Social Accounting Research As if the World Matters: Postalgia and a new Absurdism ,

Our primary concern is to ask how we as accountants and especially as accounting academics might act/speak/be in ways which are commensurate with the immense privilege most of us in the

As if the World Matters:

Prepared for the IRSPM/EGPA International Workshop on Social Audit, Social Accounting and Accountability, Charles

University, Prague, 2008

DRAFT: 3B (February 2008):

Address for Correspondence: Rob Gray, CSEAR, Gateway, School of Management,

University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9SS, Scotland Email:

rob.gray@st-andrews.ac.uk

1 The clearly derivative nature of the title is conscious and deliberate In particular both

Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Matter (Schumacher, 1973) and the far more recent and pragmatic contribution of Porritt’s Capitalism as if the World Matters (Porritt, 2004) is woven within what follows Postalgia “refers to a longing for a heavenly

future, a desire that is central to change-talk and change initiatives…” Ybema, 2004)

2 Acknowledgements: This paper is derived from a presentation initially prepared for the

AOS seminar “Calculating Sustainability” Venice, March 2007 The comments of participants

at that seminar and the early stimulus of Anthony Hopwood and Fabrizio Panozzo are very

gratefully acknowledged Subsequent comments from, inter alia, David Collison, Sue Gray

Anthony Hopwood, Markus Milne, David Owen and participants at the 2007 APIRA and CSEAR (UK) Congresses have had a major influence on the direction of the paper and its long struggle towards completion Thank you

3 Rob Gray and Crawford Spence are respectively Professor and Lecturer in Social and Environmental Accounting at the University of St Andrews Jesse Dillard is Professor of Accounting at Portland State University

Social Accounting Research As if the World Matters:

Postalgia and a new absurdism

Abstract

This essay- principally directed at the academy - considers the question “Has the social accounting project failed?” in a deliberately speculative exploration of social accounting in its most inclusive articulation The examination re-evaluates what social accounting is, could and/or should be Our departure point is recent papers from Lehman and Milne, that deal with both the limitations and the possibilities of social accounting and those involved therewith More specifically, we seek to understand whether social accounting could have succeeded more obviously in raising and maintaining an energetic discourse that is reflective of the distorted societal milieu, the crisis-ridden social and environmental context, and the pernicious system that our accounting and our research reifies, supports or, worse, ignores The analysis attempts to offer some new directions and conceptions A new(er) notion of social accountability in complex institutional situations emerges from the analysis reflecting promising advances in shadow, counter, and alternative accountings In looking to the future, we consider: social accounting as an empty signifier; the possibilities of commitment to community overriding concerns for the subject matter; and an overwhelming, even immobilizing, sense of privilege We seek to abandon hubris and the self-indulgence of the precious and embrace what a

‘good’ academic and a ‘good’ social accountant might be.

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“The short-termness of politicians and the media … can be balanced only by

confident scholars shielded from political and commercial pressures But academia has become so dependent and demoralised that it can no longer play that vital role”

Sampson (2004) p210

1 Introduction

To try and talk about `social accounting’ as a singularity is probably to invite

confusion `Social accounting’ embraces an immense diversity of practices – from (for example) environmental management accounting to habitat inventories; from Multi-National Corporation stand-alone `sustainability’ reports to dialogue-based third sector syntheses (Schaltegger and Burritt; 2000; Jones; 1996; Kolk; 2003; Pearce, 2003) It is to this diverse notion of social accounting and to social accounting in the academy that we wish to direct our attention here

Social accounting has attracted a range of criticisms over the years for its: quietism (Tinker et al, 1991); masculism (Cooper, 1992; Cooper et al., 1992); managerialism (Neu et al, 1998); attachment to modernity (Everett and Neu, 2000; Andrew, 2000) and liberalism (Shenkin and Coulson, 2007); its (incorrectly alleged) attachment to voluntarism (Gallhofer and Haslam, 1997); its (correctly alleged) attachment to proceduralism (Lehman, 2001); and its under theorised nature (see, for example, Puxty, 1986; 1991) Many of these challenges have substance and various attempts have been made to respond directly to them and/or to re-direct social accounting research, teaching and thinking in the new directions suggested by a synthesis of the resultant dialectic

