Description
The transformative potential of accounting-sustainability hybrids has been promoted and
problematized in the literature. We contribute to this debate by exploring, theoretically
and empirically, the role of accounting in shaping and reshaping sustainability practices.
We develop a holistic framework which we use to analyse the governing and mediating
roles of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency (of England and
Wales) and West Sussex County Council. Our analysis identifies that local accounting-sustainability
hybrids contribute positively to improving eco-efficiency, have some impact on
eco-effectiveness, but limited bearing on social justice. Emerging assemblages of accounting-sustainability
hybrids create capacity for wider sustainability transformations, particularly
through their mediating roles. However, a number of factors combine to frustrate
further sustainability transformations within these organisations and those they are
charged with governing. These factors include the structural constraints of the accounting-sustainability
hybrids, influenced by a relatively weak local sustainability programmatic
and the pressing need to meet increasing service delivery expectations in a period
of severe resource constraints.
Exploring accounting-sustainability hybridisation
in the UK public sector
Ian Thomson
a,?
, Suzana Grubnic
b
, Georgios Georgakopoulos
c
a
Department of Accounting Economics & Finance, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
b
School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, United Kingdom
c
Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
a b s t r a c t
The transformative potential of accounting-sustainability hybrids has been promoted and
problematized in the literature. We contribute to this debate by exploring, theoretically
and empirically, the role of accounting in shaping and reshaping sustainability practices.
We develop a holistic framework which we use to analyse the governing and mediating
roles of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency (of England and
Wales) and West Sussex County Council. Our analysis identi?es that local accounting-sus-
tainability hybrids contribute positively to improving eco-ef?ciency, have some impact on
eco-effectiveness, but limited bearing on social justice. Emerging assemblages of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids create capacity for wider sustainability transformations, partic-
ularly through their mediating roles. However, a number of factors combine to frustrate
further sustainability transformations within these organisations and those they are
charged with governing. These factors include the structural constraints of the account-
ing-sustainability hybrids, in?uenced by a relatively weak local sustainability program-
matic and the pressing need to meet increasing service delivery expectations in a period
of severe resource constraints.
Crown Copyright Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
This paper explores the role of accounting in shaping
and reshaping sustainability practices. Accounting-sus-
tainability processes and practices are regarded as central
to embedding sustainability within public service organi-
sations acting as intermediaries between government pro-
grammes of reform and local service imperatives. There are
a growing number of accounting-sustainability hybrids
1
that have been developed to embed sustainability in organ-
isations yet our understanding of how these hybrids interact
with government strategies and policies intended to change
organisations and society to act more sustainably is, both
empirically and theoretically, underdeveloped.
In developing our understanding of the relationships
between accounting-sustainability hybrids and sustain-
ability transformation we draw upon concepts from gov-
ernmentality research (Dean, 1999; Hopwood, 1983;http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.02.003
0361-3682/Crown Copyright Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
?
Corresponding author. Address: Department of Accounting Econom-
ics & Finance, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton Campus, Edinburgh EH14
1AS, Scotland, United Kingdom. Tel.: +44 (0)131 451 4342.
E-mail address: [email protected] (I. Thomson).
1
In this paper we use the phrase ‘accounting-sustainability’ to represent a
range of accounting techniques previously referred to as social, environ-
mental, ethical and responsibility accounting. The use of the term
‘accounting-sustainability’ should not be interpreted as meaning that we
endorse the adoption of these accounting techniques or consider them to
facilitate sustainable development.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006; Miller, Kurunmäki, & O’Leary,
2008). These concepts include programmatics, mediation
and mediating instruments. Programmatics are high level
discourses that frame and legitimate local change and
articulate the plans, projects, policies, aspirations, political
ideals, discursive frameworks and utopian goals of reform-
ers. However for any change to occur there is a need to
translate the aspirations of reformers into the everyday
practices of local organisations. This translation or media-
tion is an important dynamic in any programme of
transformation and normally involves a practice or object
(a mediating instrument, using a term proposed by
Kurunmäki and Miller (2011, p. 222)) that constructs points
of common reference between strategic programmes of
reform and local practices. In this paper we consider
accounting-sustainability hybrids as mediating instru-
ments that could translate programmes of sustainable
reform into local organisations in order to enable change.
Exploring the mediating potential of different account-
ing-sustainability hybrids offers a number of insights that
could inform the evolution of hybrids aligned with sustain-
ability programmatics.
Research into accounting and sustainability covers a
diverse range of accounting processes and practices
(Thomson, 2007) that can be seen as ‘‘new phenomena
produced out of two or more elements normally found
separately’’ (Miller, Kurunmäki, & O’Leary, 2008: 943),
combining aspects from a stable and dominant discipline
(accounting) with an emerging discipline (sustainability)
(Frame & O’Connor, 2014; Kastenhofer, Bechtold, &
Wil?ng, 2011; Pretty, 2011). Examples of these account-
ing-sustainability hybrids include biodiversity audits
(Jones, 1996), carbon accounting (Ball, Mason, Grubnic, &
Hughes, 2009; Hopwood, 2009), corporate social reporting
(Gray, 2010), energy costing (Bebbington, 2010), external
social audits (Georgakopoulos & Thomson, 2008; Harte &
Owen, 1987), full cost accounting (Bebbington, Gray,
Hibbitt, & Kirk, 2001), shadow accounts (Gray, 1997) and
the sustainable balanced scorecard (Figge, Hahn, Schalteg-
ger, & Wagner, 2002). Prior research into the effectiveness
of such hybrids has concentrated on their role in organisa-
tional governance rather than on their potential as mediat-
ing instruments. However, most accounting-sustainability
hybrids can be seen as attempting to lead on organisational
change in local service delivery practices that are aligned
with elements of external sustainability programmatics.
These hybrids are expected to broker or mediate between
exogenous and endogenous frames of reference.
In relation to this, we advance our theoretical under-
standing by developing a holistic framework on the gov-
erning and mediating role of accounting-sustainability
hybrids in sustainable transformations within organisa-
tions. Our framework helps in analysing the process by
which accounting-sustainability hybrids are selected as
mediating instruments and the impact this choice has on
the shaping and reshaping of local sustainability gover-
nance practices. We re?ne the levels of analysis suggested
by prior governmentality studies (Kurunmäki & Miller,
2011) to re?ect upon the complex nature of organisational
changes associated with the emerging sustainability
programmatic. Our holistic framework is drawn from a
number of sources, including the governmentality and
accounting, new public management accounting and
accounting-sustainability literatures. Central to this frame-
work is the middle layer or bridge, referred to by
Kurunmäki and Miller (2011) as the mediating instrument.
We develop additional insights into the relations between
accounting mediating instruments and the programmatic
discourses that give them form as well as local service
imperatives that in?uence their content. In our framework
we distinguish between local and non-local accounting-
sustainability hybrids, with the former referring to
processes and practices generated internally and the latter
offered as generic solutions by external bodies.
While knowledge on internal accounting and sustain-
ability processes and practices is sparse in the academic lit-
erature (Hopwood, 2009), this shortage is more evident in
the public sector (Ball &Grubnic, 2007). Unlike pro?t-orien-
tated organisations, public sector organisations in the UK
have an explicit responsibility to transform along a more
sustainable trajectory and, further, to lead collectively on
this large-scale change (DEFRA, 2005). Public service organ-
isations are considered part of the solution in protecting
against threats to peace and security as would be the case,
for example, if water and food were in limited supply or ba-
sic human rights not safeguarded. In this paper, we respond
to Kurunmäki and Miller’s (2011) call to investigate how
government ideals are made operable through processes
and practices at the unit organisational level and, in so
doing, develop further links between the accounting sus-
tainability and public administration literatures.
In the empirical section of this paper we explore the
role of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the embedding
of sustainability in the Environment Agency and West Sus-
sex County Council. These organisations are both public
service organisations with long-standing strategic commit-
ments to and regulatory responsibilities for sustainability
(Grubnic & Owen, 2010; Thomson & Georgakopoulos,
2010). As UK public service organisations they are subject
to the same nexus of programmatic discourses and con-
strained by their statutory remit as to how (or whether)
they implement government policy initiatives. In both of
the cases, senior managers endorsed the use and develop-
ment of the Connected Reporting Framework,
2
as an
accounting practice for the embedding of the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005)
3
in local processes and
practices. The existence of an authoritative sustainability
programmatic, engagement with a common accounting-sus-
tainability hybrid and different service delivery imperatives
2
Our work originates from a research project on the effectiveness of the
Connected Reporting Framework (Accounting for Sustainability, 2007;
Hopwood, Unerman, & Fries, 2010) as an accounting-sustainability hybrid
object that connects sustainability outcomes with management decision-
making and organisational actions.
3
In the US, the environmental element of sustainable development is the
focus of The President’s Climate Action Plan (Executive Of?ce of the
President, 2013), which outlines measures for dealing with climate change.
To a gathering of university students, President Obama pledged to protect
future generations from catastrophic global warming, refusing to condemn
them to ‘‘a planet that’s beyond ?xing’’ (Obama address, 2013). Many
governments agree that it is necessary to keep global mean temperature
increases to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels in order to
remain within boundary conditions.
454 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
allows the opportunity of identifying the impact of such hy-
brids in the shaping and reshaping of local sustainability
practices. Our empirical sites allow us to analyse account-
ing-sustainability hybridisation processes in order to iden-
tify how the programmatic discourse is interpreted at a
local level, examine the role of local and non-local mediating
instruments on local processes and practices, and assess
how effectively hybrids translate the sustainability pro-
grammatic into governing processes.
The comparative case study approach combined with
the holistic framework identi?es a number of important
empirical contributions to the literature. We provide
information on how accounting-sustainability hybrids
are used in two regulatory hybrid organisations respond-
ing to calls for more research in public services on
sustainability accounting (Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball
et al., 2009). Our analysis allows us to draw out key attri-
butes of effective mediation that are of particular
relevance when developing hybrids intended to be used
for mediating purposes.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Firstly
from our literature review we construct a holistic frame-
work to analyse the development of accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids in our case study organisations. This is
followed by an explanation of the research methods
including a discussion of the rationale for the case selec-
tion. We then present our ?ndings on each case separately.
We ?nish with some general concluding comments from
our analysis of the cases incorporating a discussion of the
wider implications arising from the application of our
holistic framework.
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation – a holistic
framework
‘‘Accounting is constantly engaged in a dual hybridisation
process, seeking to make visible and calculable the hybrids
that it encounters, while at the same time hybridising itself
through encounters with a range of other disciplines.’’
(Miller et al., 2008, p. 945)
Prior literature has documented and developed numer-
ous accounting-sustainability practices such as the sus-
tainable balanced scorecard (Figge et al., 2002) and full
cost accounting (Bebbington et al., 2001; Herbohn, 2005).
We consider these practices to be hybrids of accounting
with different aspects of the sustainability programmatic.
For example, the sustainable balanced scorecard attempts
to integrate the economic, environmental and social pillars
of sustainability into Kaplan and Norton’s balanced score-
card (Kaplan & Norton, 1992) in order to create a coherent
performance measurement system that supports the
implementation of an organisation’s sustainability strategy
(Schaltegger & Wagner, 2006). The sustainable balanced
scorecard develops a widely used management accounting
practice by incorporating sustainability related metrics
into existing balanced scorecards or recon?guring the bal-
anced scorecard containing the conventional four dimen-
sions (for example, ?nancial, customer, internal
processes, learning and growth) to include additional
dimensions, such as, stakeholders, environmental impact,
social responsibility and product life cycle. The sustainable
balanced scorecard attempts to co-opt the perceived
strengths of conventional balanced scorecards to the task
of making organisations more sustainable. Full cost
accounting can also be seen as a hybrid between conven-
tional costing, sustainability science and environmental
economics. Bebbington et al. (2001) de?ne full cost
accounting as a form of costing that allows accounting
and economic measures to integrate all relevant environ-
mental and social externalities. It is argued that full cost
accounting could produce costs that are compatible with
a sustainable development agenda and inform public pol-
icy development (Herbohn, 2005).
Accounting-sustainability hybrids are generally under-
stood as governing practices that seek to make visible, gov-
ernable and thinkable the risks and uncertainties (Miller &
O’Leary, 1993; Miller & Rose, 1990; Power, 2007; Rose,
1991) associated with the sustainability programmatic in
organisations (DEFRA, 2005; Frame & Cavanagh, 2009;
Russell & Thomson, 2009). Such hybrids also play a role
in mediating between accounting and sustainability initia-
tives and in embedding sustainability programmatic dis-
courses into local organisational processes. One such
hybrid which forms part of our empirical study is the Con-
nected Reporting Framework, an accounting-sustainability
hybrid, which Fries, McCulloch, and Webster (2010) argue
was designed as a non-local mediating instrument to
embed sustainability into organisations in order to bring
about sustainable transformations. The Connected Report-
ing Framework is built upon the perceived strengths of
accounting, such as robust quantitative evidence gather-
ing, relevance, materiality, reliability, comparability and
assurability, to articulate the sustainability discourse into
a ‘‘language’’ understandable to organisational decision-
makers and provide clarity for outcomes (Accounting for
Sustainability, 2007; Hopwood et al., 2010).
