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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.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze, from the Latin American thought approach (LTA), the ideas that were produced after World War II on innovation and entrepreneurship in Latin America. It should be mentioned, from now on, that in this approach the topics, phenomena, or problems are always contextualized within a broader problem to be solved, namely that of development. To this end, two axes of analysis are addressed from which the analytical bases, approaches, key concepts, and public policy proposals are located. The first axis explores the proposals related to the development and the idea of the center-periphery model. The second analyzes the role of innovation and entrepreneurship based on the industrialization model, to identify the problems or inadequacies of Latin American entrepreneurship. The proposal emphasizes the need to contextualize entrepreneurship in the broad dimension of development. In this journey, it will be observed that the role of the entrepreneur has been of relevance for the import substitution industrialization (ISI) model in its beginnings by assigning her/him the task of supplying the domestic market by substituting imports, to reduce degrees of dependence in an asymmetric economic world; in the maturity stage of the model, the need for entrepreneurship was affirmed by incorporating innovation. Briefly, we will see that when the model changed, mainly in the 1980s, the firm would assume the role of a resource center for technological accumulation to achieve competitiveness and significantly insert itself in the export market. From Latin America's history in search for development, we can conclude that innovative business entrepreneurship has been less successful and less effective than Latin America requires.