Description
As organizational leaders have become more aware of a
wider array of sustainability-related challenges, their
organizations and advisors have worked on developing a
growing range of accounting, accountability and assurance
practices to help identify and manage these sustainabilityrelated
risks and opportunities. Alongside the development
of such practices and engagements between organizations
and their stakeholders have emerged critiques and
debates, supported with insights from academic research
Editorial
Academic contributions to enhancing accounting
for sustainable development
Leaders of business, public service and third sector
organizations are increasingly recognizing that in
discharging their varied duties they must address the
signi?cant risks of global environmental change, including
the economic and social risks that can ?ow from it. They
are also recognizing the interaction of a broader range of
risks and opportunities arising from, and impacting upon,
ecological, social and economic sustainability as among
the most urgent and complex challenges facing their
organizations and society more broadly (Hopwood,
Unerman, & Fries, 2010).
As organizational leaders have become more aware of a
wider array of sustainability-related challenges, their
organizations and advisors have worked on developing a
growing range of accounting, accountability and assurance
practices to help identify and manage these sustainability-
related risks and opportunities (Bebbington, Unerman &
O’Dwyer, 2014; Malsch, 2013; O’Dwyer, Owen &
Unerman, 2011; Power, 1997). Alongside the development
of such practices and engagements between organizations
and their stakeholders have emerged critiques and
debates, supported with insights from academic research,
regarding the degree to which such practices and engage-
ments might be considered as substantive (Gray, 2010).
There is a long-standing tradition of academic research
examining a range of policies, processes and practices
related to sustainability accounting and accountability
(Buhr, 2007; Gray et al., 2010; Owen, 2008; Thomson,
2007, 2014). Journals such as Accounting, Organizations
and Society, Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal,
Critical Perspectives on Accounting, and Accounting Forum
have welcomed and encouraged a variety of this social
and environmental accounting and accountability research
over some decades (Gray, 2002; Gray & Laughlin, 2012;
Lehman, 1999; Owen, 2008). Academic networks such as
The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research
and its associated journal Social and Environmental
Accountability Journal have also played a central role in
building research capacity in this ?eld. This capacity build-
ing has been, and continues to be, important because a
body of high quality academic literature not only relies
upon the imagination and inspiration of individual
scholars but also develops from cohorts of researchers
engaged in long-term synergistic conversations that
networks such as The Centre for Social and Environmental
Accounting Research have facilitated and promoted.
Increasing organizational interest in sustainability
accounting and accountability, along with increased aca-
demic investigation of these accounting issues, has paral-
leled much greater evidence and public awareness of the
collective unsustainability of many human activities
(IPCC, 2013, 2014a, 2014b), especially the negative ecolog-
ical and social impacts of business activity (Bebbington &
Larrinaga, 2014b; Hopwood, 2009). Across the diverse
range of sustainability accounting and accountability
research (Thomson, 2014), we discern three broad strands
of literature – albeit with some overlapping studies and
blurring between these strands.
One strand seeks to demonstrate relationships between
social and environmental performance, social and environ-
mental reporting, and economic performance (including
stock market valuations). An often implicit argument
underlying this strand of literature is that elements of sus-
tainability can be highlighted and/or addressed through
existing market mechanisms. In sharp distinction, a second
strand of research suggests that social and environmental
unsustainability is largely a consequence of the capitalist
system and argues that the best (or only) way to move
towards a socially and ecologically sustainable system is
to radically reform or even overthrow markets and capital-
ism. The third strand of research seeks to constructively
but critically engage with businesses and other organiza-
tions to help them identify a range of social and environ-
mental sustainability risks and opportunities and make
changes to the way they operate in a direction intended
to result in less unsustainable operations.
As can be seen in Fig. 1, Sustainability studies from nat-
ural science demonstrate that organizations need to make
substantive changes in the short term if we are to avert
catastrophic global environmental change and resultant
societal dislocation.
Academics working in the third broad strand of sustain-
ability accounting and accountability research might well
accept arguments from studies in the second strand thathttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.07.003
0361-3682/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
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?aws in the capitalist system cause or reinforce social and
environmental unsustainability. The motivation for their
rather different approach, however, is a concern that radi-
cal reform in the capitalist system is likely to come far too
late to avert catastrophic global environmental change.
Perversely, such radical reform might only arise as a result
of the major social and economic disruption indicated in
Fig. 1 as likely to ?ow from catastrophic levels of global
environmental change. Considering this too high a price
to pay for reform, academics working in this third broad
stand of research take an approach that helping organiza-
tions to change towards less unsustainable operations has
potential to defer the time by which we will reach the
point of catastrophic global environmental change, giving
greater time and opportunity for novel solutions to chal-
lenges of global warming and social breakdown to be
developed. They see such constructive engagements as
essential in moving towards a low-emission scenario
(RCP2.6 in Fig. 1) and away from a high-emission scenario
likely to ensue in the absence of practical efforts to change
organizational (un)sustainability policies and practices
(scenario RCP8.5 in Fig. 1).
In this paper we focus on this third broad strand of sus-
tainability accounting and accountability literature, a
strand referred to as ‘accounting for sustainable develop-
ment’ (see also Bebbington & Thomson, 2013). We regard
research in this strand, that seeks to engage with and cri-
tique practice and policy, as perhaps challenging some of
the more commonly accepted distinctions and de?nitions
of criticality within parts of the accounting academy, espe-
cially studies within the second broad strand of sustain-
ability accounting and accountability research. This is
because within this work, it is an open question as to
whether or not existing power structures are in need of
replacement, reformation or redirection.
Within this third strand of literature the complexities of
the detailed underlying issues and relationships indicate a
need for greater attention to the development and re?ne-
ment of focused novel theoretical framings (Bebbington
& Thomson, 2013). Theory plays a vital role in the interac-
tion between observation and insight by providing an
explanatory framework that helps to: simplify a highly
complex word; structure the abstraction of meaningful
insights from messy data; and communicate these insights
to different audiences. Therefore greater theoretical
sophistication can play a vital role in the provision of
robust evidence and understandings upon which existing
practices can be evaluated and critiqued, and new and
sounder practices developed.
As the totality of shared empirical insights in any com-
plex area grows, interpretations of this body of insights
will evolve. Old insights will be questioned and over time
blind spots and areas of inattention will become apparent,
leading to shifts in how and why different theoretical
frameworks might be considered relevant. An important
aspect of research is thus maintaining an openness to
review and update theoretical frameworks in use, and to
develop novel theoretical framings, if evidence and under-
standings from new studies are to make ongoing and sub-
stantive contributions to evaluating, critiquing and
developing policy and practice. We argue here (and the
papers in this special section of Accounting, Organizations
and Society serve to demonstrate) that there are bene?ts
arising from greater development, diversity and sophisti-
cation in the formation and use of theory in research on
accounting for sustainable development.
In making the case for greater sophistication and use of
novel theoretical framings in accounting for sustainable
development research we start by highlighting the
increased complexity and unpredictability of relationships
between phenomena when moving from a focus on ?nan-
cially- or economically-based accounting practices to a
broader engagement with multifaceted and interacting
social, environmental and economic sustainable develop-
ment. Having established that research into accounting for
sustainable development examines practices in an arena
characterized by added layers of complexity and unpredict-
ability on top of the already very complex economically-
Fig. 1. Source: IPCC (2014c) Working Group II report, p. 13: Assessment Box SPM.1 Figure 1.
386 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
focused accounting practices, the subsequent section builds
our case aroundthe necessity for development anddiversity
of theoretical understandings or framings inabstracting and
communicating useful insights fromempirical observations
of accounting for sustainable development practices.
This is followed by a section illustrating the beginnings
of a movement towards more sophisticated use of
theory as seen in some recently published papers in the
accounting for sustainable development research strand
– in this issue of Accounting, Organizations and Society
and elsewhere. We seek to highlight how such theoretical
developments provide compelling and novel insights,
moving us forward in our understanding of accounting
for sustainable development practices. The concluding sec-
tion contributes a few ideas for potentially fruitful avenues
for theoretical formation, re?nement and development in
research on accounting for sustainable development.
Complexity and unpredictability in accounting for
sustainable development
Economically-focused accounting is a highly complex
?eld comprising both management and ?nancial account-
ing. It can be characterized as communicating and helping
to manage direct economic interactions and impacts
betweenanorganizationandthe worldexternal to the orga-
nization. It draws a boundary around the organization and
records, analyzes and/or reports on economically material
interactions andimpacts that have aneffect withinor across
this boundary. This communication and management role
may also extend to cover interactions and impacts that are
ultimately but less directly economic, but where these
interactions and impacts manifest themselves in economic
terms withina relativelyshort-termtime horizon. However,
less direct and less certain potential long-term economic
risks arising from social and environmental impacts of the
organization’s activities (such as its impact on climate
change or social cohesion) are often ignored or evaluated
as immaterial by conventional accounting practices so are
excluded from the accounting analysis.
Accounting for sustainable development necessitates
the broadening of these short-term economically-oriented
accounting practices to incorporate not just direct
short-term economic interactions and impacts but also to
incorporate the direct interactions and impacts between
the organization, the society in which it operates and the
natural environment. These additional social and environ-
mental interactions and impacts will often have an
economic impact in the longer term (Bebbington, Gray,
Hibbitt, & Kirk, 2001). Thus, in accounting for sustainable
development, an already highly complex range of more
conventional ?nancially-oriented accounting practices,
focusing on two-way economic interactions and impacts
between the organization and its external world in the
shorter term, is broadened to address a much larger array
of two-way social, environmental and economic interac-
tions and impacts between the entity and the world
beyond the entity’s boundaries.
