Search results

This paper seeks to problematise “accounting for biodiversity” and to provide a framework for analysing and understanding the role of accounting in preserving and enhancing biodiversity on Planet Earth. The paper aims to raise awareness of the urgent need to address biodiversity loss and extinction and the need for corporations to discharge accountability for their part in the current biodiversity crisis by accounting for their biodiversity‐related strategies and policies. Such accounting is, it is believed, emancipatory and leads to engendering change in corporate behaviour and attitudes.

The authors reviewed the literature relating to biodiversity across a wide array of disciplines including anthropology, biodiversity, ecology, finance, philosophy, and of course, accounting, in order to build an image of the current state of biodiversity and the role which accounting can and “should” play in the future of biodiversity.

It is found that the problems underlying accounting for biodiversity fall into four broad categories: philosophical and scientific problems, accountability problems, technical accounting problems, and problems of accounting practice.

Through establishing a framework problematising biodiversity, a roadmap is laid out for researchers and practitioners to navigate a route for future research and policymaking in biodiversity accounting. It is concluded that an interdisciplinary approach to accounting for biodiversity is crucial to ensuring effective action on biodiversity and for accounting for biodiversity to achieve its emancipatory potential.

Although there is a wealth of sustainability reporting research, there is hardly any work exploring the role of accounting in preserving and enhancing biodiversity. There is no research exploring the current state of accounting for biodiversity. This paper summarises the current state of biodiversity using an interdisciplinary approach and introduces a series of papers devoted to the role of accounting in biodiversity accepted for this AAAJ special issue. The paper also provides a framework identifying the diverse problems associated with accounting for biodiversity.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which social, ethical and environmental (SEE) disclosure is being integrated into institutional investment. The aim is also to investigate the interplay between private and public SEE disclosure.

The paper uses a grounded theory methodology involving interviews with 21 members of the UK institutional adjustment community.

The paper found that institutional investors did not consider that public SEE disclosure was adequate for their portfolio investment decisions, suggesting that SEE disclosure was decision‐useful. Consequently, this perceived market failure in public SEE disclosure has been supplemented by the development of sophisticated private SEE disclosure channels. Further, the interviews indicated that this private SEE disclosure process was becoming dialogic in nature, since not only were institutional investors initiating the engagement process with companies but also companies were starting to request information on the SEE disclosure required by institutional investors. This finding contrasts with previous work which found that the private disclosure process in financial reporting was essentially user‐oriented and uni‐directional.

This paper highlights the importance of SEE disclosure to a crucial user group, institutional investors. The research contributes to the SEE disclosure literature by revealing details of the evolving private SEE disclosure process for the first time.

An important outcome of the UK Company Law Review (CLR) involved draft regulations for a mandatory operating and financial review (OFR). The unprecedented abandonment of this mandatory OFR in November 2005 threw debate about the genuine motivations underlying the CLR into disarray. This paper seeks to reinterpret the abandonment of a mandatory OFR using interview research.

The authors conducted a series of 24 interviews with companies from the FTSE100 between May and August 2004, prior to the abandonment.

The interviews showed that the OFR was perceived as an appropriate vehicle for social and environmental reporting (SER). The interviewees considered that a mandatory OFR would provide a means of forcing SER into the mainstream and making it mandatory at a basic level. The interviews revealed that processes for the identification of material SER differ widely between organisations, ranging from embryonic to highly structured. Further, interviewees believed that directors had the final veto on inclusion of information. Despite directors' inclination to hide behind materiality as a means of avoiding SER, interviewees did not view the proposed mandatory OFR as “greenwash” but as a vehicle that would increase stakeholder confidence, as processes underlying the proposed OFR would be audited.

The research implies that abandoning the mandatory OFR represented a lost opportunity for SER.

The paper provides new evidence on the processes of materiality decision making in the SER area as well as strong endorsement of the mandatory OFR, contrary to the government turn‐around.

The purpose of the research was to discover the process of social and environmental report assurance (SERA) and thereby evaluate the benefits, extent of stakeholder inclusivity and/or managerial capture of SERA processes and the dynamics of SERA as it matures.

