Healthily Crazy Business! Solidarity Economy and Financial Education as Emancipation Tools for the Mentally Ill/INEGOCIO SANAMENTE LOCO! ECONOM
| Autor | Maragni, Felipe Teixeira Genta |
| Cargo | Contabilidad cr |
Introduction
Modern society--especially in the West--has been functioning in a capitalist-based economy where money is usually seen as the ultimate goal of a worker's life, making people prone to completely separate two moments of their routine: when working (making money) and when not working (making life). Competitiveness is also a remarkable characteristic of capitalism that encourages the search and acquisition of a variety of items by the best price while ensuring that the most prepared competitors (companies, brands, sports[wo]men, etc.) win.
As argued by Debord (2003), capitalism is an integrated spectacle in which it is extremely difficult to disentangle our personal lives from our working lives. This is even harder now, because of the technological advancements. Therefore, our bodies become machines of production and consumption, in a cycle where we work to consume and consume to exist. As the author emphasizes "[t]he spectacle's form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system's conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production" (p. 15).
This rapid growth in capitalist global market economy has arisen concerns regarding social and environmental issues, including environmental stewardship and justice in economic life (Shearer, 2002). Disparities among individuals in terms of income generation and wealth accumulation are highly evident, especially when we compare the richest with the poorest, or top earners with bottom earners. A recent report by the World Inequality Lab (2018) exposes an alarming reality: in 2016, those in the top 1% of global income earners received 22% of total income, while the bottom 50% received only 10%. Pandemic has worsened inequality even more.
A shadow is cast over those who don't reach high grounds. In a capitalist economy, winners build up advantages while losers build up disadvantages on future competitions, making it constantly harder to achieve a notorious position on the economic hierarchy (Singer, 2002). Vanegas et al. (2020), for instance, in a study carried out in López de Mesa neighborhood (Medellín, Colombia), indicated that women with access to university education and with house savings have better control over their finances than their counterparts, which, in turn, widens even more the gap between rich and poor, forming a distorted ever-growing cycle.
This predatory competition in a globalized market capitalism, on the one hand, as Shearer (2002) presents, has produced considerable benefits, such as cheaper consumer goods, an increase in standard of living, and higher per capita income for many. On the other hand, to secure these competitiveness, government and individuals might give up wage and benefits provisions, job security, maximum workweek provisions, or the right for collective representation by unions. Thus, the logic underneath capitalism and the neoliberal economy is that the economic agent, whether an individual or a corporation, is only accountable for the achievement of their own private economic goals, and that the collective good is in agreement with the pursuit and attainment of private interest. It is also congruent to the libertarian argument, which states that we should be free to act anyway we want as long as no harm is done to others. These conceptions lead to the logic that the individual is responsible for their own destiny, which, at the same time that empowers them, also diminishes the importance of a community engaged in improving their members' lives.
Ribeiro and Ribeiro (2012) prove that people with physical disabilities face initial difficulties at work, but that they are motivated by their recognition and the possibility of developing their identities as workers, as well as by the need to overcome challenges and to manage conflicts. The importance of career development programs is also emphasized. These authors conclude that career development programs are key on building opportunities for those with disabilities, stimulating a more receptive workplace that is based on differences and on the possibility of constructing an identity at work, even if the process is still marked by several conflicts, meaning that they will have to face the difficulties of being inserted.
If it is already difficult for those with physical disabilities, the prospect is much more critical for individuals with mental illnesses. Few are the companies apt to hire, train and maintain a worker with this health condition, and fewer those willing to. The fear of a mental breakdown due to conflicts, deadlines and company's goals, among any other routine scenarios presented in any enterprise, discourages employers to hire individuals with mental illnesses, who are usually seen as, simply, a "crazy/lunatic/disturbed person." As Ribeiro (2009) poses:
The antagonism and the impossibility of synthesis of the work/craziness duality relegated the person labelled as "crazy" to the exclusion of any construction in the labor world, reducing his/her existence to the stigma of crazy, and therefore, destined to live apart of the action of developing social relations and to occupying a position of socially assisted, since s/he would be the holder of a deteriorated identity. (p. 99) (1)
In this paper, when referring to "mental illness" or "mental health issues," we are focusing on more severe forms of mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, multipolarity or autism. However, we recognize there is a wide variety of other forms of mental disorders suffered by an increasing proportion of the population, some of which are intrinsically correlated to work conditions.
The (re)integration and emancipation of a mentally ill individual in society must include labor and its externalities, such as income generation and personal empowerment. Here, empowerment is understood as "a social-action process that promotes participation of people, organizations, and communities towards the goals of increased individual and community control, political efficacy, improved quality of community life, and social justice" (Wallerstein, 1992, p. 198).
It is imperative to open our minds to new forms of economic relationships advancing in the real world and through academic research towards a more critical vision, thinking of and building a society that won't let itself be steered in the name of self-interestedness and individuality. Calás et al. (2009) point of view is that the traditional perspective on entrepreneurship is aimed at reproducing the current economic system (i.e. market capitalism), based on the assumption that the collective good shall be achieved by the pursuit of economic self-interest. This perspective fails to consider entrepreneurship as a much more complex phenomenon, and that the simple fact that one is engaging in entrepreneurship means also engaging in a process of social change.
Therefore, we aim to address this issue at hand from the perspective that individuals of a society who become excluded by the dominant economic model are able to emancipate themselves from the institutional violence of the logic of capitalist market and economy by being creative and building emancipatory venture models, offering alternative means of work and income generation, gaining control and accountability over their own (personal, financial, accounting and operational) decisions, respecting individual working rhythm and their limitations (both in personal and social lives), including rather than excluding, being collective and not individualistic, being supportive instead of indifferent, teaching, building bridges of communication, destroying barriers, bringing people closer rather than fending them away, and, finally, showing that traits that are considered a weakness in the capitalist model of production can be developed as potentialities in the solidarity economy (SE). Therefore, we shall recognize all these as health promotion actions.
On the other hand, opposing the capitalist logic, SE has as its principle the unity between cooperative labor and collective ownership of the means of production. SE also aims to prioritize solidarity over competition, the preservation of employment over profitability, and the distribution of the outcomes of work among direct producers (Pitaguari, 2010).
The approach of this study falls in the realm of SE as an alternative for traditional (and often excluded) entrepreneurship, and our main fields of study are two Brazilian Solidarity Economy Ventures (SEVS), O Bar Bibitantã and Ponto Benedito de Economia Solidária e Cultura, that work for the social and financial inclusion of mentally ill individuals.
Our study is positioned in the strand of the critical accounting research proposed by Bay et al. (2014), arguing for financial literacy as an emancipatory and transformative practice. As reinforced by Stieger and Jekel (2019), traditional concepts of financial literacy can function as a legitimizing mechanism for the (re)production of neoliberalism and neoclassical economy's ideals. For their part, Lefrançois et al. (2017) show that a financial education course can produce financial savvy citizens instead of educating critically good citizens.
After this introduction, we explore the theoretical literature discussing topics such as health promotion, solidarity economy, and financial education, weaving relationships among them and critical accounting and exposing the interdisciplinarity of this study. Next, we present the methods used, based on an action-research framework. Subsequently, we learn more about O Bar Bibitantã and Ponto Benedito, and analyze how the implementation of a financial education program for the worker-members of these enterprises took place, highlighting once more the fundamental importance of the critical accounting perspective. We conclude with an in-depth reflection on the...
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