More recent and telling critiques have been offered by (for example) Cooper et al., (2005) and the challenge that their illustration of an entirely different type of social account presented to the potentially conservative, organisationally-based exploration

of social accounting More recently still, there have been a series of formal and informal discussions around the possibility that the social accounting project might have failed4; and Milne (2007) has challenged social accountants to consider the narrowness of their enterprise and their own social and environmental behaviours Such challenge is cast into relief by endeavours such as that from Cooper et al and

4 This is not intended as a straw person and the suggestions certainly deserves attention

Specific examples of this suggestion occurred both in exchanges prior to and during an AOS

seminar in Venice in March 2007 and emerged in an international consultation by CSEAR of its wider membership reconsidered the Centre’s mission, governance and success, (see, for

example, Social and Environmental Accounting Journal 26(2) pp1, 14-18)

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by the growing interest in shadow, silent and counter-accounts Such initiatives offer

a challenge to potentially sterile academic pursuits and they act as telling examples

of engaged and self-conscious action research (see Gray et al, 1996; for an

introduction and summary and see, for example, Gray, 1997; Adams, 20045;

Gallhofer et al., 2006)6,7

It is initiatives such as these that remind us that we are engaged in a critical

endeavour of debate around accountability, business and society As such, there is a probably a persuasive case for arguing that our only concerns should be that which might demonstrably contribute to a better life – and never forgetting that for many, a better life is any life at all If, then, social accounting discourses and conversations are to more actively (and exclusively) engage the liberationist purpose (that the critical project amongst others has counselled)8 then a case emerges that all

conversations which refuse to permit such examination must, of definition, be

considered illegitimate If we cannot openly discuss the contention that commerce, in

principle at least, cannot be responsible or sustainable then those who would prevent

us from so talking must either justify that suppression or have their voices silenced

On a planet on the verge of desecration, nicety and parlour manners may have a diminishingly important place

So we come to our key questions Our primary concern is to ask how we as

accountants and especially as accounting academics might act/speak/be in ways which are commensurate with the immense privilege most of us in the academy

enjoy How might an accounting make any positive difference to the brutalised

oppressed, a vandalised nature and the wounded planet? Subsidiary to that question

we hope to address why social accounting is needed and, tangentially perhaps, how

we might start to improve the debates within social accounting

5 In private conversation Carol Adams questions whether her work on Alpha and the

reporting-portrayal gap should be thought of as a “counter account”

6 For more information see Gibson et al, (2001a, 2001b) and the associated information on the CSEAR website

7 Action Research – or more especially critical action research as articulated by Richard Baker (Baker 2006) may offer a way of articulating the social accounting project and is being

developed in a way that offers a richer way in which to conceptualise engaged work of this sort

8 The ambition here is that social accounting may need to hitch Habermas, Gadamer, Taylor

et al., to a more violently liberationist wagon: a suggestion which probably takes us closer to the debates in Butler, Laclau and Zizek (2000)

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The essay is organised as follows Following this Introduction, Section 2

examines whether social accounting has any importance and whether accountants are indeed the right people to address and develop social accounting Section 3 gets

to the meat of the issue and examines whether or not we might think that social accounting has failed before considering whether we can talk about a social

accounting in Section 4 The final section of the paper explores, in Section 5, how we might move forward

2 If We Wanted To Get There Would We Start Here?

In order to clear the ground a little, we consider that there are four basic questions that deserve revisiting These are as follows First; why is it that social accounting(s) might matter - if at all? Second, does the use of the term “accounting(s)” constrain us

in any important way? Third, need social accounting have anything to do with themes

of conventional accounting? And, finally, need social accounting have any necessary attachment to accountants? To some degree, these may seem trivial questions but if

we are to try and re-imagine a new future for social accounting, it behoves us to have some notion of at least some of our built-in biases and historically acquired

limitations

Why might social accounting matter?

Briefly, social accounting within the academy has been predominantly concerned with organisation-based accounts of social and environmental interactions One major theme within this has been a concern to develop accountability in the name of some democratic ideal, (see, for example, Lehman, 1999; Shenkin and Coulson, 2007) The focus, possibly unfortunately, has principally been upon corporations – especially large corporations This has, at its simplest, probably been driven by the conventional focus of traditional accounting academe mingled with a very proper concern over the power and influence of the corporation in the construction of

hegemony, (see, for example, Porritt, 2005; Korten, 1995) If conventional accounting

matters – and it most clearly does – then social accounting can (a priori) matter at

least as much

Enquiry into social accounting offers, inter alia, holds the promise of an international

industrial and financial complex held substantially accountable for its activities Such

an accountability – if applied successfully – would expose much duplicity; it would make transparent the essential and unavoidable conflicts that a global, astonishingly

