Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Alice Bryer

Alice Bryer has an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (2010-2011) to explore the practical and cultural roles of accounting control of the labour process, focusing on worker cooperatives within the globally emerging context of the ‘social economy’. 

The project aims to build on her doctoral research, which examined the empresas recuperadas (ERs): worker cooperatives established during Argentina’s 2001 socio-economic crisis.  Based on eight ethnographic case studies, her approach formulated a motivational model of social control, the ‘politics of value creation’, and highlighted accounting as a neglected area within the anthropology of labour.

The postdoctoral project will develop her findings in two main ways.  First, it aims to build connections between accounting and anthropology through a series of interdisciplinary workshops.  Second, it will explore links between theory and practice through interactive workshops that bring together cooperative practitioners, anthropologists and scholars of accounting.  Through the collaboration of Goldsmiths, Universitat de Barcelona, and the Escuela de Organizaciones Industriales in Madrid, these workshops aim to build into a broader project that explores interdisciplinary approaches to the politics of the social economy.

Selected publications

Bryer, A. (Accepted 09/02/2009) ‘Beyond Bureaucracies? The Struggle for Social Responsibility in the Argentine Worker-Run Companies’, Critique of Anthropology. 

Bryer, A. (2009) ‘Social Responsibility for Labour in the Argentinean Worker-Run Companies’, in R. Raman (ed) Corporate Social Responsibility: Discourse, Practice and Perspectives, forthcoming (London: Palgrave).

Bryer, A. (Accepted 01/01/2010) ‘The politics of value creation: The case of the Argentinean empresas recuperadas’, Dialectical Anthropology.

A monograph based on Alice’s doctoral research, ‘The politics of value creation: Struggles for self-determination and social responsibility in the Argentinean empresas recuperadas’, will be published by Lap Lambert Academic Publishing in 2010.