‘‘It’s not enough bringing people into
our meetings given the surpluses and actions we need to
organize now. After all, we’re just one organization. I think
we need to bring together everyone’s accounts in an open
meeting’’. ‘‘That makes sense to me’’, Zeta responded,
‘‘there’s so much anger and frustration about how the mul-
tinationals and the state control everything. We need a
way of organizing society’s pro?ts and capital, coordinat-
ing all of our different projects. That probably isn’t possible
if we’re sticking to our management accounts’’. In a meet-
ing held on February 10, 2007, members discussed and
eventually agreed to implement open budgeting and
reporting meetings. One took place on April 20, 2007. This
meeting brought together people from other Empresas
Recuperadas, including each of the case studies, a variety
of newly formed grass roots worker cooperatives as well
from more established cooperatives linked to the IDEP,
piquetero groups, and various other grass roots organiza-
tions. What follows examines material gathered from
observing the meeting that helps to trace the underlying
ontological movement. Dariana, a member of Agrovida, a
cooperative that sold cheap organic fruit and vegetables
to people living in poor areas of Buenos Aires, was conclud-
ing her presentation of cost savings made in the previous
month (Exhibit F):
‘‘We want to start free classes on healthy eating and
expand into other cities and regions, so we’ll need to a
bigger base for that investment, and to get more people
involved’’. Lucia, a member of Cooperative Trebolles, an
agricultural cooperative connected to IDEP, com-
mented, ‘‘A lot of us at Trebolles would love to be part
of Agrovida’s project, but we still have no real say in
decision-making, especially about how we invest our
time or ?nances’’. Osvaldo from Hotel Cordoba sug-
gested, ‘‘Lucia, what about us visiting Trebolles and giv-
ing a talk about the potential bene?ts of collaborative
budgeting and surplus allocation?’’ Pedro, a member
of Helados Argentinos, expanded the point, ‘‘Loads of
cooperatives are still working bajo patrón so we need
more systematic consultancy, but doing stuff like that
means having a broader strategic perspective. I think
meetings combining management and ?nancial reports
could be a way to move forward, we can’t stay enclosed
in our own ‘management’’’. Juan, a director from
Polande, raised a concern, ‘‘Look, we don’t have time
to be going to meetings constantly, we can’t just forget
about the pro?t margins of our competitors’’. Neverthe-
less, Graciela another member of Polande responded,
‘‘To me it makes sense, otherwise what differentiates
us from IDEP, the FSCPA, or pro?t-maximizing multina-
tionals? Juan you know that we ?nd ways of saving
time when we’re more motivated by what we do’’.
Graciela’s response prompted a discussion about what
it meant to differentiate. Inés from a neighbourhood
assembly in central Buenos Aires argued, ‘‘Our assembly
needs more money to stay independent from the politi-
cians, we can see here that the Empresas Recuperadas
are making enough to contribute more to us’’. However,
this prompted several criticisms. Olivio, an activist
involved in connecting several piquetero groups, devel-
oped these proposing, ‘‘What we need is a regulatory
body that has capital and technical support structures
but is accountable to us, to society, not just the same
minority who focus on their money and power’’. In
response, Rodrigo, a retired manager who was involved
in coordinating activities of several neighbourhood
assemblies, suggested, ‘‘Couldn’t open meetings be used
to regulate a fund for participation? It’s pretty clear we
need a way of supporting and coordinating all the
different actions’’. Following some further discussion,
Lisa, a member of Editorial Soria, attempted to bring
together people’s ideas, ‘‘What we’re talking about then
is a regulatory body that everyone can be part of
through open meetings of a participation fund? Because
the only way we can all pursue our different projects,
instead of worrying about money or corruption, is if
we all can, not if we leave the decision-making to the
likes of IDEP and the FSCPA’’. The meeting concluded
with a general agreement to hold an open meeting
including the organizations’ budgets, performance
reports, and ?nancial reports, for participants to plan
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 525
and coordinate the construction of a regulatory body.
Melina fromHotel Cordoba summed up a common view
of this conclusion, ‘‘Let’s not assume that open meet-
ings, or even a new regulatory body, are instant solu-
tions that will give everyone a chance to participate,
but I think we will be able to learn more about what
actually are our abilities and how we can develop
them’’.
