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We present a critical literature review debating Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The aim of this study is to understand the role of politics in the construction of hegemonies in SEA research in Brazil. In particular, we examine the role of hegemony in relation to the co-option of SEA literature and sustainability in the Brazilian context by the logic of development for economic growth in emerging economies. The methodological approach adopts a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. The study employs a hermeneutical, rhetorical approach to understand and classify 352 Brazilian research articles on SEA. We employ Brown and Fraser’s (2006) categorizations of SEA literature to help in our analysis: the business case, the stakeholder–accountability approach, and the critical case. We argue that the business case is prominent in Brazilian studies. Second-stage analysis suggests that the major themes under discussion include measurement, consulting, and descriptive approach. We argue that these themes illustrate the degree of influence of the hegemonic politics relevant to emerging economics, as these themes predominantly concern economic growth and a capitalist context. This paper discusses trends and practices in the Brazilian literature on SEA and argues that the focus means that SEA avoids critical debates of the role of capitalist logics in an emerging economy concerning sustainability. We urge the Brazilian academy to understand the implications of its reifying agenda and engage, counter-hegemonically, in a social and political agenda beyond the hegemonic support of a particular set of capitalist interests.

Following the adage that “an image is worth ten thousands words,” this chapter will use ethnographic pictures to illustrate two main ideas. First, tourism should be analyzed as one of the names of power. It is so because tourism fractures the continuum of reality differentiating the elements; it constantly names and arranges them into cultural categories. It also channels the relations among those elements and engenders a distinctive time-space binomial (Bakhtin, 1937) that renders these relations meaningful to people. Tourism gives a peculiar sense to the social life of groups in destinations and, consequently, orientates their daily life practices. The second idea is that tourism is probably the most sophisticated elaboration of capitalism. It is a new historical mode of managing reality. It contributes to perpetuate the center–periphery exploitation system and makes feasible the conversion of any place into a desirable destination. It not only provides with the necessary materiality of transport, room and board, and entertainment for customers, but it also commercializes the intangible and produces new meanings. Thus, to study tourism implies to analyze that complex set of sociotechnical practices and devices that, linking the desirable and the feasible, enable certain social groups to spend their leisure time away from their quotidian, including what they do in those places and the social processes induced at their destinations.

The Spanish region commercially branded as Costa Blanca has long been a popular destination for millions of holidaymakers from both northern Europe and Spain itself (Gaviria Labarta, 1974; Moreno Garrido, 2007). However, from the 1960s onward, these Mediterranean shores have also attracted thousands of people from northern Europe for other purposes, some as more or less permanent residents, and others as seasonal peripatetic visitors, traveling back and forth between their first, second or third homes (Aledo, 2008). In many ways, the increase in second home visits and long-term stays in areas such as Mediterranean Spain parallels well-known developments of seasonal and full-time retirement and other migration in North America to what has been termed the Sunbelt states (Mings & McHugh, 1995). The situation in Europe, however, is more complex, due, for instance, to the crossing of national borders, a variety of spoken languages, and possibly also for greater cultural differences. Certain parts of such flows are related to perceptions of diminishing distances and to the progress of internationalization processes in societies in general, where tourism and other long-distance mobilities are not only an outcome, but also a crucial catalyst.