The social accounting project and Accounting
Organizations and Society
Privileging engagement,imaginings,new accountings and
pragmatism over critique?
Rob Gray
The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Rearch,University of Glasgow,65–71Southpark Avenue,Glasgow G128LE,UK
Abstract
This paper provides one review of the social accounting literature of the last 25years or so with particular attention to the role played by Accounting,Organizations and Society (AOS )in its development.The principal theme of the essay is that social accounting,at its best,is designed to open up a space for new accountings between the ‘conventional’accounting literature and practice and the ‘alternative’critiques and theorising.It eks to do this,as the title suggests,through privileging —even d
emanding —engagement and imaginings of new accountings that —it ems inevitable —owe at least as much to pragmatism as to critique.Despite many poor beginnings and a heavy weight of substantive critique,the social accounting project(s)are advancing and are increasingly informed by the alternative/critical pro-jects.The way forward propod is for social accounting to both draw more from the wealth of theorising and,simultaneously,to take more confidence in itlf and learn how to write up —and publish —the extensive experience of engagement which is so central to social accounting.#2002Elvier Science Ltd.All rights rerved.
1.Introduction
Social accounting takes a wide variety of forms and appears under various labels.‘Social accounting’is ud here as a generic term for convenience to cover all forms of ‘accounts which go beyond the economic’and for all the different labels under which it appears —social responsi-bility accounting,social audits,corporate social reporting,employee and employment reporting,stakeholder dialogue reporting as well as environ-mental accounting and reporting.Some explora-tion of themes which compri social accounting are considered later.
Social accounting has always struggled to find its place in the accounting firmament.It continues
to do so.Social accounting is neither an estab-lished part of corporate and/or accounting prac-tice nor is it enthusiastically adopted or admired by any of the different branches of the alternative/critical project.1Thus it is neither a part of ‘con-0361-3682/02/$-e front matter #2002Elvier Science Ltd.All rights rerved.P I I:S 0361-3682(00)00003-
9
Accounting,Organizations and Society 27(2002)687–708
/locate/aos
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The u of the rather clumsy term ‘alternative/critical’is in recognition that there are writers in who might e themlves as either ‘alternative’theorists or ‘critical’theorists and,despite the historical roots of the term critical,might feel uncomfor-table to be included under the other label [See Power (1999)for a brief discussion of this].However we term it,the reference is (at its simplest)to the literature most typically associated with the journals Accounting,Organizations and Society ,Accounting,Auditing and Accountability ,Advances in Public Interest Accounting and Critical Perspectives on Accounting .The term ‘alternative/critical’is ud throughout the essay.See Power and Laughlin (1992)for one review of the field.
ventional accounting’,2nor an obvious part of the rearch literature in which that accounting is addresd,analyd and critiqued.Whilst different parts of social accounting ek to resonate with elements of either conventional accounting as currently conceived or with streams of argument within the alternative/critical project,the heart of the social accounting project tries to create and occu
py a new disciplinary space which eks some manifestation of what an‘alternative/critical’accounting might look like whilst heavily tem-pered by recognition of reporting practicalities and realpolitik.We might,for the purpos of this discussion,typify the social accounting project as one which eks change in the form of new accountings,a project which(ideally,at least)is deeply sympathetic to(and increasingly influenced by)the different streams of the alternative/critical project but a project which‘gets its hands dirty’and is,conquently,partially mired in the impu-rities of pragmatism.3
For the(and,indeed,other reasons which we shall touch upon in due cour)social accounting has consistently attracted a small but substantive array of criticisms,even attacks:social accounting is‘not accounting’;it is inappropriate for accoun-tants;it is managerialist;it disrupts capital mar-kets;it is trivial and/or irrelevant;it is ethno-centric;it is anthropocentric;it is phallocentric:it is under-theorid:it threatens profitability:and so on.Not surprisingly,therefore,the social accounting‘project’is probably rather more lf-conscious than most areas of accounting rearch.Such lf-consciousness ems inevitable as we struggle to tell stories that make n of social accounting,respond to critique from all branches of accounting andfinance and to ek an articulation that justifies its study and practice in the shifting sands of collegiate disdain,abu and (perhaps worst)indifference.This n of the pr
oject being unloved and beleaguered is,at times,so overwhelming that it is difficult to know whether the project(in a somewhat trite,perhaps,‘ideal type’Kuhnian world)should be abandoned altogether as it is so unacceptable to such a large proportion of the academy.Or is it,perhaps,that attacks from all sides actually tell us that social accounting is doing something so unpopular that it must(?)be of value and,with the ineffable optimism of the social accounting project,we should call for much wider participation in a project which speaks of the possibilities of a resi-lient new accounting—albeit one as yet unformed.
