Plotting the Contours of an Emerging Field: An Essay and Research Note Concerning British Academic Social and Environmental Accountants

Abstract

The broad field we might think of as ‘social accounting’ has attracted a fair amount of criticism over the years, increasingly it seems, from within its own ranks. It is no surprise that social accounting is a field given to self-evaluation but as (for example) Correa and Laine (2013. “Struggling Against Like-Minded Conformity in Order to Enliven SEAR: A Call for Passion.” Social and Environmental Accountability Journal 33 (3): 134–144) demonstrate, there is a growing trend of articulated disquiet amongst members of the social accounting community. Prompted by these concerns, this paper was initially envisaged as an attempt to provide some empirical content to these concerns and, in particular, to try and describe the members of the community in rather more detail than simply an overview of selected published work. Obtaining any reliable global data proved beyond me, but there is exceptionally good data concerning the UK and Ireland accounting community: The British Accounting Review Research Register. Consequently, at the risk of parochialism, this short piece plots the contours of the British social and environmental accounting community over 28 years from 1984 to 2011 (the last date for which data are currently available). The data are frequently arresting and suggest that some of the critiques of social accounting may have a point of some substance. The paper concludes with a broad reflection on whether the experience from the UK and Ireland may be repeated elsewhere and whether these data have any lessons for our community more widely.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sue Gray for her help in both collecting the data and developing this paper.

Notes

1 This is the reference that Nick Barter makes in his review of the paper – see Correa and Laine (2013) for more detail.

2 The term ‘British’ is used here to avoid linguistic clumsiness and to echo that the data are drawn from the British Accounting Review Research Register. However, it should be noted that later editions of the Register also included data about institutions from the Republic of Ireland, which is also reflected in this paper.

3 Unlike the USA equivalent which is always known by its editor's name – Hassleback – the British editions are always referred to as the BAR Register. The editors of the Register have changed over time: The first editions were produced by Bob Perks and myself; then I produced the subsequent editions by myself, then with Kenneth Gee and latterly with Christine Helliar. Christine Helliar took over leadership of the Register in 1992 and my last edition was 2004. Gwen Hannah, Lissa Monk and Christine Helliar have kept the editions emerging since then.

4 This is part of the coding that we developed in the Register from the early 1980s.

5 There is clearly a serious bias over what is – and what is not – ‘social accounting’. I chose to emphasise those who elected to self-report as having an interest in social/environmental/sustainability accounting and finance and to then develop a list of topics that accorded most closely with the index in Gray, Adams, and Owen (2014). This bias is important and I will return to it at the end of the paper.

6 Sue Gray helped considerably with the data collection and we undertook some duplication of data collection in order to isolate any individual oversights and biases. I think we have managed a fairly reliable degree of data identification – given, especially, that the Register itself is unlikely to be 100% accurate.

7 Briefly, whilst all higher education institutions are now known as ‘universities’ in the UK, before about 1970, there were only the relatively traditional universities which were broadly categorised as ‘ancient’ and ‘red brick’. The period of the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the creation of both ‘new universities’ and polytechnics which, in turn, were renamed as universities in the early 1990s. Furthermore, colleges of higher education have increasingly applied for and been granted university status and permitted to award their own degrees.

8 As the Register developed, there was an increasing pressure from departments for the editors to admit other (typically the more prolific) scholars to the listing. The first of these were bankers but increasingly (especially as accounting departments were absorbed into management schools) other areas of management were included in entries.

9 Only working papers and proceedings were excluded – as they are from the Register.

10 I would need to know more about the nature of scholarly communities and the influence of convention on scholarship but there is a strong sense that the more established a School, the more likely it is to undertake conventional research into conventional, orthodox topics and vice versa. Is there something about universities that is indeed totalising and conservative (as Correa and Laine suggest) and, in turn, it is this conservative elite which determines what is ‘quality’ and recruits to the rigours of normal science? Perhaps only on the margins (as Miller 1998 suggested) do the innovative ideas and explorations occur.