However this broadening is not limited to adding these
additional two-way dimensions of social and environmen-
tal impacts to more familiar economic impacts. The direct
impacts on society, the natural environment and the econ-
omy ?owing from an organization’s activities will usually
also result in less direct impacts between society, the envi-
ronment and the economy. Thus, any single action taken
by an organization can initially directly impact upon and
cause a variety of changes in elements of social cohesion,
the natural environment and the amount and distribution
of wealth. These direct impacts on society, the environ-
ment and the economy will subsequently lead individually
and/or collectively to other changes in these areas. These
other changes can then in turn impact further upon the
organization (Hopwood et al., 2010).
To illustrate the distinction between these direct and
less direct impacts and interactions, we can consider the
widely reported BP Gulf of Mexico oil accident in 2010.
According to a US Congressional enquiry, this accident
apparently partly resulted from local decisions within the
oil multinational BP and its contractors to save relatively
immaterial costs by cutting corners in oil exploration
safety measures (National Commission on the BP
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, 2011). The ensuing accident
might have been prevented had more robust safety mea-
sures been in place. It directly killed 11 workers employed
on the oil drilling exploration rig, a clear negative social
impact for these 11 people and their friends and families.
It also directly caused large scale oil pollution in the Gulf
of Mexico and directly incurred large economic costs for
BP and its partners in extinguishing the ?re, stopping the
oil leak and cleaning up some of the spilt oil. These direct
(and fairly immediate) external impacts on social, environ-
mental and economic factors themselves then caused
many other negative impacts in these areas. Thus, for
example, the oil pollution killed many ?sh, prevented
many ?shermen going to sea to catch ?sh for a period
and damaged the tourist industry in states close to the
oil spill (National Commission on the BP Deepwater
Horizon Oil Spill & Offshore Drilling, 2011). The negative
environmental impact from the oil spill therefore caused
other social and economic impacts on communities in
coastal areas close to the oil spill. Several of these and
other impacts then fed through into further economic
impacts for BP and its contractors who were required to
pay compensation to those affected and who suffered
reputation damage. In total, BP reported costs of
US$40.9 billion in 2010 associated with the Gulf oil spill.
Consistent with long-standing arguments within the
academic literature, with longer time horizons, social and
environmental impacts became economic impacts.
If longer-term and less direct possible economic conse-
quences of social and environmental risks had been more
prominent in routine decision-making processes at BP,
the actions and outcome might have been different. Of
course, we can never prove a counterfactual. However
decisions informed by narrowly focused short-term eco-
nomic accounting information might plausibly be very dif-
ferent if a broader range of direct and indirect social,
environmental and economic impacts and interactions
were incorporated into the accounting information and
risk assessments used to inform decision-making.
Expanding existing accounting mechanisms to cover
these social and environmental interactions and impacts
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394 387
is far from straightforward however. This is because the
dynamics and characteristics within the social and envi-
ronmental dimensions differ in important ways from those
in the more familiar economic dimension. One of these
major differences, for example, is in the area of
commensuration.
A key factor that facilitates accounting measurement,
aggregation and comparison of many different economic
transactions and events is that there is a suf?ciently broad
intersubjective consensus on the commensuration of these
economic impacts in terms of ?nancial monetary measure-
ment. Economic activity relies in large part on the
exchange of property rights. As the exchange of property
rights usually involves the exchange of money there are
readily available monetary measurements available for
these transactions. These monetary valuations appear to
lead to relatively broad intersubjective consensus on the
common measurement of economic impacts of different
actions and events. Thus economic impacts are often com-
mensurated in practice in monetary terms.
In considering this outcome it is important to stress
that this monetary commensuration is not an intrinsic
characteristic of the economic arena. Rather it re?ects
the weight of time and effort spent over many decades in
producing intersubjective consensus. For example whilst
the notion and broad de?nition of pro?t is still subject to
ongoing debate and critique in some quarters, it has
become widely taken for granted in others, even when
the potentially fragile and subjective nature of its supports
are readily apparent.
Challenges to this intersubjective consensus can arise
as the mode of analysis and measurement of economic
outcomes is brought to bear in arenas where other modes
of thinking are prevalent. The case of the Diagnostic
Related Group as a central tool in the resource allocation
of healthcare resources in acute settings is a useful exam-
ple. Early research on this matter demonstrated the con-
testation, fragility and malleability of the approach
(Chua, 1994; Chua & Degeling, 1993). Moving on in time,
in reviewing the landscape of contemporary healthcare
costing we ?nd that, for better or worse, the Diagnostic
Related Group is now a pervasively dominant approach
(Chapman, Kern, & Laguecir, 2014) and routinely offers a
basis for practical commensuration in healthcare.
The term ‘practical’ is an important caveat here. From
the perspective of researchers in the second broad strand
of social and environmental accounting and accountability
research, attempts by some practitioners and consultants
to put a common, often monetary, value on all material
sustainability impacts are in principle ill-conceived
(Hines, 1991). From the perspective of researchers working
in the third strand of this research, intersubjective consen-
sus on measurement might, however, in some areas be suf-
?cient to allow some social and environmental impacts to
be practically commensurated such that they can begin to
be more directly and actively considered.
One candidate for such practical commensuration is
carbon impacts. Emissions of carbon dioxide (and other
global warming gases) have broadly a global impact, which
therefore does not vary substantively depending upon
where in the world the carbon dioxide is emitted. There
are (admittedly contested) market mechanisms available
through increasingly prevalent carbon trading schemes to
put a traded price on carbon emissions (Bebbington &
Larrinaga, 2014a). Whilst a contested matter, some would
argue that suf?cient consensus has now developed for
commensuration with economic impacts to begin to take
place in this area.
As we move to other environmental areas we ?nd less
experience and established practice of measurement how-
ever. For these environmental impacts practical commen-
surability is a more remote prospect. One such impact is
the use of water in manufacturing, transporting and using
products. It might be possible to establish accounting
mechanisms to calculate the amount of water that has
been use to bring each product to its current state and
location – the notional amount of water embedded in a
product (Russell & Lewis, 2014). However, aggregating
and comparing this embedded water is highly problematic
such that any resulting interpretation might not be mean-
ingful. This is because two products with the same amount
of embedded water may have each used water in their pro-
duction in a manner that has very different environmental
impacts.
For example, water is used to grow grass to feed cattle
that produce milk and beef. Where this water comes from
plentiful rainfall in an area that does not suffer water stress
its use will have a very different ecological and social
opportunity cost than the same amount of water embed-
ded in the milk and beef of cattle grazing in an arid region.
Further complexity is added where an area might be arid at
some times of the year but very wet at others, with the
opportunity cost of water embedded in the same product
from the same location varying depending upon the time
of year of production. Given this complexity and diversity
in the social and environmental opportunity cost of a given
amount of water, reaching the level of intersubjective con-
sensus necessary for practical commensuration with a
metric for the impact of water use is likely to be much
more challenging than it has been for carbon.
This very brief example therefore illustrates the com-
plexity and challenge of commensurating the environmen-
tal impact of water use and water embedded in products
and services. Without the ability to commensurate, many
accounting mechanisms developed to help informdecisions
inthe economic sphere cannot be usedinthe environmental
or social spheres. These commensuration problems call for
potentially radically new accounting mechanisms to be
developed to make an effective contribution to enhancing
social and environmental sustainability.
In addition to commensuration problems that arise
when broadening the focus of accounting from the eco-
nomic to encompass social and environmental sustainabil-
ity, the relationships and interactions between social,
environmental and economic impacts are much more
complex than many appreciate. We indicated earlier in this
paper that added complexity necessitates accounting to
consider of a range of direct short-term impacts along with
less direct longer-term impacts. The greater the complex-
ity of these impacts, the more challenging is the task of
developing new effective accounting mechanisms and pro-
viding robust evidence regarding these mechanisms.
388 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
In this special section of Accounting, Organizations and
Society, Bebbington and Larrinaga (2014b) indicate that
the nature of social and environmental impacts are also
very different from the relationships that characterize
economic impacts that are more familiar to accountants.
They point not only to the uncharted nature of many
aspects of sustainable development, but also argue that
the relationships between key elements of sustainable
development may be unchartable. This adds further major
layers of complexity and unpredictability to the issues
underlying accounting for sustainable development and
to the transformation of raw empirical observations into
useful evidence, insights and understandings.
Bebbington and Larrinaga (2014b) argue that if
accounting practices are to develop in a manner that can
positively contribute towards sustainable development,
there is a need for researchers to draw more broadly from
the latest understandings provided by sustainability
science. From this perspective, effective research into
accounting for sustainable development requires a move
far beyond the focus prevalent in much social and environ-
mental accounting research, where studies often examine
rather conventional accounting elements of sustainability
accounting. This, they argue, will require researchers to
be more open to appreciating the broader context of
sustainability science and sustainable development.
Researchers then need to embrace greater levels of
uncertainly and unpredictability in relationships being
researched, with sustainable development viewed as a
‘wicked’ problem combining scienti?c evidence with polit-
ical and social discourse in a way that raises novel and
complex ontological and epistemological questions.
Bebbington and Larrinaga (2014b) also highlight recent
developments in recognizing a need to address these com-
plex problems of sustainable development using a ‘post-
normal’ approach to research and developments in policy
and practice. This requires a multi-disciplinary problem-
focused rather than a siloed-disciplinary approach to
research, enrolling the knowledge, views and participation
of many in the research rather than just an elite of experts.
Viewed from this perspective, effective research into
accounting for sustainable development requires us to
embrace and handle considerable complexity, a challenge
that will be appealing to many academics.