It seems from the above evidence that even high social
levels of participation remain partial because the actors
may identify goals and perspectives that are not yet
included, and devise ways of potentially including them.
The case thereby suggests the importance of an open-
ended continuum for developing our understanding of
the partiality of accounting (Cooper & Sherer, 1984), rather
than a closed analytical framework. In seeking knowledge
of greater social levels of participation, we should be wary
of drawing sharp distinctions, between management
accounting and ?nancial reporting, between organizations
and wider regulatory bodies, and also between theory and
practice (Cooper & Hopper, 2007). By rejecting the notion
that actors will invariably replicate exclusionary power
structures, a participative approach adds substance to dia-
logic theorizing, helping to identify and explain how actors
broaden their ontological borders through participative
processes and the involvement of non-experts (Brown,
2009). We can conclude that using open budgeting and
reporting to construct a new regulatory body is not a
mechanismguaranteed to result in a totalizing transforma-
tion, a completely new social agency. Rather, it could be a
learning opportunity that might enable a steadily broader
range of actors to create more freely than traditional social
interests allow by participating in shaping ontologies for
their collective lives.
Discussion and conclusion
Discussion
The paper set out to develop existing critical accounting
theories and knowledge of the socially contradictory and
divergent aspects of participation in budgeting through a
critical anthropological approach. It pursued a de?nition
of critical anthropology as an empirical and philosophical
inquiry into the roles of participation in constructing
greater ontological pluralism, by developing the contribu-
tion of those anthropologists who, by exploring beyond
traditional divides over social agency, have created an
emerging focus on studying ontological movements. The
paper operationalized a framework combining social
praxis and modes of existence using a multiple site ethno-
graphic methodology of worker cooperatives, thereby
extending the insights gained from previous single case
studies of the Empresas Recuperadas (Bryer, 2011a;
Bryer, 2011b). It built a continuum for re?ecting more
broadly on the potentials for enhancing the participatory
and ontologically pluralistic capacities of accounting sys-
tems through historical, constructive, and participatory
components.
To test these claims empirically, the paper ?rst sought
to add a historical dimension to formulating theories of
the positive effects of participation, tracing connections
between actors’ different concerns and interests that dom-
inant ontologies failed to satisfy in the particular historical
context of Argentina (Gledhill, 2013; James, 1988). Its evi-
dence shows that while members of the Empresas Recu-
peradas were often concerned about their wages and
pro?ts in an unstable economy, many also wanted to take
part in accounting because they aspired to participate in
speci?c ways in constructing their society. The notion that
participatory budgeting has an inherent and ?xed role is
thus highly problematic, whether we understand this as
responding to the market (Brownell, 1981; Merchant,
1998), or as re?ecting general asymmetrical power rela-
tions (Hopper et al., 1987). However, the ethnographic
concept of speci?c and ?exible roles is also inadequate
(Ahrens & Chapman, 2006; Bryer, 2011a). We found we
needed to situate the apparent incoherence and conten-
tiousness of participation within a comparative perspec-
tive (Abram & Weszkalnys, 2013), which could track
progressive expansions in the range of goals and values,
beyond prevailing limits. By tracing the ontological move-
ments shaped by and re?ected through the actors’ differing
levels of agency and participation, the continuum located
the budgeting of Gra?cas Gallina as the ‘least participative’
case and Hotel Cordoba as the ‘most participative’, under-
stood within a broader struggle embodied in Argentinean
society.
Critical anthropology therefore modi?es and develops
the structuralist theory of the inevitable limits of participa-
tion (Burawoy, 1979; Ezzamel et al., 2004), helping us to
investigate what makes some actors in particular places
and moments accept their subordination, and also what
motivates and enables others to use accounting to widen
the boundaries of their worlds. In identifying a link
between attending wider actions and viewing accounting
as a means of resistance, the historical component of our
framework theorized the importance of anthropological
?ndings provided by Kasmir (1996) and Grenier (1988)
for critical accounting. Using a multiple site perspective
helped to develop and test this insight. For example, for
Agrovida Performance Report
March 2007
Budgeted Actual
Total Costs
(Labour/Raw materials)
300,500
(180,500/120,000)
260,100
(175,200/84,900)
Total Revenues 420,000 420,850
Gross Margin 119,500 160,750
Percentage 28.4 38.2
Exhibit F.
