Problematizing profit and profitability: Discussions

Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts an interdisciplinary discussion approach. It also brings into conversation ideas and views of several scholars on problematising profit and profitability in various contexts and explores potential implications of such problematisation.

Findings: An interdisciplinary approach to problematising profit and profitability has a lot to offer. While profit and profitability are stigmas that corporations need to address, they tend to make invisible the collective endeavour of people who work hard (mostly in backstage) to achieve a desired profit level for a division and/or an organisation. Profit tends to preclude the social process of debating about the potential contradictions of ends and indeed the means of collective activity. An inherent message that we can decipher from the contributions to this discussion is the increasing need to worry about how managers are socialised to think that critical theory and interpretive research have no lessons for them. It is the failure of positivist researchers and practitioners to learn from the lessons that are offered by critical research in contrast to the suffocating influence of neo-liberal economic ideas. The impact of a fixation with markets and associated neo-liberal ideas that has led to a situation where organisations are strongly distrusted and in instances reviled in their attempts to make profits, at times illicitly.

Originality/value: In setting out a future research agenda, our paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism focussing on problematising profit and profitability in various settings. The discussion perspectives offered in this paper provides not only a basis for further research in this essential area of discourse and regulation on the role and status of profit and profitability, but also provides emancipatory potential for practitioners (to be reflective of their practices and the undesirable consequences of such practices) whose overarching focus is on these socially constructed accounting numbers.

Impact: Problematising opens-up the potential for interesting and significant theoretical insights. A much greater pragmatic and theoretical reconsideration of profit and profitability will be fostered by the exchanges we include here.