The value of greater theoretical depth and diversity in
research on accounting for sustainable development
Given the rapidly changing and highly complex
accounting for sustainability arena, as discussed above,
the challenge of engaging in research that supports con-
structive critique of existing practices and innovation of
new practices in accounting for sustainable development
is a large one. Issues related to articulation of compelling
and theoretically informed research questions together
with an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of
different research approaches have been longstanding top-
ics of discussion in the accounting literature (see, for
example, Chapman, 2012; Chua, 1986). However, for
reasons outlined above, there is a need for greater atten-
tion to be paid to the role of theory in the accounting for
sustainable development literature than is generally found
(but see: Gray, Owen, & Adams, 2010). In the words of Gray
and Laughlin (2012, p. 241):
What must be avoided in the future is the myopic,
isolated and colourless concentration on descriptive
studies of social accounting practices. . . which has
dominated research over the last 20 years.
Articulation of compelling research questions (or
problems) and use of research methods suited to collec-
tion of data in a form appropriate to addressing these
questions are central to the possibilities for academic
contribution (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013; Broadbent &
Unerman, 2011; Silverman, 2011). Theory plays a vital
role in articulation of research questions, in identi?ca-
tion of appropriate methods to collect data to address
these questions and in analysis of this data (see, for
example, Ahrens & Chapman, 2006; Alvesson &
Sandberg, 2013). Theory offers a vital tool in the
transformation of data from a description of ‘what is’
into in-depth insights, surfacing the drivers underlying
‘what is’ and providing perspectives on ‘what could be’.
A prerequisite to examining and seeking to advance the
roles of theory in any area of research is a shared under-
standing of what the term ‘theory’ means as ‘there are
many views on theories in the social sciences’ (Alvesson
& Sandberg, 2013, p. 51). Ahrens and Chapman (2006,
p. 823) characterize ‘theory’ as meaning ‘an orienting set
of explanatory concepts. . . [where] events in the ?eld
may best be explained with reference to multiple theories’.
Similarly, Silverman (2011, p. 52) explains that the role of a
theory is to:
. . .arrange sets of concepts to de?ne and explain some
phenomenon. . . [w]ithout a theory, such phenomena
as ‘gender’, personality’, ‘talk’ or ‘space’ cannot be
understood by social science [we would add accounting
and sustainability to this list]. In this sense, without a
theory there is nothing to research. . . theories provide
the impetus for research.
In the arguments we put forward in this paper, we
use the term ‘theory’ in the way de?ned in the above
studies, as a framework of concepts that help to struc-
ture our observations and then our understandings of
these observed elements of the world, and to communi-
cate this understanding (see also: Ohlson, 2011).
Interpretive research approaches are common in
accounting for sustainable development research studies,
perhaps because of the nature of the complexity and nuan-
ces underlying the issues being researched. In any research
approach, theory represents an exercise in simpli?cation in
relation to an in?nitely complex world. As is commonly
discussed in the method sections of interpretive studies,
the role of such work is to be plausible, trustworthy and
fruitful since direct claims towards truth become complex
in the absence of a realist objective benchmark for judging
these claims. This does not equate to a collapse into
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394 389
relativism (Chua, 1986), rather it suggests the value of
some development within and diversity between multiple
strands of theorization.
For some time, theorizing in sustainability accounting
and accountability research, and especially within the
accounting for sustainable development strand of research,
has been dominated by rather broad versions of stake-
holder and legitimacy theories (Bebbington, Unerman, &
O’Dwyer, 2014; Deegan, 2002, 2014; Deegan & Unerman,
2011; Rinaldi, Unerman, & Tilt, 2014; Unerman, 2008).
Employment of these theories was effective in developing
useful insights in earlier stages of the development of
social and environmental accounting practice and research
– particularly when research focused on external reporting
practices. However applying the same broad brushstrokes
of a theory time and again with different data does not
usually produce major insights to advance the evidence
base upon which more solid polices and practices can be
developed.
So, for example, once it is realized that legitimacy plays
a role, the incremental value of looking further for a broad
brushstrokes notion of legitimacy falls rapidly. This is not
to devalue legitimacy as a concept however, rather it is
to suggest the need for the concept of legitimacy to take
on nuance and detail over the course of a stream of studies
rather than acting as a ?xed reference point. We note that
similar considerations could be applied within the second
broad stand of sustainability accounting and accountabil-
ity research that focuses on issues around managerial cap-
ture of social and environmental accounting practices.
Once a number of research studies have demonstrated that
there is managerial capture, we could question how much
potential there is to make a substantive additional contri-
bution to knowledge by simply highlighting further this
managerial capture. While the general tendency might
persist and thus merit continued attention, greater value
from such ongoing observations might arise from further
development and detail in the nature of capture.
Theory choice involves a purposeful choice of emphasis
on the nature of a matter of enquiry. Given the inherent
limitations of any simpli?cation provided by any one
research study, interpreting data using any particular theo-
retical framing highlights particular matters of concern that
are the focus of that theory but necessarily leaves out many
other matters of concern. It is important to note therefore
that when a number of studies each providing related sim-
pli?cations are viewed collectively, they together provide a
much richer understanding of the ?eld of enquiry.
From this perspective, theoretical development and
diversity is far from a sign of ?ckleness among academic
researchers. Rather, it is a sign of a con?dent and mature
academy. Individual theories bene?t from development
over time but, even given development, no single theoret-
ical framework can provide anywhere near a complete or
meaningful understanding of a highly complex and chang-
ing ?eld being studied through the abstraction of a variety
of empirical data across numerous studies. An academic
division of labor, often unplanned in advance, with differ-
ent aspects of an overall picture of a ?eld provided by dif-
ferent academic studies, can be the most effective way for
the academy to contribute robust insights to evaluate,
critique and develop practice. These different studies and
their insights are not in competition with each other. No
one study’s insights are necessarily better than those of
other studies, but the insights provided by each individual
study are made more powerful when combined with
insights from other high quality studies in a particular
?eld.
Over time it is the challenge for research communities
to develop such understandings of problems that they ?nd
fruitful. At some point they also need to be ready to
acknowledge potential dead ends in inquiry, and/or
perhaps just the more attractive avenues that different
novel or re?ned theorizations might bring with them. This
need not represent a kind of Kuhnian paradigm shift, since
in interpretive work the newly proposed theory does not
represent the falsi?cation of the last one.
That said, clinging to an unchanging theoretical frame-
work to view and communicate a changing world, where
theoretical abstractions also need to change in light of
new evidence of changed practices, risks providing ever
less relevant and compelling interpretations of empirical
observations.
In interpretive studies, simply using the same theory
over and over without letting it evolve in light of new evi-
dence and thinking shows a degree of stagnation incom-
patible with the philosophy underlying interpretivism
and the messiness of the data. Furthermore, clinging to
existing theories precludes, or at best hinders, the forma-
tion of new theory that could help provide new perspec-
tives both in informing methods of observing practices
and policies in accounting for sustainable development,
and in surfacing robust evidence from these often complex
and messy observations.
Recent theoretical development and diversity in the
literature on accounting for sustainable development
Although research into sustainability accounting and
accountability has been dominated by studies of organiza-
tional reporting practices, advances in accounting for sus-
tainable development practices in recent years have
offered great opportunity to research complex internal
management accounting and control aspects of accounting
for sustainable development. Studies in this area examine
how accounting practices can and have been used to
embed considerations of sustainable development into
decision-making at different levels within organizations
(Bebbington, 2009; Bebbington & Fraser, 2014;
Bebbington & Thomson, 2013; Owen, 2008). These com-
plex practices are fertile ground for the use of a variety
of theories to help provide robust evidence and under-
standings upon which organizations can further develop
such practices (Bebbington & Thomson, 2013).
A variety of theoretical framings were used by papers
published in a recent (2013) special issue of Management
Accounting Research on the theme of sustainable develop-
ment in management accounting practices. For example,
both Arjaliès and Mundy (2013) and Rodrigue, Magnan,
and Boulianne (2013) use levers of control theory; while
both Bouten and Hoozee (2013) and Contrafatto and
Burns (2013) draw on Laughlin’s (1991) theoretical
390 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
framing of organizational change and Moore (2013) draws
on Dillard et al.’s (2004) framing of organizational change.
However, Bebbington and Thomson (2013) argue that
while the insights from these papers make good use of
theory, there is potential for even more compelling and
useful insights emerging from collective use of a broader
base of theorization.
In this special section of Accounting, Organizations and
Society, Spence and Rinaldi (2014) make novel use of
governmentality theories to help us understand how a
supermarket chain used accounting-based decision-
making mechanisms in a quest to embed commitments
to enhanced sustainability management and social respon-
sibility among other organizations in their supply chain.
Some of these other organizations were small farms, and
use of governmentality theories helps surface insights
related to management of the power dynamics between
these small farms and the supermarket. Speci?cally,
Spence and Rinaldi (2014) use and develop Dean’s (2009)
four ‘analytics of government’ (?elds of visibility, techne,
episteme, and identity formation) to structure an under-
standing of how speci?c accounting practices, in the con-
text of a new regime of sustainability practice instituted
by the supermarket, were effective in shaping the gover-
nance of the supply chain. This novel theorization in
accounting for sustainable development research enabled
Spence and Rinaldi (2014) to develop an understanding
of how the new regime of sustainability practice was
developed in a manner that enabled sustainability
governance to transcend the corporate boundaries of the
supermarket chain and extend to indirect governance of
other organizations within the supermarket’s supply chain.