This paper used semi‐structured interviews with 20 accountant and consultant assurors to derive data, which were then coded and analysed, resulting in the identification of four themes.

This paper provides interview evidence on the process of SERA, suggesting that, although there is still managerial capture of SERA, stakeholders are being increasingly included in the process as it matures. SERA is beginning to provide dual‐pronged benefits, adding value to management and stakeholders simultaneously. Through the lens of Freirian dialogic theory, it is found that SERA is starting to display some characteristics of a dialogical process, being stakeholder inclusive, demythologising and transformative, with assurors perceiving themselves as a “voice” for stakeholders. Consequently, SERA is becoming an important mechanism for driving forward more stakeholder‐inclusive SER, with the SERA process beginning to transform attitudes of management towards their stakeholders through more stakeholder‐led SER. However, there remain significant obstacles to dialogic SERA. The paper suggests these could be removed through educative and transformative processes driven by assurors.

Previous work on SERA has involved predominantly content‐based analysis on assurance statements. However, this paper investigates the details of the SERA process, for the first time using qualitative interview data.

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.

This paper aims to provide evidence to suggest that private social and environmental reporting (i.e. one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and investees on social and environmental issues) is beginning to merge with private financial reporting and that, as a result, integrated private reporting is emerging.

In this paper, 19 FTSE100 companies and 20 UK institutional investors were interviewed to discover trends in private integrated reporting and to gauge whether private reporting is genuinely becoming integrated. The emergence of integrated private reporting through the lens of institutional logics was interpreted. The emergence of integrated private reporting as a merging of two hitherto separate and possibly rival institutional logics was framed.

It was found that specialist socially responsible investment managers are starting to attend private financial reporting meetings, while mainstream fund managers are starting to attend private meetings on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Further, senior company directors are becoming increasingly conversant with ESG issues.

The findings were interpreted as two possible scenarios: there is a genuine hybridisation occurring in the UK institutional investment such that integrated private reporting is emerging or the financial logic is absorbing and effectively neutralising the responsible investment logic.

These findings provide evidence of emergent integrated private reporting which are useful to both the corporate and institutional investment communities as they plan their engagement meetings.

No study has hitherto examined private social and environmental reporting through interview research from the perspective of emergent integrated private reporting. This is the first paper to discuss integrated reporting in the private reporting context.

This paper extends the nature and relevance of exploring the historical roots of social and environmental accounting by investigating an account that recorded and made visible pollution in 17th century London. John Evelyn's Fumifugium (1661) is characterised as an external social account that bears resemblance to contemporary external accounting particularly given its problematising intentionality.

An interpretive content analysis of the text draws out the themes and features of social accounting. Emancipatory accounting theory is the theoretical lens through which Evelyn's social account is interpreted, applying a microhistory research approach. We interpret Fumifugium as a social account with reference to the context of the reporting accountant.

In this early example of a stakeholder “giving an account” rather than an “account rendered” by an entity, Evelyn problematises industrial pollution and its impacts with the stated intention of changing industrial practices. We find that Fumifugium was used in challenging, resisting and seeking to solve an environmental problem by highlighting the adverse consequences to those in power and rendering new solutions thinkable.

This is the first research paper to extend investigations of the historical roots of social and environmental accounting into the 17th century. It also extends research investigating alternative forms of account by focusing on a report produced by an interested party and includes a novel use of the emancipatory accounting theoretical lens to investigate this historic report. Fumifugium challenged the lack of accountability of businesses in ways similar to present-day campaigns to address the overwhelming challenge of climate change.

This paper seeks to broaden the agenda for environmental and ecological accounting research across several dimensions, extending the form of accounting in this field by encouraging research into its historical roots and developing a definition of accounting that can address the severe environmental and ecological challenges of the 21st century.

The authors explored environmental and ecological accounts from the dawn of human consciousness across a wide variety of media and in a broad range of forms. This theoretical approach reacts to the cold capitalist commodification of nature inherent in much environmental accounting practice, which documents, values and records usage of natural capital with little attempt to address depletion and loss.

