Rhetoric or Reality? Do Accounting Education and Experience Increase Weighting on Environmental Performance in a Balanced Scorecard?

We are nearing the end of the United Nations' Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014). There has been substantial rhetoric in education and business forums, and many universities have integrated sustainability into their accounting curricula, but what effect is accounting education having? This study considers whether the rhetoric of sustainability is manifest in a greater emphasis on environmental performance by students and practitioners. In an evaluation task using a balanced scorecard we found that third-year accounting students in Australia and Germany recognised lead performance indicators, and penalised poor environmental performance, more than did first-year students. Experienced accounting controllers, however, placed less emphasis on environmental performance than did third-year accounting students. This suggests that the rhetoric taught in universities regarding the strategic importance of environmental performance exceeds the reality of organisational priorities, at least for now.     

Engagement Research in Public Sector Accounting

Abstract: This paper argues for the value of engagement research in order to encourage public sector accounting academics to take such an approach. Given that there is little evidence about the practice or value of engagement research, however, we set out to explore, evaluate and establish the lessons learned from a specific episode of engagement research. In outlining a project carried out between 2003 and 2005 by Amanda Ball and Vernon Soare, which sought to promote sustainability reporting in public service organisations, we argue that this form of research may positively impact government, public policy, professional accounting institutions and others involved in regulating or otherwise standardising public sector accounting practice.     

AN EPISTEMIC COMMUNITY AS INFLUENCER AND IMPLEMENTER IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTING IN AUSTRALIA

This paper explicates the dual role of epistemic communities as influencers of accounting policy within regulatory space and as implementers who effect change within the domain of accounting. Set within the context of New South Wales in Australia, and the challenge of the financial sustainability of its local councils, the study was informed by documentary sources, and used data from interviews and a survey. Accounting and finance professionals, as an epistemic community, played a pivotal role in formulating accounting policy and in embedding fair value measurement of infrastructure assets.     

Who pays attention to sustainability reports and why? Evidence from Google search activity

We introduce country-level Google search activity as a direct measure of the level of stakeholder attention directed towards sustainability reports. We validate this measure by establishing that search activity for sustainability reports is correlated with temporal patterns in firms' supply of these reports. To frame the economic magnitude of this search behaviour, we then show that the level of attention directed towards sustainability reports is very low compared to the level of attention directed towards financial and accounting information. Next, we examine two related research questions. First, we identify who pays attention to sustainability reports. We find, consistent with the environmental Kuznets curve, that attention towards sustainability reports is strongly associated with economic development. Consistent with findings in prior research that suggest citizens in stakeholder-oriented countries have stronger preferences for firms to act prosocially, we also find that search activity for sustainability reports relative to search activity for financial performance metrics is greater in civil law countries than in common law countries. Finally, we then explore the question of why individuals pay attention to sustainability reports and find evidence that suggests sustainability reports are used for two primary purposes: evaluating the societal impacts of firms' actions; and, firm valuation.     

A balance-sheet approach to fiscal sustainability

This paper proposes an alternative methodology to assess fiscal sustainability. Our balance-sheet approach (BSA) relies on estimating separately all of a government's assets and liabilities as opposed to focusing only on the burden of explicit liabilities. In our approach, assets are primarily the present discounted value of taxes, and liabilities include explicit liabilities but also the present discounted value of expenditures. Using the value of assets and liabilities, we compute the government's balance sheet, and therefore net worth. We then evaluate the response of net worth to growth, commodity prices or real exchange rate shocks. By computing a value for the government's net worth, our methodology allows an assessment of fiscal sustainability that is less reliant on the analyst's assumptions than traditional debt sustainability analysis (DSA).     

Islamic Banking Sustainability: A Review of Literature and Directions for Future Research

This study reviews literature on the Islamic banking sustainability and presents directions for future research. The article discourses scholars’ and practitioners’ views on the two perspectives of sustainability in relation to the objectives of Islamic banking and finance. That there are limited studies on Islamic banking sustainability is one of the major issues presented in the article. The study highlights essential issues on the sustainability without in-depth empirical analysis. The needs for long-term economic, social, and environmental sustainability are not a compromising issue. Therefore, Islamic banks must strike a balance between the institutional, societal, and environmental sustainability in order to achieve the objective of Sharia.     

Sustainability accounting in action: Lights and shadows in the Italian context

This study analyses the use of eight tools for sustainability accounting and the aims of sustainability accounting in decision making. The data, collected through a survey and interviews, indicate that only a small set of experimenter firms use these tools while other firms appear to be more conservative. From a decision making perspective, sustainability accounting is closely associated with the monitoring of internal compliance and efficiency. Unfortunately, sustainability accounting is in a relatively early phase of development and the lack of engagement by most firms is negative for the construction of a more balanced relationship between business and environmental and social issues.     