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successful (and probably essentially rapacious) capitalism generates The vision – optimistic though it might be – is that even such a procedurally-based accountability (Lehman, 2001; Shenkin and Coulson, 2007;) would allow for the possibility that a stark clarification of the social injustice and environmental degradation embedded in production, consumption and expansion – indeed in modern financial capitalism -would demand that both civil society and the state act in a manner which has the potential to produce a very different world from the one in which we now live

Such an accountability would have the potential to heavily temper – even erase – current notions of success and reputation as the currency of late financial capitalism The uncontrollable financial markets – possibly the most pernicious fora on the planet – would, at least be recognised for what they are and, even, possibly, be subject to questioning and retrenchment, (Gray 2002b) Debates about organisational

sustainability and responsibility might be held with evidence rather than entirely through assertion and public relations machines, (Milne et al, 2006)

This sense of the potential of social accounting and accountability is not intended as utopian in itself but rather as a means through difference might be able to emerge vision9 The essence, as we understand it, is to re-introduce some intrinsic but

explicit ethic to capitalism that might offer a path towards limiting current devastation and injustice and perhaps potentially halt our current headlong plunge towards

dystopia

It is in this way that we see social accounting mattering and it is these types of

underlying principles – albeit reformist rather than directly revolutionary – by which

we would like to see social accounting should ultimately judged

Social … `accounting(s)’?

The creation and communication of accounts in the broad sense has been frequently identified as a ubiquitous human activity, (Abercrombie et al., 1984; Arrington and Puxty, 1992; Arrington and Francis, 1993) Thus a social accounting which envisages

a universe of all possible accountings need only engage with the baggage of

traditional accounting to a limited – and possibly deliberate - degree This seems, to

us, to be a red herring and the considerable literature in social accounting that pays

9 Indeed, any vision of utopia lies beyond our scope here and, as we have argued elsewhere (Gray, 1992; Dillard XXX; Spence 200?), our notion of utopia would be unlikely to possess

much in the way of formal accounting and little or no formal social accounting.

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almost no recognisable obeisance to the literature and principles of traditional

accounting tends to confirm this, (see, for example, Raynard, 1995; Spreckley, 1997; Pearce, 2003; Pearce and Kay, 2005; Quarter et al., 2003)

Social within conventional accounting?

It seems important to recognise that for many commentators, social accounting is predominantly concerned with the manifestation of social and environmental issues within the conventions of traditional accounting (see, for example, Solomons, 1974; and for illustrations of this see, for example, Schaltegger and Burritt, 2000; Epstein, 2004; Hughes et al., 2000; Gray et al.,1998) As (for example) risk, asset impairment, environmental liabilities and the implications of carbon trading find their way into the financial numbers of the organisation and the financial statements begin to morph slightly; as (for example) cost classifications develop and investment appraisal takes

a longer view; and as audit (for example) adds environmental and reputational risk to its issues of concern, social and environmental issues begin to have some – probably fairly slight – impact on the world of the economic But, the social and environmental issues are only manifest here to the extent that they are translated into the economic:

they have no intrinsic social or environmental importance

The concerns within this area of the literature appear to owe more to an interest in the conventionally financial and economic than they do to an interest in the social or

the environmental, per se The interest in social accounting here seems lie in the

potential for – albeit incremental – change in conventional accounting practice

However, much more substantively, traditional accounting itself must be treated with considerable care if we are to ever think of it as a vehicle for justice or environmental responsibility To the extent that any social accounting is inseparable from

conventional accounting, it must fall foul of the penetrating and significant charges of

`the’ critical accounting project, (see, for example, Cooper and Hopper, 1990;

Gallhofer and Haslam, 1997; Laughlin, 1999; Power and Laughlin, 1992; Tinker,

1984) That is, as we well know, accounting, inter alia, serves vested interests, is

masculist, positivist and oppressive,; it silences voices and only recognises that which is and can be priced – and price reflects only what vested interest will allow it

to If international financial capitalism is not the answer to your problems then neither

is traditional accounting

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So what about accountants?