Attempting to review25years of a subject with which one has been cloly associated rais some interesting problems—the most obvious of which is the danger of simply repeating the stories that one has learnt to tell about the subject,(e,for example,Gray,Owen&Adams,1996;Mathews, 1997).Is it,indeed,possible to tell new tales that revi and stimulate the folkloric roots of your tribe and its rituals?Inevitably,any such review must be very personal in orientation.The‘social accounting project’is not a homogeneous one. That lack of homogeneity of the social accounting project is probably both the source of its con-tinued vibrancy and one of the root caus for its (perceived?)lack of coherence.The project is not homogeneous in intention,approach,interest, focus or methodology.Its proponents e it as rving purpos as diver as improving share-holders’fina
ncial decisions to re-inventing capit-alism—with every point in between.The methods of its rearchers vary from the strictly function-alist through most of the alternative documented approaches to scholarship,evidence-gathering and
2Does this need explaining?The term refers to the accounting
that is typically practid by accountants,defined and defended
by professional accountancy bodies and/or taught through
mainstream textbooks in accounting andfinance qualifications.
Sometimes referred to here,for short-hand reason(and with no
intention to exclude management accounting).as‘GAAP-
accounting’.
3Although‘pragmatism’is employed in its common usage
here,it ems to me that there is more that could be done for
social accounting through the u of the Pragmatic project(e,计算机个人简历封面
for example,Goodman,1995)to provide an alternative ground-
ing and justification for a theme of argument,rearch and
practice who distinguishing feature is its desire to‘work’,(to
have‘cash value’as William James would have put it),and to
disneyenglishwork in the interest of higher ethical ideals such as democracy,
accountability,justice and decency.As far as I am aware,this
line has yet to be formally explored for social accounting,(but
e Arrington,1990,1997).
688R.Gray/Accounting,Organizations and Society27(2002)687–708
interpretation.4So to presume to speak for the motivations and intentions of all tho associated with this diversity is inappropriate.Similarly,any critique I can offer must be esntially immanent;
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栗子的英文
Conquently,this essay is structured as follows. The next ction outlines a brief personal view of the history of social accounting which is followed by a brief excursion into the themes and elements that social accountants typically recogni about their area of study.The social accounting papers wh
ich have appeared in Accounting,Organiza-tions and Society(AOS)are then briefly reviewed in Section 4.Section5tries to draw some immediate lessons from the AOS experience before moving to explain what social accounting might,and perhaps should,be in Section6.The principal justification for social accounting must lie,it is argued in its emancipatory and radical possibilities.This is one theme from the journal which is developed in Section7.Section8spec-ulates on why so little engagement appears in the accounting literature—and the social accounting literature in particular—whilst thefinal ction asrts themes that I believe the social accounting project(s)need if they are to move to greater maturity.