However, most of the evaluations of the Connected
Reporting Framework (e.g. Bhimani & Soonawalla, 2010;
Brigham, Kiosse, & Otley, 2010; Fries et al., 2010; Lewis &
Ferguson, 2010; Unerman & O’Dwyer, 2010) focus on its
effectiveness in organisational governance through the
creation of greater visibility and knowledge of the ?nancial
consequences of consuming resources and the provision of
a different lens to view organisational practices. Although
there is some discussion on the bene?ts of using the Con-
nected Reporting Framework as a mediating instrument to
embed sustainability into organisations, there is very little
discussion on how (or whether) the Connected Reporting
Framework is selected as a suitable mediating instrument.
We position our analysis of accounting-sustainability
hybrids in the governmentality literature that has been
used to explore a range of different aspects of accounting
– including management accounting (Armstrong, 1994;
Ezzamel, Robson, Stapleton, & McLean, 2007; Lambert &
Pezet, 2010; Miller & O’Leary, 2007), accounting and power
(Dean, 1999; Everett, Neu, & Rahaman, 2007; Rose, 1991),
historical emergence of accounting (Hopwood, 1983;
Hopwood, 1987; Hoskin & Macve, 1986), accounting and
auditing in the public sector (Kurunmäki, 1999;
Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006; Miller & Rose, 2008; Nyamori,
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 455
2009), accounting and organisational transformation
(Kornberger & Carter, 2010; McKinlay, Carter, Pezet, &
Clegg, 2010; Vaivio, 2006), accounting and resistance
(Fischer & Ferlie, 2013; Neu & Heincke, 2004) and account-
ing regulation (Mennicken, 2008).
To date there has been limited application of govern-
mentality theories to the development of accounting-sus-
tainability practices (see, for example: Everett, 2004;
Neu, 2000, 2006; Spence & Rinaldi, 2014). However, such
hybrids have been extensively examined and critiqued
from a range of different theoretical perspectives, and con-
cerns raised that accounting practices problematically cap-
ture the sustainability programmatic and suppress ?elds of
visibility, forms of knowledge and techniques of governing
considered essential for any sustainable transformations
(e.g., Cooper, 1992; Cooper, Taylor, Smith, & Catchpowle,
2005; Gray, 2010; Larrinaga-Gonzalez & Bebbington,
2001).
Given the power of accounting in contemporary modes
of public sector governance (Broadbent & Guthrie, 2008;
Broadbent & Laughlin, 2002; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2011;
Llewellyn, 1994), we expect that our research will identify
accounting, and in particular, hybrids of accounting and
sustainability to be central to the (in)effectiveness of how
the sustainability programmatic is hybridised into organi-
sational processes and practices (Ball, 2005, 2007; Ball &
Grubnic, 2007). In order to evaluate the role of these hy-
brids in organisational transformation, it is important to
recognise the governing and mediating roles of accounting
objects
4
(Briers & Chua, 2001; Miller et al., 2008) and, in par-
ticular, that while the governing and mediating roles of
accounting hybrids are inter-related, they cannot be con-
?ated (Wise, 1988, 1995; Wise & Smith, 1989a, 1989b,
1990). Therefore, there is a need for a more explicit theoret-
ical and empirical understanding of the mediating role of
accounting-sustainability hybrids in order to inform the
evolution of those hybrids aligned with the sustainability
programmatic and address the concentration of prior re-
search on the governing effectiveness of such hybrids.
Our review of the accounting, governmentality and
hybridisation literature identi?es a number of key ele-
ments, critical processes and inter-relationships associated
with accounting hybridisation processes. These include
understanding: the nexus of programmatic discourses
framing an organisation; the potential set of non-local
and local mediating instruments; the local organisational
context; the construction of locally relevant hybrid pro-
grammatic discourses; the construction of locally relevant
mediating instruments; and, the design and embedding of
local accounting-sustainability hybrids in the governing of
the organisational processes and practices. From this re-
view we constructed a holistic framework to interpret
our case study ?ndings and also to inform future research
and practice development in this ?eld.
This holistic framework contains four inter-related
dimensions that collectively can be used to gain insights
into how organisations respond to changes at program-
matic and non-local levels. These four dimensions are:
how the local organisations interpret, prioritise and con-
struct their own locally relevant programmatic discourses;
how organisations select and/or construct mediating
instruments to channel the sustainability programmatic
into their local accounting processes and practices; how
organisations construct and embed hybrids of accounting
and sustainability into their governing processes; and ?-
nally, how effectively these accounting-sustainability hy-
brids translate the sustainability programmatic into local
governing processes. The remainder of this section will
present the four dimensions individually and then discuss
how these dimensions may interact in different contexts.
How organisations interpret, prioritise and construct their
local programmatic discourses
One observation from our review of the literature re-
lates to the importance of understanding the program-
matic discourses that impact on organisations, in
particular challenging the assumption of an identi?able
programmatic discourse (Dorrestijn, 2012; Miller et al.,
2008; Power, 2004, 2007). Despite a large body of empiri-
cal evidence (Ball, 2005; Bebbington & Gray, 2001; Herb-
ohn, 2005; Lehman, 2001) many accounting
sustainability studies assume that the impact of the sus-
tainability programmatic can be isolated and that it will
be a powerful force in transforming accounting and organ-
isational practices (e.g. Figge et al., 2002; Fries et al., 2010;
Henri & Journeault, 2010; Lohman, 2009). Van Helden, Aar-
dema, Ter Bogt, and Groot (2010) argue that organisations
(including public service organisations) are framed by a
complex web of competing and contradictory program-
matic discourses. It is, therefore, dif?cult to isolate the im-
pact of a single programmatic, such as sustainability, on a
speci?c hybridisation event (Miller & O’Leary, 2007; Miller
et al., 2008; Wise, 1988; Wise & Smith, 1990). This com-
plex set of programmatic discourses requires public service
organisations to construct their own hybrid programmatic
with which to legitimate any organisational changes in
terms of their identity, responsibilities, priorities, govern-
ing practices and permitted actions.
The freedom and power of organisations to construct
their programmatic hybrid varies. Regulatory hybrid
organisations, such as public service organisations, tend
to have limited capacity to determine which programmatic
discourses should in?uence their actions (e.g., Hyndman &
Connolly, 2001; Kurunmäki, 2004; Kurunmäki & Miller,
2006; Power, 2007). The UK public sector is subject to a
complex, evolving set of programmatic discourses (Ball,
2005; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006; Lapsley & Wright,
2004; Laughlin, 2007) which include New Public Manage-
ment, public welfare, value for money, outcome- and evi-
dence-based governance, deregulation and competition,
individual freedom, national security, economic growth,
risks and most recently the austerity discourse. Sustain-
ability is a relatively recent programmatic discourse that
impacts on the governing of and governing by UK public
service organisations (Ball, 2002, 2005; Ball & Grubnic,
2007; Ball et al., 2009). There are considerable commonal-
ities between public service values and the sustainability
4
We are using the term ‘object’ to represent physical objects, social
constructs, ideas and social processes and practices.
456 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
programmatics, but there are also signi?cant differences
(Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Boyne, 2002; Broadbent & Guthrie,
2008; Lehman, 2001). Our review of the literature suggests
that the impact of the sustainability programmatic will be
mitigated by the impact and/or alignment with other pro-
grammatics that frame individual organisations. Therefore
when analysing any accounting-sustainability hybridisa-
tion it is important to explore how organisations integrate
elements of the sustainability programmatic into their lo-
cal programmatic discourses.
How organisations select and/or construct mediating
instruments to channel the sustainability programmatic into
local accounting processes and practices
There are a number of studies that identify the impor-
tance of understanding how mediating instruments impact
on organisational and accounting transformations. It is
recognised that mediating instruments impose structural
constraints on any hybridisation by de?ning the points of
common reference from which any integration could
emerge (Miller & O’Leary, 1987; Miller et al., 2008; Wise,
1988; Wise & Smith, 1990). Mediating instruments allow
the mutual recognition of potential hybridisations, but any
hybridisation possibilities are restricted by the extent to
which the mediating instrument fully represents the points
of commonality. The importance(andproblems) of account-
ing objects operating as mediating instruments in driving or
shaping organisational transformation is well established
(Hopwood, 1983; Hoskin & Macve, 1986; Miller et al.,
2008; Radcliffe, 1998) and is recognised in the accounting-
sustainability literature (e.g., Gray, Walters, Bebbington, &
Thomson, 1995; O’Dwyer, 2003b, 2005; Puxty, 1991). How-
ever, there is a lack of exploration as to how (or whether)
such hybrids are selected as mediating instruments. As dis-
cussed earlier in this section the Connected Reporting
Framework is one example of an accounting technique that
con?ates the mediatingpotential of accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids with how fully they represent the sustainability
programmatic (e.g., Gray et al., 1995; Henri & Journeault,
2010; MacKenzie, 2009; Russell & Thomson, 2009).
In order to develop our understanding of accounting-
sustainability hybrids’ mediating potential in contempo-
rary organisations we draw upon mediation in the history
of science literature (Cleaver, 1989; Lenoir, 1988; Levallois,
2011) and, in particular, the work of Wise (1988, 1995) and
Wise and Smith (1989a, 1989b, 1990). These works iden-
tify a number of important characteristics of objects that
in?uence their possibility of being selected as mediating
instruments. One rather counter-intuitive observation is
that it is the general awareness of an object rather than
its technical or conceptual sophistication that affects its
selection for mediation. A number of authors conclude that
all parties to any hybridisation must accept a mediating
instrument as legitimate and relevant to them in order
for hybridisation to occur (Wise, 1988, 1995; Wise &
Smith, 1989a, 1989b, 1990). Therefore a mediating instru-
ment needs to be understandable by all parties in the con-
text of their individual knowledge and experiences.
Typically mediating instruments are ubiquitous objects
that play a visible and observable part in different contexts.
For example, Wise (1988) describes how the steam engine
and telegraph cable operated as mediating instruments in
the integration of physical science, political science and
engineering disciplines in the 19th century. Actors from
different scienti?c disciplines were able to relate and
understand these objects on both practical and theoretical
levels, considered them to offer generalisable and plausible
translations of other theories, practices and values and
thus were accepted as mediating instruments (Wise &
Smith, 1989a, 1989b, 1990).
Wise (1988) discusses how people can ?nd it dif?cult to
accept novel programmatic discourses as more relevant
than their everyday experiences that have remained rela-
tively stable over time despite previous radical changes
in the programmatic level. His work suggests that individ-
uals are less likely to choose non-local objects to create
mutually acceptable frames of reference between a novel
programmatic (such as sustainability) and their local
organisational processes and practices. Drawing on the
work of Wise and others (Cleaver, 1989; Lenoir, 1988;
Levallois, 2011; Wise & Smith, 1990), it is more likely that
generally understood everyday objects will be selected to
translate or embed programmatic discourses into local
processes and practices, regardless of non-local objects’
conceptual or practical appropriateness for the task.
How organisations construct and embed hybrids of
accounting and sustainability into their governing processes
There is a large body of work that identi?es the critical-
ity of a shared calculative rationality and the calculability
of ‘‘the other’’ in the development of accounting hybrids,
including accounting-sustainability hybrids (e.g., Fischer
& Ferlie, 2013; Gouldson & Bebbington, 2007; Gray, Dey,
Owen, Evans, & Zadek, 1997; Lambert & Pezet, 2010). Cal-
culation and calculability appear to be central to the iden-
tity and underlying rationality of accounting and
accountants. This suggests that without the possibility of
calculating ‘‘the other’’ there would be very little possibil-
ity of accounting hybridisation. It is dif?cult to see how
accounting and sustainability hybridisation would be sub-
stantially different from the hybridisation of accounting
and other domains or discourses. Therefore the most likely
hybridisation route would be through the calculable risks
and uncertainties of unsustainable development. Elements
of sustainability that have been or can be calculatively cap-
tured possess the greatest potential for accounting-sus-
tainability hybridisation. The wide-ranging literature on
social and environmental accounting, reporting and audit-
ing practices tends to support this observation and many
authors express concerns over what they regard as the
inherent incalculability of sustainability programmatic dis-
courses (e.g., Georgakopoulos & Thomson, 2005, 2008,
2012; Maunders & Burritt, 1991). Another important
observation is the possibility of the local resistance in
shaping the development of accounting-sustainability hy-
brids (Armstrong, 2006; Broadbent, Jacobs, & Laughlin,
2001; Kurunmäki, Melia, & Lapsley, 2003; Miller et al.,
2008).