Medawar has commented (see 1976 as well as in conversation and see

Hopwood,1985) that if you were setting off to develop a system of social accounting

and accountability you would be well advised not to start with accountants The

reasons for Medawar’s concerns are obvious once pointed out Accountants’

attachment to rules and procedures; their general identification with those holding the power; and their largely deserved reputation for conservatism and avoidance of risk and innovation will inevitably limit their ability to innovate Any worthwhile social

accounting will involve innovation and an interactive and developmental approach to the new craft Accountants are trained (see, for example, McPhail, 1999; Annisette, 2000; Gray and Collison, 2002; Gray et al., 2001) to believe themselves, for example,

to be impartial, technical and concerned with precision and accuracy, (Hines, 1988) when they are, of course, none of these things Accountants are by no means

disinterested (see, for example, Morgan, 1988) and there is little evidence to suggest that, as a group, they would be your first choice to embrace a public interest which privileged civil society and the disenfranchised over capital and the powerful

And yet, to see the social accounting initiatives from accountants over the years as only exercises in (say) legitimation or appropriation of territory seems contentious, (see, for example, ASSC, 1975; AAA, 1973; but see also Hopwood, 1978) Indeed, the frames, methods or disciplines acquired by accountants have potential value10,11

In many regards, the most important talent of the accountant probably lies in the design, recognition, assessment and control of information systems both within and outside an organisation In putting these internal and external systems together, the accountant can generate data, evaluate its probable reliability and determine its appropriateness to the issues under consideration These factors, together with an experience in the

communication of information, suggest a range of talents that seem essential for much social accounting of whatever form

10 There is the more difficult issue of the extent to which accountants will adopt the baggage of traditional accounting through unconscious attachment rather than as a conscious rational choice

11 These comments are drawn from Gray (1990) which was designed to encourage

accountants to engage in environmental accounting practices Whilst the statements may well

be accurate, they are also fairly nạve in a number of regards Amongst the most striking is that accountants appear to value themselves for abilities that actually they do not possess – like valuation and the like, (Gray, 1990; Gray et al, 2001)

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Whilst it may very well be that it is the attachments to the baggage of the accountants that attracts the most telling of the criticisms of `the social accounting project’ as

manifest in the accounting literature (that social accounting is managerialist, marginalist, liberal, procedural, reformist etc) Nevertheless, we retain a (wary) association with accounting/accountants for the time being We do this reasons both pragmatic and moral

First , there is a moral, deontological case for the development of social accounting

by accountants This rests on the notion that, faced with poverty, injustice,

environmental degradation and so on, our position of awesome privilege demands that we seek to reform, not just our own lives and our roles in civil society, but our professional and employment lives as well So a natural moral question is to ask

“what can accountants qua accountants do?” – and one answer is to make

accounting more “social” Social accounting is one possible manifestation of that

Second, as the critical accounting project has so vividly and convincingly

demonstrated, accounting and finance are deeply implicated in the state of society and the natural environment That suggest a moral responsibility to understand, ameliorate and possibly reverse the negative aspects of that implication If

accounting (and finance) are closely associated with poverty, injustice and

environmental degradation can a more social accounting offer a better prospect for the species (and, indeed, other species)? This seems a project worth pursuing – although the answer is far from clear

A crucial caveat needs spelling out Nothing we say here is suggesting that

accounting is the best or only place to start But having made some prior decision (for whatever reasons) to remain an accountant albeit one in the academy, examination

of the possibilities offered by accounting seem an appropriate place to start There is

no suggestion that social accounting is any more important than a social finance; social business, social law, or even social activism outside the academy etc etc.12

(See, for example, Shenkin and Coulson, 2007, for one tentative foray in this

direction)

12 What seems remarkable (and perhaps tells us something useful about accounting and

accountants) is the diverse traction that social accounting does appear (we stress `appear’ as

we have no empirical support or this) to have gained The hypothesis may be worth exploring; explanation might be interesting

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Finally, there are the better established arguments which suggest that (utopian visions aside) a social accounting will, eventually, be a part of any solution to the extent that it can be prevented from becoming part of the problem Crucially, there is

a recognition that traditional accounting is so mischievously interested and

distracting, colonising and totalising that, for any liberation or emancipation to take

place it must change its nature Social accounting can offer some of the ways in

which accounting might change13 Now, whilst seeking to change accounting practice

has the potential to change organisational practice and consequently societal

perceptions (see, for example, Ball, 2007) there remains the very real empirical concern that the only accounting change that is likely to gain traction is that which has either the backing of the powerful (currently international financial capitalism) or

a groundswell of civil society behind it That social accounting appears to have

neither is, obviously, a major issue that needs to be addressed because it means (we now know) that most change that occurs in the public domain is likely to be anodyne

However, within the academy, there remains (in principle at least) the freedom to seek out such change as may be feasible And so, to move on, we believe we need to address a slightly more stark – if potentially parochial - concern that is occasionally laid

at the door of social accounting: namely, has it failed?

