Ambidexterity

† This is a reference to an article by Corbett et al. (2014) that, broadly, suggests that academics need to find a new way of surviving whilst being innovative and recognising the need to be disruptive. I return to this paper later in this piece.

, Puzzlement, Confusion and a Community of Faith? A Response to My Friends

Abstract

This short paper is a response to the four personal and affectionate, if not quite eulogistic, essays that accompany this volume. These essays from David Owen, Lee Parker, Richard Laughlin and Jane Broadbent offer a range of themes about my work, about CSEAR and about social and environmental accounting which I seek to pick up and develop here. The essay is both by way of a personal reflection stimulated by the comments made and a reflection on the ‘success’ (or otherwise) of both social and environmental accounting and social science research more generally. The paper concludes with some speculative suggestions for how the social and environmental accounting community might look to the future.

Notes

† This is a reference to an article by Corbett et al. (2014) that, broadly, suggests that academics need to find a new way of surviving whilst being innovative and recognising the need to be disruptive. I return to this paper later in this piece.

1 75 is an astonishing number. I only know this number because CSEAR recently asked for such a list – I do not know why but it was a revealing exercise.

2 It took a number of years and great deal of reading and digging to realise that, in all actuality, the reason I could make no sense of much of accounting or economics was that, indeed, they did not make any sense when asked some really basic questions about their assumptions and internal consistency.

3 These were also influential in the formation of early green politics with which I became involved and which has remained an important stimulus for me throughout my career.

4 Although whether I know my own motivation is quite another matter. As Bob Perks was wont to say: you never do anything for less than three reasons but you never know more than two of them.

5 This is changing somewhat – especially in the work of Christine Cooper.

6 In preparing for this section of the paper, I rather got carried away and so a separate short note has been constructed about the social accounting community in Britain (see Gray 2014).

7 Indeed it prompted a whole body of data collection that I report in the present issue of SEAJ (Gray 2014).

8 I am aware of the irony of trying so hard not to duplicate the very literature I am citing here.

9 These data are very quickly drawn from the running bibliography I have used for years and which appears on the CSEAR website. It reflects my own biases of course and inevitably has an emphasis on older pieces rather than always the very latest publications.