Social and environmental accounting,organisational change and management accounting: A processual view

Consistent with calls for in-depth studies of social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR) intervention (Bebbington, 2007, Fraser, 2012, Contrafatto, 2012), our paper focuses on the interrelationship between organisational change and SEAR practices, as well as the involvement of management accounting in such organisational dynamics. Drawing insight from both Laughlin (1991) and Burns and Scapens’ (2000) theoretical frameworks, we explore the processes of change through which SEAR practices become elevated to strategising status, in the context of broader organisational and extra-organisational developments, but we also illuminate how institutionalised assumptions of profit-seeking limit the extent to which broader sustainability concerns become infused into day-to-day business practice. Our paper highlights the importance of management accounting in facilitating and shaping the cumulative path of SEAR practices (and sustainability more generally); however, we also heed caution against uncritical reliance upon conventional management accounting tools. The following paper extends our understanding of SEAR practices as cumulative process over time, an awareness of the potential limits to such developments in profit-seeking organisations, and stresses a need to be circumspect when involving management accounting.     

Accounting and networks of corruption

This study examines the nature and role of accounting practices in a network of corruption in an influence-market setting. The study focuses on the Canadian government’s Sponsorship Program (1994–2003), a national unification scheme that saw approximately $50 million diverted into the bank accounts of political parties, program administrators, and their families, friends and business colleagues. Relying on the institutional sociology of Bourdieu, the study demonstrates the precise role of accounting practices in the organization of a corrupt network imbued with a specific telos and certain accounting tasks. The study illustrates how accounting is accomplished and by whom, and it shows how the ‘skillful use’ of accounting practices and social interactions around these practices together enable corruption. In so doing, the study builds on a growing body of work examining criminogenic networks and the contextual, collaborative and systemic uses of accounting in such networks.     

Management accounting as practice

In this paper we outline a distinctive practice theory approach to considering the role of management accounting in the constitution of organizations. Building on [Schatzki, T.R. (2002). The site of the social: a philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press] notion of arrays of activity we emphasise the ways in which organisational members actively reconstitute their management control systems by drawing on them as a shared resource. By tracing the skilful practices through which social actors in a restaurant chain understand and mobilise accounting to contribute in specific ways to what they regard as the objectives of their organisational units, we develop a notion of situated functionality. Situating the interrelationships between technical and interpretive accounting processes in the wider field of organisational practices we elaborate the ways in which management control systems as structures of intentionality both shape and are shaped by shared norms and understandings.     

Accounting history and theorising about organisations

Historical accounting research has a substantial track record of using a variety of theoretical insights to better understand how and why accounting has contributed to, and been affected by, organisational change and development. The article outlines the emergence of a range of theories that have been employed by accounting historians, against the background of the development of accounting history as a significant disciplinary field within accounting research. From its investigation of accounting historians’ approaches to studying accounting as a central practice in organisational processes, it reveals how historical accounting studies have been informed by and contributed to theorisation of such organisational phenomena. The article concludes that theory is largely used to provide conceptual frameworks for historical narratives, with historical accounting research often focused on case studies of single organisations or organisational settings. However, theory has also been mobilised at more general levels, to provide meta-narratives of the rise of capitalism and the emergence of managerialism. Far from treating accounting as technical practice, accounting historians are revealed as conceiving accounting as social practice, impacting both human behaviour and organisational and social functioning and development. As social practice, accounting emerges deeply embedded and pervasive in organisations and societies.     

Exploring accounting history and accounting in history

Accounting history, as the history of accounting and the consideration of accounting in history, provides insight into an understanding of accounting in the past, for the present, and into the future. Whilst often viewed as a routine, rule driven practice, the accounting history discipline recognises accounting as having a much wider pervasiveness as social practice and even moral practice. As social practice, accounting affects individual, organisational and societal behaviour. This collection of articles demonstrates the importance of looking at history to provide context and illustrates that understandings of the past lead to comprehension of the present and foresight for the future. The articles in this special issue, international in essence, epitomise the diversity of the accounting history field in exploring accounting in diverse organisations, in investigating accounting in its wider context and in employing different theoretical approaches. In considering the accounting phenomenon that occurred, there is additionally the insight of that which did not occur, the relevance of past events and non-events as an ingredient to better understanding the present and to potentially reshaping the future.The articles explore of the role of actors/agents around accounting and organisational change, how key individuals and networks of individuals, can influence others, both within and external to the organisation, to enact change or prevent change in areas where accounting contributes. It is suggested that these studies could be extended, to consider more widely the influence of the interaction of individuals via prosopographical or similar studies. This collection of articles has global reach, and we make an additional call for more international, interactional or comparative approaches to studies in accounting history. Accounting history studies can further investigate organisational contexts and situations, exploring reporting internally and externally to the organisation and informing current and future accounting and related practices.     