3 Has Social Accounting Failed?

Despite the challenges that social accounting has attracted, and despite the fact that

it has not succeeded in the benign and global reformation of capital, to see the social accounting project as all failure (or perversely, as all success) would be unhelpful Social accounting has, for much of its life, had to fight to have an existence: it was so contemptuously treated (certainly in accounting) until the about 1990 in most

locations that to expect survival of a “social accounting project” at all was ambitious

That it has survived and thrived means, we would suggest, that whatever else it is, the social accounting project is no failure (See, for example, Gray, 2004; Laine, 2006)

13 Of course, in principle, if social accounting is the universe of all possible accountings then it probably offers all the ways in which accounting might change

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Histories of social accounting already exist (see, for example, Mathews, 1997; Gray

et al., 1996; Gray 2002; Owen, 2007b) and so there is no need to repeat them here

It is probably worth, however, drawing out two temporal threads for what follows14

First, we might draw a crude periodisation of social accounting activity The

experimentation of the early 1970s which led to employee and employment reporting; the 1980s emphasised additional disclosures in the annual report and then we see the re-emergence of the stand-alone reports from 1990 These standalones

emphasised the environmental, (until about 1995), then the social and community issues alongside environmental matters (until about 2000) since when there has been considerable diversity in the legends of reporting but “sustainability” and

“responsibility” have dominated.15

A second temporal thread might seek to draw parallels between the development of legislation covering social and environmental issues in business (including reporting) and the climate and nature of voluntarism The initial Anglo-American optimism and interest in accountability and responsibility in the 1970s (see, for example, ASSC, 1975; AICPA, 1977) gave way to increasingly focused guidelines (typically on

environmental reporting) and then to the current enthusiasms for the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Such insistent voluntarism contrasts with both the evidence about the failures of voluntarism (see, for example, Kolk et al, 1999; Leipzeiger, 2003) and the marginal but nevertheless more

regulatory efforts that have occurred outside the Anglo-American nexus, (Hibbit and Collison, 2004)

Theorising these developments has not been the strongest element of the social accounting project Much is offered by the normative frameworks of accountability and, increasingly, an over-arching context is offered by sustainability16 More positive theorisations have drawn from an immense array of theory from agency theory to Marxian analysis, from institutional theory to reflexivity As with much of conventional

14 That both of these threads ignore the public and third sectors is an important matter to which we will return later

15 Such a crude periodisation could be leant support by the KPMG surveys – KPMG (1999,

2002, 2005)

16 The extent to which accountability and sustainability can be made mutually supportive remains, however, unclear

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accounting, however, an ad hoc activity like social accounting is likely to defy

attempts to coherently theorise its practice

But what, if anything, has social accounting achieved?

Accepting that we do not have any clear and objective yardstick by which to make

such an evaluation an ad hoc assessment might recognise that social accounting:

has produced a healthy and diverse network of scholars, teachers and (to a lesser extent) practitioners; it has advanced the subject in teaching and, most significantly, it has generated a range of experiments, engagements and challenges with practice, (see, for example, Unerman et al, 2007) More especially, if we consider social accounting within the academy then its achievements:- to develop what is

understood by social accounting; to make the subject of social accounting teachable and researchable; to give a community of scholars a legitimacy; and to engage with and stimulate practice –strongly suggest that project has actually been a noted success Certainly applying any label of “failure” to social accounting seems

unwarranted

But has social accounting managed to develop or maintain a creative energy, an imaginative angst, a frontier of antagonism, between the world as is and the world as should be? (See also Everett, 2007) Here we might be less sanguine

There are two themes we want to explore here: social accounting in the academic community and, of more essence, social accounting and engagement with practice and policy

Social accounting and the academic community

Milne’s trenchant critique provides a helpful stepping off point (Milne, 2007) Milne examines Mathews’ categorisation of the elements of social accounting: Social Responsibility Accounting; Total Impact Accounting; Socioeconomic Accounting and Social Indicators Accounting (Mathews, 1984) Milne then re-assesses social

accounting research over the past 20 years and concludes that most effort has been directed at the disclosure of social and environmental information by companies (what Mathews called Social Responsibility Accounting) to the almost exclusion of wider research Balancing the recognition that Milne somewhat overstates his case17

with the recognition that Mathews’ categorisation was not universal in the first place,