A Canadian Response to the Pursuit of Global Sustainability Reporting Standards*

As business, government, and society continue to emphasize the importance of sustainability—both of individual organizations and of the natural world—accounting standard-setting bodies want to be part of the process. In September 2020, in response to “urgent and growing demand” for more “consistent and comparable” sustainability reporting, the IFRS Foundation (the Foundation) released for comment a Consultation Paper on Sustainability Reporting. In the paper, the Foundation proposed the creation of a Sustainability Standards Board (SSB), which it would oversee alongside the IASB. The SSB would become, de facto, the global sustainability reporting standard setter. The Foundation received 577 responses to its proposal. These responses came from around the world and from a wide range of stakeholders. Thirty-eight of the responses came from Canada. This study profiles the Canadian responses, contrasting them with the wider set of worldwide responses. Some uniquely Canadian features include user responses from a large number of pension funds and preparer responses solely from the energy sector. There was also a significant response from the Canadian accounting community, including from the full set of Canadian standard-setting organizations. Five auditors general also responded. Overall, Canadian respondents supported both globalized sustainability reporting standards and the Foundation's creation of the SSB. This support aligns Canada's response with the worldwide response.     

Processes of auditability in sustainability assurance – the case of materiality construction

This study examines how financial audit-styled concepts such as materiality are transferred to non-financial audit arenas. Drawing on a case study of assurors working within a Big 4 professional services firm, we uncover a number of interrelated features of the materiality determination and assessment process within sustainability assurance (assurance on sustainability reports). We illustrate how assuror flexibility, underpinned by assuror intuition, is central to uncovering assurance technologies deemed capable of addressing the materiality of ambiguous sustainability data. Assurors with no financial audit background retrospectively rationalise their intuition using the assumed authority of structured financial audit methodologies. This facilitates the tentative translation of financial audit knowledge to the sustainability assurance domain. Collaborative, holistic decision-making processes inform the assurors’ continual construction of materiality and are characterised by alliances of (accountant and non-accountant) ‘expert’ assurors merging formal and tacit knowledge. These alliances seek social cohesion within sustainability assurance teams in order to establish a social consensus among assurors around the materiality determination and assessment process. Our analysis develops and extends Power’s theorisation of how new areas are made auditable and advances our understanding of the more practical aspects of non-financial assurance services offered by Big 4 professional services firms.     

Does workload and institutional pressure on accounting educators affect academia at Australian universities?

This paper examines accounting academics’ perceptions as to whether institutional pressure has increased in the previous 5–10 years subsequent to changes in the higher education environment, encouraging universities to adopt private sector managerialism. Results from 87 respondents indicated that workload pressures have increased and they experienced pressure to perform acts related to a student-as-customer model, which have negatively affected their well-being and work quality. The majority are not actively seeking to leave academia, but believe it is not a good time for others to aspire to such a career. This paper contributes to the debate about the sustainability of accounting academia at Australian universities.     

Is accounting for sustainability actually accounting for sustainability…and how would we know? An exploration of narratives of organisations and the planet

The emergence of sustainable development as the complex notion through which social and environmental issues must be addressed – whether at policy, personal or organisational levels – has had a growing influence in the accounting literature. In addition to explorations of what sustainability may mean for accounting and finance, we have experienced a growth in both critiques of sustainability reporting (sic) and in experiments and speculations on how accounting for sustainability might advance. This growth – as with social and environmental accounting before it – has very properly attracted critique. One convergent theme in that critique has been a challenge that much of the realist and procedural baggage associated with conventional accounting is no longer apposite when seeking to account for sustainability. What may be required, is a more nuanced understanding of what ‘sustainability’ actually is and how, if at all, it can have any empirical meaning at the level of the organisation. This essay seeks to initiate an auto-critique of accounting for sustainability via an examination of meanings and contradictions in sustainable development which, in turn, leads towards a suggestion for the development of multiple and conditional narratives that whilst no longer realist or totalising, explicitly challenge the hegemonic claims of business movements in the arena of sustainability and sustainable development.     

Sustainability accounting—a brief history and conceptual framework

Research linking accounting to the emerging concept of sustainability surfaced in the early 1990s and has received continuing attention in academic and professional accounting literature. This paper tracks this brief history through to the release of the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in August 2002, consolidating the various approaches into a sustainability accounting framework. The result is a comprehensive reporting model that presents an enormous challenge to business organisations, requiring a significant commitment of resources to achieve widespread implementation. Failure to meet this challenge enables business organisations to continue to avoid accountability for their continuing unsustainability. The paper concludes with a personal view as to how implementation of the sustainability accounting framework could proceed.     