2.A brief background and revisionist history? The giving and receiving of accounts ems to be an inherent part of human experience,(Arrington &Francis,1993;Arrington&Puxty,1991; Meyer,1986).For the bulk of human experience the accounts will be esntially social and either formal or informal in nature.However,as the world and its organization becomes more com-plex,wefind the formal accounts—and,espe-cially,formal economic accounts—rising in importance to the point where they are the ubi-quitous and powerful phenomena that exercis us as accounting academics.Thus,although the giv-ing and receiving of‘social accounts’is probably as old as human society,it has fallen to other dis-ciplinary tribes to examine and explore the accounts and only latterly have(typically feminist
4Indeed,I could even speculate that the only three things on which all social accountants are united is(a)the eking of some sort of change:(b)a typically incoherent dissatisfaction with GAAP-accounting:and(c)an entirely instrumental—one might even say cavalier—attitude to rearch methods.If the purpo of rearch is to stimulate and to change,then it will be inclined to draw its evidence from wherever it canfind it—however that evidence is accumulated
5This is a mantle more lf-consciously taken up by other journals such as Accounting,Auditing and Accountability Jour-nal,Advances in Public Interest Accounting,Accounting Forum, and,more recently,Advances in Environmental Management
and Accounting.There are also many newsletters which lf-consciously ek to advance(various parts of)the project—including the academic newsletter Social and Environmental Accounting.三年级英语上册教案
6It is also likely that—to extend Power’s(1999) argument—the social accounting project could not have developed in the way it has done had not Accounting,Organi-zations and Societyfirst created a new disciplinary space itlf.
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and feminist-influenced)accounting rearchers turned their attention to such matters.[e for example,Hines(1992)for further engagement with such matters].Whether properly or not,(lf-styled)social accounting rearch has largely ignored this broader giving and receiving of accounts and largely concentrated(in common with so much of accounting rearch)on tho accounts in which the organisation—as oppod to the individual,family,group—features as the entity to which the account relates.
More particularly,social accounting is typically thought of as an activity(and a possibility)of emerging interest from about the mid-to late 1960s.7Recognition of and interest in the subject grew,contemporaneously,with an apparent growth in anxiety about corporate ethics,corpo-rate power,social responsibility and ecological degradation.The phenomena,in turn,were to be understood against a backdrop of a significant radical ferment8that ems unimaginable at the millennium.This was a time when,depending on your point of view,(for example)capitalism was fighting a rearguard action for its legitimacy,a new social contract between business and society was being forged or the esntial contradictions of capitalism were about to produce the predicted collap.
The brave new world that the1960s promid also laid the foundations that,as the decade led into th
e1970s,produced an explosion of explora-tions into managerial and corporate social responsibility.This brought with it an attendant new vocabulary of social audit,social perfor-mance,social disclosure and accountability.With it also came an increa in both experimental practice of social audits,incread attention to metrics of measurement for‘social performance’and a steady growth in both journals and papers in tho journals concerned with a whole raft of matters who central concern was to(re-)con-ceptuali the notion(s)of‘business and society’. (Accounting,Organizations and Society in1976 was clearly amongst this number).Of significance. the period up to the late1970s also laid the foun-dations for a emingly unprecedented increa in new laws requiring,inter alia,disclosure about aspects of the organisation’s social,labour and environmental intentions and performance. Clor to home—and for reasons that are still not entirely obvious—the accounting profession was,by the mid-1970s,taking surprisingly posi-tive attitudes,positions,even steps about the developments.The UK Accounting Standards Steering Committee(as was)had produced what remains the most radical re-statement,from the accounting profession,of how organisational dis-closure needed to be enhanced by social and environmental accounting,[ASSC,1975;and e Bedford(1976)and Renshall(1976)for discus-sion].At the same time,the US profession was actively commissioning and publishing texts sup-portive of social accounting(e,for example, AICPA,1977;Nikolai et al.,1976),The1970s also saw the emergence of t
he value added statement 8This radical ferment was perhaps best exemplified by such events as the1968Paris riots;the Kent,Ohio shootings;Viet-nam and the anti-war movement,nuclear disarmament pro-tests;the emergence of the green movement;Martin Luther-King and his assassination;labour disputes and the ri in power of trades unions;and so on.The suggestion that the breakdown of capitalism—or at least the hegemony of western capitalism—was imminent was rather more than wishful thinking(or fearful prediction).However,it is esntial to note that the were predominantly white,western ferments.It is this which made them so potentially powerful a source of threat to western capitalist hegemony and why they remain as such poignant aspects of the backdrop to a western interpretation of the1960s.Such obrvations lead,inevitably,to the recognition that the social accounting project as considered here is,itlf,a white,Western pre-occupation(and,quite probably,masculist and bourgeois as well.There are few sins of which social accounting has not been accud).The growing interest in eth-nicity offers further opportunities for a new social accounting project.I shall attempt to be careful,in this essay,to retain an explicit acknowledgement of the partial and culturally-depen-dent nature of this story.
