Accounting as learnt social practice: The case of the empresas recuperadas in Argentina

Can accounting practices give coherence to the diverse and unique qualities of organizational activities rather than constraining them? According to the conventional view, accounting is a means of ordering activity from above to achieve the inevitable and uniform end of profitability. The paper challenges this perspective by developing a concept of learnt social practices, a methodology for theorizing the social and subjectively creative capacities of accounting as a practice embedded in social relations; collective activities through which individuals shape wider meaningful realities, potentially reshaping their own needs and understandings. The methodology develops through an ethnographic analysis of the empresas recuperadas – worker cooperatives formed as a grass roots initiative within a wider societal movement in Argentina, which responded to economic and political crises in 2001 by creating new organizational and institutional practices. By analyzing descriptions and observations of social interactions and dialogues, the paper identifies and explains how accounting practices can distort communication, but can also push individuals to clarify their concerns through the constitution of social consensus. Building on attempts to theorize social order and diversity, the paper concludes by formulating a concept of the conscious, relational activities through which accounting practices represented and constructed a form of inter-dependency that was sensitive to the needs and understandings of individuals.