Transformative change towards sustainability: the interaction between organisational discourses and organisational practices

This paper adopts a case study approach to explore the complex process of organisational change towards greater social and environmental sustainability. The case study of a major global financial services organisation involved interviews and examination of company documents, and their website over the period 2000–2014. The rare longitudinal empirical evidence from different sources provides important insights to how companies are responding to increasing demands for sustainable development. Using Laughlin’s [1991. Environmental disturbances and organizational transitions and transformations: some alternative models. Organization Studies, 12 (2), 209–232] pathways of change model, the study investigates the interaction between organisational discourses (i.e. its interpretive schemes) and organisational practices (i.e. design archetypes). The findings demonstrate the centrality of organisational discourses, especially those relating to accounting calculative practices, to radical change towards sustainable development. The paper also contributes to the literature on institutional logics, particularly multiple institutional logics, and how these are implicated in change processes.     

Accounting for time: managing time in project-based teamworking

In this paper, we investigate time management in project based teamworking, a form of work that is seen as becoming a significant feature in many organisations, and consider its implications for accounting control. The analysis is based on a perspective on time in organisations which, drawing on time-geography, considers the management of time in project-based teamworking organisations as part of the organisational actors' ongoing active production and reproduction of their social context. We grounded this perspective in a longitudinal ethnographic study of project-based teamworking, which examined the development process of computer-based management information systems for top executives in a large multinational company. The extended time-geography perspective presented in this paper offers a theoretical framework within which various organisational practices may be explained and provides a better understanding of the social dynamics of time management than is provided by traditional accounting approaches. The implications of this perspective for the use of accounting practices in the management of time in project-based teamworking are discussed.     

The construction of a social account: a case study in an overseas aid agency

This paper presents a case study examining the evolution of a social accounting process in an Irish overseas aid agency, the Agency for Personal Service Overseas. Much of the corporate rhetoric surrounding social accounting processes simplifies their complex nature and tends to downplay many concerns as to how they can effect ‘real' organisational change and empower stakeholders. The case exposes this complexity by illuminating the contradictions, tensions and obstacles that permeated one such process. The paper contributes to the recent increase in field work in the social accounting literature, called for by Gray [Account. Orga. Soc. 27 (2002) 687], which seeks a richer, more in-depth understanding of how and why social accounting evolves within organisations.     

Dirty work and the construction of identity. An ethnographic study of management accounting practices

This paper examines the processes by which identity work influences accounting and organisational practices. Analysing ethnographic material, we study how accountants engage in a struggle for recognition in a context where tensions emerge from the confrontation between idealised occupational aspirations and situated possibilities. To theorise this struggle we draw on Everett Hughes’s conceptualisation of a moral division of labour. Building on his concept of “dirty work”, we differentiate between the “unclean” and the “polluted”. Accountants have to perform tasks that are incompatible with the aspirational identities they claim; more than “boring”, these tasks become symbols of misrecognition. We call these unclean tasks. Yet even tasks that, in a more favourable context, would be associated with prestigious aspects of the job, can become degrading in specific situations. We call them polluted work. We highlight how trying to comply with a positively-anticipated role transition can help avoid unclean work yet generate more polluted work. Our analysis suggests that paying greater attention to symbolic differentiations between prestigious and shameful aspects of work can improve our understanding of accounting, identity work and organisational practices.     