Many accounting-sustainability hybrids (such as the
sustainable balanced scorecard, Connected Reporting
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 457
Framework, and full cost accounting) appear to be de-
signed as generic accounting practices informed by pro-
grammatic discourses with little consideration for local
organisations and their capability to change pre-existing
service delivery imperatives. In many cases accounting
hybridisation appears to be driven by intra-organisational
dynamics decoupled from programmatic discourses or
framed by mediating instruments constructed from local
processes and practices (Miller et al., 2008). Prior studies
note the complex interplay between programmatic and lo-
cal levels in the development of accounting hybrids and
how the same set of programmatic discourses do not pro-
duce the same local governing processes, practices or out-
comes. In our study both organisations are part of the UK
public sector rather than the large publicly listed compa-
nies that form the basis of most accounting-sustainability
research papers (Thomson, 2007). Arguably this creates
the possibility of a different set of accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids, as public service organisations have responsi-
bilities for governing social, economic and environmental
risks (Ball, 2002, 2005; Ball & Grubnic, 2007) and are more
likely to have calculative measures of social inequality, so-
cial justice, economic inequality and environmental
damage.
How effectively organisational accounting-sustainability
hybrids translate the sustainability programmatic into local
governing processes
A recurrent theme from our literature review is the
need to evaluate the extent to which accounting hybrids
represent programmatic discourses in organisational
practices and processes (Broadbent & Laughlin, 2005,
2008; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2011; Llewellyn & Northcott,
2005). For example, prior research into UK public sector
reforms using accounting mediating instruments notes
that the emergent accounting hybrids have not always
been aligned with the state’s programmatic and distorted
the aspirations of the intended reform (e.g., Broadbent &
Guthrie, 2008; Broadbent et al., 2001; Hyndman &
Connolly, 2001; Kurunmäki et al., 2003). Prior research
suggests that the scope of accounting-sustainability
hybrids will impact on its sustainable governing and
transformative potential (Frame & Cavanagh, 2009;
Larrinaga-Gonzalez & Bebbington, 2001; O’Dwyer,
2003b, 2005). Generally the closer the alignment of any
accounting-sustainability hybrid with the sustainability
programmatic then the more likely it will problematise
existing actions and evaluate future decisions in line
with sustainability transformation (Cooper et al., 2005;
Frame & O’Connor, 2014; Harte & Owen, 1987; Russell
& Thomson, 2009). However, much of the prior research
identi?es that most accounting-sustainability hybrids
only incorporated eco-ef?ciency aspects of the sustain-
ability programmatic, associated with ‘‘win–win’’ envi-
ronmental measures (Figge et al., 2002; Gray, 2010;
Gray et al., 1995; Henri & Journeault, 2010). This privi-
leging of eco-ef?ciency in such hybrids creates a poten-
tial structural problem when these hybrids are used in
a mediating role and may restrict any embedding of
the sustainability programmatic related to social justice,
community development or eco-effectiveness.
5
The re?exive relationships among the programmatic,
mediating and local practice levels
The ?nal observation from our literature review is the
re?exive nature of accounting hybridisation processes in
organisations. Miller et al. (2008) note that ‘‘hybridising
is a continually inventive process, in which proliferation
and multiplication is the norm’’ (p.961.). The creation of
a new accounting hybrid does not only change the
accounting processes and practices but can change ‘‘the
other’’ (e.g., engineering, medicine, health and safety, re-
search and development, marketing, medicine, teaching,
risk management) and the wider societal context
(Armstrong, 1994; Rahaman, Everett, & Neu, 2007; Walker,
2010; Young, 1995). The adoption and implementation of a
new accounting hybrid can substantively alter the organi-
sation through both its governing and mediating potential.
It can trigger a wider series of changes (see Armstrong,
2006; Miller & O’Leary, 1993) through creating new
problematisations and possibilities for change, through
new accounting hybrids acting as mediating instruments
to link previously distinct parts of the organisation and
facilitating and shaping further transformation (Briers &
Chua, 2001). This is not always a positive phenomenon
and these secondary level changes driven by accounting
hybrids can lead to a colonisation of organisations by
accounting rationality and governing techniques, such as
the spread of New Public Management in the UK and other
countries.
Prior research into accounting hybridisation suggests
that accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes will
not follow a ‘‘non-local to local’’ trajectory but may include
‘‘local to non-local’’ and ‘‘local to local’’ dynamics. Given
the continual nature of accounting hybridisation in local
settings (Miller et al., 2008) the subject of analysis should
not be a single hybrid but rather the evolving assemblage
of accounting-sustainability hybrids (Miller & O’Leary,
1993, 1994) within the organisation. The impact of any hy-
brid should be evaluated in the context of the local bundle
of accounting practices and any potential synergistic im-
pacts they carry.
Adopting our holistic framework enables the research-
er to observe sequences of inter-connected transforma-
tions. The holistic framework developed in this section
provides additional insights into our theoretical under-
standing of how to facilitate the development of more
effective assemblages of accounting-sustainability hy-
brids and how to analyse their emergence in practice.
We will now outline the research methods used in this
study, including case selection criteria and how we ana-
lysed the case studies.
5
Eco-ef?ciency is concerned with reducing the resources consumed to
meet a given social or environmental objective without questioning the
sustainability of that objective. Eco-effectiveness involves problematising
and rede?ning these objectives to be in alignment with the sustainability
programmatic and its focus is on systematic changes to enable sustainable
transformation.
458 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
Research methods
In order to explore the role of accounting-sustainability
hybrids in the embedding of the sustainability program-
matic into the local practices of the Environment Agency
and West Sussex County Council, we selected a compara-
tive case study research approach (Yin, 2003). This re-
search design allowed insights into the choice and
suitability of local and non-local accounting practices as
mediating instruments, and into the impact they have on
the integration of a common and authoritative sustainabil-
ity programmatic. In particular, we sought to identify what
aspects of the programmatic are rendered visible, calcula-
ble and governable by these local accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids.
The rationale for choosing our case organisations was
fourfold. Firstly, both organisations are regulatory hybrids
and subject to the same nexus of programmatic discourses
including the UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA,
2005). Secondly, both organisations have long-standing
strategic commitments to sustainable transformation and
are considered to be exemplars in this area in the UK public
sector (Grubnic & Owen, 2010; Thomson & Georgakopou-
los, 2010). Thirdly the Environment Agency and West Sus-
sex County Council were trialling the Connected Reporting
Framework to further embed the sustainability program-
matic (DEFRA, 2005) into their local processes and prac-
tices. Fourthly, while both organisations have regulatory
responsibilities associated with sustainability, the nature
of these responsibilities differ substantively.
Therefore, while the two case organisations exhibited
similarities to justify comparative analysis they also pre-
sented suf?cient differences. For example, while West Sus-
sex County Council has some responsibilities for the
environment, more of its legal responsibilities and service
delivery imperatives are concerned with social welfare, so-
cial justice and community building. Therefore West Sus-
sex County Council has more potential for embedding
social justice dimensions into its accounting-sustainability
hybrids than the Environment Agency. The Environment
Agency has some responsibilities in relation to social and
economic matters but most of its responsibilities, service
delivery imperatives and accountability relationships have
to do with climate change and environmental protection.
The Environment Agency should, therefore, possess more
potential for embedding eco-ef?ciency and eco-effective-
ness into its practices, including regulating others to im-
prove resource ef?ciency, and reducing waste and
harmful emissions as part of a transformation to a low car-
bon economy.
In the UK public sector the sustainability programmatic
is articulated through a series of sustainability strategies
adopted by the relevant UK parliaments, for example the
UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005). These
strategies are collections of policies, programmes and pro-
posals to transform all aspects of UK life including public
service organisations. Public service organisations are not
only required to transform their practices but also the
way they govern others, while remaining within their stat-
utory limits to act. While we do not discuss how effectively
these strategies capture global political and scienti?c sus-
tainability discourses, we interpret the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) as an of?cial represen-
tation of the UK government’s sustainability strategy in
England and Wales that forms part of the nexus of pro-
grammatic discourses that frame our case organisations.
The UK sustainability strategy is consistent with the
underlying liberal ideology that currently informs the
governing of the UK (Dean, 2007; Oels, 2005; Russell &
Thomson, 2009). The UK Sustainable Development Strategy
(DEFRA, 2005) presents sustainability as a model for the
good governance of a civilised, responsible society that at-
tempts to balance social justice, community building and
equality of opportunity with environmental protection
and enhancement and strong economic growth.
Our research methods were emergent in nature when
investigating the case studies. Methods and themes co-
developed as the data and interpretations accumulated,
allowing each interview to build on previous ?ndings. Rep-
resentatives fromthe organisation(s) were interviewed un-
til a degree of empirical saturation was reached. In
addition, we examined and incorporated into our analysis
a range of documents including strategy statements, web-
pages, policy documents, internal reports and annual ac-
counts. These secondary sources were analysed using
themes developed from an initial analysis of the interview
data.
The interviews in the Environment Agency and West
Sussex County Council were undertaken in the period April
to August 2009. Table 1 outlines the job description or title
of those interviewed. In both cases the interview process
began with a general round-table discussion with initial
contacts to explore the scope of our research and identify
key organisational representatives to interview. We at-
tempted to develop understanding from a range of differ-
ent disciplines operating within both organisations rather
than limit interviews to accounting-related employees.
The employees interviewed included chief executives,
accounting staff, staff who designed the accounting-sus-
Table 1
Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council representatives
interviewed.
Environment Agency West Sussex County Council
Chief Executive Chief Executive
Director of Finance Cabinet Member for Finance
and Resources
Head of Financial Management Group Manager, Customer
and Communities Finance
Chair of Audit Risk and Governance
Committee
Sustainability Group
Manager
Head of Environmental Finance Sustainability Group Team-
Members (3)
Environmental Finance Manager Economic Research Assistant
Team Manager – Internal
Environmental Management
Systems
Internal Communications
Manager
Human Resources Manager Training Manager
Regional Operational Director Business Change Project
Manager
Senior Emergency
Management Advisor
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 459
tainability hybrid practices and processes, staff who oper-
ated the accounting-sustainability hybrid practices and
staff who used the accounting-sustainability hybrid prac-
tices and processes. In addition, we were able to interview
a member of the Environment Agency’s Board of Directors,
who was also chair of the Audit Risk and Governance Com-
mittee and an elected member of West Sussex County
Council holding the position of Cabinet Member for
Finance and Resources.
The range of representatives interviewed allowed the
exploration of accounting-sustainability hybridisation
from multiple perspectives such as different levels of man-
agement, expertise and practical experiences. All but one
of the interviews were conducted on site, the remaining
interview being conducted by telephone.
Almost all of the interviews lasted approximately 1 h.
Interviewees were co-operative, open, friendly and sup-
portive. All interviews were recorded and summary notes
written up as soon as possible after the event. The inter-
views were transcribed and the transcripts analysed using
protocols described by O’Dwyer (2003a). Emerging themes
were informed by notes taken, post-interview discussions
and documents provided by the case organisations.
By systematically comparing interview transcripts, we
were able to discern the factors that in?uenced strategic
decisions on implementing and promoting sustainability,
evidence of the mechanisms associated with accounting-
sustainability hybridisations and perceived problems and
obstacles to the embedding of sustainability. Our interview
protocols allowed us to gather information from different
positions and perspectives within the Environment Agency
and West Sussex County Council and to sense check their
‘‘description’’ with that provided by others and the avail-
able documentary evidence.
In our analysis, we considered for each case the rela-
tionships between mediating instruments, programmatic
discourses and local practices and the relationships within
these levels. This holistic analysis provided insights into
how organisations interpret, prioritise and construct their
own locally relevant version of the nexus of programmatic
discourses; how these organisations select and/or con-
struct mediating instruments to channel the sustainability
programmatic into their local accounting processes and
practices; how these organisations construct and embed
hybrids of accounting and sustainability into their govern-
ing processes; and ?nally how effectively these account-
ing-sustainability hybrids translated the sustainability
programmatic into local governing processes. The next
two sections apply this framework to interpret and present
the evidence gathered from the Environment Agency and
West Sussex County Council.
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation: the
Environment Agency
The interpretation, prioritisation and construction of the local
programmatic discourse
The publication of the UK Sustainable Development Strat-
egy (DEFRA, 2005) did not bring about a radical transfor-
mation in the Environment Agency’s programmatic
discourse, but it strengthened their position and legitimacy
within the UK regulatory framework. Since 1996 The
Environment Agency
6
has played a central role in delivering
the environmental objectives of the UK government
(www.environment-agency.gov.uk/aboutus/default.aspx),
including promoting sustainability. Their strategy docu-
ment
7
(Environment Agency, 2006) outlined their ?ve key
roles as follows:
‘‘We will
Work directly to tackle environmental problems as an
ef?cient operator.
Work with businesses as a modern regulator to help
them reduce their effect on the environment.
But we can’t do it all ourselves. We also need to:
Be an in?uential adviser and an effective partner, per-
suading others to act and to work with us.
Highlight the problems facing the environment and
explain the need for action as an active communicator.