526 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
Carlos from Editorial Soria, participating in cost and wage
determination discussions supported a new con?dence,
gained from his organization of workshops on the Empre-
sas Recuperadas, enabling him to break from traditional
bonds with caudillos. Pedro from Gra?cas Horacio under-
stood setting and meeting targets for departmental con-
trollable costs as a means of asserting potentials to
coordinate his actions with piquetero organizations. He,
like many other members developing greater levels of
agency, was frustrated therefore by not participating in
more far-reaching aspects of planning and control. This
?nding illustrates the necessary complexity we get from
comparing by constructing a continuum, rather than
conceiving of dichotomies such as participatory as opposed
to hierarchical, or dialogic vs. monologic modes of account-
ing. It adds substance to Child’s (1969) emphasis on
determining the objectives of action, suggesting that par-
ticipative cost calculation alone did not satisfy the degree
of pluralism that many participants envisioned as neces-
sary to overcome persistent con?icts between wages and
pro?ts.
It seems that even in worker cooperatives mere accom-
modation between the interests of capital and labour is
elusive. The critical anthropological insight, however, is
how extending participation in budgeting and perfor-
mance evaluation could encompass goals and views typi-
cally excluded by this dichotomy, which was vital for
moving away from persistent antagonisms between wages
and pro?t. The case of Gra?cas Katerina, in particular,
added this constructive perspective to accounting critiques
of the pluralist school of industrial relations (Owen &
Lloyd, 1985), thus articulating a link between ?ndings pro-
vided by Kasmir’s (2005) anthropological study of US man-
ufacturing companies, and Toms’ (1998, 2002) historical
accounting analysis of cooperatives. For example, we saw
that members in the graphics department used favourable
variances achieved through sub-contracting machinery to
support a day of open discussions. We cannot say that
the ontological movement underlying this participation
captured all of the actors’ concerns and ideas, but that it
did enable actions that were more widely satisfactory.
Critical anthropology therefore supports the ANT con-
clusion that accounting gives social life a coherence that
is simultaneously unstable (Briers & Chua, 2001; Preston
et al., 1992), but quali?es it by questioning any assumption
that such insecurity is uniformly oppressive or individual-
istic. For example, the evidence from cases such as Gra?cas
Belgrano indicated that debates and disagreements over
how to make use of cost savings for members’ different
associative activities were more likely to lead to positive
outcomes than debates over increasing pro?ts or wages.
Rather than becoming de-motivated and frustrated, mem-
bers planned and evaluated collective actions structured
by a greater variety of perspectives and goals, such as the
participation website. Furthermore, the case of Gra?cas
Katerina suggested that extending participation in
longer-term surplus allocation, and supporting others to
implement collaborative budgeting, could enable more
far-reaching, heterodox, and long-lasting actions. Account-
ing is therefore not simply a means for individuals to
manipulate ontologies to their personal advantage
(Covaleski et al., 2013). Participatory budgeting may ‘curb’
individualized, unsustainable goals in a way that widens
individuals’ opportunities for in?uencing their social lives.
We learned from re?ecting on the political roles of crit-
ical accounting research in the ?nal case how an increasing
variety of actors could address the question of how to sup-
port goals and views marginalized by dominant regulatory
and accounting institutions. By developing Rodger’s (2005)
anthropological analysis of participative budgeting in local
government, this participative approach reinforced criti-
cisms of the roles of accounting in public sector reforms
(Chua & Degeling, 1993; Preston et al., 1997), demonstrat-
ing that the subordination of multiple actors’ interests to
regimes of pro?t maximization is not natural or inevitable.
Perhaps the most signi?cant ?nding from Hotel Cordoba
was the actors’ common conviction that bridging manage-
ment accounting and ?nancial reporting could potentially
construct a more pluralistic regulatory institution, that is,
one that that enables organizations to produce more freely
from conventional social interests. This ?nding supported
renewed efforts to connect accounting theory with radical
politics (Brown, 2009; Cooper, 2003; Cooper & Hopper,
2007). However, we need more studies of organizations
developing high levels of agency and participation to
understand such potentials, and how they could inform
struggles for participation and plurality in other places
and moments.