By analysing the earliest ecological and environmental “accounts” recorded by humans at the dawn of human consciousness, and considering a wide array of subsequent accounts, the authors demonstrate that rather than being a secondary, relatively recent development emerging from financial accounting and reporting, environmental and ecological accounting predated financial accounting by tens of thousands of years. This research also provides a wealth of perspectives on diversity, not only in forms of account but also in the diversity of accountants, as well as the broadness of the stakeholders to whom and to which the accounts are rendered.

The paper can be placed at the intersection of accounting history, the alternative, interdisciplinary and critical accounts literature, and environmental and ecological accounting research.

Practically, the authors can draw ideas and inspiration from the historical forms and content of ecological and environmental account that can inform new forms of and approaches to accounting.

There are social implications including the diversity of accounts and accountants derived from studying historical ecological and environmental accounts from the dawn of human consciousness especially in the broadening out of the authors' understanding of the origins and cultural roots of accounting.

This study concludes with a new definition of accounting, fit for purpose in the 21st century, that integrates ecological, environmental concerns and is emancipatory, aiming to restore nature, revive biodiversity, conserve species and enhance ecosystems.

The frequency and sophistication of consumer boycotts continue to increase from already high levels. Surprisingly, only limited research in marketing has investigated this topic. The purpose of this paper is to provide a strategic analysis of an actual consumer protest with implications for better managerial decisions.

The animosity model of consumer purchase behavior was employed in two longitudinal studies to investigate an ongoing marketplace protest – Australian consumers' boycott of French products. Study 1 was carried out while France was engaged in nuclear testing in the South Pacific. Study 2 was carried out 1 year after the resolution of the conflict.

Results from Study 1 show that Australian consumers' animosity toward France was negatively related to their willingness to purchase French products. Consistent with a key prediction from the animosity model, this effect was independent of evaluations of French product quality. The findings from Study 2 show that, a year after the cessation of nuclear testing, Australian consumers continue to have strong negative affect toward France, which in turn, had negative marketplace consequences for French products.

While the results from Study 1 show that consumer anger over nuclear testing did not necessarily lead to the denigration of the quality of French goods, the second study indicates that, beyond the duration of the official protest, there may be repercussions for products associated with the offending party. Accordingly, managers should consider implementing communications programs which, over time, effectively reinforce the quality of their products in the minds of protesting consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons behind the significant gender gaps observed in entrepreneurial interest among adolescents. Specifically, the authors aim to test multiple models that analyze direct and indirect relationships between work and leadership experience, presence of a parental role model, self‐efficacy, and interest by teens in becoming entrepreneurs.

A sample of over 5,000 middle and high school students participated in the larger study from which the data were drawn. Participants completed measures of entrepreneurial self‐efficacy, entrepreneurial intentions, work and leadership experience, and parental entrepreneurial role model. The authors analyzed the data using structural equation modeling.

While the study confirmed previous empirical findings regarding the antecedents of entrepreneurial self‐efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions, significant differences across gender emerged. First, while boys and girls hold jobs outside of school in comparable numbers, this work experience is much more powerful in generating self‐efficacy among boys. Additionally, the findings indicated that self‐efficacy seemed to have a stronger effect on entrepreneurial interest for girls than for boys, and that having an entrepreneurial mother or father had a significant and positive effect on girls' (but not boys') levels of the entrepreneurial interest.

Common method variance and other typical limitations of cross‐sectional self‐report surveys are acknowledged. Future research should use longitudinal and multi‐method approaches to overcome such limitations.

Findings suggest that feeling like they are able to succeed as entrepreneurs might count more for girls than for boys when considering career options, and demonstrate the value of entrepreneurial role models for young girls, especially those who already have the confidence and perceived skills to launch their own future ventures.

The paper documents research that represents one of the few large‐scale studies of US teens examining entrepreneurial intentions and antecedents across gender.