Accounting’s contribution to a conscious cultural evolution: an end to sustainable development

Influential institutions are acknowledging the need for more change to reverse practices that seriously damage social and ecological systems. The depth and extent of these changes are indicated by the call for a conscious cultural evolution. This paper considers a possible contribution from accounting to comply with such an evolution.A theoretical basis for accounting’s contribution to a conscious cultural evolution is outlined by means of a truth classification scheme developed in this paper as well as the works of Foucault, Giddens, evolutionary biologists and life-world theorists. This theoretical basis is then used to interpret the results of an EU funded research project that was to identify the criteria and specifications for a sustainable development management and accounting tool. The strengths and weaknesses of traditional, social and environmental accounting are evaluated against the needs of sustainable development as identified during the course of this project as well as a proposed balanced accounting. The theoretical basis identified in this paper is further employed to re-evaluate the concept of accounting equity in the context of equitable communities and face-to-face relationships. Finally, the potential resistance to changes of this kind that may exist within contemporary mainstream accounting is considered. The end of sustainable development is considered within the conclusion.     

Testing the limits of structuration theory in accounting research

In 1985 I published a paper in Accounting Organizations and Society with Bob Scapens titled Accounting Systems and Systems of Accountability; understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts. The paper suggested the potential usefulness of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory for efforts to understand accounting in its organisational contexts. Rather than engage in a further review of the use of structuration theory in accounting, this paper sets out to test our original proposition as to the usefulness of Giddens ideas for accounting research. I explore three points of possible criticism in the paper. That structuration theory does not take the ‘agency’ of accounting sufficiently seriously; that Foucault and Lacan allow us to get much closer to the ways in which accounting information works back upon human subjects; and that Giddens and accounting share a lack of ethics.     

Governmentality in accounting and accountability: A case study of embedding sustainability in a supply chain

This paper examines how the introduction of sustainability accounting has been used by an organization as a means to seek to govern social, economic and environmental issues relating to suppliers. The concept of governmentality and four analytics of government are proposed as a means to examine systematic ways of exercising power and authority. This theoretical framework illuminates the specific rationales and practices of government that enable particular aspirations of reform – such as sustainability – to be constituted. The analysis is informed by the discussion of the implementation of sustainability-orientated regimes of practice in the context of a single supply chain within a major supermarket chain in the UK against the theoretical analytics of government. The paper provides novel empirical insights into how sustainability accounting shaped forms of power, rationales and practices in a supply chain. It explores the extent to which senior decision-takers frame and use sustainability accounting to foster disciplinary effects based ostensibly upon social and environmental goals. These are found in practice to be reformulated primarily according to an economic (rather than social or environmental) regime of practice.     

Beyond Self‐Evident: Recognising the Problematic Political Context of Accrual Accounting Adoption in South Korea

This paper responds to a recent call by researchers that we need to move beyond both advocacy of and technical arguments about the value of accrual accounting to more fully recognise the institutional forces, key change agents and the local political fields. We draw on elements of institutional theory and the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the ‘problematic’ aspects of institutional forces, key organisational change agents and the local political field associated with the adoption of accrual accounting in the South Korean public sector. We found that accrual accounting was driven by many factors including a local financial scandal, the advocacy of a civil society group and the ambitions and the ideology of key actors. The contribution of this paper is that it shows how the practices of accounting cannot be separated from their political and personal context.     

The validity of management accounting language games – A pragmatic constructive perspective

To support the development of a pragmatic practice-based theory for management accounting, practice theory offers valuable avenues for understanding the development, role, and effects of tools and techniques used by practitioners. Scholars have identified communication as a critical dimension for analysis, as discourse can govern the production of knowledge and power structures. However, previous research has mainly focused on the role of actors within static environments; how actors justify their actions and goals, compared with other actors; and how they are aligned with or justify new practices relative to existing practices. The pragmatic constructivist framework that underpins this special issue builds on this research but recognises that previous research has paid little attention to how people—when interacting within a dynamic environment—develop and create new types of constructive causality. Importantly, the necessary conditions for people's actions to construct what they intend to remain largely unexplored. Pragmatic constructivism is founded on the recognition that any theory of management accounting must include conceptual devices representing the notion of success, as well as techniques for evaluating the truth aptness of local practices of reality construction, such as those represented by managemen accounting. This special issue aims to theoretically and empirically explore the potential in management accounting for the measurement and governance of constructed causality. The central topic is the role of management accounting in supporting individual and collective actors to effectively construct causal chains that make organisations work. The three articles in this special issue adopt different approaches to combining the pragmatic constructivist framework with additional theoretical frameworks, as well as using different research methodologies. The papers' findings point to the importance of co-authorship in the creation of functioning organisational practices, and suggest that this might be threatened by information technology. Co-authorship involves language games in the form of dialogical interaction between the accountants and other involved actors. This process develops a shared understanding anchored in a fusion of conceptual models that is tied to individual collaborators' local practice.     

