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Abstract
This essay is intended as a self-reflective, auto-critique of the ‘social accounting community’. The essay is directed at the academic community of accountants concerned with social accounting. This `community' is predominantly concerned with English language accounting journals and is preoccupied with the social and environmental practices of the larger private sector organisations. The essay is motivated by a concern over our responsibilities as academics in a world in crisis and a concern that social accounting is losing its energy and revolutionary zeal. This community's social accounting endeavours have taken place in almost complete ignorance of the activities and developments in non accounting communities and, in particular, developments in the public and third sectors. The essay reaches out to the public and third sector work and literature as an illustration of one of the ways in which ‘our’ social accounting can try to prevent itself from becoming moribund.
Acknowledgements
This article 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, Amanda Ball, David Collison, Colin Dey, Sue Gray, Anthony Hopwood, Markus Milne, David Owen, Ian Thomson, participants at the 2007 APIRA Congress, the CSEAR (UK) Congress and IRSPM/EGPA Prague Workshop have had a major influence on the direction of the article and its long struggle towards completion. Thank you. Finally, it is our pleasure to acknowledge the support of Stephen Osborne and the supportive but excellent and very demanding comments of the anonymous referees whose efforts have lifted the article out of unconscious parochialism.
Notes
1 The clearly derivative nature of the title is conscious and deliberate. In particular both Schumacher's (Citation1973) Small Is Beautiful: Economics As if People Matter and the far more recent and pragmatic contribution of Porritt's (Citation2005) Capitalism: As if the World Matters are 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 Citation2004).
2 Prepared for the IRSPM/EGPA International Workshop on Social Audit, Social Accounting and Accountability, Charles University, Prague, 2008.
3 We are grateful to Hugh McBride for this reference as a motto for social accounting!
4 The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) is a membership-based organization located at the University of St Andrews and, at the time of writing, comprised over 700 members in over forty countries. More detail can be found at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/management/csear
5 This is not intended as a straw person and the suggestion certainly deserves attention. Specific examples of this suggestion occurred both in exchanges prior to and during an Accounting Organizations and Society 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).
6 In private conversation Carol Adams questions whether her work on Alpha and the reporting–portrayal gap should be thought of as a ‘counter account’.
7 For more information see Gibson et al. (Citation2001) and the associated information on the CSEAR website.
8 Action Research – or more especially Critical Action Research as articulated by Richard Baker (Citation2006) – 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 conceptualize engaged work of this sort.
9 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 et al. (Citation2000).
10 Social accounting we are using here as the usual generic term to cover, inter alia, social responsibility accounting, social, sustainability and environmental accounting, reporting, disclosure and audit and so on.
11 Indeed, any vision of utopia lies beyond our scope here and, as we have argued elsewhere (Dillard Citation1991; Gray Citation1992), our notion of utopia would be unlikely to possess much in the way of formal accounting and little or no formal social accounting.
12 This long-standing dialogue between ‘social accounting’ and ‘critical accounting’ raises a notion of a potential for ‘critical social accounting’. If we dwelt upon ‘critical social accounting’ would the ‘critical’ be a redundant qualifier?
13 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.
14 These comments are drawn from Gray (Citation1990), which was designed to encourage accountants to engage in environmental accounting practices. While the statements may well be accurate, they are also fairly naïve in a number of regards. Among the most striking is that accountants appear to value themselves for abilities that actually they do not possess – such as a capacity for valuation and an understanding of organization (Gray Citation1990; Gray et al. Citation2001).
15 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. (See, for example, Shenkin and Coulson Citation2007, for one tentative foray in this direction.) 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 for this) to have gained. The hypothesis may be worth exploring; explanation might be interesting.
16 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.
17 This may not be causally reliable however. The survival of social accounting might owe more to the prevailing conditions or it might be that social accounting helped move social and environmental issues to the forefront of attention. Did social accounting facilitate the conditions that make the situation more evident? If so, then this provides evidence for lack of failure. Otherwise, we might be trying to equate being pulled along by events – events against which we might actually have been pushing – as evidence of failure.
18 That both of these threads ignore the public and third sectors is an important matter to which we will return later. See also Maltby (Citation2005) for a more subtle and longer-term approach to this history.
19 Such a crude periodization could be leant support by the KPMG surveys – KPMG (Citation1999, Citation2002, Citation2005) and see also Mathews (Citation1997).
20 The extent to which accountability and sustainability can be made mutually supportive remains, however, unclear.
21 There is, for example, now a fairly substantial corpus of fieldwork research in social accounting.
22 For more on this see Gray (Citation2005); Parker (Citation2005); Deegan (Citation2007).
23 While noting that research and English language publication are clearly not the same thing, and that (consequently) bias at the level of the journal may also contribute to convergence, our concern is with the landscape that the visible (hence published) work suggests and creates.
24 There is an intriguing question as to whether or not all theories of social accounting are theories about the absence of accountability (Owen Citation2008).
25 See, for example, Thomson and Bebbington (Citation2005) and the new editorial policy of Social and Environmental Accountability Journal.
26 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.
27 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?
28 We will maintain an heroic and potentially improper assumption that there is a social accounting project and that such a project can be conflated with CSEAR and its network of over 700 people in over forty countries. Of course this is facile for at least four obvious reasons. First, much of the development of public and third sector social accounting has only partially been prominent in the CSEAR network. Second, despite attempts to the contrary (in 2006, CSEAR undertook a self-evaluation exercise designed to ensure an inclusive ambience rather than a clique-y or exclusive attitude) some major actors have (it seems) actively disavowed involvement with the CSEAR network (for example, Everett, Neu, Friedman and Miles, Gallhofer and Haslam). Third, other work (most obviously that appearing in the North American positivist journals), would probably not be any part of a social accounting project – except as a straw person for the purposes of occasional illustration. Finally, personnel are not consistent: for example, key characters such as Ralph Estes, Marc Epstein and Trevor Gambling made many substantive contributions to the field and then moved off to consultancy and activism and retirement (although Epstein returning more recently, see, for example, Epstein and Freedman Citation1994; Epstein Citation2008).
29 The role of Reg Mathews in this construction of a community is celebrated in Gray and Guthrie (Citation2007).
30 Similar analyses and histories of the (primarily public and third sector orientated) Social Accounting Network (SAN) would be a valuable contrast to this.
31 Perhaps, rather, these are characteristics of the community rather than what make the community. They provide a context but not the dogma. It is a place for ideas to emerge and be refined; for bringing and evaluating ideas from practice. The community facilitates a plethora of ‘projects’ tied together with the thread of a quest for enlightenment and understanding leading to a ‘better’ world by improve the human condition.
32 ‘Hello, my name is Social Accounting and I am a paradigm.’
33 See Bebbington and Dillard (Citation2007) for a robust development of this suggestion.
34 We would acknowledge a suggestion from Alan Lowe at this point in which he notes that the pragmatic approach to change which has often informed the social accounting community bears a more than passing resemblance to the arguments of Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory – a matter deserving of further exploration (see, for example, Latour Citation2005).
35 This is not to suggest that working in the third sector is without its own difficulties and challenges as the Prague Workshop in 2008 amply illustrated.
36 Perhaps worthy of note are the efforts of a colleague at St Andrews University, Nick Barter, whose PhD is intended to articulate just such an idea.
37 This is a direct quote from a paper being developed by Colin Dey and Ian Thomson on the role of shadow accounting – we are unable to reference it but we can acknowledge it!