Sociology of Worth: Justifying an Ambitious Sustainability Agenda at a University

ABSTRACT

Within each society choices must be made between competing approaches about where valuable and scarce societal resources will be allocated. In every society there is, and should be, a constant struggle between differing ideas, ideals, and world views; each representing divergent interpretations of how society should best operate. In critical accounting studies there has long been interest in how accounting is employed as an ‘objective’ technology to provide information to aid decision-making in such competing worlds. A separate stream of research analyses the role that universities should play as community and business exemplars for sustainability practices. In regional Australia, Charles Sturt University (CSU) laid claim to being the first Australasian university to be accredited as achieving carbon-neutrality. This paper employs a sociology of worth framework to analyse the impact of accounting in privileging or compromising the implementation of CSUs sustainability agenda. This paper analyses the transformation of CSU to a ‘green’ university and investigates the role that accounting and account giving have played in the justification between different orders of worth in the university context and outlines how the sociology of worth framework can be used to explain the success of CSUs ‘green’ agenda in a time of financial constraint.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology of worth
• sustainability
• university
• accounting and accountability

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Boltanski and Thévenot’s {[1991] 2006, 25) sociology of worth generalised model addresses ‘the relation between agreement and discord’ and identifies several forms (orders) of generality as the basis for analysis. These orders are collectively described in the title of the Boltanski and Thévenot text as ‘economies of worth’, however, in the broader literature, the orders and general model been additionally described as the ‘sociology’, ‘worlds’, ‘orders’ and ‘polities’ of worth.

2 Boltanski and Thévenot’s text On Justification: Economies of Worth ([1991] 2006) was originally published in French in 1991.

3 Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) identified a further worth justificatory regime which they described as a project-oriented worth based on networks and demonstrated by network activity.

4 This Rafferty and O’Dwyer (2013) research study was commissioned by the National Tertiary Education Union in Australia using CSU and 5 other universities as case studies to analyse the potential contribution of university workers (union members) to promoting sustainability within university workplaces.

5 The Learning in Future Environments (LiFE) index has been developed by universities in the UK and Australia and provides a methodology for reporting on how well universities are embedding sustainability initiatives and monitoring their progress. The LiFE index has been adopted by members of the Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS).

6 Australian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS) represents the higher education sector in Australia and New Zealand and aims to ‘support change towards best practice sustainability within the operations, curriculum and research of the tertiary education sector’ (Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability, 2019). ACTS is aligned with the UK-based Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EUAC) which is also a member-based organisation aiming to improve sustainability outcomes for its members. CSU uses the ACTS LiFE framework as its base process development and measurement tool for benchmarking the university’s sustainability performance. The LiFE framework runs in conjunction with EUAC and allows comparison with over 70 international universities including 4 Australian institutions. EUAC are in the process of releasing an updated benchmarking tool which CSU will adopt in due course.

7 To provide context on the necessity for the University to use motor vehicles; the three main CSU campuses (Bathurst, Wagga, and Albury Wodonga) are considerable distances from each other. For example, it is slightly more than 5 h by car between the Albury and Bathurst campuses.

8 In 2020, to expand an iron ore project, multi-national miner Rio Tinto destroyed the Juukan Gorge caves which showed evidence of Australian First Nation peoples continuous habitation of more than 46,000 years, including through the last glacial period. Whilst the heritage value of these caves could not be measured in monetary terms, Rio Tinto had valued the iron ore they would have access to by destroying the caves at an estimated AUD$132 million (BBC 2020). Cherns (1978, 108) gave portent to this Australian disaster when he contended that ‘sadly the more we bring in the less importance we assign to what we leave out; thus the harder we find it to assign a money value to a good, the less value we assign it. And maybe we should do the reverse – something without value may be valueless or invaluable. If we devalue the invaluable, we complete our alienation’.

9 As recently as February 2023.