And we will:
Be the champion of the environment (in the context of
sustainable development) and advise on environmental
issues, whilst taking account of economic and social
issues.’’
(Environment Agency Corporate Strategy 2006–2011, p. 3)
(Emphasis added by authors to denote links to other pro-
grammatic discourses.)
The Environment Agency Corporate Strategy (Environ-
ment Agency, 2006) contained a number of key attributes
from other UK public sector programmatic discourses
(see bold above), for example: new public management,
public welfare, value for money, deregulation and compe-
tition, partnership working and economic growth and risk
management (e.g., Lapsley & Wright, 2004). The Agency
adopted into their local programmatic elements of the UK
Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) that were
aligned with their existing portfolios of powers and
responsibilities, for example climate change,
8
pollution
prevention, regulation and eco-ef?ciency. We considered
the Environment Agency to be a regulatory hybrid organisa-
tion (see Power, 2004, 2007) and despite their support of the
UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005), they
6
The Environment Agency was created in 1996 by the merger of
National Rivers Authority, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution and other
waste regulation authorities. Many of the Agency’s accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids can be traced back to, for example, the National Rivers Authority
Environmental Reporting established in 1987.
7
Note that their Strategy document for 2010–15 (Environment Agency,
2009) also contained a similar blend of these programmatics, but their
vision statement contained a stronger emphasis on people and community.
We focussed on the 2006–11 Strategy as this was active during the main
period of our ?eldwork.
8
The Climate Change Act (2008) granted the Environment Agency
powers to enforce the UK’s carbon emission reduction regime (accessiblehttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/27/contents).
460 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
argued that as an Executive Public Body of the UK Government
they had limited scope to change beyond their statutory re-
mit. This was described by the Environmental Finance Man-
ager as follows: ‘‘Its [Environment Agency’s] focus is very
much around environmental things, so you know, putting a
lot of time and effort beyond the environmental connection
would be more dif?cult for us.’’ However, many of the risks
contained within the UK Sustainable Development Strategy
(DEFRA, 2005) associated with unsustainable development
were considered potentially catastrophic and in need of ur-
gent action, for example climate change.
‘‘We’re still in the middle of a big economic crisis and that
pales into insigni?cance, compared to what the world is
going to be like in a hundred years’ time if we do not crack
climate change. We won’t need to worry about economic
crises, we’ll be struggling to live.’’
(Head of Financial Management)
A key element of the Agency’s local programmatic was
to be recognised as a best practice organisation in environ-
mental management. This involved the development of
management processes and practices that could be
adopted by all organisations and the integration of busi-
ness-like characteristics into their public service program-
matic such as the ‘‘business case for sustainability’’ as part of
their commitment to ‘‘practise what they preached’’.
The need for the Environment Agency to become more
sustainable in all it did was recognised, but how this was
implemented was mediated by their ability and authority
to change. Speci?cally the Agency sought to demonstrate
the feasibility of change to others, balanced with risks from
the nexus of programmatic discourses. This led to an eco-
ef?ciency bias in the elements of DEFRA (2005) that
formed part of the Agency’s strategic discourse.
The selection and construction of sustainability mediating
instruments
The power and problems associated with accounting
mediating instruments in organisational transformation,
including sustainability, is well documented (e.g., Kurunmäki,
2004; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006, 2011; Kurunmäki et al.,
2003). Within the Agency the selection of ‘‘sustainable’’
mediating objects was in?uenced by the normal interac-
tion among staff conducting their day-to-day work. All
staff interviewed viewed eco-ef?ciency as part of their role
as the guardian of the natural environment. The following
quote from the Chief Executive Of?cer illustrated the
justi?cation of the use of accounting-sustainability hybrids
to mediate between the sustainability programmatic, the
Agency’s strategy, local practice and staff motivation and
values.
‘‘Most of our staff believe that the reason we’re doing a lot
of our work is to improve the environment and therefore,
by us doing this, we’re helping directly, doing our bit for
the environment. Second is that by being as green as we
can be, we’re setting an example for others and that makes
it easier when we’re going out and doing our work because
quite often people will say ‘Well what do you do and how
are you doing it?’, and they will copy us. And a third one is
that by using less gas, by doing less mileage, you’re saving
money and that money can be reinvested. . .In a private
organisation that would be pro?t, but for us it’s reinvesting
it in doing more work for the environment. So recycling
stuff and reducing waste and making sure that money is
used to good effect.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
The selection of mediating instruments in the Environ-
ment Agency was affected by their widespread use of
accounting-sustainability hybrids. The Agency has devel-
oped and used such hybrids since 1996 and environmental
accounting (a form of accounting-sustainability hybrid)
was considered normal practice throughout the Environ-
ment Agency, for example.
‘‘Environmental monitoring and reporting is part of the
Environment Agency’s DNA. The Environment Agency is a
special case in this context with high levels of know-how
continuously being developed.’’
(Head of Financial Management)
‘‘Since the beginning of the Environment Agency, we’ve
had carbon, waste and water usage data for internal man-
agement systems and have set targets on reducing and
monitoring these things.’’
(Head of Environmental Finance)
The existence of local accounting-sustainability hybrids
impacted on the perceived usefulness of non-local hybrids
as mediating instruments between the sustainability pro-
grammatic and the Agency’s activities. Within the Agency
there was a specialist Environmental Finance Team whose
function was to develop and implement best-practice
accounting-sustainability hybrids. The Environmental
Finance Team were considered the local experts in select-
ing appropriate mediating instruments.
Environmental Finance Team members described how
their hybrids evolved through the systematic application
of basic accounting concepts to the problem of reducing
environmental impacts, and believed that accounting, if
applied appropriately, could positively contribute to the
sustainable development of organisations. Team members
were committed to the evolution of accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids that built incrementally on measurable suc-
cesses and the gradual integration and normalisation of the
more radical elements of the sustainability programmatic.
The ability of non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids
to ?t into or enhance the existing hybridisation process
was an important criterion as to whether it was adopted
for mediating or governing in the Environment Agency.
Prior successes of the Agency’s accounting-sustainabil-
ity objects in mediating and de?ning common points of
reference between the sustainability programmatic, organ-
isational values, statutory responsibilities and the motiva-
tion of individual employees was already well established.
For example:
‘‘On the whole, we’ve tried to demonstrate there have been
savings from doing this in terms of pounds savings and
physical savings. So we’re trying to link the two together,
pounds and physical units; that’s probably been the biggest
success and the biggest heart-winner, heart and mind win-
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 461
ner, because people can latch onto that, ‘Ah, I can see the
value of that now, I wondered why you’ve been doing
that’.’’
(Regional Operations Director)
‘‘It is a good thing to be able to understand what your envi-
ronmental impacts are . . . to be able to understand what it
is costing you to be able to deliver bene?t and know-how.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
The existing level of expertise and general satisfaction of
the Agency’s senior management with the Environmental
Finance Team’s accounting-sustainability hybrids in medi-
ating the sustainability programmatic meant that any non-
local accounting-hybridwas subject toa highlevel of critical
evaluation as to its ?tness for purpose in the Agency.
Environment Agency accountants were active (often in
leadership roles) in accounting networks, standard setting
processes and policy forums, (e.g., the Association of Char-
tered Certi?ed Accountants, Socially Responsible Pensions,
Accounting for Sustainability, and HM Treasury’s Financial
Reporting Advisory Board
9
) and had an extensive knowl-
edge of accounting-sustainability hybrids. The Agency
10
was involved in the development of a number of such gen-
eric hybrids, including the Connected Reporting Framework.
The developers of the Connected Reporting Framework
claimed it was designed to link a holistic understanding of
sustainability with the strategy and activities of an organisa-
tion, including social welfare, fair trade and lifecycle impacts
of its products and services (Fries et al., 2010). However, the
Environmental Finance Team selected their local hybrids in
preference to the Connected Reporting Framework despite
claims that it could be an effective sustainability mediating
instrument. Team members were positive about the mediat-
ing role the Connected Reporting Framework could play in
other organisations, but were ambivalent about its useful-
ness to the Environment Agency. The Connected Reporting
Framework was described by one interviewee as ‘‘like putt-
ing on an old shoe’’. The following quotes illustrate their
reaction to the Connected Reporting Framework.
‘‘It [the Connected Reporting Framework] is another
framework, it’s got some aspects that we’ve done before,
so let’s take the good bits, let’s use the bits that we were
already going to do anyway and let’s throw out the bits
that we actually think don’t work. I don’t think we’ve rad-
ically changed what we’ve done.’’
(Environmental Finance Manager)
‘‘Let’s import what you know, so let’s make this as sort of
sensible and pragmatic as we can make it.’’
(Director of Finance)
‘‘Our internal environmental management systems were
much better developed than the actual reporting required
for the Connected Reporting Framework.’’
(Head of Environmental Finance)
The Connected Reporting Framework was not consid-
ered to add signi?cant value to the Agency over their exist-
ing accounting-sustainability objects, although it was
credited with the re-invigoration of their external environ-
mental reporting and internally legitimated their planned
programme of accounting-sustainability hybridisation.
Environmental Finance Team staff identi?ed a number of
technical de?ciencies in the Connected Reporting Frame-
work,
11
but it was the Connected Reporting Framework’s
lack of ?t with the Agency’s everyday experiences that mit-
igated against its selection as a mediating instrument. How-
ever, Environmental Finance Team staff acknowledged that
their assemblage of hybrids did not fully account for their
sustainability impacts (positive or negative). For example
the Environment Finance Manager stated that, ‘‘It [their sys-
tem] is not sustainability reporting in the truest sense, it is envi-
ronmental reporting.’’
This self-criticism was supported by the Chief Executive
Of?cer who argued that they did not account for all their
material environmental impacts or include the sustainabil-
ity outcomes of their activities. The Connected Reporting
Framework did incorporate more social concerns than
the Environment Agency accounting-sustainability hy-
brids, but this was insuf?cient to justify its adoption in
the Agency. The Connected Reporting Framework could
have mediated more elements of the sustainability pro-
grammatic to the Environment Agency yet it was not ac-
cepted as a plausible or generally understood mediating
instrument. However, as will be discussed later, it also
could have seriously disrupted the Environment Agency’s
more systematic approach to the hybridisation of account-
ing and sustainability.
The construction and embedding of accounting-sustainability
hybrids into governing processes
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation in the Environ-
ment Agency was a continual process that utilised the gov-
erning and mediation possibilities of different hybrids
(similar to the ?ndings of Briers & Chua, 2001; Miller &
O’Leary, 1993, 1994; Miller et al., 2008). The Environmen-
tal Finance Team’s objective was to create an effective
assemblage of accounting-sustainability hybrids rather
than to perfect individual techniques. The Team developed
a pragmatic approach based on solving locally de?ned
problems (such as the reduction of energy consumption).
This involved developing accounting techniques, in con-
junction with local experts, experimenting with different
hybrids and re?ecting on their effectiveness in answering
speci?c local problems. They re?ned these hybrids until
consensus emerged that they were effective in governing
that problem and, where appropriate, integrated these hy-
brids into their normal accounting processes and practices.
The Environmental Finance Team used the measurable
success (and failures) of these new governing techniques
to problematise other aspects of their activities and cre-
9
HM Treasury’s Financial Reporting Advisory Board is the body respon-
sible for setting public sector ?nancial reporting standards in the UK.
10
Not all of the Environmental Finance Team were involved in the initial
development of the Connected Reporting Framework although they were
involved in its piloting and adaptation for public sector reporting.
11
The Environment Agency successfully promoted a highly modi?ed
version of the Connected Reporting Framework to be included in the UK
Public Sector Accounting Reporting Standards (UK Treasury, 2012). A full
discussion of this process falls outside the scope of this paper.
462 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
ated new possibilities for change, similar to the iterative
processes observed by Miller and O’Leary (1993, 1994).
For example, the integration of of?ce energy consumption
data into their budgeting and performance measurement
systems enabled more effective governance of their energy
use in buildings, but the measurable success of this energy
governance technique was also used to problematise the
use of other resources in their buildings (such as paper,
water and waste) and created possibilities of developing
systems to govern and reduce the consumption of these re-
sources. The accounting hybrids that successfully reduced
water use and waste in Agency buildings were then used
to evaluate other Agency activities in an attempt to iden-
tify further possibilities for water and waste reduction.
As these hybrids were normalised within the account-
ing system they also created the capacity to respond to
new problems as they emerged, such as climate change.
For example, the availability of energy consumption data
for buildings and transportation combined with carbon
conversion metrics allowed the Environment Agency to ex-
tend their energy governance system to a carbon gover-
nance system that channelled the climate change
programmatic into all parts of the Agency that consumed
energy.
A good example of how an individual accounting-sus-
tainability hybrid ?tted into the wider assemblage was
the Agency’s Low Carbon Staff Travel System. Over time
the Environment Agency developed a set of staff travel
practices and processes that merged expertise from a wide
range of professions and disciplines. These included pro-
curement, transport management, carbon management,
air emissions, management and ?nancial accounting, logis-
tics, management controls and performance measurement.
