On the use of framing strategies by the Big Four accounting firms: bringing sustainability risks into the mainstream

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the discourse that the Big Four accounting firms have promoted on the notion of sustainability risks, ultimately framing them as economical, technical, tractable and controllable. Drawing on Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1982) anthropological understanding regarding the construction of risk in modern society in combination with frame theory, we study how the Big Four's specialized publications frame sustainability risks and the magnitude of their consequences. Our analysis indicates that four framing strategies characterize the firms’ discourse: representing the Big Four as proactive knowledge producers; promoting quantification and measurability; fostering neoliberal policy-making and de-emotionalizing socio-environmental issues. We maintain that through these framing strategies, the wicked issues of sustainability are overly simplified, transposed into the conventional area of organizational economics, and therefore made manageable in the unbroken pursuit of corporate growth. In other words, the apparent aim is to take sustainability risks into a territory where corporate elites are in the habit of thinking and acting: the economic arena, as delimited by the boundaries of the organization. In so doing, the Big Four create a space for their role as business advisors, ensuring that their profitability is strengthened as companies seek professional help in establishing a meaningful control structure around (narrowly defined) sustainability risks. Instead of bringing sustainability risks into the purview of organizational controllability, we believe there is a crucial need to bring business organizations and the Big Four accounting firms into the purview of responsibility toward the planet.

KEYWORDS:

• Big Four accounting firms
• discourse analysis
• framing strategies
• Mary Douglas
• sustainability risks

Acknowledgements

We benefited from comments made by Lies Bouten, by workshop participants at Concordia University (Montréal) and by participants at the 2019 International Congress of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR, St Andrews, Scotland) and the 2019 Qualitative Research and Critical Accounting Conference (QRCA, Bogota, Colombia). Funding for this research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged from comments made by two anonymous reviewers, Lies Bouten.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example: https://www.accaglobal.com/sg/en/technical-activities/sustainability.html; https://www.cgma.org/topics/sustainability.html; https://www.cpacanada.ca/en/business-and-accounting-resources/other-general-business-topics/sustainability.

2 Our analysis reveals that top executives and board members are identified by the Big Four as the main audiences for their reports.

3 General consent on core concepts may cohabit with significant disagreement on what the core concepts mean and imply (Tregidga et al., 2013).

4 We identified potential exclusions through referents such as: (1) reports describing the socio-environmental crises and possible ways to address it (IPCC, 2018; Raworth, 2012; United Nations, 2015; WHO, 2011; WWF, 2020), and (2) the accounting literature on the social construction of “sustainability” (Laine, 2010; Mäkelä & Laine, 2011) and “sustainable organizations” (Tregidga & Milne, 2006; Tregidga et al., 2014).

5 See Online Appendix 1 for the complete Big Four references.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.