7Although it is necessary to note that,for example,Guthrie
and Parker(1989)trace social accounting as we currently
recogni it back to the early twentieth century.There ems
little question that one could trace it back a good deal further if
one were so minded.More particularly,it ems inevitable that六级分数分布情况
海风教育一对一价格the wider one draws the definition of social accounting,the
wider the accounts it incorporates and the more ubiquitous and
the deeper-rooted in history it becomes.There is much work to
be done by social accountants on such issues but,for the pur-
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pos of this essay,it is the pre-occupations of social accoun-
tants that will(tautologically)determine what shall be
considered as social accounting.
690R.Gray/Accounting,Organizations and Society27(2002)687–708
(cf Burchell et al.,1985),and it was the zenith of both interest in and practice of employee and employment reporting.9This interest was reflected in the professional accountancy journals which were demonstrating a quite remarkable appetite (by the standards of the1990s)for polemic and experimental writing on social accounting. Academic writing on social accounting throughout the1970s was spasmodic and gen-erally ad hoc but was not insubstantial.The American Accounting Association was positively supporting and exploring the development of both social(and environmental)accounting(AAA, 1973a,b).The business and management literature which had generated the basic terms of debate about‘social responsibility’was increasingly interested in the accounts,audits and metrics of social accounting(e,for example,Blake et al., 1976:Epstein et al.,1977).Speculative texts(most notably Estes,1976;Gambling,1974;and Jen-n,1976)together with the occasional spec-ulative chapters in books of readings(e,for example,Solomons,1974)and the influential AAA reports reprented thefirst attempts to make any n of this new sort of accounting. Whilst the academic accounting journals were not (apparently)openly hostile to social accounting, neither did they em to be explicitly encouraging of the area.This was a time when the Accounting Review was still a journal with wide and innova-tive aspirations and it laid down two important themes.Thefirst was the theoretical(‘normative’) reflection about the nature of accounting and social accounting which produced such highly influential pieces by Churchman(1971)and Rama
nathan(1976).The cond theme was an empirical(sic)strand of social accounting rearch in which Buzby(1974),Buzby and Falk(1979) and Spicer(1978)started a(continuing)line of rearch in which corporate social disclosure is taken as one of the explanatory or dependent variables in the statistical analys of obrvable data relating to corporate reporting and/or stock market performance.
So,although Accounting,Organizations and Society was not,therefore,thefirst journal to publish systematic investigations into and explorations of social accounting,it was thefirst to undertake any kind of systematic encourage-ment of thefield and to explicitly recogni it as an important part of its mission.(And it did this as an explicit part of its mission to re-define the intellectual landscape of accounting;Power,1999). How that mission has been(re)-interpreted and how it has manifested itlf in the work published in the journal made the prospect of undertaking this review all the more challenging.In turn,it rais an interesting problem about whether it is possible to review social accounting in Accounting, Organizations and Society without reviewing Accounting,Organizations and Society itlf.We shall e.
If Accounting,Organizations and Society was born into a generally under-theorid although largely fertile,world,the journal—and the social accounting project—had to mature in the less encouraging e
nvironment of the1980s.The tales told of the broad trends of more recent times are simpler and better remembered.The descent into the dark night of Thatcher/Reagan neo-liberal brutalism which re-established the economic as the totem criteria of existence was then followed by the‘inclusive’1990s in which‘environment’became the talisman of worth and where stake-holders and dialogue with them the mark of a ‘new organisation’.Accounting interests in the profession,in business and(to a very large extent with some significant exceptions),in academe continued to follow largely predictable patterns. The extent to which the social accounting litera-ture,Accounting,Organizations and Society and, more especially,its authors responded to,resisted and/or reinforced the broad trends ems a matter worth returning to later.
