Designing the model of factors affecting in the implementation of social and environmental accounting with the ISM approach

Abstract

Purpose

Solely focusing on economic development and financial issues have led to insufficient attention to society and the environment, which has increased the injustice in this area. Accounting can aid to compensate for this harm and improve environmental issues. That is why social and environmental accounting (SEA) is rapidly growing and evolving. However, it has not been fully implemented yet. May be one cause for this issue is the lack of identifying the factors that influence SEA implementation in all dimensions. The purpose of this paper seeks to identify these factors.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on the existing theoretical foundations and expert opinions, the factors influencing SEA implementation were divided into seven categories, namely, accounting requirements, environmental justice, environmental responsibility, legal requirements, organizational factors, pollution control and business issues. Interpretative structural modeling and MICMAC techniques were applied to examine the relationships between these categories and model design.

Findings

The results revealed that the legal requirement dimension is one of the effective factors and which has been identified as the cause. However, the rest of the dimensions are influenced by legal requirements. As a result, as the legal requirements are considered as the foundation of establishing the model, this factor must be seriously considered for the effective implementation of the SEA.

Social implications

As the environment is not a unique environment and it has given the pivotal role of the environment in the sustainable development of communities, this leads to an increased demand for improved environmental quality. As a result, public expectations of the accounting profession to increase SEA have increased. In this paper, using the opinions of 12 environmental accounting professionals, a model for Implementation of SEA was designed to avoid social and environmental costs and damages.

Originality/value

Considering that identified factors are of great importance in the implementation of SEA, it seems that using a comprehensive framework that includes all the factors, can have a great impact on how to improve and enhance SEA. This study is the first to provide comprehensive model for SEA implementation.

Citation

Sayyadi Tooranloo, H. and Askari Shahamabad, M. (2020), "Designing the model of factors affecting in the implementation of social and environmental accounting with the ISM approach", International Journal of Ethics and Systems, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp. 387-410. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOES-12-2019-0190