Thomson, Grubnic, and Georgakopoulos (2014) also use
governmentality theory in developing novel accounting for
sustainable development insights – but in a somewhat
different manner to, and using a different framing than,
Spence and Rinaldi (2014). In using a different theoretical
framing they help to illustrate our earlier argument that
multiple developments or re?nements of theory across
separate studies can provide complementary understand-
ings and insights. Thomson et al. (2014) enroll the govern-
mentality concepts of programmatics, mediation and
mediating instruments in drawing upon and developing
theories in the area of accounting hybridization to analyze
evidence related to accounting for sustainable develop-
ment in the public sector from the perspective of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids.
Against a context of government policies aimed at fos-
tering greater sustainability in delivery of public services,
Thomson et al. (2014) use this theoretical conceptualiza-
tion to help understand aspects of, and constraints to, pub-
lic sector accounting for sustainable development that lead
to or hinder substantive sustainable development and
transformation within the activities of the two very differ-
ent public sector organizations. This novel application of a
hybridization theoretical framing helps Thomson et al.
(2014) provide evidence about how, despite government
polices aimed at enhancing sustainability, pressing ?nan-
cial resource constraints in the UK public services coupled
with imperatives to continually meet tough service
delivery targets have limited the effectiveness of the
accounting-sustainability hybrids. This limitation of effec-
tiveness was in terms of failing to deliver the deeply
embedded sustainability transformations and improved
social justice that were an aim of the hybrids.
Moving frommanagement control aspects of accounting
for sustainable development to external reporting research,
some papers examining social and environmental reporting
practices have developed and re?ned the types of new
theoretical perspectives we call for in the preceding section
of this paper. Examples of some of these studies include
Bebbington, Kirk, and Larrinaga (2012), Bebbington,
Larrinaga-Gonzalez, and Moneva-Abadía (2008), Brown,
de Jong, and Lessidrenska (2009), Contrafatto (2014),
Etzion and Ferraro (2010), O’Dwyer, Owen & Unerman
(2011) and Tregidga, Milne, and Kearins (2014).
Bebbington et al. (2008), for example, develop a theo-
retical and empirical understanding of reputation risk to
help provide more nuanced insights into motivations
underlying sustainability reporting practices than would
have been apparent using the broad version of legitimacy
theory that is dominant in the literature. While retaining
a focus on legitimacy theory itself, O’Dwyer et al. (2011)
use a more in-depth, focused and nuanced legitimacy
framing than is common in accounting for sustainable
development research to help understand the processes
through which practices of assurance of sustainability
reports became legitimated among different stakeholders
of these practices.
A further way to develop this theme is to draw on the-
ories that have long provided useful insights in other areas
of accounting and management, such as management
accounting and control studies (Higgins & Larrinaga,
2014). For example Contrafatto (2014) makes use of an
institutional theory framework to understand the progres-
sive processes and stages through which social and envi-
ronmental reporting became embedded and a generally
accepted practice within a multinational company.
The theoretical framing employed in Contrafatto (2014)
helped identify three key stages that led to the institution-
alization of social and environmental reporting practices.
The ?rst of these occurred before any systematic external
sustainability reporting and involved the development of
shared understandings among key players about the cor-
poration’s social and, in particular, environmental respon-
sibilities. The institutional theory framing in Contrafatto
(2014) facilitates an understanding of the dynamics lead-
ing to the development of these essential shared under-
standings. The second stage involved the continual
development of practices and process used to produce
annual sustainability reports, with institutional theory
again helping the study to abstract and surface insights
into factors that were core to the development and on-
going re?nement of these practices. The ?nal stage, leading
to ?rmer institutionalization of these sustainability report-
ing processes and routines, was the much greater formal-
ization of the sustainability reporting processes and
systems, including the roles of staff and departments
involved in these processes.
Moving away from legitimacy and institutional-related
framings, Bebbington et al. (2012) use theoretical insights
from a combination of regime theory, constructivism and
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394 391
norm cascades to understand why a mandatory environ-
mental reporting regime in one country (Spain) was
characterized by lack of compliance (the reporting had
not achieved the status of a norm) whereas a voluntary
environmental reporting regime in another country (the
UK) for the same industry at the same time as the Spanish
example attracted high levels of compliance. Use of a
complex interplay of theory and data in Bebbington et al.
(2012) provides theoretical and empirical insights into
compliance with different environmental reporting
regimes that would not have emerged from simply
describing the data or from using, for example, a broad
version of legitimacy theory.
Tregidga et al. (2014) draw upon Laclau and Mouffe’s
version of discourse theory to analyze how, over almost
two decades, corporations in one national context used
their sustainability reports to construct their collective
identities as supposedly sustainable organizations, and
how this identity construction using sustainability reports
changed over time. The paper demonstrates how sustain-
ability reports have been used to construct evolving
sustainable identities for corporations that enabled
corporations to maintain operations that were far from
sustainable while giving the image of caring for society
and the environment.
The discourse theory used in the paper helps abstract
evidence showing how discourse within corporate sustain-
ability reports has both in?uenced and helped transform
over time societal conceptions of what sustainability com-
prises. This discourse has also helped construct societal
conceptions of what sustainable organizations should look
like (howto identify such organizations) while not posing a
challenge to much of the unsustainable operations of the
corporate world. The main sustainable identities identi?ed
from this theoretical framing evolved over time and are
split into three distinct phases. The ?rst phase (the
1990s) is characterized by Tregidga et al. (2014) as one
where the constructed identity was one of organizational
compliance with environmental regulations and other soci-
etal expectations on environmental responsibility. The sec-
ond phase (the ?rst part of the 2000s) is characterized as
one where the identity of sustainable organizations is con-
structed through the provision of leadership in furthering
sustainability. The ?nal phase (the last half of the 2000s)
is one where being a sustainable corporation has been
transformed to mean a business that is economically suc-
cessful while delivering social and environmental bene?ts.
Overall, the papers discussed here indicate that novel
theoretical frameworks are beginning to be used bene?-
cially in accounting for sustainable development academic
research. These papers, including papers in this special sec-
tion of Accounting, Organizations and Society, have used
theory to help inform processes employed to collect data
and to organize and interpret this data that is often com-
plex and messy – re?ecting the complex and dynamic nat-
ure of the underlying phenomena encompassed by
concerns for sustainable development. While we ?nd it
encouraging to see novel theoretical frameworks being
developed, re?ned and used in this manner, we share
Bebbington and Thomson’s (2013) observation and con-
cern that a much wider array of theoretical perspectives,
including some from outside accounting and management
studies, need to be drawn upon if the accounting academy
is to provide a more powerful evidence base upon which
more effective accounting for sustainable development is
to be built (see also: O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2014).
Conclusions and directions for future theoretical
developments in accounting for sustainable
development research
We have sought to brie?y outline the complex dynam-
ics and interdependencies underlying accounting in the
area of sustainable development. We made the case that
a sensitivity to this framing suggests the bene?ts of a
greater degree of theoretical development and diversity
than has often characterized extant research in the area.
We also reviewed a selection of recent papers that demon-
strate this interplay of framing, theorization and insight.
Between them, these papers use a variety of theoretical
framings to derive evidence and understandings from
complex data. The understandings provided by each paper
do not compete with each other for the status of the cor-
rect or best explanation. Rather, they are complementary,
each providing different insights that collectively build
towards a more complete understanding of the highly
complex arena of accounting for sustainable development.
Given the rapidly increasing array of complex accounting
for sustainable development practices and policies, the
papers discussed above do not, however, collectively pro-
vide anywhere near a complete picture or understanding
of accounting for sustainable development. There is there-
fore considerable scope for other novel theorizations to be
applied in the analysis of empirical observations to con-
tribute further towards the robust evidence and under-
standings that we believe the academy has a duty to
provide about accounting for sustainable development.
In making this case, a question that might be wondered
at is what might be speci?c examples of novel or further
re?ned theories. Directly attempting an answer to such a
question might offer a chance to promote some particular
personal favourites. However this would risk replacing one
set of established theoretical directions (and limitations)
with another. A more important message regarding theory
that follows from our arguments above is of the need to
consider the dynamic ?ux and complementarity of differ-
ent streams of research and theoretical framings.
A risk to be carefully considered is the importation of
theorizing into a particular area without an awareness of
subsequent developments of the imported theory in the
originating area. Given the evolution and development of
theory, subsequent discussion of limitations and potentials
needs careful attention. Of course, given the potentially
very different interests that might guide theoretical devel-
opment in different arenas this is not to say that the most
recent set of preoccupations of what might be considered
a founding group of thinkers is salient. It is to say, however,
that an awareness of howand why such a group might have
sought to push their own agendas forwards is important.
Accounting for sustainable development represents a
complex and pressingly important area of research. We
have argued in this paper for the bene?ts of greater
392 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
theoretical development and diversity in such work. Faced
with potentially emotive and pressing concerns to intro-
duce radically different approaches to our understanding
of what sustainable development does and should mean,
there is a risk that the kind of intellectual investment nec-
essary in understanding theory is perceived of as a distrac-
tion from important and practically relevant work. The
counter argument is to remind ourselves of Kurt Lewin’s
famous observation that ‘‘There is nothing so practical as
a good theory.’’ We hope that the issues discussed here,
along with the examples provided in the other papers in
this special section of Accounting, Organizations & Society
will help in this undertaking.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to: Jan Bebbington, David Cooper,
Kari Lukka, Jan Mouritsen, Brendan O’Dwyer and Keith
Robson for their constructive and challenging comments
on an earlier version of this paper. The resulting views
expressed in this paper, however, are our own.