If this background and mystory/history are acceptable,then before turning to look at the social accounting papers which appeared in Accounting,Organizations and Society,it ems appropriate to briefly consider the nature and constituents of social accounting itlf.
9The period also saw a significant ri in the laws on
disclosure,especially concerning employee and employment
matters.France led thefield in this area with the requirement
for the company publication of a bilan social.
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3.What is social accounting?
Social accounting can be ufully thought of as the univer of all possible accountings.Early attempts to locate and theori social accounting had conceived of the subject as some marginal subt of conventional accounting(e,for exam-ple,Solomons,1974)as a uful sort of‘add-on’This conception significantly constrained social accounting and made it virtually impossible to ek a coherence for social accounting within an already incoherent conventional accounting.The shaking offof the shackles in favour of eing (for example)financial accounting as a very con-strained subt of social accounting gave,I believe,a much-needed impetus from which social accounting could begin to develop new and more coherent imaginings.It also,as a by-product, offered a(relatively)novel way of eing conven-tional(typically)financial accounting as a form of social accounting but one which was constrained by reference to,not only,specific forms of accounting entities but also by the limited(eco-nomic)events the accounting recognid,the lim-ited(financial)descriptions it employed and the limited(powerful)t of‘urs’and‘us’to which it allow
ed legitimacy.Social accounting was what happened when the constraints were relaxed. Given this potentially infinite array of possible social accountings,it is no surpri to learn that the social accounting project is not homogeneous. Whilst for many of us the project is grounded in the principles of democracy and accountability, increasingly informed by the alternative/critical project(s)and eks evolutionary and emancipa-tory moment within current possibilities,not all who write on social accounting subscribe to the values—or,if they do so,do so to varying degrees.The degrees vary between complete rejection of current structures of business,eco-nomic and social organisation—whether,for example,marxian,deep ecology or feminist—through to the(typically)implicit acceptance of cur-rent orthodoxy that is the common position in most mainstream accounting discussions and rearch. Eschewing the perils of the tautology of definition still leaves some requirement to bracket what is and thus what is not to be encompasd by this review.
Rather than give a standard—and inevitably trite—definition of social and environmental accounting,reporting,etc.[e Gray et al.(1996) for such an attempt],it ems more apposite to draw out elements from tho aspects of the Accounting,Organizations and Society mission concerned with accounting and the social.
For some years I confess I was quite unclear as to how‘accounting and the social’and‘social accounting’differed.In one n.they do not—the reflexivity between accounting and the social has to be a major consideration in the analysis of social accounting and,to the extent that tho reflexivities are considered inappropriate,unjust, damaging,exploitive(or whatever ethical criteria is employed),an understanding of accounting and the social becomes the motivation for much social accounting.One dimension of social accounting is with the social and environmental conquences of conventional directly drawing from the alternative/critical project)but it is equally about(attempts at)mitigation of this and conquential change in accounting.More espe-cially,Accounting,Organizations and Society has, inter alia,not only helped us reconstitute‘social’as a noun but has,equally effectively,done the same to‘accounting’.This is an important lin-guistic turn becau social and environmental accounting can now be en,I believe,as primarily concerned with examining and encouraging the emergence of new‘accountings’—accountings which supplant,complement or challenge the more conventional accountings but in a manner which responds to,even(ideally)resonates with, the concerns and occupations of alternative/cri-tical theorising that has been so clearly central to the Accounting,Organizations and Society project. If social accounting can then be en as princi-pally concerned with new accountings,it may still be uful in the prent context to identify,more specifically,some of the key lines of enquiry within the lit
erature,if only so that the limitations,bia-s,etc.,that social accountants tend to exhibit might be more transparent.I have already noted above the tendency for social accountants to be more pre-occupied with formal,as oppod to informal accounts(a bias not easily justified),and would re-emphasi the tendency to concentrate
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