The Low Carbon Staff Travel System evolved into a set of
decision protocols and metrics designed to reduce carbon
emissions by prompting consideration of the need for tra-
vel and the selection of the lowest carbon option available.
Fig. 1 illustrates how the Low Carbon Staff Travel System
was embedded within the Agency’s management and
accounting systems.
The accounting processes and practices contained with-
in the Low Carbon Staff Travel System were in?uential in
making visible both the costs and carbon impacts of staff
travel choices and legitimated low carbon travel practices
through the calculation of cost savings. Staff travel miles
and costs of individual staff travel choices were captured
in the Agency’s ?nancial ledger and formed part of the
budgetary systems, corporate scorecards, key performance
targets and internal benchmarking. The Low Carbon Staff
Travel System was fully integrated into the Agency’s
accounting, management, procurement and investment
practices and processes.
Fig. 1. The connectivity of Low Carbon Staff Travel System within the Environment Agency. Source: Thomson and Georgakopoulos (2010, p. 139).
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 463
The success of the Low Carbon Staff Travel System was
used by the Environmental Finance Team to problematise
other climate change impacts of the Agency, including pro-
curement and outcome measures. The Environmental Fi-
nance Team extended the principles of the Low Carbon
Staff Travel System to evaluate the embedded (lifecycle)
carbon in all goods and services purchased and the net life-
cycle carbon emissions of their civil engineering pro-
gramme, including the ?ood prevention infrastructure.
The further development of lifecycle carbon accounting hy-
brids enabled the Environment Agency to make radical
step-changes to reduce their impact on climate change
and build the capacity to mediate with other aspects of
the sustainability programmatic in their supply chain, such
as human rights, fair trade, health and safety.
Contrary to prior research, accountants were attributed
with helping the Agency become more sustainable. For
example:
‘‘Its [engagement with environment] opened up the
?nance team and they’ve become much more colleagues
rather than gatekeepers. And I think our business is bene-
?ting enormously in having what I call ‘user-friendly
accountants’.’’
(Chair of Audit Risk and Governance Committee)
In the literature review we noted that the calculability
of ‘‘the other’’ was important in resisting or enhancing
the development of most accounting hybrids, as well as
accounting-sustainability hybrids (e.g., Georgakopoulos &
Thomson, 2008; Maunders & Burritt, 1991). We observed
that calculative rationality, evidence and measurement
formed a major part of the Agency’s values and activities
not just in the accounting department. Employees
throughout the Environment Agency were highly knowl-
edgeable about sustainability, the science underpinning
their regulations and methods of calculating environmen-
tal impacts. Measuring the environment was normalised
12
within the Agency and there was little resistance and con-
siderable scope to further hybridise accounting with the
measurable elements of sustainability that fell within the
Agency’s statutory remit. Elements of the environment were
already calculatively captured by scienti?c methods and in
regulatory instruments and therefore hybridising with
accounting was not viewed as problematic by other disci-
plines in the Environment Agency.
How effectively the accounting-sustainability hybrids
translate the sustainability programmatic into local governing
processes
In this section we analyse how effectively the Environ-
ment Agency’s organisational accounting-sustainability
hybrids translated the sustainability programmatic into
their local governing processes. In particular we evaluate
the potential of the Agency’s hybrids to govern the sustain-
able transformations contained in DEFRA (2005). We also
consider whether these accounting-sustainability hybrids
could distort the embedding of the sustainability program-
matic in the Environment Agency. We analyse the Agency’s
hybrids in order to establish whether they problematised
their unsustainable actions, supported decisions to pro-
mote sustainable change or focussed on the limited eco-
ef?ciency concerns commonly found in ‘‘for-pro?t’’
organisations.
We identi?ed a wide range of individual accounting-
sustainability hybrids that operated in the Environment
Agency, which are summarised in Table 2. These hybrid
practices were mostly concerned with the establishment
of the ?nancial bene?ts of adopting eco-ef?cient practices
and the problematisation of poor eco-housekeeping.
Accounting-sustainability hybrids have been effective in
embedding an eco-ef?ciency programmatic throughout
the Agency, for example in their Low Carbon Staff Travel
Protocol; but have been largely ineffective in areas such
as social justice or community building.
A number of the Environment Agency’s hybrids could
be considered to be underpinned with a concern for eco-
effectiveness rather than eco-ef?ciency (Table 2, third col-
umn). Eco-effective accounting-sustainability hybrids with
their emphasis on more system level changes have much
greater potential to govern transformation along a sustain-
able trajectory. However, as mentioned earlier, there were
a number of constraints on the ability of the Agency to
transform sustainably, but there was evidence that they
were building in-house capacity to enable future changes.
This included working with suppliers to provide physical
Table 2
Examples of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency.
Eco-ef?ciency accounting-sustainability hybrids Eco-effectiveness accounting-sustainability
hybrids
Energy costing, budgeting and KPIS Environmental reporting Life-cycle costing
Water costing budgeting and KPIS Corporate scorecards Social responsible investment monitoring of
pension funds
Staff travel protocol Environmental innovation
competitions
Carbon calculators for suppliers
Pollution prevention costing Water costing budgeting and KPIS Building design environmental impact analysis
Internal environmental performance league tables and
benchmarking
Environmental investment appraisal
techniques
Environmental procurement processes
Environmentally signi?cant expenditure monitoring Environmental internal auditing Carbon accounting
‘‘Environmental’’ bookkeeping systems and invoices Staff appraisal and review systems
12
For example, acceptable air emissions in urban areas are de?ned in
terms of speci?c pollutants such as lead, nitrous-oxide, carbon monoxide
and by speci?c measures, for example, lead emissions. The latter are
problematic if they exceed 0.5 lg per cubic metre or less, when expressed
as an annual mean.
464 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
quantities on invoices, requiring suppliers to provide car-
bon calculations, the incorporation of physical measures
in their ledger, the capture of resource usage in expense
forms or department returns, environmental speci?cations
in procurement processes, building environmental impacts
into capital expenditure analysis, as well as training
accounting staff in environmental management.
The Agency’s assemblage of accounting-sustainability
hybrids has the potential to problematise the eco-inef?-
ciency and eco-ineffectiveness of its actions. This assem-
blage was used to systematically support eco-ef?ciency
initiatives throughout the Environment Agency and to
make substantive progress on the development of viable
eco-effective hybrids.
Key ?ndings and insights from accounting-sustainability
hybridisation in the Environment Agency
The accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes
in the Environment Agency did not follow a ‘‘non-local to
local’’ trajectory, but were more complex with strong
‘‘local to non-local’’ and ‘‘local to local’’ dynamics. Hybrid-
isation in the Agency was driven by strong, cooperative
intra-organisational dynamics framed by local accounting
practices, partially decoupled from the sustainability
programmatic but in?uenced by the wider set of programmatic
discourses associated with UK public service organisations.
Within the Agency there was a widely held belief that
accounting-sustainability hybrids could assist organisa-
tions develop sustainably. This belief was based on the
cumulative, measurable environmental and ?nancial bene-
?ts attributed to (and measured by) their hybrids. These
included signi?cant environmental improvements in car-
bon emissions, resource use, energy use, water use and
waste produced (Thomson & Georgakopoulos, 2010). These
improvements were not attributed to any single hybrid but
to the systematic nature of their hybridisation process and
the synergistic impact of their evolving assemblage of
accounting-sustainability hybrids.
When viewed from the perspective of developing such
an assemblage of hybrids we observed the emergence of
a positive sequence of transformations where individual
accounting-sustainability objects both governed speci?c
organisational problems and priorities and allowed for
the creation of new possibilities of change through local
mediation. However, we also recognise that the Environ-
ment Agency may be a special case in relation to account-
ing-sustainability hybridisation. They have considerable
expertise in sustainability; there was no substantive con-
?ict between their activities and the sustainability pro-
grammatic; they were assigned resources and the
responsibilities to develop sustainability; they had power
over others on environmental issues; they were under-
pinned by a calculative culture; their staff were committed
to environmental governance; the measurement and cal-
culation of the environment was normalised; their
accounting staff were acknowledged leaders in the ?eld;
and, engagement with accountants in the Agency was wel-
comed. Environment Agency accountants were aware that
the Agency’s assemblage of accounting-sustainability hy-
brids was far from complete and recognised that there
was anurgent needtodevelopaccountingpractices andpro-
cesses to make visible and render governable the sustain-
able outcomes of their actions. In particular, the
accountants were keen to move beyond eco-ef?ciency and
develop eco-effective accounting-sustainability hybrids.
Most of the obstacles to the development of hybrids
that were found to exist in other organisations did not ex-
ist in the Environment Agency and this perhaps explains
our positive evaluation of the future potential of their hy-
brids. Our analysis of the Agency con?rms many of the crit-
icisms of past researchers into the role of accounting on
sustainability transformation but also identi?es a number
of important insights that could inform the development
of more effective organisational assemblages of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids.
The next section presents our analysis of the role of
accounting in the shaping of sustainability practices in
West Sussex County Council. West Sussex County Council
shared with the Environment Agency a high level commit-
ment to embedding sustainability throughout its activities
but, as mentioned earlier, its regulatory remit in relation to
the sustainability programmatic was very different. The
following section will follow the same structure as the
Environment Agency, which allows a holistic evaluation
of hybridisation in the Council and facilitates comparison
between the two cases.
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation: West Sussex
County Council
The interpretation, prioritisation and construction of the local
programmatic discourse
Interviews with key representatives from the County
Council Cabinet and Chief Executive’s Board, as well as
respondents from the Sustainability Group,
13
revealed a
nexus of programmatic discourses impacting on accounting-
sustainability hybridisation. As implied in the literature (for
example, VanHeldenet al., 2010), the UKSustainable Develop-
ment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) was hybridised with other dis-
courses, acting as a ?lter on activity at the Sustainability
Group level and throughout West Sussex County Council.
While respecting the guiding principles and shared pri-
orities for UK action contained in the UK Sustainable Devel-
opment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005), it was clear from the Chief
Executive Of?cer and Cabinet Member for Finance and Re-
sources that these were viewed as a snapshot in a moving
trajectory. The Cabinet Member, for example, pointed to
improving upon A Time for Action: A Strategy for a Sustain-
able West Sussex (West Sussex Sustainability Forum, 2005),
a two-page document translating the UK Sustainable Devel-
opment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) to West Sussex: ‘‘We had A
Time for Action which was the sustainable strategy. But I felt
we could do a lot more and wanted to take it further.’’ In part,
this attitude may be attributed to the prior positions held
by these Board members requiring knowledge of the
13
The Sustainability Group is a small designated specialist unit of four
workers charged with championing sustainability and directing efforts
towards integrating sustainability into the everyday activities of West
Sussex County Council.
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 465
importance of environmental protection and sustainabil-
ity. The Chief Executive Of?cer previously held of?ce as
the County’s Director for Environment and Development,
and the Cabinet Member for Finance and Resources had
previously been responsible for the Environment and
Economy. The Chief Executive Of?cer had been involved
in the 1992 Rio Climate Change Convention negotiations,
suggesting both familiarity with the foundations of the
UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) and
the ?uid nature of debates on sustainability.
Notwithstanding the above, the UK Sustainable Develop-
ment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) was broadly interpreted as
requiring changes in the Council’s decision making pro-
cesses. The Cabinet Member presented the Council’s ap-
proach to sustainability as ‘‘360° vision, 360° thinking
and 360° of sustainability’’. The 360° vision, a catch-all
phrase, incorporates the pursuit of an innovative and pro-
ductive economy, a strong, healthy and just society, and a
protected physical and natural environment, which is con-
sistent with the goals for UK Government and Devolved
Administrations included in DEFRA (2005). Decision-mak-
ing practices in West Sussex County Council could be seen
to depart from these goals as they encouraged consider-
ation of environmental and social issues alongside ?nancial
issues rather than integrated as evoked in the UK Sustain-
able Development Strategy.
The sustainability programmatic as presented in the UK
Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) was further
hybridised from two other main sources. Firstly, the dis-
course was ‘‘up-dated’’ with the expert knowledge of lead-
ing political activists. Here, the Cabinet Member revealed
the in?uence of inspirational master classes hosted by the
Council and delivered by Professor Jonathon Porritt (June
2006) and Lord Nicholas Stern(June 2008). The choice of ex-
perts in the political domain rather than the scienti?c ?eld
played a part in swaying the agenda more readily towards
in?uencing behaviour than concentrating on precise mea-
surement and calculation (Ascui & Lovell, 2011).
The master classes held more resonance with the Cabi-
net Member than A Time for Action: A Strategy for a Sustain-
able West Sussex (West Sussex Sustainability Forum, 2005).