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doc_967917965.pdf
As organizational leaders have become more aware of a
wider array of sustainability-related challenges, their
organizations and advisors have worked on developing a
growing range of accounting, accountability and assurance
practices to help identify and manage these sustainabilityrelated
risks and opportunities. Alongside the development
of such practices and engagements between organizations
and their stakeholders have emerged critiques and
debates, supported with insights from academic research
Editorial
Academic contributions to enhancing accounting
for sustainable development
Leaders of business, public service and third sector
organizations are increasingly recognizing that in
discharging their varied duties they must address the
signi?cant risks of global environmental change, including
the economic and social risks that can ?ow from it. They
are also recognizing the interaction of a broader range of
risks and opportunities arising from, and impacting upon,
ecological, social and economic sustainability as among
the most urgent and complex challenges facing their
organizations and society more broadly (Hopwood,
Unerman, & Fries, 2010).
As organizational leaders have become more aware of a
wider array of sustainability-related challenges, their
organizations and advisors have worked on developing a
growing range of accounting, accountability and assurance
practices to help identify and manage these sustainability-
related risks and opportunities (Bebbington, Unerman &
O’Dwyer, 2014; Malsch, 2013; O’Dwyer, Owen &
Unerman, 2011; Power, 1997). Alongside the development
of such practices and engagements between organizations
and their stakeholders have emerged critiques and
debates, supported with insights from academic research,
regarding the degree to which such practices and engage-
ments might be considered as substantive (Gray, 2010).
There is a long-standing tradition of academic research
examining a range of policies, processes and practices
related to sustainability accounting and accountability
(Buhr, 2007; Gray et al., 2010; Owen, 2008; Thomson,
2007, 2014). Journals such as Accounting, Organizations
and Society, Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal,
Critical Perspectives on Accounting, and Accounting Forum
have welcomed and encouraged a variety of this social
and environmental accounting and accountability research
over some decades (Gray, 2002; Gray & Laughlin, 2012;
Lehman, 1999; Owen, 2008). Academic networks such as
The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research
and its associated journal Social and Environmental
Accountability Journal have also played a central role in
building research capacity in this ?eld. This capacity build-
ing has been, and continues to be, important because a
body of high quality academic literature not only relies
upon the imagination and inspiration of individual
scholars but also develops from cohorts of researchers
engaged in long-term synergistic conversations that
networks such as The Centre for Social and Environmental
Accounting Research have facilitated and promoted.
Increasing organizational interest in sustainability
accounting and accountability, along with increased aca-
demic investigation of these accounting issues, has paral-
leled much greater evidence and public awareness of the
collective unsustainability of many human activities
(IPCC, 2013, 2014a, 2014b), especially the negative ecolog-
ical and social impacts of business activity (Bebbington &
Larrinaga, 2014b; Hopwood, 2009). Across the diverse
range of sustainability accounting and accountability
research (Thomson, 2014), we discern three broad strands
of literature – albeit with some overlapping studies and
blurring between these strands.
One strand seeks to demonstrate relationships between
social and environmental performance, social and environ-
mental reporting, and economic performance (including
stock market valuations). An often implicit argument
underlying this strand of literature is that elements of sus-
tainability can be highlighted and/or addressed through
existing market mechanisms. In sharp distinction, a second
strand of research suggests that social and environmental
unsustainability is largely a consequence of the capitalist
system and argues that the best (or only) way to move
towards a socially and ecologically sustainable system is
to radically reform or even overthrow markets and capital-
ism. The third strand of research seeks to constructively
but critically engage with businesses and other organiza-
tions to help them identify a range of social and environ-
mental sustainability risks and opportunities and make
changes to the way they operate in a direction intended
to result in less unsustainable operations.
As can be seen in Fig. 1, Sustainability studies from nat-
ural science demonstrate that organizations need to make
substantive changes in the short term if we are to avert
catastrophic global environmental change and resultant
societal dislocation.
Academics working in the third broad strand of sustain-
ability accounting and accountability research might well
accept arguments from studies in the second strand thathttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.07.003
0361-3682/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
?aws in the capitalist system cause or reinforce social and
environmental unsustainability. The motivation for their
rather different approach, however, is a concern that radi-
cal reform in the capitalist system is likely to come far too
late to avert catastrophic global environmental change.
Perversely, such radical reform might only arise as a result
of the major social and economic disruption indicated in
Fig. 1 as likely to ?ow from catastrophic levels of global
environmental change. Considering this too high a price
to pay for reform, academics working in this third broad
stand of research take an approach that helping organiza-
tions to change towards less unsustainable operations has
potential to defer the time by which we will reach the
point of catastrophic global environmental change, giving
greater time and opportunity for novel solutions to chal-
lenges of global warming and social breakdown to be
developed. They see such constructive engagements as
essential in moving towards a low-emission scenario
(RCP2.6 in Fig. 1) and away from a high-emission scenario
likely to ensue in the absence of practical efforts to change
organizational (un)sustainability policies and practices
(scenario RCP8.5 in Fig. 1).
In this paper we focus on this third broad strand of sus-
tainability accounting and accountability literature, a
strand referred to as ‘accounting for sustainable develop-
ment’ (see also Bebbington & Thomson, 2013). We regard
research in this strand, that seeks to engage with and cri-
tique practice and policy, as perhaps challenging some of
the more commonly accepted distinctions and de?nitions
of criticality within parts of the accounting academy, espe-
cially studies within the second broad strand of sustain-
ability accounting and accountability research. This is
because within this work, it is an open question as to
whether or not existing power structures are in need of
replacement, reformation or redirection.
Within this third strand of literature the complexities of
the detailed underlying issues and relationships indicate a
need for greater attention to the development and re?ne-
ment of focused novel theoretical framings (Bebbington
& Thomson, 2013). Theory plays a vital role in the interac-
tion between observation and insight by providing an
explanatory framework that helps to: simplify a highly
complex word; structure the abstraction of meaningful
insights from messy data; and communicate these insights
to different audiences. Therefore greater theoretical
sophistication can play a vital role in the provision of
robust evidence and understandings upon which existing
practices can be evaluated and critiqued, and new and
sounder practices developed.
As the totality of shared empirical insights in any com-
plex area grows, interpretations of this body of insights
will evolve. Old insights will be questioned and over time
blind spots and areas of inattention will become apparent,
leading to shifts in how and why different theoretical
frameworks might be considered relevant. An important
aspect of research is thus maintaining an openness to
review and update theoretical frameworks in use, and to
develop novel theoretical framings, if evidence and under-
standings from new studies are to make ongoing and sub-
stantive contributions to evaluating, critiquing and
developing policy and practice. We argue here (and the
papers in this special section of Accounting, Organizations
and Society serve to demonstrate) that there are bene?ts
arising from greater development, diversity and sophisti-
cation in the formation and use of theory in research on
accounting for sustainable development.
In making the case for greater sophistication and use of
novel theoretical framings in accounting for sustainable
development research we start by highlighting the
increased complexity and unpredictability of relationships
between phenomena when moving from a focus on ?nan-
cially- or economically-based accounting practices to a
broader engagement with multifaceted and interacting
social, environmental and economic sustainable develop-
ment. Having established that research into accounting for
sustainable development examines practices in an arena
characterized by added layers of complexity and unpredict-
ability on top of the already very complex economically-
Fig. 1. Source: IPCC (2014c) Working Group II report, p. 13: Assessment Box SPM.1 Figure 1.
386 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
focused accounting practices, the subsequent section builds
our case aroundthe necessity for development anddiversity
of theoretical understandings or framings inabstracting and
communicating useful insights fromempirical observations
of accounting for sustainable development practices.
This is followed by a section illustrating the beginnings
of a movement towards more sophisticated use of
theory as seen in some recently published papers in the
accounting for sustainable development research strand
– in this issue of Accounting, Organizations and Society
and elsewhere. We seek to highlight how such theoretical
developments provide compelling and novel insights,
moving us forward in our understanding of accounting
for sustainable development practices. The concluding sec-
tion contributes a few ideas for potentially fruitful avenues
for theoretical formation, re?nement and development in
research on accounting for sustainable development.
Complexity and unpredictability in accounting for
sustainable development
Economically-focused accounting is a highly complex
?eld comprising both management and ?nancial account-
ing. It can be characterized as communicating and helping
to manage direct economic interactions and impacts
betweenanorganizationandthe worldexternal to the orga-
nization. It draws a boundary around the organization and
records, analyzes and/or reports on economically material
interactions andimpacts that have aneffect withinor across
this boundary. This communication and management role
may also extend to cover interactions and impacts that are
ultimately but less directly economic, but where these
interactions and impacts manifest themselves in economic
terms withina relativelyshort-termtime horizon. However,
less direct and less certain potential long-term economic
risks arising from social and environmental impacts of the
organization’s activities (such as its impact on climate
change or social cohesion) are often ignored or evaluated
as immaterial by conventional accounting practices so are
excluded from the accounting analysis.
Accounting for sustainable development necessitates
the broadening of these short-term economically-oriented
accounting practices to incorporate not just direct
short-term economic interactions and impacts but also to
incorporate the direct interactions and impacts between
the organization, the society in which it operates and the
natural environment. These additional social and environ-
mental interactions and impacts will often have an
economic impact in the longer term (Bebbington, Gray,
Hibbitt, & Kirk, 2001). Thus, in accounting for sustainable
development, an already highly complex range of more
conventional ?nancially-oriented accounting practices,
focusing on two-way economic interactions and impacts
between the organization and its external world in the
shorter term, is broadened to address a much larger array
of two-way social, environmental and economic interac-
tions and impacts between the entity and the world
beyond the entity’s boundaries.
