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This article explores and contrasts the views of two influential research projects within the social and environmental accounting space. Both projects advocate for sustainability. The first here referred to as the Critical Social and Environmental Accounting Project (CSEAP), was developed and championed by Rob Gray and calls for immediate radical structural change. The second one is called the Pragmatic Sustainability Management Accounting Project (PSMAP), championed by Stefan Schaltegger, and advocates for an entrepreneurial process of creating radical solutions in joint stakeholder collaboration over time.

The paper is the culmination of a decade-long debate between Gray and Schaltegger as advocates of CSEAP and PSMAP, respectively. Specifically, the paper explores the differences and agreements between CSEAP and PSMAP on whether and how companies should pursue sustainability and the role of accounting in these efforts. The paper focusses on critical issues that exemplify the tension in their views: general goals, the role of structure and agency and how to creating change and transformation.

The article contrasts CSEAP's uncompromising antagonising approach to accountability and fundamental systemic change with PSMAP's pragmatic approach to sustainability accounting with its management and entrepreneurship-orientated approach to change and unwavering support for transformative managers on the front lines. Despite their apparent differences, the paper also outlines areas of agreement between these two positions and how accounting and sustainability can move forward.

The debate tries to reconcile language and conceptional differences in the social and environmental accounting (SEA) and sustainability management accounting (SMA) communities to reduce confusion in the research space over what sustainability is for organisations and what role accounting plays in this. The authors hope that the tension between the different positions outlined in this paper generates new insights and positions on the topic.

While the two views explored in this paper are primarily incompatible, each generates implications for practice, research and education. Debates like this are crucial to moving from discursive disagreement to creating a tolerant and robust foundation for moving forward and achieving much-needed sustainable transitions in the economy and society.

The authors offer shared understandings, points of continuing disagreement and alternative views on the nature of sustainability. The debate forges a bridge of understanding where both sides can learn from each other.

This study explores a hegemonic alliance and the role of relational forms of accounting and accountablity in the making of contemporary capitalism.

We use the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” documents to provide an account of the detailed machinations between interest groups (corporations and the state) that are constitutive of hegemonic activity.

Our analysis of the “Cablegate” documents shows that the US and Chevron were crafting a central role for Turkmenistan and its president on the global political stage as early as 2007, despite offical reporting beginning only in 2009. The documents exemplify how “accountability gaps” occlude the understanding of interdependence between capital and the state.

The study contributes to a growing idea that official accounts offer a fictionalized narrative of corporations as existing independently, and thus expands the boundaries associated with studying multinational corporate activities to include their interdependencies with the modern state.

The study traces how global capitalism extends into new territories through diplomatic channels, as a strategic initiative between powerful state and capital interests, arguing that the outcome is the empowerment of authoritarian states at the cost of democracy.

The study argues that previous accounting and accountability research has overlooked the larger picture of how capital and the state work together to secure a mutual hegemonic interest. We advocate for a more complete account of these activities that circumvents official, often restricted, views of global capitalism.

The authors explore the Australian Government's implementation of budgetary measures to manage the social and economic impacts of COVID-19, paying particular attention to how the country's history of inequality has shaped these actions, and the effect inequality may have on outcomes.

In this qualitative case study of public budgeting, the authors draw on the latest research into inequality to consider the implications of policy responses to COVID-19 in Australia. In particular, we examine the short-term introduction of what we term “people-focused” budgetary measures. These appeared contrary to the dominant neoliberalist approach to Australian welfare policymaking.

This paper foregrounds the relationship between budgeting, public policy and inequality and explores how decades of increasingly regressive tax systems and stagnating living wages have made both people, and the state, vulnerable to crises like COVID.

There is still much to learn about the role of accounting in the shaping of growing economic inequality. In focusing on public budgeting within the context of COVID, the authors suggest ways accounting researchers can contribute to our understanding of economic inequality, both in terms of drivers and consequences. The authors hope to contribute to a growing body of accounting research that can influence social movements, political debates and policymaking, while also raising awareness of the consequences of wealth and income inequality.

The authors explore ways accounting scholars might help articulate a post-COVID future that avoids recreating the inequalities of the past and present.

This paper explores how neoliberalism restrains the ability of governments to respond to crises through budgetary action. It examines the immediate budgetary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by the Australian government and explores how the conditions created by prior neoliberal policies have limited these responses.

A review and examination of the prior literature on public budgeting and new public management are provided. The idea of a “neoliberal straitjacket” is used to frame the current budgetary and economic situation in Australia.

The paper examines the chronology of Australia's budgetary responses to the economic and health crisis created by COVID-19. These responses have taken the form of tax breaks and a temporary payment scheme for individuals made unemployed by the pandemic.

The insights gained from this paper may help with future policy developments and promote future research on similar crises.

The analysis of Australia's policies in dealing with the pandemic may offer insights for other countries struggling to cope with the fiscal consequences of COVID-19.

The current academic publishing model, in which researchers rely significantly on multinational publishing companies to disseminate their work, has implications for knowledge enterprise both in terms of knowledge production and distribution. This study aims to provide a critical reflection on the academic publishing model and how it works, particularly in light of the rise of open access publishing and the growing analytics focus of publishing companies and discusses the impact on knowledge equity.

This exploratory essay offers a critical analysis of the impact of the current academic publishing model on research practices. The discussion provides a foundation for the argument that knowledge equity is essential to social justice.

To effectively fulfil the transformative aims of the interdisciplinary research community within social and environmental accounting, it is imperative to establish equitable access to published research.