17 There is, for example, now a fairly substantial corpus of fieldwork research in social

accounting

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there is still, in all probability, a substantial charge to be answered Casual

empiricism (see also the CSEAR website Reviews section for support) would suggest that a significant majority of the 20-30 international articles published each year on social accounting18 are concerned with disclosure studies Such circumstantial

evidence of potential herding behaviour might be a function of data availability and convention but might contain a more worrying hint of Tuttle and Dillard’s argument about research exhibiting institutional isomorphism as it moves from diversity to homogeneity, (Tuttle and Dillard, 2007) Would different emphases have encouraged the emergence of a different landscape in social accounting? We would, however, contend, as does Milne (2007), that there is something fundamentally unhealthy about an area of study that has such infinite potential and yet seems to exhibit what appears to be so relatively limited an imagination

Has the revolutionary fervour given way to systematic development of smaller and smaller issues in the interests of publication and research assessment? Is the

complexity of the issues addressed in social accounting research a function of the research tools and modes of scholarship and publication which are considered currently acceptable? Alternatively is there something about accountants (Medawar,

1976, Hopwood, 1985) that encourages conformity and, at its extremes, the

inability/reluctance to escape the “epistemology of modernity” as Lehman has it (Lehman, 2006; 2007) Additionally, it appears that there are conservative tendencies

in academe itself (Tuttle and Dillard, 2007)

So, although social accounting might succeed in attracting accounting academics dissatisfied with the mainstream and who have some wish to undertake an

engagement closer to matters of `real’ (not exclusively economic) concern and

importance, perhaps neither we as individuals nor as a community possess the capacity or imagination to research absence (Choudhury, 1988) or silence (Hines, 1992) in new and innovative ways Social accounting research has, for example, few theorists Consequently it seems to rely inordinately on either some very loose

approximation to normal science or the work of, for example, Lehman, Power and Tinker We continue to struggle with the ways to energise imagination and produce a literature of imagination and engagement (Gray, 2002; but see later) Such an

absence leaves us open to charges of failure from theoretical communities More substantially, we would have to accept that while most social accountants (see

18 For more on this see Gray (2005); Parker (2005); Deegan (2007)

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below) explicitly recognise that social accounting is “interested”, it is probably the case that the full extent of that interest has not been carefully explored, understood and exposed (see, for example, Hopwood, 1985; Lehman, 2006).

Furthermore, it seems important to note that there would appear to be a high degree

of self-discipline in the work that is undertaken in social accounting That is,

speculation and proposals for practice in the literature are probably unlike to sit too far from what is currently considered to be the art of the possible Speculations about the consequences of (for example): profoundly reducing the volume of financial accounting; producing accounts through poetry; developing full TBL accounts;

applying full dialogic accounting systems19 to all TNCs, etc.; are scarce Are they a victim of self-discipline? Would journals refuse to distinguish between such careful speculation and indulgent arm waving and incoherent assertion? This may well be an issue that academe needs to sort out

This leads to a significant point: social accounting academe is so often limited to being a function of current social accounting practice20 Research is largely limited by

an activity that is a function of international financial capitalistic hegemony In a remarkable sense, we find ourselves only able to study that which power will allow us

to study – how revolutionary is that? This is not a new phenomenon21 – nor is it limited to social accounting But it certainly offers a challenge to any project which wishes to be both innovative and reformist (perhaps even revolutionary) when the empirical terms of the work must be negotiated in unfairly balanced contracts with the very organisations one wishes to change

So, whilst there might be a case that social accounting is currently not obviously

building a new or revitalised project, it has achieved a great deal The social and

environmental language of business, accounting and finance has changed; claims for

19 See, for example, Thomson and Bebbington, (2005)

20 One of the most remarkable recent manifestations of this must surely be the almost

complete absence of any “carbon accounting” in the social accounting literature With the largely unprecedented adoption of “carbon“ as a focal point by both business and policy, we predict an upsurge in interest in carbon accounting and, somewhat belatedly, an academic literature on it

21 The irony here is that much early social accounting research managed to gain some

empirical traction through the cataloguing and analysis of disclosure in annual reports as a way to provide the subject with some reification and validity Do we remain haunted by this initiative?

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