However this broadening is not limited to adding these
additional two-way dimensions of social and environmen-
tal impacts to more familiar economic impacts. The direct
impacts on society, the natural environment and the econ-
omy ?owing from an organization’s activities will usually
also result in less direct impacts between society, the envi-
ronment and the economy. Thus, any single action taken
by an organization can initially directly impact upon and
cause a variety of changes in elements of social cohesion,
the natural environment and the amount and distribution
of wealth. These direct impacts on society, the environ-
ment and the economy will subsequently lead individually
and/or collectively to other changes in these areas. These
other changes can then in turn impact further upon the
organization (Hopwood et al., 2010).
To illustrate the distinction between these direct and
less direct impacts and interactions, we can consider the
widely reported BP Gulf of Mexico oil accident in 2010.
According to a US Congressional enquiry, this accident
apparently partly resulted from local decisions within the
oil multinational BP and its contractors to save relatively
immaterial costs by cutting corners in oil exploration
safety measures (National Commission on the BP
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, 2011). The ensuing accident
might have been prevented had more robust safety mea-
sures been in place. It directly killed 11 workers employed
on the oil drilling exploration rig, a clear negative social
impact for these 11 people and their friends and families.
It also directly caused large scale oil pollution in the Gulf
of Mexico and directly incurred large economic costs for
BP and its partners in extinguishing the ?re, stopping the
oil leak and cleaning up some of the spilt oil. These direct
(and fairly immediate) external impacts on social, environ-
mental and economic factors themselves then caused
many other negative impacts in these areas. Thus, for
example, the oil pollution killed many ?sh, prevented
many ?shermen going to sea to catch ?sh for a period
and damaged the tourist industry in states close to the
oil spill (National Commission on the BP Deepwater
Horizon Oil Spill & Offshore Drilling, 2011). The negative
environmental impact from the oil spill therefore caused
other social and economic impacts on communities in
coastal areas close to the oil spill. Several of these and
other impacts then fed through into further economic
impacts for BP and its contractors who were required to
pay compensation to those affected and who suffered
reputation damage. In total, BP reported costs of
US$40.9 billion in 2010 associated with the Gulf oil spill.
Consistent with long-standing arguments within the
academic literature, with longer time horizons, social and
environmental impacts became economic impacts.
If longer-term and less direct possible economic conse-
quences of social and environmental risks had been more
prominent in routine decision-making processes at BP,
the actions and outcome might have been different. Of
course, we can never prove a counterfactual. However
decisions informed by narrowly focused short-term eco-
nomic accounting information might plausibly be very dif-
ferent if a broader range of direct and indirect social,
environmental and economic impacts and interactions
were incorporated into the accounting information and
risk assessments used to inform decision-making.
Expanding existing accounting mechanisms to cover
these social and environmental interactions and impacts
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394 387
is far from straightforward however. This is because the
dynamics and characteristics within the social and envi-
ronmental dimensions differ in important ways from those
in the more familiar economic dimension. One of these
major differences, for example, is in the area of
commensuration.
A key factor that facilitates accounting measurement,
aggregation and comparison of many different economic
transactions and events is that there is a suf?ciently broad
intersubjective consensus on the commensuration of these
economic impacts in terms of ?nancial monetary measure-
ment. Economic activity relies in large part on the
exchange of property rights. As the exchange of property
rights usually involves the exchange of money there are
readily available monetary measurements available for
these transactions. These monetary valuations appear to
lead to relatively broad intersubjective consensus on the
common measurement of economic impacts of different
actions and events. Thus economic impacts are often com-
mensurated in practice in monetary terms.
In considering this outcome it is important to stress
that this monetary commensuration is not an intrinsic
characteristic of the economic arena. Rather it re?ects
the weight of time and effort spent over many decades in
producing intersubjective consensus. For example whilst
the notion and broad de?nition of pro?t is still subject to
ongoing debate and critique in some quarters, it has
become widely taken for granted in others, even when
the potentially fragile and subjective nature of its supports
are readily apparent.
Challenges to this intersubjective consensus can arise
as the mode of analysis and measurement of economic
outcomes is brought to bear in arenas where other modes
of thinking are prevalent. The case of the Diagnostic
Related Group as a central tool in the resource allocation
of healthcare resources in acute settings is a useful exam-
ple. Early research on this matter demonstrated the con-
testation, fragility and malleability of the approach
(Chua, 1994; Chua & Degeling, 1993). Moving on in time,
in reviewing the landscape of contemporary healthcare
costing we ?nd that, for better or worse, the Diagnostic
Related Group is now a pervasively dominant approach
(Chapman, Kern, & Laguecir, 2014) and routinely offers a
basis for practical commensuration in healthcare.
The term ‘practical’ is an important caveat here. From
the perspective of researchers in the second broad strand
of social and environmental accounting and accountability
research, attempts by some practitioners and consultants
to put a common, often monetary, value on all material
sustainability impacts are in principle ill-conceived
(Hines, 1991). From the perspective of researchers working
in the third strand of this research, intersubjective consen-
sus on measurement might, however, in some areas be suf-
?cient to allow some social and environmental impacts to
be practically commensurated such that they can begin to
be more directly and actively considered.
One candidate for such practical commensuration is
carbon impacts. Emissions of carbon dioxide (and other
global warming gases) have broadly a global impact, which
therefore does not vary substantively depending upon
where in the world the carbon dioxide is emitted. There
are (admittedly contested) market mechanisms available
through increasingly prevalent carbon trading schemes to
put a traded price on carbon emissions (Bebbington &
Larrinaga, 2014a). Whilst a contested matter, some would
argue that suf?cient consensus has now developed for
commensuration with economic impacts to begin to take
place in this area.
As we move to other environmental areas we ?nd less
experience and established practice of measurement how-
ever. For these environmental impacts practical commen-
surability is a more remote prospect. One such impact is
the use of water in manufacturing, transporting and using
products. It might be possible to establish accounting
mechanisms to calculate the amount of water that has
been use to bring each product to its current state and
location – the notional amount of water embedded in a
product (Russell & Lewis, 2014). However, aggregating
and comparing this embedded water is highly problematic
such that any resulting interpretation might not be mean-
ingful. This is because two products with the same amount
of embedded water may have each used water in their pro-
duction in a manner that has very different environmental
impacts.
For example, water is used to grow grass to feed cattle
that produce milk and beef. Where this water comes from
plentiful rainfall in an area that does not suffer water stress
its use will have a very different ecological and social
opportunity cost than the same amount of water embed-
ded in the milk and beef of cattle grazing in an arid region.
Further complexity is added where an area might be arid at
some times of the year but very wet at others, with the
opportunity cost of water embedded in the same product
from the same location varying depending upon the time
of year of production. Given this complexity and diversity
in the social and environmental opportunity cost of a given
amount of water, reaching the level of intersubjective con-
sensus necessary for practical commensuration with a
metric for the impact of water use is likely to be much
more challenging than it has been for carbon.
This very brief example therefore illustrates the com-
plexity and challenge of commensurating the environmen-
tal impact of water use and water embedded in products
and services. Without the ability to commensurate, many
accounting mechanisms developed to help informdecisions
inthe economic sphere cannot be usedinthe environmental
or social spheres. These commensuration problems call for
potentially radically new accounting mechanisms to be
developed to make an effective contribution to enhancing
social and environmental sustainability.
In addition to commensuration problems that arise
when broadening the focus of accounting from the eco-
nomic to encompass social and environmental sustainabil-
ity, the relationships and interactions between social,
environmental and economic impacts are much more
complex than many appreciate. We indicated earlier in this
paper that added complexity necessitates accounting to
consider of a range of direct short-term impacts along with
less direct longer-term impacts. The greater the complex-
ity of these impacts, the more challenging is the task of
developing new effective accounting mechanisms and pro-
viding robust evidence regarding these mechanisms.
388 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
In this special section of Accounting, Organizations and
Society, Bebbington and Larrinaga (2014b) indicate that
the nature of social and environmental impacts are also
very different from the relationships that characterize
economic impacts that are more familiar to accountants.
They point not only to the uncharted nature of many
aspects of sustainable development, but also argue that
the relationships between key elements of sustainable
development may be unchartable. This adds further major
layers of complexity and unpredictability to the issues
underlying accounting for sustainable development and
to the transformation of raw empirical observations into
useful evidence, insights and understandings.
Bebbington and Larrinaga (2014b) argue that if
accounting practices are to develop in a manner that can
positively contribute towards sustainable development,
there is a need for researchers to draw more broadly from
the latest understandings provided by sustainability
science. From this perspective, effective research into
accounting for sustainable development requires a move
far beyond the focus prevalent in much social and environ-
mental accounting research, where studies often examine
rather conventional accounting elements of sustainability
accounting. This, they argue, will require researchers to
be more open to appreciating the broader context of
sustainability science and sustainable development.
Researchers then need to embrace greater levels of
uncertainly and unpredictability in relationships being
researched, with sustainable development viewed as a
‘wicked’ problem combining scienti?c evidence with polit-
ical and social discourse in a way that raises novel and
complex ontological and epistemological questions.
Bebbington and Larrinaga (2014b) also highlight recent
developments in recognizing a need to address these com-
plex problems of sustainable development using a ‘post-
normal’ approach to research and developments in policy
and practice. This requires a multi-disciplinary problem-
focused rather than a siloed-disciplinary approach to
research, enrolling the knowledge, views and participation
of many in the research rather than just an elite of experts.
Viewed from this perspective, effective research into
accounting for sustainable development requires us to
embrace and handle considerable complexity, a challenge
that will be appealing to many academics.