The content of the transcript of the seminar on ‘‘Adapting
to Change’’ delivered by Lord Stern clearly spells the risk
of non-action on production and consumption in terms of
temperature increases; highlights responsibility at the
individual level by making explicit links from activities to
climate change; and, has a practical orientation in drawing
attention to targets on emissions on a per capita basis. In
contrast, the Council’s strategy refers to a number of key
threats to the quality of life; positions itself on collective
as well as individual action; and, is generic on achievement
across the three spheres of sustainable development.
The in?uence of political activists, in conjunction with
the passion for and sensitivity to environmental issues by
key representatives of the Board, contributed towards a
bias to action on climate change. The Chief Executive Of?-
cer commented on reducing carbon emissions:
‘‘[It] has become such a totemic issue around the environ-
ment and sustainability. Things like the Stern Report have
conquered the economic Everest on this. The underpinning
for being able to tackle sustainability on those sorts of
issues in economic and environment terms is now so
strong it’s sort of irresistible.’’
Social issues, in contrast, were perceived as diffuse and,
by implication, dif?cult to get to grips with:
‘‘That [social issues] is the $64,000 question. And that’s
partly I think why in the last sort of seventeen years since
Rio, it’s not embedded in the same way. The social aspects,
the community and cohesion aspects of sustainability have
sort of been second runners in this.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
Secondly, and more pervasively, the programmatic was
hybridised with the government’s new public manage-
ment/ef?ciency/austerity programmatic discourses. As
the Chief Executive of?cer explained: ‘‘I’m afraid money is
such a central priority at the moment, it takes most of my
time.’’
The new public management/ef?ciency/austerity pro-
grammatic overshadowed the sustainability programmatic
and held greater ‘‘political potency’’ for the Board, leading to
short-term economic interests prevailing over longer-term
environmental concerns (Boston & Lempp, 2011) and con-
signing sustainable development as a secondary consider-
ation within the organisation as a whole. As a result,
environmental considerations were mostly framed by the
more economic discourses put forth by government.
The programmatic discourse was hybridised with the
arguments of political activists in order to engage individ-
ual members of staff and yet was permeated by the UK
Government’s economic programmatics. An example of
this was the lack of reference by interviewees to, say,
Strong and Prosperous Communities (DCLG, 2006), implying
that equivalent pressures were not felt in the social arena.
The selection and construction of sustainability mediating
instruments
From the mediating instruments available for channel-
ling the sustainability programmatic and achieving organ-
isational transformation, the Council selected Forum for
the Future’s (2010) Sustainability Standard
14
and the Con-
nected Reporting Framework. These were described by a
number of organisational participants as compatible with
each other.
On the one hand, the Sustainability Standard was used
by Council Members and Senior Of?cers to mobilise action
across staf?ng groups. There was recognition by the Cabi-
net Member and Chief Executive Of?cer that sustainability
champions alone were insuf?cient in driving organisa-
tional transformation, particularly if sustainability was to
be viewed as a routine part of work roles. The Sustainabil-
ity Standard helped in offering a benchmark matrix as a
means for undertaking a self-assessment and providing a
score mirroring those used by the Audit Commission in
14
The Sustainability Standard was developed by Forum for the Future and
its local authority partners and is intended to encourage continuous
improvement toward sustainable development through suggesting prac-
tical steps for the achievement of desired outcomes.
466 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
the Comprehensive Performance Assessment.
15
As a conse-
quence, the weak to fair rating (‘‘not awful but not great’’)
held resonance with members of staff and signalled a need
for improvement. The Sustainability Standard also helped
in providing steps to mainstreaming sustainability in a local
government context.
On the other hand, the Connected Reporting Framework
was used to add momentum to a prior decision to integrate
sustainability more widely in the Council. As articulated by
the Chief Executive Of?cer:
‘‘. . .it seemed to us that the whole project and the whole
reporting framework were going to provide the impetus
for a coherent and holistic approach to what our footprint
was environmentally across a whole range of issues. So this
seemed to offer the way forward for us to make a single
commitment that would have a multiple impact, if you
like. So rather than on each occasion when we looked at
a new building or on each occasion at a new policy or
whatever, trying to start the whole argumentation again,
we made a single corporate commitment to achieving
greater sustainability.’’
Although the Connected Reporting Framework was per-
ceived as legitimising organisational commitment to sus-
tainability, the Council retained agency on how the
framework hybridised with their existing organisational
processes and practices. In other words, the Sustainability
Group did not legitimise the general orientation of the gen-
eric Connected Reporting Framework or, indeed, the use of
the Accounting for Sustainability decision-making tool (see
Spence & Rinaldi, 2014) to ensure sustainability factors
were taken into account. This is pertinent as the tool has
the potential to render many of West Sussex County Coun-
cil’s service delivery imperatives visible, such as commu-
nity building, community engagement and social justice.
The Council’s programmatic hybridisation and local pro-
grammatic discourse had the effect of imposing structural
constraints upon the implementation of the Connected
Reporting Framework. In addition, the Sustainability Group
Manager revealed a hybrid ‘‘business case’’ Connected
Reporting Framework in framing initiatives:
‘‘A lot of people go on about sustainability; they take the
three core areas now: social, environmental and economic
impacts. But what we’re trying to do is take those three
areas and then that is surrounded by ?nance.’’
(Sustainability Group Manager)
The Connected Reporting Framework, as presented by
the Accounting for Sustainability project, lay outside the
Council’s points of reference and, accordingly, was nar-
rowed in focus when used as part of their sustainability re-
form process.
Consistent with the interpretation and perceived tech-
nical aspect of the Connected Reporting Framework, it
was seen as a means of securing more involvement from
the accountants in the Council’s sustainability journey. As
expressed by the Sustainability Group Manager, the input
of accountants was critical: ‘‘So we can do sustainability,
but where’s the ?nance people? And they’re the main people
that you need to take forward sustainability.’’
A ‘‘business case’’ Connected Reporting Framework was
in keeping with the hybrid discourse of advancing sustain-
ability in a period of reducing resources. The Council
undertook a Fundamental Service Review of all activities
following a series of poor ?nancial settlements coupled
with minimal government grant increases and a pledge
to keep Council Tax affordable. Speci?cally, the Council
was charged with identifying ef?ciency savings to a total
value of ?fty million pounds sterling. As a consequence,
the Sustainability Group Manager was keen to demon-
strate positive economic and environmental bene?ts in
the improvement of eco-housekeeping within the Council.
In order to further induce the involvement of accoun-
tants, members of the Sustainability Group used their prior
knowledge of accounting processes and practices to dem-
onstrate the ?nancial bene?ts of their initiatives. In this
way, the Sustainability Group reasoned that identifying
?nancial savings from their initiatives would be suf?cient
in convincing accountants in the Council to support and
further develop these accounting-sustainability hybrids.
As shown, the Council selected Forum for the Future’s
Sustainability Standard and Connected Reporting Frame-
work to add impetus to the sustainability agenda and help
engage with staff. The Sustainability Group adapted the
Connected Reporting Framework with the effect of com-
promising on some of the objectives as asserted by
Accounting for Sustainability (Hopwood et al., 2010). Posi-
tive environmental and economic impacts were actively
sought while positive impacts on society and social cohe-
sion were assumed to occur on ful?lment of the changes
in the other two spheres. The accountants, if not silent, as-
sumed a supporting role in the implementation of the Con-
nected Reporting Framework.
The construction and embedding of accounting-sustainability
hybrids into governing processes
At local level, the Sustainability Group developed three
accounting-sustainability hybrids (Sustainability Work-
place Tool, Sustainability Appraisal and Carbon Model) that
drew upon their accounting expertise, processes and prac-
tices (Grubnic & Owen, 2010). Development of these
accounting-sustainability hybrids, and to varying degrees,
their use in organisational governing, relied upon top level
managerial and political support as well as internal and
external networks.
Given the breadth of the sustainability programmatic
discourse, the Sustainability Group Manager assigned one
team member to lead on the construction of each account-
ing-sustainability hybrid. The group members were well
versed in the hybridised local sustainability discourse
although, generally, less familiar with the realities of prac-
tices inherent in an organisation responsible for the deliv-
ery of a diverse range of services. Work on the hybrids
offered team members the opportunity of becoming more
knowledgeable on current and incoming legislation,
managerial regimes within the Council, publicly available
15
The Comprehensive Performance Assessment used an audit and
inspection framework to determine an understandable benchmark rating
of the performance of councils as well as identify areas for improvement on
delivery of services to the public.
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 467
strategic documents and political plans. Accordingly,
Sustainability Of?cers located hybrids in government
directives in addition to governing processes of the Cabinet
and Chief Executive’s Board.
The construction of the accounting-sustainability hy-
brids varied in terms of approach taken. When developing
the Sustainability Workplace Tool and Sustainability Ap-
praisal the staff started with external best practice exem-
plars and tailored them to their local needs. In the case
of the Carbon Model they used a process of experimenta-
tion building on local know-how and experience. The Chief
Executive Of?cer and Sustainability Group Manager were
not adverse to using ideas developed elsewhere:
‘‘We certainly have no dif?culty with the notion that other
people are doing things that we’d quite like to steal.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
‘‘We always try and use tools that are currently the best
practice in the market.’’
(Sustainability Group Manager)
Seeking practices established in another location can be
linked to a lack of human resources within the Group and a
desire to promote behavioural change sooner rather than
later. The Sustainability Appraisal, for example, was based
on the Integrated Appraisal Toolkit for the North West
(NWRA, 2003) and, speci?cally, the idea that the sustain-
ability of projects can more readily be shaped at the initial
scoping stage. The North-West Toolkit had the added ben-
e?t of re?nement subsequent to an extensive consultation
exercise with bodies such as the Health Development
Agency and Environment Agency. The lead worker on the
Sustainability Appraisal focussed her work on incorporat-
ing objectives from the West Sussex Sustainable Community
Strategy (WSCC, 2009a) into this local accounting-sustain-
ability hybrid in order to ensure relevance to in-house
projects.
The Sustainability Appraisal and, to a greater extent, the
Sustainability Workplace Tool, included assessments de-
signed to ensure more eco-ef?cient practices. As an exam-
ple, the Sustainability Workplace Tool sought to promote
energy reduction practices among members of staff such
as the unplugging of computer terminals at the end of a
working day. In this way, the hybrids collectively focussed
on reducing negative environmental consequences and,
with particular reference to the Sustainable Workplace
Tool, largely ignored the sustainable consequences of ser-
vices delivered.
The experimental approach undertaken in developing
the Carbon Model both utilised and extended the knowl-
edge of the Climate Change Of?cer. The Of?cer justi?ed
experimentation on the basis of general recommendations
submitted by a group of consultants including the need for
‘‘?nancial innovation’’ within the Council. For the develop-
ment of this hybrid, innovation was greatly facilitated
through access to extensive documentation generated by
the Fundamental Service Review. This incorporated dia-
grammatic depictions of processes integral to delivering
services. The Of?cer also secured cooperation and substan-
tial input from two senior managers with responsibilities
for two distinct areas (road maintenance and residential
site management). In this way, the hybrid was tailored to
the local setting and services delivered.
Similar to the Sustainability Workplace Tool and Sus-
tainability Appraisal, the Carbon Model was justi?ed on
the basis of local service imperatives. As the Climate
Change Of?cer articulated:
‘‘We can’t afford not to do something about our carbon
emissions. Reducing our emissions will not only reduce
the negative effect we have on climate change, but by
reducing our energy bills, we will also save the County
Council large amounts of money.’’
(WSCC, Sustainability Report 2007)
However, in mediating between the need for eco-ef?-
ciency on the one hand and compliance to national indica-
tors on the other, the Of?cer envisioned the Carbon Model
as promoting social gain. Information generated by the
model permitted the Climate Change Of?cer in conjunction
with the Service Manager/Owner to contemplate the
restructuring of services such that social outcomes would
be achieved.
The Carbon Model, as a technical tool, encompassed
both carbon dioxide emissions arising from service deliv-
ery lines and ?nancial values relating to energy usage.
Using diagrams on service processes, the Climate Change
Of?cer, with some reliance on the expertise of the senior
managers, mapped energy relating to accommodating
staff; travel; off-grid fuels (such as diesel and propane);
and, contractors. Data for the Carbon Model was then de-
rived from annual electricity and gas bills, an internal team
focussed exclusively on transport (‘‘anything in terms of
transport, it will be under a cost code’’) and contractors. Sim-
ilar to activity-based costing, the Climate Change Of?cer
designed the Model in a way to enable service managers
to identify and remove non-value adding energy units
and costs.
In contrast to the Carbon Model, the Sustainability
Workplace Tool and Sustainability Appraisal, at the time
of research, did not incorporate measurements in the form
of ?nancial savings. Rather, these accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids were developed on the assumption that savings
would accrue from changing behaviour. In a newsletter
placed on the intranet, the Sustainability Group argued:
‘‘The Carbon Trust suggests that at least 10% of all energy costs
can be reduced by improving staff behaviour’’. However,
there was evidence of secondary hybridisation in rendering
visible the cost of poor resource management in the future.
