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This paper draws on the thinking of the nineteenth-century Italian philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi and scholars who studied his thoughts on the relationship between nature and humans. Leopardi's philosophy of nature recognizes the alienness of nature in relation to humankind, thus challenging human governance of the planet. The poet’s thoughts align with the dilemma identified in the Anthropocene literature: who speaks for nature? This dilemma has accounting implications in terms of the frameworks and disclosures to be adopted. Therefore, Leopardi’s thoughts can become the basis for a more articulated and complex understanding of some key concepts and issues at the roots of SEA.

The paper utilizes content analysis to examine four essays by Giacomo Leopardi, which serve as the source of our data.

Leopardi recognizes the alienness of nature with respect to humanity and the voicelessness of nature as a generative of conflict. He also warned of the consequences of human governance that does not take nature’s needs into account. These findings open a discussion on the complex accounting implications of the distance between humanity and nature. They can inspire SEA scholars to change the status quo by developing new accounting frameworks from the perspective of nature and adopting forms of governance of nature that recognize the need to protect it as a voiceless stakeholder.

Through Leopardi’s humanistic and poetic philosophy, the perspective of nature can be infused into SEA studies, thereby promoting the need for a multidisciplinary and complex approach to the discipline.

This paper aims to point to the shift in the temporal orientation, going from reporting on the past to creating insights about the future, which might be suggestive of perennial managerial attempts to push the boundaries of bounded rationality.

In this essay, the authors want to critically engage with the concept of “data-driven management” in the context of digitalization. To do so, they sketch the edges of current discourses around the emerging idea of data-driven management and its relationship with the inner workings of organizations from an accounting perspective. They question the often-times supposed objectivity and increased rationality of the concept and instead introduce the idea of becoming “data-curious” (before being data-driven).

The authors observe that this push also seems to be accompanied by trends of individualized decision-making and prevailing hopes of technology to solve organizational problems. They therefore suggest that it is valuable for current debates to take a moment to give attention, in practice and in research, to the role of temporality, benefits of collective decision-making and changes in professions (of accountants).

The aim of this paper is to spark curiosity and engagement with the phenomenon of data-driven management by outlining a novel set of potential future pathways of research and point towards methods that might help studying the questions arising for a data-curious approach.

This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.

The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.

Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.

The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.

The Prevent policy was singular and ‘simple’: to prevent individuals from getting drawn into terrorism, to identify and stop this process before it begins. In the context of the global war on terror and the shadow of terrorist attacks in the United States and England, this was an increasingly growing issue within the media and the broader public discourse. A central institution charged with enacting Prevent in the United Kingdom were education institutions (schools, colleges and universities), the rationale being that these places of learning house individuals during impressionable and vulnerable times and the Prevent policy can protect these individuals.

This chapter will provide an alternative critical discussion on Prevent by framing it as the securitisation of the UK education sector. As such, Prevent is a form of surveillance and a mechanism of power over educators and learners which carry counterproductive consequences for both. In doing so, this chapter will question how education professionals balance their professional identity and their new role in supporting and enacting the Prevent duty. Through developing a new multi-level ‘Critical Realist World Systems Model’, this chapter will provide a conceptual discussion of Prevent policy more broadly and how education professionals navigate the friction between their professional values and legal obligations. This chapter draws on a range of theoretical traditions to begin to question a well-established security policy within English and Welsh educational institutions providing a conceptual starting point to examine similar and future policies.

The purpose of this paper is to test if activism by civil society organisations (CSOs hereafter) in successfully mobilising resistance to the Government of Ghana “collateralization” of gold resources and other mineral royalties in 2020 (dubbed the “Agyapa deal”) espouse tenets of Foucault’s (2009) “governmentality” and “counter conduct” dispositions.

This paper draws on Dean’s (1999) discussion of government analytics to highlight how CSO activism can simultaneously challenge government practice and share in it. This paper uses an evidence-based and interpretive qualitative content analysis approach. This paper relied on secondary data sources from 1 January 2020 to 21 August 2021. Data collection involved an extensive review of secondary materials concerning the Agyapa deal, relying on the author's local knowledge to identify the likely sources of information.

This paper exposes how the counteractions of CSOs, underpinned by the desire for so-called “good governance”, invariably extend governmentality and other neo-liberal ideals. In this case, CSOs' actions espoused the ideals of marketisation, extended governable spaces, engrained subjectivation and treated citizens as incapable of formulating and advancing their desires without overt help. Secondly, it provides evidence that massive deployment of accountability and other calculable practices, however wilful, complement efforts at shaping public opinion.

CSO counter-conduct is merely symbolic rather than substantive. Substantive counter-conduct requires the citizenry to actively lead the problematisation process, holding CSOs accountable for acting on their behalf. The current trajectory where CSO accountability is primarily to their international financiers, predominantly neo-liberal advocates, raises questions about “in whose interest they seek another form of governance?” Practically, the splinter of interests that may emanate from citizenry directly led counter-conduct can affect garnering the critical mass needed to force a policy change. That said, however, there is a case for citizenry “making themselves” rather than “being made” within the governmentality process.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first application of the Foucauldian and Dean framework to a data set from Ghana.

This study aims to structure a model for integrating social value into strategic management based on identifying the critical success factors (CSF) for such integration in the investigated companies.

This research was based on the actor–network theory. Through a rigorous approach to the case study methodology in a two-stage process lasting 21 months, we carried out this study.

Companies that use the polyhedral social accounting model in their strategic management processes do so without a reference model. We identified CSF for integrating social value, which was incorporated into a protocol model based on stakeholder theory and the use of social accounting.

Practitioners can use the proposed model to maintain the alignment of strategic performance and purpose. Using social accounting based on indicators and financial proxies allows managers to incorporate social value into strategic management in terms of financial value.

The institutional demand for social information is based on the growing sensitivity of companies. Aligning social values with business strategies contributes to social sustainability.

This study focuses on an unresearched emerging phenomenon. Since the first approach to stakeholder theory, the development of a stakeholder-oriented strategy has faced the lack of a stakeholder accounting system. The polyhedral model of social accounting could help overcome this problem as it provides information that allows a novel and innovative method to make a stakeholder-oriented strategy effective.