Concluding comments
Greater social levels of participation in budgeting and
greater degrees of ontological plurality have emerged from
our study of Argentinean worker cooperatives bound
together by an inter-dependency that was not smooth, uni-
form, or mechanistic. The relationship took shape through
tensions, disagreements, and differences between people,
many of whom were actively learning to rethink and
develop their social aims and abilities, and to challenge
prevailing ontological limits positively and collectively.
This critical anthropological perspective reinforced scepti-
cism about the enduring economic features of accounting
because it located the politics of participation within a
structural theory of interests (Hopper et al., 1987), which
nevertheless allowed us to analyze the behaviour of actors
who were collectively pursuing goals and values beyond
traditional binary concepts of social agency. It developed
the concept of a historical totality, exploring how con?icts
in and around participative budgeting could stem from the
problem of maximizing the surpluses available for more
people meaningfully to in?uence their social environ-
ments. Using this critical basis for comparison, our descrip-
tions and interpretations were better able to resist the
danger highlighted by Knights and Collinson (1987: 475)
for partial complicity with what we denounce.
By constructing a continuum of participation and onto-
logical pluralism, our critical anthropology provided an
answer to the question of how to challenge the ‘‘taken-
for-granted reality of coercion, manipulation, and inequal-
ity that characterizes managerial regimes’’ (Knights and
Collinson, 1987: 474). It did not present this answer as
de?nitive or universally applicable. Its concern was to
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 527
demonstrate the bene?ts for critical accounting of
operationalizing the complementary anthropological inter-
ests of Marx and Latour in seeking to understand how
actors can consolidate their more expansive ways of struc-
turing action. This meant not attempting to illustrate a pre-
determined model of what accounting should be, but
instead to develop the efforts of researchers to use empir-
ically grounded research to redraw its theoretical and
methodological borders (Ahrens & Chapman, 2006;
Cooper & Hopper, 2007). Its ?ndings reinforce the need,
?rst raised by Child (1969), for more studies investigating
the potentially radical ontological features and effects of
participation.
The key advantage of a framework combining social
praxis and modes of existence is therefore the potential it
gives to draw wider ontological boundaries, informing us
of new views, motives, and skills, that accounting can sup-
port and even generate. Studying the roles of participation
in the politics of more pluralistic forms of social agency
therefore quali?ed the otherwise solid critical accounting
conclusion that boundaries privilege interests and sustain
partiality (Cooper and Sherer, 1984; Cooper & Hopper,
2007). It enabled us to delineate how actors built support
structures that encompassed others’ differing perspectives,
as well as their own worldviews (Qu & Cooper, 2011). The
combined historical, constructive, and participative contri-
butions of the framework demonstrated that we could
usefully move beyond tensions within structural and
post-structural accounting literatures using anthropologi-
cal insights. Focusing on cooperatives emphasized that
accounting does have general, socially material functions
stemming from the capitalist epoch. However, it has also
shown that conventional divides between capital and
labour are not immutable, and demonstrated concepts that
might help future studies to detect how the complex spec-
i?cities of their organizations add up to collective wholes
which are more satisfactory to their subjects.
We cannot know in advance the wider associative
actions that will help actors to question the orthodoxy of
prevailing ontological barriers, or the contentious forms
by which they might take shape as more encompassing
totalities. Studying the ontological movements shaped,
contested, and substantiated by these worker cooperatives,
supported a reassessment of claims about the diversity of
accounting that remain comfortably within prevailing
totalities (Ahrens & Chapman, 2006). Yet, it has cautioned
us against assuming that collective ownership mechanisti-
cally provides completed answers to the question of the
roles of accounting in progressive social change. Modifying
and extending insights from Hopper et al. (1987) and Toms
(2002), the paper has suggested that these roles cannot be
limited to undermining pro?tability or even to distributing
economic resources more equally. We found that even
accounting developments that at ?rst sight we might think
of as driven by general economic interests, such as the
extension of participation in cost and wage determination,
helped to move actors away from traditional insecurities
and con?icts by articulating more of their unique perspec-
tives and concerns. A potentially useful way of further
engaging with the paper’s continuum therefore would be
through a ?eld study of a conventional ?rm implementing
participation initiatives in multiple segments, examining
the associative actions that may surround them, and focus-
ing on the scope for actors to develop their levels of
agency. Such work may thus offer further insights into
how employees’ lived experiences of production problems
(Knights and Collinson, 1987) can progressively become
their active visions and demands for broadening the range
of goals for which ?rms allocate surpluses (Kasmir, 2005).