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.     

Sustainability + Accounting Education: The Elephant in the Classroom

Despite the growing importance of sustainability and the sustainable development agenda, and despite the growing presence of papers recognising the critical interaction between sustainability and accounting and finance (and, indeed, with all social science), there has been a relatively muted response apparent within the accounting education literature itself. This relative lack of literature may well be unexpected but what is not unexpected is the difficulty that accounting and finance teachers have in developing such demanding new ideas with accounting and finance students in the classroom. Without in any sense gainsaying the considerable impediments to innovation, this explicitly polemical essay seeks to address a more fundamental difficulty: that of the way in which sustainability is approached and represented in both the literature and the classroom itself. The contention is that, unless sustainability is ‘keeping you awake at night’, you do not understand it. The paper seeks to support this contention and then offers an example of one undergraduate course that is explicitly designed to stop students sleeping peacefully.     

The Sustainability of Indian Fiscal Policy: A Reassessment of the Empirical Evidence

This paper reassesses the sustainability of fiscal policy in India from 1950 to 2010. Overall, the evidence broadly supports the hypothesis that the fiscal policy is "weakly" sustainable and documents a higher speed of adjustment to the intertemporal budget constraint than earlier papers do. Notwithstanding this improvement in the fiscal outlook, the author suggests that India should pursue a policy of fiscal consolidation in the years ahead, both because the ratio of public debt to the gross domestic product is still high compared to other emerging market countries and because "weak" fiscal solvency implies potential adverse consequences on the management of public debt.     

Cyclically‐Neutral Generational Accounting

This paper introduces a key methodological innovation into generational accounting. By incorporating cyclically‐adjusted balances into the forward‐looking budget projections underlying the concept, we isolate pure policy effects, which render comparisons of the fiscal sustainability indicators obtained across time and countries truly meaningful. We also show that a demographic effect and a debt effect may drive fiscal sustainability measures over time, and establish a routine to control for these effects in the generational accounting framework. An empirical application for Spain illustrates that our proposed decomposition of indicators is empirically relevant. Standard generational accounting suggests that fiscal sustainability in Spain improved substantially in preparing for EMU. However, calculation of the pure policy effects reveals that this has not been the case.     

持久性减税对地方财政可持续性的动态效应研究

持久性减税可能对地方财政造成动态冲击,合理施策有利于保障地方财政可持续性。为此,选取我国2010—2019年251个地级市数据,使用熵值法从财源结构、支出效益、治理目标和区域协调四个方面构建地方财政可持续性指标,系统考察持久性减税对地方财政可持续性的短期与长期动态效应。研究发现：持久性减税短期内不利于地方财政可持续性,但从长期来看,将对地方财政可持续性产生显著的促进作用;异质性分析表明,短期内减税对地方财政可持续性的负向影响在经济发展水平更高、财政自给率更高以及产业结构高级化更强的地级市更明显,因此要更加注意施策力度。     

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.     

Micro-processes of justification and critique in a water sustainability controversy: Examining the establishment of moral legitimacy through accounting

To analyse the micro-processes of moral justification and critique, this paper explores how managers combine different moral principles through the use of accounting, in order to establish the moral legitimacy of water sustainability practices. Drawing on the Economies of Worth framework and based on an exploratory case study of a water utility, this paper reveals four micro-processes of justification and critique - neutralising, enlisting, summoning and sensegiving - that reflect the different ways of moral legitimation mobilised by the managers. It also reveals the presence of different orders of worth which refer to the market, industrial, civic and green moral principles, and the dynamic role of accounting as a test of worth used to combine and bring them together. The findings suggest that moral legitimacy is not necessarily a dichotomous variable, but that it operates on a continuum established by managers and negotiated through the use of accounting. The paper illuminates the role of accounting in the unfolding of moral legitimation processes, and advances the micro-analysis of moral legitimacy in sustainability accounting research. It also contributes to sustainability disclosure research by showing that external disclosure reflects internal deliberations, and together they participate in the establishing of moral legitimacy.     

The potential of integrated reporting to enhance sustainability reporting in the public sector

This paper examines the influence of integrated reporting (IR) on the sustainability reporting practices of a state-owned enterprise through a content analysis of their reports and interviews with report preparers. The findings show a steady increase in the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosures. In 2012, the organization chose to adopt the IR framework in order to enhance sustainability reporting for all stakeholders. The IR process resulted in a more balanced disclosure of material aspects of sustainability. However, while IR has the potential to enhance public sector sustainability reporting, inter-generational equity issues were ignored.