Governing with the Sustainability Workplace Tool re-
quired subjective judgements rather than more precise
measurements. Lacking accounting input, internal legiti-
macy was attempted by assigning a Staff Sustainability
Group Member to manage the use of the Sustainability
Workplace Tool. This involved an assessment of six areas
(waste, energy, procurement, water, people and transport)
for an individual department, team or building, which gen-
erated a percentage score, and a requirement to improve
that score by at least ?ve percentage points the following
year.
Both the Sustainability Workplace Tool and Sustain-
ability Appraisal used a traf?c light system to show re-
sults. As with Forum for the Future’s Sustainability
468 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
Standard, this held more resonance with staff members,
highlighting areas requiring attention. Partly re?ecting
its stage of development, the Carbon Model relied to a
greater extent on the close interaction between the Cli-
mate Change Of?cer and respective service managers to
better understand local service provision in order to effect
change.
The Council had a small but dedicated resource for
developing accounting-sustainability hybrids. At one end
of the scale, the Sustainability Workplace Tool encom-
passed eco-housekeeping measures applicable to all staff
groupings. Because of its generic nature, the hybrid did
not infringe upon regulatory regimes imposed by Central
Government or necessarily require changes to service
delivery beyond exercising thrift. At the other end of the
scale, application of the Carbon Model demonstrated po-
tential in promoting change of a more transformational
nature. The hybrid was designed to reveal unknowns in
terms of energy consumption and, furthermore, prompt
discussions on how to improve service delivery including
social outcomes.
How effectively the accounting-sustainability hybrids
translate the sustainability programmatic into local governing
processes
As with the Environment Agency, accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids were effective in translating eco-ef?ciency
in relation to Council activities into their local governing
processes and recognising the importance of eco-effective-
ness. The Sustainability Group sought to contribute to so-
cial justice directly through implementation of the
Sustainability Appraisal and, indirectly, through the
embedding and piloting of the Sustainable Workplace Tool
and Carbon Model.
Members of the Sustainability Group had heightened
awareness of the need for eco-effectiveness and, consistent
with the messages of Lord Stern, regarded the manage-
ment of environmental risks as a local imperative. As a re-
sult, all three local accounting-sustainability hybrids
sought to reduce energy use and, in so doing, contain car-
bon dioxide emissions. Metrics following completion of the
Sustainable Workplace Tool were collated at directorate
level and improvement targets monitored via incorpora-
tion in the Corporate Sustainability Programme 2009–2013
(WSCC, 2009b).
As a pre-requisite to formal tracking, the hybrids had
the backing of the County Council Cabinet and Chief Exec-
utive’s Board in the expressed ambition of getting their
‘‘own house’’ in order as well as providing leadership and
direction to other public service organisations and the sur-
rounding local community. As the Chief Executive Of?cer
expressed:
‘‘There’s two real issues on that; one is the environmental
footprint of the organisation as an organisation and the
other, and much broader answer, is around policy and
other leads. [What] does the County Council give West
Sussex as community leaders, as the providers of 80% of
local government services? [What does it provide] to oth-
ers, to pursue more sustainable approaches?’’
In a complementary move to focus attention on the
importance of climate protection, and counter potential
resistance, interview respondents cited using ‘‘visible’’
examples such as how recent droughts impacted on local
reservoirs as part of their governing processes.
Eco-effectiveness was assumed by the Sustainability
Group to be linked to eco-ef?ciency in that better house-
keeping measures incorporated into the hybrids would re-
sult in the release of ‘‘?nancial dividends’’. Although there
were targets on more parsimonious use of resources, the
Sustainability Group Manager admitted to work needed
on quantifying ?nancial savings. For example, he suggested
dual hybridisation of accounting in developing increased
understanding of whole-life costing and lifecycle assess-
ment. However, one by-product of non-inclusion of calcu-
lable savings in the Sustainable Workplace Tool was the
promotion of respect for the environment and, moreover,
operation within environmental limits as a worthy journey
in its own right among staff members.
The Sustainability Group as a conduit for the Chief Exec-
utive’s Board sought to contribute directly and, more so,
indirectly, to the achievement of social outcomes. The Sus-
tainability Appraisal, for example, in line with the articu-
lated 360° vision, attempted to include social concerns
when reviewing new project proposals. Nevertheless, it is
fair to say that managing environmental and economic
risks consumed most of the effort of this Group, as re-
?ected in the general orientation of the hybrids and the
content of the Corporate Sustainability Programme 2009–
2013 (WSCC, 2009b). Social commitments in the latter
were con?ned to equality of employment within the Coun-
cil, increasing numbers of staff engaged in community vol-
unteering and reducing workplace bullying.
Given the above, it would be incorrect to infer that is-
sues such as creating safer and stronger communities,
improving the quality of life of older people and children,
young people and families as risk, promoting healthier
communities and raising standards across schools, identi-
?ed in the UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA,
2005) as within the remit of local government, were not at-
tended to by the Council. Indeed, the Council recently
underwent a restructuring of the Chief Executive Board
in order to promote a uni?ed team assuming responsibili-
ties across the social spectrum of the sustainability pro-
grammatic. Following on, social imperatives were viewed
as main council business, with all professional enclosures
and staff groupings responsible for realising county
strategy.
As argued by the Sustainability Group Manager, devel-
opment and implementation of accounting-sustainability
hybrids contributed to the maintenance of front-line ser-
vices and, therefore, indirectly, current social outcomes.
To make his point, the Manager cited the tracking of
expenditure on energy and water over an eight-year peri-
od, with exponential growth revealing consequences on
Council budgets. Crudely, the line of reasoning undertaken
followed the logic of environment plus ?nance equals the
protection of core ‘‘social’’ services. As rationalised by
him: ‘‘We keep saying, if you want to keep paying [major en-
ergy supply company] money, ?ne, but I’d rather pay our
child protection of?cers money.’’
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 469
In summary, the local accounting-sustainability hybrids
practiced by the Sustainability Group centred on the more
recently identi?ed environmental risks and sustainable
consumption of resources in order to safeguard the planet
as well as Council funds. When evaluated against the sus-
tainability programmatic, lack of further inclusion of social
issues into the hybrids constituted a missing link between
the social, economic and environmental. As a result, a dee-
per understanding of commonalities among elements, as
well as risks and uncertainties following trade-offs, was
foregone.
Key ?ndings and insights from accounting-sustainability
hybridisation in West Sussex County Council
The accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes
in the West Sussex County Council, similar to that ob-
served in the Environment Agency, exhibited a range of
different trajectories including some ‘‘non-local to local’’
and relatively strong ‘‘local to local’’ and ‘‘local to non-lo-
cal’’ dynamics. Accounting-sustainability hybridisation
was driven from the top of the Council and operationalised
via the Sustainability Group rather than from the main-
stream accounting function. The hybridisation processes
was affected by a nexus of programmatic discourses affect-
ing the UK public sector and in particular by the new pub-
lic management and austerity discourses. Despite the clear
commitment to sustainability reform the sustainability
programmatic was perceived as relatively weak in a con-
text of increasing service delivery imperatives and poor
?nancial settlements.
Similar to the ?ndings of the Environment Agency,
interview respondents within West Sussex County Council
believed that accounting-sustainability hybrids could as-
sist them in developing sustainably based on the cumula-
tive, measurable environmental and ?nancial bene?ts
attributed to (and measured by) their assemblage of hy-
brids. However, unlike the Environment Agency the Coun-
cil’s assemblage of accounting-sustainability hybrids
remained distinct from the mainstream ?nancial account-
ing processes and practices. These hybrids ran in parallel to
the mainstream accounting systems providing greater vis-
ibility to the bene?ts of eco-ef?ciency initiatives. The Sus-
tainability Group was active in trying to engage with the
mainstream Council accountants in order that these
accounting-sustainability hybrids would eventually be-
come part of the mainstream accounting systems.
There was some evidence of a con?ict between the po-
tential implications of embedding sustainability and the
?nancial settlements to the Council from Government
impacting upon organisational budgets. This helps explain
the emergence of a ‘‘business case’’ for sustainability,
which concentrated on ?nancially bene?cial activities that
did not substantively challenge everyday organisational
activities. However, the Sustainability Group, working with
very limited resources and outside the mainstream
accounting function, was able to create a range of innova-
tive accounting-sustainability hybrids and in?uence gov-
erning processes. The hybrids resulted in a signi?cant
improvement in the eco-ef?ciency of council operations
and created a growing awareness of the importance of con-
sidering the Council’s eco-effectiveness. Collectively, the
hybrids created substantial potential for further local sus-
tainability mediation and change.
The next section presents our concluding comments
and a discussion of the main implications of our analysis
of accounting-sustainability hybridisation in the Environ-
ment Agency and West Sussex County Council.
Conclusion
The main purpose of this paper was to explore the role
of accounting-sustainability hybrids in shaping and
reshaping sustainability practices. As part of this explora-
tion, we developed a holistic framework from our review
of the accounting, governmentality, public sector, sustain-
ability and hybridisation literatures (for example, Gray,
2010; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2011; Miller et al., 2008; Wise,
1988). We used this to analyse the factors and processes
that shaped the implementation of the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) in the Environment
Agency and West Sussex County Council. Our analysis re-
vealed a number of empirical insights into accounting-sus-
tainability hybrids and led to the realisation that this
holistic framework could be usefully applied in other stud-
ies that seek to investigate the complex interactions be-
tween accounting and sustainability. This framework
enables a more in-depth understanding of accounting
and sustainability hybridisation at a theoretical level as
well as when analysing different empirical sites. It can also
be of use to researchers and practitioners seeking to design
and embed accounting-sustainability hybrids into local
organisational settings that will enable, rather than con-
strain, sustainable transformations.
Theoretical contributions
We believe that our holistic framework further re?nes
the insights offered by prior governmentality studies in
helping to understand the relationship between account-
ing and organisational change. In addition to considering
the dynamics from policy injunctions to the embedding
of these ideals at local level (see Kurunmäki & Miller,
2011), we propose an iterative holistic approach. Our main
theoretical contribution is in developing a more detailed
exploration of how (or whether) accounting-sustainability
hybrids are selected as mediating instruments and the im-
pact of this selection process on the local embedding of the
sustainability programmatic, as well as any further
accounting-sustainability hybridisation. In particular the
work of Wise (1988, 1995) and Wise and Smith (1989a,
1989b, 1990) suggests that this selection process will be
biased towards the existing everyday practices within an
organisation and biased against more abstract, novel ideas
at the programmatic level. This observation poses a num-
ber of questions as to the effectiveness of developing gen-
eric, non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids that draw
mainly from the programmatic level, based on their gov-
erning potential.
Another theoretical contribution for future research is
the distinction between the governing and mediating roles
470 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
of speci?c accounting-sustainability hybrids. The govern-
ing potential of such a hybrid relates to its ability to man-
age a de?ned organisational risk, while the mediating
potential relates to the hybrid’s ability to channel aspects
of the sustainability programmatic into other areas of the
organisation (or beyond) as a precursor to further transfor-
mation. Past research (and developments in practice) has
failed to adequately address this difference. The attributes
of effective governance and effective mediation are differ-
ent and therefore should not be con?ated. From a theoret-
ical perspective, there is a lack of explicit consideration as
to how, in general, key actors select (and ignore) mediating
instruments as legitimate at local level. This may partially
explain the relatively low adoption of accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids that re?ect the non-eco-ef?cient aspects of
the sustainability programmatic.
Our holistic framework allowed us to make a number of
empirical contributions in response to a general call for
more research on sustainability accounting in the public
services (Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball et al., 2009) and to
understand the complex inter-relationships between
accounting, sustainability and local service delivery imper-
atives. Our analysis challenges the appropriateness of non-
local ‘for-pro?t’ accounting-sustainability hybrids for
mediation and governance in regulatory-hybrid organisa-
tions (see for example Broadbent et al., 2001; Kurunmäki,
Lapsley, & Miller, 2011; Miller et al., 2008), but also recog-
nises the power of locally legitimate ‘public sector’
accounting-hybrids in promoting and restricting sustain-
able transformations.
We will now summarise the ?ndings revealed through
application of the holistic framework to our case studies.
We also re?ect on the power of the local in accounting-sus-
tainability hybridisation, the lack of resistance from non-
accounting staff, the normalisation of calculative capture
of the environment and the transformative, governing and
mediating potential of accounting-sustainability hybrids in
the Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council.
The interpretation, prioritisation and construction of the local
programmatic discourse
Given that local hybrid programmatics are used to
frame and legitimate any organisational transformation,
understanding how they are constructed is critical to
understanding the hybridisation of accounting and sus-
tainability. We observe in both cases that the impact of
the sustainability programmatic on the local strategic dis-
courses of the Environment Agency and West Sussex
County Council was diluted due to other programmatics
such as new public management, public welfare, value
for money, deregulation and competition, economic
growth, and austerity. Elements of the sustainability pro-
grammatic are evident in the respective local strategic dis-
courses, but typically relate to existing institutional
responsibilities and resource constraints. The UK Sustain-
able Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) appeared to legit-
imate existing commitments to the sustainability
programmatic rather than to transform it.
