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This paper addresses the limited discourse on cooperative enterprise in the U.S. business and accounting academy. Structured as a critical essay motivated in part by Professor Richard Vangeermersch’s recommendation to expand accounting historians’ horizons to include more discourse on left-leaning topics, the paper reviews accounting literature on the cooperative organizational form that points up sustainability challenges in relation to conventional profit computations. The author argues that the reasons for the academy’s lack of attention to cooperative ventures are difficult to pinpoint but may be symptomatic of an underlying ‘implicit religion’ of capitalist ideology that does not welcome alternative points of view.