While more immediately relevant to ethnographic work,
the framework could also guide accounting history studies
of participation, for example, revisiting struggles for
worker participation. By investigating relations between
the actors’ social levels of agency and participation (or lack
of) – perhaps by using contemporary testimonies, media
reports, and local histories – this research could add
important complexities to existing explanations of the
weaknesses and con?icts of labour participation and resis-
tance (Oakes & Covaleski, 1994).
We cannot determine by logic or distil from experience
all of the aspects of accounting systems that could support
ontological movements. The continuum highlighted the
relative usefulness of monthly budgets and performance
reports for reducing controllable costs in ways that
enhance the scope for more varied perspectives and goals.
However, the data did not allow analysis of other aspects
of budgeting such as full cost calculations, ?exible budgets
and accompanying variance analysis. Future studies of
participation in these techniques could therefore explore
further the social mutability of the limits of more conven-
tional ‘management’ accounting practices. The case
supported the view that constructing participation in dis-
cussions of longer-term surplus allocation could help to
overcome these apparent limits, bridging work activities
and wider social actions. We can ask similar questions
about other methods of strategic management accounting
such as capital budgeting, activity-based costing, and stra-
tegic performance evaluation systems. The framework
could also support future studies of relations between
these techniques and wider planning and control technol-
ogies such as enterprise resource planning systems.
The case concluded by pointing tentatively to the scope
for bridging internal and external reporting activities to
represent and organize the surpluses of a participative
society, but the study was necessarily of limited duration.
To explore this conclusion would require us to extend
the timescale to encompass the Empresas Recuperadas’
responses to the Argentinean version of the global ?nancial
crisis and recession, connecting with the continuing
anthropological research of grass roots participative
responses to contemporary crises. Such work, whether in
Argentina or examining participation in other settings,
might further enhance our understanding of how more
people’s potentially wide-ranging skills, views, and aims,
can gradually replace the demands of private pro?t and
capital in durable ways.
Marx and Latour both stress that the crises of dominant
social and political structures mean that people are
thinking about and responding collectively to their
shortcomings and ?aws. Crises therefore need not be sim-
ply negative phenomena. The paper has argued that
exploring beyond conceptual boundaries that constrain
528 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530
our understanding of accounting is inter-dependent with
this happening in practice; that a viable critique should
enable researchers to engage positively with the critical
theorizing of an increasingly broad and diverse range of
actors. To facilitate this has been its overarching aim.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Chris Chapman and Mahmoud Ezzamel
for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of
the paper. I also thank the reviewers and the editor for
their comments and recommendations.
References
Abram, S., & Weszkalnys, G. (2013). Introduction. In S. Abram & G.
Weszkalnys (Eds.), Elusive promises: Planning in the contemporary
world (pp. 1–33). Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
Ahrens, T., & Chapman, C. (2004). Accounting for ?exibility and ef?ciency:
A ?eld study of management control systems in a restaurant chain.
Contemporary Accounting Research, 21(2), 271–290.
Ahrens, T., & Chapman, C. (2006). Theorizing practice in management
accounting research’. In C. Chapman, A. Hopwood, & M. Shield (Eds.),
Handbook of management accounting research. London: Elsevier Ltd..
Ahrens, T., & Mollona, M. (2007). Organizational Control as Cultural
Practice: a Shop Floor Ethnography of a Shef?eld Steel Mill.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 32, 305–331.
Armstrong, P. (1991). Contradiction and social dynamics in the capitalist
agency relationship. Accounting, Organizations, and Society, 16(1),
1–25.
