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From 2006 to 2016, Brazilian agricultural cooperatives exhibited a sharp increase in sales. Since the operational cycle of these organizations demands a positive net working capital that is usually funded by debt, the authors examine whether this rise in sales was obtained at the cost of the short-term financial sustainability. As a matter of comparison, the authors conduct the same analysis for Brazilian agricultural public traded companies.

The authors employ the dynamic analysis of working capital method to measure the short-term financial sustainability of these organizations.

The authors find that the expansion of net working capital caused by the growth of the revenues of the sampled cooperatives was mostly funded by short-term debt, which rose by 31% in annualized terms. The authors also document that around 60% of these firms displayed a current capital structure that can be considered risky in terms of indebtedness, and that the majority of firms exhibited a non-sustainable growth in the period, what contrasts with the performance presented by Brazilian agricultural publicly traded companies, since only 16% of the firms from this group have shown a non-sustainable growth. This distinction seems to be explained by the lower capacity of agricultural cooperatives to provide resources from their operations.

The authors investigate the short-term financial sustainability of a unique dataset of 65 Brazilian agricultural cooperatives and provide insight for researchers analyzing the dual nature of these firms.

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.