The value of greater theoretical depth and diversity in
research on accounting for sustainable development
Given the rapidly changing and highly complex
accounting for sustainability arena, as discussed above,
the challenge of engaging in research that supports con-
structive critique of existing practices and innovation of
new practices in accounting for sustainable development
is a large one. Issues related to articulation of compelling
and theoretically informed research questions together
with an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of
different research approaches have been longstanding top-
ics of discussion in the accounting literature (see, for
example, Chapman, 2012; Chua, 1986). However, for
reasons outlined above, there is a need for greater atten-
tion to be paid to the role of theory in the accounting for
sustainable development literature than is generally found
(but see: Gray, Owen, & Adams, 2010). In the words of Gray
and Laughlin (2012, p. 241):
What must be avoided in the future is the myopic,
isolated and colourless concentration on descriptive
studies of social accounting practices. . . which has
dominated research over the last 20 years.
Articulation of compelling research questions (or
problems) and use of research methods suited to collec-
tion of data in a form appropriate to addressing these
questions are central to the possibilities for academic
contribution (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013; Broadbent &
Unerman, 2011; Silverman, 2011). Theory plays a vital
role in articulation of research questions, in identi?ca-
tion of appropriate methods to collect data to address
these questions and in analysis of this data (see, for
example, Ahrens & Chapman, 2006; Alvesson &
Sandberg, 2013). Theory offers a vital tool in the
transformation of data from a description of ‘what is’
into in-depth insights, surfacing the drivers underlying
‘what is’ and providing perspectives on ‘what could be’.
A prerequisite to examining and seeking to advance the
roles of theory in any area of research is a shared under-
standing of what the term ‘theory’ means as ‘there are
many views on theories in the social sciences’ (Alvesson
& Sandberg, 2013, p. 51). Ahrens and Chapman (2006,
p. 823) characterize ‘theory’ as meaning ‘an orienting set
of explanatory concepts. . . [where] events in the ?eld
may best be explained with reference to multiple theories’.
Similarly, Silverman (2011, p. 52) explains that the role of a
theory is to:
. . .arrange sets of concepts to de?ne and explain some
phenomenon. . . [w]ithout a theory, such phenomena
as ‘gender’, personality’, ‘talk’ or ‘space’ cannot be
understood by social science [we would add accounting
and sustainability to this list]. In this sense, without a
theory there is nothing to research. . . theories provide
the impetus for research.
In the arguments we put forward in this paper, we
use the term ‘theory’ in the way de?ned in the above
studies, as a framework of concepts that help to struc-
ture our observations and then our understandings of
these observed elements of the world, and to communi-
cate this understanding (see also: Ohlson, 2011).
Interpretive research approaches are common in
accounting for sustainable development research studies,
perhaps because of the nature of the complexity and nuan-
ces underlying the issues being researched. In any research
approach, theory represents an exercise in simpli?cation in
relation to an in?nitely complex world. As is commonly
discussed in the method sections of interpretive studies,
the role of such work is to be plausible, trustworthy and
fruitful since direct claims towards truth become complex
in the absence of a realist objective benchmark for judging
these claims. This does not equate to a collapse into
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394 389
relativism (Chua, 1986), rather it suggests the value of
some development within and diversity between multiple
strands of theorization.
For some time, theorizing in sustainability accounting
and accountability research, and especially within the
accounting for sustainable development strand of research,
has been dominated by rather broad versions of stake-
holder and legitimacy theories (Bebbington, Unerman, &
O’Dwyer, 2014; Deegan, 2002, 2014; Deegan & Unerman,
2011; Rinaldi, Unerman, & Tilt, 2014; Unerman, 2008).
Employment of these theories was effective in developing
useful insights in earlier stages of the development of
social and environmental accounting practice and research
– particularly when research focused on external reporting
practices. However applying the same broad brushstrokes
of a theory time and again with different data does not
usually produce major insights to advance the evidence
base upon which more solid polices and practices can be
developed.
So, for example, once it is realized that legitimacy plays
a role, the incremental value of looking further for a broad
brushstrokes notion of legitimacy falls rapidly. This is not
to devalue legitimacy as a concept however, rather it is
to suggest the need for the concept of legitimacy to take
on nuance and detail over the course of a stream of studies
rather than acting as a ?xed reference point. We note that
similar considerations could be applied within the second
broad stand of sustainability accounting and accountabil-
ity research that focuses on issues around managerial cap-
ture of social and environmental accounting practices.
Once a number of research studies have demonstrated that
there is managerial capture, we could question how much
potential there is to make a substantive additional contri-
bution to knowledge by simply highlighting further this
managerial capture. While the general tendency might
persist and thus merit continued attention, greater value
from such ongoing observations might arise from further
development and detail in the nature of capture.
Theory choice involves a purposeful choice of emphasis
on the nature of a matter of enquiry. Given the inherent
limitations of any simpli?cation provided by any one
research study, interpreting data using any particular theo-
retical framing highlights particular matters of concern that
are the focus of that theory but necessarily leaves out many
other matters of concern. It is important to note therefore
that when a number of studies each providing related sim-
pli?cations are viewed collectively, they together provide a
much richer understanding of the ?eld of enquiry.
From this perspective, theoretical development and
diversity is far from a sign of ?ckleness among academic
researchers. Rather, it is a sign of a con?dent and mature
academy. Individual theories bene?t from development
over time but, even given development, no single theoret-
ical framework can provide anywhere near a complete or
meaningful understanding of a highly complex and chang-
ing ?eld being studied through the abstraction of a variety
of empirical data across numerous studies. An academic
division of labor, often unplanned in advance, with differ-
ent aspects of an overall picture of a ?eld provided by dif-
ferent academic studies, can be the most effective way for
the academy to contribute robust insights to evaluate,
critique and develop practice. These different studies and
their insights are not in competition with each other. No
one study’s insights are necessarily better than those of
other studies, but the insights provided by each individual
study are made more powerful when combined with
insights from other high quality studies in a particular
?eld.
Over time it is the challenge for research communities
to develop such understandings of problems that they ?nd
fruitful. At some point they also need to be ready to
acknowledge potential dead ends in inquiry, and/or
perhaps just the more attractive avenues that different
novel or re?ned theorizations might bring with them. This
need not represent a kind of Kuhnian paradigm shift, since
in interpretive work the newly proposed theory does not
represent the falsi?cation of the last one.
That said, clinging to an unchanging theoretical frame-
work to view and communicate a changing world, where
theoretical abstractions also need to change in light of
new evidence of changed practices, risks providing ever
less relevant and compelling interpretations of empirical
observations.
In interpretive studies, simply using the same theory
over and over without letting it evolve in light of new evi-
dence and thinking shows a degree of stagnation incom-
patible with the philosophy underlying interpretivism
and the messiness of the data. Furthermore, clinging to
existing theories precludes, or at best hinders, the forma-
tion of new theory that could help provide new perspec-
tives both in informing methods of observing practices
and policies in accounting for sustainable development,
and in surfacing robust evidence from these often complex
and messy observations.
Recent theoretical development and diversity in the
literature on accounting for sustainable development
Although research into sustainability accounting and
accountability has been dominated by studies of organiza-
tional reporting practices, advances in accounting for sus-
tainable development practices in recent years have
offered great opportunity to research complex internal
management accounting and control aspects of accounting
for sustainable development. Studies in this area examine
how accounting practices can and have been used to
embed considerations of sustainable development into
decision-making at different levels within organizations
(Bebbington, 2009; Bebbington & Fraser, 2014;
Bebbington & Thomson, 2013; Owen, 2008). These com-
plex practices are fertile ground for the use of a variety
of theories to help provide robust evidence and under-
standings upon which organizations can further develop
such practices (Bebbington & Thomson, 2013).
A variety of theoretical framings were used by papers
published in a recent (2013) special issue of Management
Accounting Research on the theme of sustainable develop-
ment in management accounting practices. For example,
both Arjaliès and Mundy (2013) and Rodrigue, Magnan,
and Boulianne (2013) use levers of control theory; while
both Bouten and Hoozee (2013) and Contrafatto and
Burns (2013) draw on Laughlin’s (1991) theoretical
390 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
framing of organizational change and Moore (2013) draws
on Dillard et al.’s (2004) framing of organizational change.
However, Bebbington and Thomson (2013) argue that
while the insights from these papers make good use of
theory, there is potential for even more compelling and
useful insights emerging from collective use of a broader
base of theorization.
In this special section of Accounting, Organizations and
Society, Spence and Rinaldi (2014) make novel use of
governmentality theories to help us understand how a
supermarket chain used accounting-based decision-
making mechanisms in a quest to embed commitments
to enhanced sustainability management and social respon-
sibility among other organizations in their supply chain.
Some of these other organizations were small farms, and
use of governmentality theories helps surface insights
related to management of the power dynamics between
these small farms and the supermarket. Speci?cally,
Spence and Rinaldi (2014) use and develop Dean’s (2009)
four ‘analytics of government’ (?elds of visibility, techne,
episteme, and identity formation) to structure an under-
standing of how speci?c accounting practices, in the con-
text of a new regime of sustainability practice instituted
by the supermarket, were effective in shaping the gover-
nance of the supply chain. This novel theorization in
accounting for sustainable development research enabled
Spence and Rinaldi (2014) to develop an understanding
of how the new regime of sustainability practice was
developed in a manner that enabled sustainability
governance to transcend the corporate boundaries of the
supermarket chain and extend to indirect governance of
other organizations within the supermarket’s supply chain.