Avineri, S. (1968). The social and political thought of Karl Marx. London:
Verso.
Bebbington, B., Brown, J., Frame, B., & Thomson, I. (2007). Theorizing
engagement: The potential of a critical dialogic approach. Accounting,
Auditing, and Accountability Journal, 20(3), 356–381.
Briers, M., & Chua, W. F. (2001). The role of actor-networks and boundary
objects in management accounting change: a ?eld study of the
implementation of activity-based costing. Accounting, Organizations
and Society, 26(3), 237–269.
Brown, J. S. (2009). Democracies, sustainability and dialogic accounting
technologies: Taking pluralism seriously. Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, 20, 313–342.
Brownell, P. (1981). Leadership style, budgetary participation, and
managerial behaviour. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 6(3),
307–321.
Brownwell, P., & Hirst, M. (1986). Reliance on accounting, budgetary
participation, and task uncertainty; tests of a three way interaction.
Journal of Accounting Research, 24, 241–249.
Bryer, A. R. (2011a). Accounting as learnt social practice: The case of the
empresas recuperadas in Argentina. Accounting, Organizations, and
Society, 38(8), 478–493.
Bryer, A. R. (2011b). Purposive action and conscious practices: The case of
the empresas recuperadas in Argentina. Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, 1, 1–5.
Bryer, R. A. (2006). Accounting and control of the labour process. Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, 17, 551–598.
Burchell, S., Clubb, C., Hopwood, A., & Hughes, J. (1980). The roles of
accounting in organizations and society. Accounting, Organizations and
Society., 5–27.
Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process
under monopoly capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burawoy, M. (1985). The politics of production: Factory regimes under
capitalism and socialism. London: Verso.
Child, J. (1969). The business enterprise in modern industrial society.
London: Collier-Macmillan Limited.
Chua, W. F., & Degeling, P. (1993). Interrogating an accounting-based
intervention on three axes: instrumental, moral, and aesthetic.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 18(4), 291–318.
Cooper, C. (2003). Critical accounting in Scotland. Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, 13(4), 451–462.
Cooper, D., & Sherer, M. (1984). The value of corporate accounting
reports: arguments for a political economy of accounting. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 1, 207–232.
Cooper, D., & Hopper, T. (2007). Critical theorising in management
accounting research. In C. Chapman, A. Hopwood, & M. Shields (Eds.),
Handbook of management accounting research. London: Elsevier Ltd..
Covaleski, M., & Dirsmith, M. (1988). An institutional perspective on the
rise, social transformation, and fall of a university budgetary category.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 33(4), 562–587.
Covaleski, M., & Dirsmith, M. (1995). The preservation and use of public
resources: transforming the immoral into the merely factual.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2–3, 147–173.
Covaleski, M., Dirsmith, M., & Weiss, J. (2013). The social construction,
challenge and transformation of a budgetary regime: The
endogenization of welfare regulation by institutional entrepreneurs.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 38(5), 333–364.
Dillard, J., & Ruchala, L. (2005). The rules are no game: From instrumental
rationality to administrative evil. Accounting, Auditing, and
Accountability Journal, 18(5), 608–630.
Ezzamel, M., Willmott, H., & Worthington, H. (2004). Accounting and
management – Labour relations: The politics of production in ‘the
factory with a problem’. Accounting, organizations and society, 29(3–4),
269–302.
Fox, A. (1966). Managerial ideology and industrial relations. British Journal
of Industrial Relations, 4, 366–378.
Galhoffer, S., & Haslam, J. (2003). Accounting and emancipation: Some
critical interventions. London: Routledge.
Gledhill, J. (2012). Introduction. In J. Gledhill & P. Schell (Eds.), New
approaches to resistance in Brazil and Mexico. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Gledhill, J. (2013). Redeeming the promise of inclusion in a neoliberal city.
In S. Abram & G. Weszkalnys (Eds.), Elusive promises: Planning in the
contemporary world (pp. 117–135). Oxford and New York: Berghahn
Books.
Godio, J. (1980). Historia del movimiento obrero latinoamericano/1
anarquistas y socialistas, 1850–1918. Mexico: Editorial Nueva Imagen.