Walking the talk? Supply chain accounting and trust among UK supermarkets and suppliers

This paper examines the way in which calculative practices are implicated in the constitution of trust in the UK retail sector. In the sector, where trust receives much attention in declarations of intent, the notion of category management – a framework for orchestrating collaborative buyer–supplier relations based on dualistic modes of information exchange – has become widely adopted. Drawing on Giddens’ conceptualization of trust in abstract systems, it is argued that regimes of calculative practices embedded in the category management framework played an integral role in constituting system trust in category management and enabled its rapid diffusion across the sector. However, modes of supply chain accounting can also be deployed as a mechanism to further particular interests behind a veil of talk about trust. This paper presents a longitudinal field study where management accounting practices pursued under the banner of category management operated to dissemble a variety of self-interested actions and trust was deployed largely as a discursive resource which ultimately resulted in distrust and cynicism. This paper presents a framework for conceptualizing the relationship between accounting and inter-organizational trust and provides insights into the way that accounting techniques such as open booking accounting and joint performance management introduced amid ‘trust talk’ can act to undermine trust in buyer–supplier relations.     

Accounting in Babel? Constructing social accounting as a multi-logical performance

All social practices reproduce certain taken-for-granteds about what exists. Constructions of existence (ontology) go together with notions of what can be known of these things (epistemology), and how such knowledge might be produced (methodology)—along with questions of value or ethics. Increasingly, reflective practitioners—whatever their practice—are exploring the assumptions they ‘put to work’ and the conventions they reproduce. Questions are being asked about how to ‘cope’ with change in a postmodern world, and ethical issues are gaining more widespread attention. If we look at these constructions then we often find social practices: (a) give central significance to the presumption of a single real world; (b) centre a knowing subject who should strive to be separate from knowable objects, i.e. people and things that make up the world; (c) a knowing subject who can produce knowledge (about the real world) that is probably true and a matter of fact rather than value (including ethics). Social practices of this sort often produce a right–wrong debate in which one individual or group imposes their ‘facts’ (and values) on others. Further they often do so using claims to greater or better knowledge (e.g. science, facts …) as their justifications.We use the term “relational constructionism” as a summary reference to certain assumptions and arguments that define our “thought style”. They are as follows: fact and value are joined (rather than separate); the knower and the known—self and other—are co-constructed; knowledge is always a social affair—a local–historical–cultural (social) co-construction made in conversation, in other kinds of action, and in the artefacts of human activities (‘frozen’ actions so to speak), and so; multiple inter-actions simultaneously (re)produce multiple local cultures and relations, this said; relations may impose one local reality (be mono-logical) or give space to multiplicity (be multi-logical). In this view, the received view of science is but one (socially constructed) way of world making, as is social constructionism, and different ways have different—and very real—consequences.In this paper, we take our relational constructionist style of thinking to examine differing constructions of foot and mouth disease (FMD)¹ in the UK. We do so in order to highlight the dominant relationship construction. We argue that this could be metaphorised as ‘accounting in Babel’—as multiple competing monologues—many of which remained very local and subordinated by a dominant logic. However, from a relational constructionist point of view, it is also possible to argue that social accounting can be done in a more multi-logical way that gives space to dialogue and multiplicity. In the present (relational constructionist) view, accounting is no longer ‘just’ a question of knowledge and methodology but also a question of value and power. To render accounting practices more ethical they must be more multi-voiced and enable ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’.     