Thomson, Grubnic, and Georgakopoulos (2014) also use
governmentality theory in developing novel accounting for
sustainable development insights – but in a somewhat
different manner to, and using a different framing than,
Spence and Rinaldi (2014). In using a different theoretical
framing they help to illustrate our earlier argument that
multiple developments or re?nements of theory across
separate studies can provide complementary understand-
ings and insights. Thomson et al. (2014) enroll the govern-
mentality concepts of programmatics, mediation and
mediating instruments in drawing upon and developing
theories in the area of accounting hybridization to analyze
evidence related to accounting for sustainable develop-
ment in the public sector from the perspective of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids.
Against a context of government policies aimed at fos-
tering greater sustainability in delivery of public services,
Thomson et al. (2014) use this theoretical conceptualiza-
tion to help understand aspects of, and constraints to, pub-
lic sector accounting for sustainable development that lead
to or hinder substantive sustainable development and
transformation within the activities of the two very differ-
ent public sector organizations. This novel application of a
hybridization theoretical framing helps Thomson et al.
(2014) provide evidence about how, despite government
polices aimed at enhancing sustainability, pressing ?nan-
cial resource constraints in the UK public services coupled
with imperatives to continually meet tough service
delivery targets have limited the effectiveness of the
accounting-sustainability hybrids. This limitation of effec-
tiveness was in terms of failing to deliver the deeply
embedded sustainability transformations and improved
social justice that were an aim of the hybrids.
Moving frommanagement control aspects of accounting
for sustainable development to external reporting research,
some papers examining social and environmental reporting
practices have developed and re?ned the types of new
theoretical perspectives we call for in the preceding section
of this paper. Examples of some of these studies include
Bebbington, Kirk, and Larrinaga (2012), Bebbington,
Larrinaga-Gonzalez, and Moneva-Abadía (2008), Brown,
de Jong, and Lessidrenska (2009), Contrafatto (2014),
Etzion and Ferraro (2010), O’Dwyer, Owen & Unerman
(2011) and Tregidga, Milne, and Kearins (2014).
Bebbington et al. (2008), for example, develop a theo-
retical and empirical understanding of reputation risk to
help provide more nuanced insights into motivations
underlying sustainability reporting practices than would
have been apparent using the broad version of legitimacy
theory that is dominant in the literature. While retaining
a focus on legitimacy theory itself, O’Dwyer et al. (2011)
use a more in-depth, focused and nuanced legitimacy
framing than is common in accounting for sustainable
development research to help understand the processes
through which practices of assurance of sustainability
reports became legitimated among different stakeholders
of these practices.
A further way to develop this theme is to draw on the-
ories that have long provided useful insights in other areas
of accounting and management, such as management
accounting and control studies (Higgins & Larrinaga,
2014). For example Contrafatto (2014) makes use of an
institutional theory framework to understand the progres-
sive processes and stages through which social and envi-
ronmental reporting became embedded and a generally
accepted practice within a multinational company.
The theoretical framing employed in Contrafatto (2014)
helped identify three key stages that led to the institution-
alization of social and environmental reporting practices.
The ?rst of these occurred before any systematic external
sustainability reporting and involved the development of
shared understandings among key players about the cor-
poration’s social and, in particular, environmental respon-
sibilities. The institutional theory framing in Contrafatto
(2014) facilitates an understanding of the dynamics lead-
ing to the development of these essential shared under-
standings. The second stage involved the continual
development of practices and process used to produce
annual sustainability reports, with institutional theory
again helping the study to abstract and surface insights
into factors that were core to the development and on-
going re?nement of these practices. The ?nal stage, leading
to ?rmer institutionalization of these sustainability report-
ing processes and routines, was the much greater formal-
ization of the sustainability reporting processes and
systems, including the roles of staff and departments
involved in these processes.
Moving away from legitimacy and institutional-related
framings, Bebbington et al. (2012) use theoretical insights
from a combination of regime theory, constructivism and
Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394 391
norm cascades to understand why a mandatory environ-
mental reporting regime in one country (Spain) was
characterized by lack of compliance (the reporting had
not achieved the status of a norm) whereas a voluntary
environmental reporting regime in another country (the
UK) for the same industry at the same time as the Spanish
example attracted high levels of compliance. Use of a
complex interplay of theory and data in Bebbington et al.
(2012) provides theoretical and empirical insights into
compliance with different environmental reporting
regimes that would not have emerged from simply
describing the data or from using, for example, a broad
version of legitimacy theory.
Tregidga et al. (2014) draw upon Laclau and Mouffe’s
version of discourse theory to analyze how, over almost
two decades, corporations in one national context used
their sustainability reports to construct their collective
identities as supposedly sustainable organizations, and
how this identity construction using sustainability reports
changed over time. The paper demonstrates how sustain-
ability reports have been used to construct evolving
sustainable identities for corporations that enabled
corporations to maintain operations that were far from
sustainable while giving the image of caring for society
and the environment.
The discourse theory used in the paper helps abstract
evidence showing how discourse within corporate sustain-
ability reports has both in?uenced and helped transform
over time societal conceptions of what sustainability com-
prises. This discourse has also helped construct societal
conceptions of what sustainable organizations should look
like (howto identify such organizations) while not posing a
challenge to much of the unsustainable operations of the
corporate world. The main sustainable identities identi?ed
from this theoretical framing evolved over time and are
split into three distinct phases. The ?rst phase (the
1990s) is characterized by Tregidga et al. (2014) as one
where the constructed identity was one of organizational
compliance with environmental regulations and other soci-
etal expectations on environmental responsibility. The sec-
ond phase (the ?rst part of the 2000s) is characterized as
one where the identity of sustainable organizations is con-
structed through the provision of leadership in furthering
sustainability. The ?nal phase (the last half of the 2000s)
is one where being a sustainable corporation has been
transformed to mean a business that is economically suc-
cessful while delivering social and environmental bene?ts.
Overall, the papers discussed here indicate that novel
theoretical frameworks are beginning to be used bene?-
cially in accounting for sustainable development academic
research. These papers, including papers in this special sec-
tion of Accounting, Organizations and Society, have used
theory to help inform processes employed to collect data
and to organize and interpret this data that is often com-
plex and messy – re?ecting the complex and dynamic nat-
ure of the underlying phenomena encompassed by
concerns for sustainable development. While we ?nd it
encouraging to see novel theoretical frameworks being
developed, re?ned and used in this manner, we share
Bebbington and Thomson’s (2013) observation and con-
cern that a much wider array of theoretical perspectives,
including some from outside accounting and management
studies, need to be drawn upon if the accounting academy
is to provide a more powerful evidence base upon which
more effective accounting for sustainable development is
to be built (see also: O’Dwyer and Unerman, 2014).
Conclusions and directions for future theoretical
developments in accounting for sustainable
development research
We have sought to brie?y outline the complex dynam-
ics and interdependencies underlying accounting in the
area of sustainable development. We made the case that
a sensitivity to this framing suggests the bene?ts of a
greater degree of theoretical development and diversity
than has often characterized extant research in the area.
We also reviewed a selection of recent papers that demon-
strate this interplay of framing, theorization and insight.
Between them, these papers use a variety of theoretical
framings to derive evidence and understandings from
complex data. The understandings provided by each paper
do not compete with each other for the status of the cor-
rect or best explanation. Rather, they are complementary,
each providing different insights that collectively build
towards a more complete understanding of the highly
complex arena of accounting for sustainable development.
Given the rapidly increasing array of complex accounting
for sustainable development practices and policies, the
papers discussed above do not, however, collectively pro-
vide anywhere near a complete picture or understanding
of accounting for sustainable development. There is there-
fore considerable scope for other novel theorizations to be
applied in the analysis of empirical observations to con-
tribute further towards the robust evidence and under-
standings that we believe the academy has a duty to
provide about accounting for sustainable development.
In making this case, a question that might be wondered
at is what might be speci?c examples of novel or further
re?ned theories. Directly attempting an answer to such a
question might offer a chance to promote some particular
personal favourites. However this would risk replacing one
set of established theoretical directions (and limitations)
with another. A more important message regarding theory
that follows from our arguments above is of the need to
consider the dynamic ?ux and complementarity of differ-
ent streams of research and theoretical framings.
A risk to be carefully considered is the importation of
theorizing into a particular area without an awareness of
subsequent developments of the imported theory in the
originating area. Given the evolution and development of
theory, subsequent discussion of limitations and potentials
needs careful attention. Of course, given the potentially
very different interests that might guide theoretical devel-
opment in different arenas this is not to say that the most
recent set of preoccupations of what might be considered
a founding group of thinkers is salient. It is to say, however,
that an awareness of howand why such a group might have
sought to push their own agendas forwards is important.
Accounting for sustainable development represents a
complex and pressingly important area of research. We
have argued in this paper for the bene?ts of greater
392 Editorial / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 385–394
theoretical development and diversity in such work. Faced
with potentially emotive and pressing concerns to intro-
duce radically different approaches to our understanding
of what sustainable development does and should mean,
there is a risk that the kind of intellectual investment nec-
essary in understanding theory is perceived of as a distrac-
tion from important and practically relevant work. The
counter argument is to remind ourselves of Kurt Lewin’s
famous observation that ‘‘There is nothing so practical as
a good theory.’’ We hope that the issues discussed here,
along with the examples provided in the other papers in
this special section of Accounting, Organizations & Society
will help in this undertaking.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to: Jan Bebbington, David Cooper,
Kari Lukka, Jan Mouritsen, Brendan O’Dwyer and Keith
Robson for their constructive and challenging comments
on an earlier version of this paper. The resulting views
expressed in this paper, however, are our own.
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Jeffrey Unerman
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Christopher Chapman
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