This essay opens space for discussion of the current publishing model, given its dominance of the knowledge enterprise. It outlines some of the implications of this model for knowledge equity and suggests strategies for fostering a more inclusive and accessible dissemination of scholarly work.

This paper proposes a research method for analysing talk about accounting concepts, systems and numbers. The authors argue that studying accounting talk in situ is a fruitful way to understand both the role accounting plays in the framing of relationships between individuals and the associated emotional content of these exchanges. As such, the authors argue that conversation analysis (CA) is a useful complement to interviews in qualitative research.

The authors introduce a specific approach to CA called positioning theory, which captures the linguistic and emotional subtleties embedded within interpersonal interactions, and the way accounting impacts and mediates these relations through measuring, assessment and control. The authors draw on one particularly animated conversation about accounting in a manufacturing company. The conversation was a largely emotional and animated exchange between individuals where talk about accounting was imbued with metaphors, violence, sex and humour.

While participants in conversations may appear to draw on similar forms of language and expression, CA allows researchers to see that the meaning of these shared expressions change based on who is saying them, whom they are saying them to and how they are saying them. Dissecting conversations as they unfold, offers a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of accounting as central to the social fabric of organisational life.

As opposed to interviews, which often suffer from the rationality of hindsight (referred to as retrospective rationality), CA captures the unfolding nature of accounting talk in real-time–not upon reflection.

The purpose of this paper is to advance a critical realist perspective on performativity and use it to examine how novel conceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have performative effects.

To illustrate how the authors’ critical realist understanding of performativity can play out, the authors offer a field study of an Australian packaging company and engage in retroductive and retrodictive theorising.

In contrast to most prior accounting research, the authors advance a structuralist understanding of performativity that pays more systematic attention to the causal relationships that underpin performative tendencies. The authors explain how such tendencies are conditioned by pre-existing, social structures, conceptualised in terms of multiple, intersecting norm circles. The authors illustrate their argument empirically by showing how specific conceptions of CSR, centred on the notion of “shared value”, were cemented by the interplay between the causal powers embedded in such norm circles and how this suppressed alternative conceptions of this phenomenon.

The findings draw attention to the structural boundary conditions under which particular conceptions of CSR can be expected to become performative. Greater attention to such boundary conditions, denoting the social structures that reinforce and counteract performative tendencies, is required to further cumulative, yet context-sensitive, theory development on this topic.

The paper is the first to adopt a critical realist perspective on performativity in the accounting literature. This perspective strikes a middle path between the highly constructivist ontology, adopted in most accounting research concerned with performativity and realist criticisms of this ontological position for de-emphasising the influence of pre-existing, objective realities on performativity.

The authors critique Modell's proposition that critical realism is useful in elucidating and creating possibilities for emancipation.

The authors begin by outlining Modell's conception of enabling structures. If ‘activated’ by reflexive individuals, these are theorised to be a mechanism through which agents can begin to emancipate themselves. However, the authors argue that emancipation must be contextualised within the material realities of global capitalism, paying particular attention to the shape of inequality and the subjects of exploitation. In doing this, they draw on Marx to pose an alternative view of structure.

In offering a Marxist critique of critical realism, the authors show how capitalist superstructure and base work together to reinforce inequality. In doing this, they highlight the enduring importance of collective action as the engine of emancipation. It is for this reason that they advocate for an emancipatory politics, which is collectively informed outside of, and in conflict with, the logics of capitalism.

The authors argue that explicit discussions of capitalism and its structures must be at the centre of critical accounting research, especially when it pertains to emancipation.

Given the importance of the conceptual framing of critical accounting research, this article suggests that critical realism has much to offer. That said, the authors draw on Marx to raise a number of important questions about both the nature of structure and the identity of reflexive agents within critical realism. They do this to encourage further debate about the emancipatory possibilities of the critical accounting project and the ideas proposed by Modell (2020).

The purpose of this paper is threefold. To clarify what is meant by “pragmatism” as a philosophy for social and environmental accountability (SEA) research, to survey its use within this research field and to explore how a further pursuit of pragmatism may extend this research field.

An extensive review of the SEA literature was conducted in order to determine what aspects of the philosophy of pragmatism have been used within the research. The authors organised the discussion of the literature around the pragmatist ideas of “truth” and “sensemaking”.

SEA research is a heterogeneous space in which various ideas are commonly attributed to the philosophical notion of pragmatism. However, there is a tension in the literature between seeing accounting as a medium for representing social and environmental organisational activities and a pragmatist view of accountings as a way of allowing managers and stakeholder to make sense of these same activities.

A clearer development of the ideas of pragmatism may be used to redirect the focus of SEA research in a number of useful ways. Seeing accounting as a medium of sensemaking between organisations and their stakeholders allows the authors to widen the exploration of accounting not only to the production of reports but also their interpretation by users. The ideas of pragmatism also allow the authors to explore the ways stakeholders might affect change within organisations and how accounting may support this process rather than capture or limit it.

This paper concludes by providing a set of methodological prescriptions for conducting future SEA research in a way that is inspired by pragmatism. It outlines an approach to research that focuses on users and their sensemaking and encourages an exploration of the possible ways accounting may create positive change in organisations.

Overall, this paper refines what it means to follow pragmatism within SEA research. It will promote a clearer understanding of how we, as a research community, may engage with practice in more positive ways in order to facilitate corporate social responsibility.

This poem aims to portray an individual's experience of office life.

A short poem is presented.

Power relations disperse slowly in the glass prisms of modern offices and recreate mirages of a person's superiors in their imagination.

This poem may resonate with any individual who longs for success in their organisation.

The poem tries to capture a sense of the ambiguous and desperate relationship with those an individual works for and longs to be recognised by.