Accounting, hybrids and the management of risk

This essay addresses the implications of accounting and hybrids for the management of risk. We argue firstly and most generally for a definition of hybrids that extends beyond organisational forms. The existing literature, we suggest, has been too focused on organisational forms, and has largely neglected the hybrid practices, processes and expertises that make possible lateral information flows and coordination across the boundaries of organisations, firms, and groups of experts or professionals. Secondly, we argue that the management of organisations is rapidly being transformed into and formalised around the management of risk, while much of the management of uncertainty occurs through a variety of hybrids that reside beyond the formalised practices of risk management. Thirdly, we argue that accounting practices are central to these issues, in so far as accounting is constantly engaged in a dual hybridisation process, seeking to make visible and calculable the hybrids that it encounters, while at the same time hybridising itself through encounters with a range of other disciplines. We address these issues in three main stages. The first section considers the ‘discovery’ of hybrid organisational forms by researchers on management and organisations over the course of more than two decades. The second section examines the ways in which economists, lawyers and other social scientists have considered the issue of hybrids. Here, the preoccupation with hybrid organisational forms largely continues, with its attendant neglect of hybrid practices, processes and expertises. The third section considers the discovery of a wider range of hybrids by researchers in accounting, and examines two specific arenas in which the hybridising of accounting expertise has been central: the microprocessor industry, and the various encounters between medical and financial expertise in the context of the ‘New Public Management’ reforms. The essay concludes with a discussion of the implications of this broader definition of hybrids for accounting and the management of risk.     

Straddling between paradigms: A naturalistic philosophical case study on interpretive research in management accounting

This paper analyses interpretive research in management accounting from the perspective of naturalistic philosophy of science. We focus on the relation of interpretive research to the subjective/objective dichotomy appearing in the methodological literature of the social sciences. In management accounting research, it is often routinely assumed that interpretive studies, following the reasoning by Burrell and Morgan [Burrell, G., & Morgan. G. (1979). Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis. London: Heinemann], are based on subjectivism only. The major purpose of this paper is to give flesh to the existing debates around the nature of interpretive research with the help of in depth analysis of one example of such research in management accounting. Since abstract and general philosophical arguments are often used merely to cloud more relevant case specific issues concerning the focus of explanation and the nature of empirical evidence offered, our analysis aims at providing conceptual tools for articulating with greater precision what is being asserted in a given study. The specific target of the examination is the interpretive study by Dent [Dent, J. F. (1991). Accounting and organisational cultures: A field study of the emergence of a new organisational reality. Accounting, Organisations and Society, 16, 693–703], which is one of the highly appreciated and extensively quoted pieces of research picked from the interpretive management accounting literature. Our analysis indicates that though there certainly are, and needs to be, unique subjectivist features in interpretive studies as compared to more ‘objectivist’ approaches, there are also important similarities, and that the view of sociological paradigms as necessarily mutually exclusive does not hold water. Hence interpretive research straddles between paradigms. As we argue that interpretive studies, in addition to including subjectivist elements, also encompass objectivist features, we invert the typical social theory critique of ‘scientific’ (management) accounting research that it cannot be an objective ‘mirror of reality’ by claiming that interpretive studies cannot be exclusively subjectivist and still they remain theoretically relevant. Our philosophically tuned analysis explicates how concepts from different paradigms, such as interpretations, understanding meanings, and causality, can successfully co-exist and co-operate within a single study.     

A colonial “social experiment”: Accounting and a communal system in British-ruled Fiji

There is now an emerging literature that focuses on accounting practices in colonial processes of imperialism. This historical study theorises accounting's involvement in collectivistic social arrangements within a colonial regime. It analyses the colonial functions of accounting in British-ruled Fiji. We define colonialism by an official emphasis on the customary in 19th century utopian community-type ideas. The paper focuses on the moments and processes including that of accounting that produced such an expression of cultural difference. Rather than taking the communal division as given, this paper analyses the construction of such an identity and the role played by accounting from a political economy perspective. It examines the complex negotiations that sought to define a utopian communal arrangement that exploited, inter alia, the generation of much needed revenue for the state coffers.Archival documents highlight the emphasis on revenue that led to exploitative colonial labour policy for indigenous taxation and its attendant requirement for exacting unremunerated labour from the indigenous population. The paper also shows how accounting calculations were indiscernible from exploitative and oppressive acts of organising indigenous labour for colonial taxes as well as for the collaborating Chiefs’ personal services.