Beyond Bureaucracies? The Struggle for Social Responsibility in the Argentine Workers’ Cooperatives

• Published in: Critique of anthropology Vol. 30; no. 1; pp. 41 - 61
• Main Author: Bryer, Alice
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.03.2010; Sage Publications; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Accountability; Accounting; America; Anthropology; Argentina; Bankruptcy; Between-subjects design; Bureaucracy; Bureaucratization; Business ethics; Capital; Capital formation; Co-operatives; Communication; Companies; Conflict; Cooperatives; Cultural capital; Decision making; Economic anthropology; Economic crisis; Economic systems; Empowerment; Ethics; Ethnography; Ethnology; Exploitation; Idealistic; Innovations; Intersubjectivity; Leadership; Marxism; Neoliberalism; Objectivity; Political economy; Political leadership; Politics; Productivity; Profitability; Social capital; Social goals; Social processes; Social relations. Intercultural and interethnic relations. Collective identity; Social responsibility; Social structure and social relations; Socioeconomic factors; State formation; Workers; South America; Argentina; politics; Argentina; state formation; leadership; workers’ cooperatives; social responsibility; accountability; conflict; Leadership; Formation of the State; Cooperative; workers' cooperatives; Alternative approach; Bureaucracy; Political economy; Social responsibility; leardership; Wrestling; Conflict; Worker; Politics; Profit; Business
• ISSN: 0308-275X; 1460-3721
• DOI: 10.1177/0308275X09345414

■ Can workers run socially responsible enterprises or are they doomed to bureaucratization and self-exploitation under the pressures of the prevailing socio-economic system? This article focuses on the empresas recuperadas (ERs), workers’ cooperatives established during Argentina’s 2001 social and economic crisis. Combining ethnography and a critical political economy of accounting, it provides a worker-centred approach to ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR), which recognizes the politico-cultural complexities of class and state formation as constitutive social processes. Responding to the effects of neoliberal restructuring, thousands of Argentine workers occupied, revived and operated bankrupt or abandoned companies, often using assembly-based decision-making. Challenging idealistic or deterministic approaches, the article identifies links between the everyday politics of profitability, wider processes of state formation and workers’ social understandings. It reveals that while some ERs used accounting as a bureaucratic tool of moral and political leadership that constrained social goals, others democratized their accounts to promote social responsibility centred on self-empowerment. My findings suggest the possibilities for qualitative innovations in political economy by demonstrating that objectivity in accounting needs grounding in intersubjectivity, in the ethnography of communication between subjects relating to a shared world. They support Marx’s theory of determination by identifying the practical possibilities for worker-run companies to control capital as a social relation and promote human-centred CSR through their accounting control, rather than simply imposing the usual productivity targets.