Grenier, G. (1988). Inhuman relations: Quality circles and anti-unionism in
American industry. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Harrison, G. (1992). The cross cultural generalizability of the relation
between participation, budget emphasis, and job related attitudes.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(1), 1–15.
Howarth, M. (2007). Worker Cooperatives and the Phenomenon of Empresas
Recuperadas in Argentina: an Analysis of Their Potential for Replication.
Oldham: RAP Spiderweb.
Hopper, T. et al. (1987). Accounting for accounting: Towards the
development of a dialectical view. Accounting, Organizations and
Society, 12(5), 437–456.
Jönsson, S., & Macintosh, N. (1997). CATS, RATS, and EARS: Making the
case for ethnographic research. Accounting, Organizations and Society,
22(3/4), 367–386.
James, D. (1988). Resistance and reintegration. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Kasmir, S. (1996). The myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, politics and
working class life in a Basque town. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Kasmir, S. (2005). Activism and class identity: The Saturn auto factory
case. In J. Nash (Ed.), Social movements: An Anthropological reader.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Knights, D., &Collinson, D. (1987). Disciplining the shop ?oor: Acomparison
of the disciplinary effects of managerial psychology and ?nancial
accounting. Accounting, Organization and Society, 12(5), 457–477.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-
Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. (2013). ‘Biography of an inquiry – About a book on modes of
existence’, (translated from the French by Catherine Porter). Social
Studies of Science, 43(2), 287–301.
Marx, K., Engels, F. (1962). Selected works, (Vols. I–II), Moscow.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1963). In R. Pascal (Ed.), The German ideology parts I
and III. New York: International Publishers.
Maunders, K. (1981). The disclosure of company ?nancial information to
employees and unions: the state of the art. AUTA Review, 5–19.
Merchant, K. A. (1998). Modern management control systems. Saddle Hill:
Prentice Hall.
Narotzky, S., & Smith, G. A. (2006). Immediate struggles: People, power, and
place in rural Spain. California: University of California Press.
Oakes, L., & Covaleski, M. (1994). A historical examination of the use of
accounting based incentive plans in the structuring of labour–
management relations. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 19(7),
579–599.
Owen, D., & Lloyd, A. (1985). The use of ?nancial information by trade
union negotiators in plant level collective bargaining. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 10(3), 329–350.
A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530 529
Preston, A. M., Cooper, D., & Coombs, R. (1992). Fabricating budgets: A
study of the production of management budgeting in the National
Health Service. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(6), 561–593.
Preston, A. M., Chua, W. F., & Neu, D. (1997). The diagnosis-related group-
prospective payment system and the problem of the government of
rationing health care to the elderly. Accounting, Organizations and
Society, 22(2), 147–164.
Qu, S., & Cooper, D. (2011). The role of inscriptions in producing a balanced
scorecard. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 36, 344–362.
Robson, K. (1991). On the arenas of accounting change: the process of
translation. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16(5/6), 547–570.
Rodgers, D., (2005). Unintentional democratisation? The Argentinazo and
the politics of participatory budgeting, 2001–2004’. .
Roseberry, W. (1997). Marx and anthropology. Annual Review of
Anthropology, 26, 25–46.
Schaumberg, H. (2008). In search of alternatives: The making of
grassroots politics and power in Argentina. Bulletin of Latin American
Research, 27(3), 368–388.
Thompson, I., & Bebbington, J. (2005). Social and environmental reporting
in the UK, a pedagogic evaluation. Critical Perspectives on Accounting.,
16(5), 507–533.
Tinker, T. (1980). Towards a political economy of accounting: an empirical
illustration of the Cambridge controversies. Accounting, Organizations
and Society, 4, 147–160.
Toms, J. S. (1998). The supply of and demand for accounting information
in an unregulated market: Examples from the Lancashire cotton mills,
1855–1914. Accounting, Organizations, and Society, 23(2), 217–238.
Toms, J. S. (2002). The rise of modern accounting and the fall of the public
company: The Lancashire cotton mills 1870–1914. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 27, 61–84.
530 A.R. Bryer / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 511–530

doc_882515722.pdf