Our analysis suggests that the sustainability program-
matic may not be a powerful driving force for change in
relation to the in?uence of other programmatics thus sup-
porting prior studies on the limited capacity of regulatory
hybrid organisations on responding to voluntary program-
matics such as sustainability, unless they are backed up
with speci?c regulatory changes (e.g., Kurunmäki, 2004;
Lapsley & Wright, 2004; Laughlin, 2007; Llewellyn &
Northcott, 2005).
The selection and construction of sustainability mediating
instruments
Both the Environment Agency and West Sussex County
Council have accounting-sustainability hybrids tailored to
their strategic priorities and service delivery imperatives.
In both organisations these hybrids are considered to have
been effective in reducing their negative environmental
impacts. Particularly in the Environment Agency it was
the success of ‘‘home-grown’’ hybrids that in?uenced their
selection as mediating instruments. Our ?ndings are con-
sistent with prior research (for example, Broadbent &
Guthrie, 2008; Wise, 1988, 1995) that the everyday power
and presence of costs, ?nance and resource constraints in
working practices helps the selection of accounting-sus-
tainability hybrids as mediating instruments. These
accounting-sustainability hybrids that were constructed
and adapted to local priorities appear to create a legiti-
mate, plausible conceptual link between eco-ef?ciency
and improved service delivery outcomes. The ?ndings ap-
pear to suggest that in the context of sustainability, local
factors seem to be more powerful than the non-local. The
preference to select the known and the mundane as medi-
ating instruments, particularly when responding to novel
programmatics (Wise, 1988), regardless of any perceived
technical or conceptual superiority of the external ’’expert’’
solution, is an important insight into the development of
accounting-sustainability hybrids. The power of the local
context and importance of local actors in determining
what they consider to be acceptable mediating instru-
ments should not be under-estimated but does create a po-
tential obstacle to programmatic led reforms.
The construction and embedding of accounting-sustainability
hybrids into governing processes
The accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes
in both cases exhibited most of the characteristics identi-
?ed in accounting-sustainability, new public management
accounting and management accounting hybridisation re-
search (e.g., Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball et al., 2009; Kur-
unmäki et al., 2011; Miller et al., 2008). The accounting-
sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency and
West Sussex County Council were formed (and reformed)
in the intersections and repeated interactions among pro-
grammatic discourses, resource constraints, political prior-
ities, local accounting practices, the organisation’s legal
responsibilities, accountability relationships, existing
assemblage of governing practices, existing knowledge of
the sustainability programmatic and everyday service
delivery imperatives.
In both cases, the accounting-sustainability hybrids did
restrict the points of common reference for hybridisation
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 471
possibilities (Miller & O’Leary, 2007; Miller et al., 2008;
Wise, 1988) by privileging what both organisations were
already doing and their existing local programmatics.
These hybrids did not re?ect all of the possible intersec-
tions of the sustainability programmatic with the local ser-
vice delivery responsibilities in the Environment Agency or
West Sussex County Council and therefore could restrict
the full implementation of the UK Sustainable Development
Strategy (DEFRA, 2005).
Our ?ndings are consistent with prior studies (e.g., Clea-
ver, 1989; Lenoir, 1988; Levallois, 2011; Wise, 1988) that
stress the need for mutual acceptance and understanding
of the legitimacy of any mediating instrument and the abil-
ity of a potential mediating instrument to offer plausible
translations of other theories and practices into their do-
mains. It would appear that one consequence of the
accountingisation of the UK public sector (Ball & Grubnic,
2007; Ball et al., 2009; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006, 2011)
is the greater awareness and understanding of accounting
throughout public sector organisations. The normalisation
of accounting-public service hybrids over a sustained per-
iod has led to accounting objects possessing many of the
characteristics associated with mediating instruments
and thus increasing their likelihood of being part of any
programmatic led reform.
Non-accounting workers involved in the sustainability
transformation initiatives appear to have welcomed the
development of accounting-sustainability hybrids. The
hybridisation of accounting with sustainability is seen to
grant greater power and legitimacy to local initiatives
and improve their eco-ef?ciency. Non-accounting staff ap-
pear either unaware or unconcerned with the problems
identi?ed in accounting-sustainability research studies,
such as managerial capture, problematic calculative cap-
ture, lack of challenge to unsustainable business as usual
assumptions, and the inability for accounting to incorpo-
rate unmeasurable aspects of sustainable development
(e.g., Cooper, 1992; Cooper et al., 2005; Everett, 2004;
Everett & Neu, 2000). This suggests a need for more effec-
tive engagement by the accounting research community
with all disciplines involved in sustainability reforms, par-
ticularly given the lack of independent critiques of many
generic non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids that
claim to be effective sustainable mediating and governing
technologies.
As noted earlier the calculability of ‘‘the other’’’ was not
a major obstacle to developing accounting-sustainability
hybrids in these two cases. For example, measuring the
environment was a common practice in the Environment
Agency and those elements of the environment already
calculatively captured offered a number of locally legiti-
mate accounting-sustainability hybridisation possibilities.
However, it was the combined impact of a number of dif-
ferent factors that led to a majority of hybrids being under-
pinned by eco-ef?ciency concerns.
We challenge other researchers to identify appropriate
local measures of the sustainability programmatic in order
to convince practicing accountants of the existence of
acceptable measures of ’’the other’’ by ’’the other’’ and
demonstrate how these measures can be integrated into
accounting processes and practices. This allows the possi-
bility of combining the calculative techniques with the
contemporary power and legitimacy of accounting in
organisational governance in the context of sustainable
transformation. However, this has to be tempered in light
of concerns raised that accounting practices problemati-
cally capture the sustainability programmatic and sup-
press ?elds of visibility, forms of knowledge and
techniques of governing considered essential for any sus-
tainable transformations (e.g., Maunders & Burritt, 1991;
O’Dwyer, 2003b; Puxty, 1991; Russell & Thomson, 2009).
How effectively the accounting-sustainability hybrids
translate the sustainability programmatic into local governing
processes
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation in the Environ-
ment Agency and West Sussex County Council involved
patterns of complex and re?exive dynamics as suggested
by our holistic framework. Accounting-sustainability hy-
brids were present in the construction of local program-
matic discourses and used to mediate between local
practices and the sustainability programmatic. The in?u-
ence of local hybrids at all stages of the sustainability
transformation could create a self-referential dynamic
with all subsequent hybridisations dominated by account-
ing characteristics with the risk of decoupling local prac-
tices from the sustainability programmatic. Our analysis
of the cases demonstrates that this multi-level involve-
ment of accounting-sustainability hybrids was partially
responsible for the predominance of accounting-eco-
ef?cient hybrids although without these hybrids it would
be less likely that the eco-ef?ciency improvements in the
Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council
would have occurred. For example, it was the everyday
accounting-sustainability practices, rather than non-local
accounting-sustainability hybrids such as the Connected
Reporting Framework, that were selected as mediating
instruments between the sustainability programmatic
and local processes and practices. The construction of local
hybrids as mediating instruments was seen to omit signif-
icant elements of the sustainability programmatic but, on a
pragmatic level, they did facilitate local changes in relation
to climate change impacts, energy use, resource use and
waste reduction. Our analysis suggests that these hybrids
allowed elements of the weak sustainability programmatic
discourse to hybridise with more powerful discourses (e.g.,
new public management, austerity, and modernisation)
thus enabling change in local organisational practices.
Key ?ndings and insights from accounting-sustainability
hybridisation
Despite the public sector context of our case studies
(Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball et al., 2009), it would appear
that our ?ndings on the content and nature of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids are largely consistent with re-
search into for-pro?t and third sector organisations
(Figge et al., 2002; Fries et al., 2010; Henri & Journeault,
2010; Herbohn, 2005), with a privileging of accounting-
eco-ef?ciency hybrids associated with cost-effective
’’eco-housekeeping’’ activities (Ball & Grubnic, 2007) or
472 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
regulatory compliance (Georgakopoulos & Thomson, 2005,
2008, 2012). Despite the regulatory responsibilities of the
Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council,
their hybrids tended not to encompass all aspects of the
sustainability programmatic (DEFRA, 2005).
The assemblages of accounting-sustainability hybrids
are only partial representations of the sustainability pro-
grammatic, and as a result they are unable to support sys-
tematic reforms along a sustainable trajectory (Russell &
Thomson, 2009) and could distort the intentions of the sus-
tainability programmatic. Currently, such hybrids are pow-
erful governing and mediating instruments (Hopwood
et al., 2010) in these two public service organisations, but
they ignore signi?cant elements of the sustainability pro-
grammatic. These accounting-sustainability hybrids privi-
lege one, albeit important, aspect of this programmatic
and appear under-developed in terms of enacting the rad-
ical social transformations contained in the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005). However, the inter-
views in the Environment Agency and West Sussex County
Council identify a desire to develop hybrids that are capa-
ble of making visible, calculable and governable social jus-
tice, community building, eco-effectiveness and eco-justice
in order to support wider sustainable transformations.
They identi?ed a number of obstacles that are preventing
them from moving beyond accounting for the negative
environmental impacts of their existing service delivery
imperatives. There does appear to be a programme of re-
forms that suggests a potential for breaking through the
‘‘green-business’’ ceiling.
Final thoughts and implications
This paper raises a number of important insights into
how and whether accounting can enact this more radical
transformation and we identify a number of challenges
for further research. This paper extends our understand-
ing of how accounting practices structure, legitimate
and constrain discourses around the governing of society
and nature. We have attempted to highlight how
accounting-sustainability hybrids could (mis)translate
the sustainability programmatic and strip it of its radical
vision and potentially relegate it to a footnote of the mod-
ern, neo-liberal programmatic. We believe that this may
not be an inevitable consequence and we observe the
emergence of hybrids with the potential to challenge
and transform, particularly when we consider organisa-
tional assemblages of accounting-sustainability hybrids
such as in the Environment Agency and West Sussex
County Council.
Creating plausible accounting-sustainability mediating
instruments grounded in local contexts yet re?ecting the
sustainability programmatic remains a challenge for the
development of more effective accounting-sustainability
hybrids. Our ?ndings support the arguments of others
(e.g., Gray, 2010; Lehman, 2001) that researchers should
develop hybrids by understanding the sustainability pro-
grammatic (political and scienti?c) in order to develop sus-
tainability-accounting hybrids that support and facilitate
sustainable transformation. There is a similar challenge
for researchers to develop and disseminate the ‘‘sustain-
ability case’’ for business rather than relying on the more
restrictive ‘‘business case’’ for sustainability.
Acknowledgements
We wish to acknowledge the contributions of Professor
David Owen as lead academic on one of the cases and
thank him for his continued support during the process
of framing and writing this paper. We are very grateful to
Professor Chris Chapman and Professor Jeffrey Unerman
and two anonymous journal referees for their guidance
and constructive comments at all stages of the reviewing
process. This work was presented at the International Con-
gress on Social and Environmental Accounting Research
(2010 and 2013), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Accounting (2011) and the Irish Accounting & Finance
Association Annual Conference (2012) as well as a number
of internal seminars at our respective institutions. We
thank participants for their helpful comments. Last, but
not least, we thank the organisers of the Accounting for
Sustainability Project and employees at the Environment
Agency and West Sussex County Council. In conjunction
with the Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies
(CCAB), our case organisations contributed to the funding
of our project.
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doc_693868377.pdf
The transformative potential of accounting-sustainability hybrids has been promoted and
problematized in the literature. We contribute to this debate by exploring, theoretically
and empirically, the role of accounting in shaping and reshaping sustainability practices.
We develop a holistic framework which we use to analyse the governing and mediating
roles of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency (of England and
Wales) and West Sussex County Council. Our analysis identifies that local accounting-sustainability
hybrids contribute positively to improving eco-efficiency, have some impact on
eco-effectiveness, but limited bearing on social justice. Emerging assemblages of accounting-sustainability
hybrids create capacity for wider sustainability transformations, particularly
through their mediating roles. However, a number of factors combine to frustrate
further sustainability transformations within these organisations and those they are
charged with governing. These factors include the structural constraints of the accounting-sustainability
hybrids, influenced by a relatively weak local sustainability programmatic
and the pressing need to meet increasing service delivery expectations in a period
of severe resource constraints.
Exploring accounting-sustainability hybridisation
in the UK public sector
Ian Thomson
a,?
, Suzana Grubnic
b
, Georgios Georgakopoulos
c
a
Department of Accounting Economics & Finance, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
b
School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, United Kingdom
c
Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
a b s t r a c t
The transformative potential of accounting-sustainability hybrids has been promoted and
problematized in the literature. We contribute to this debate by exploring, theoretically
and empirically, the role of accounting in shaping and reshaping sustainability practices.
We develop a holistic framework which we use to analyse the governing and mediating
roles of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency (of England and
Wales) and West Sussex County Council. Our analysis identi?es that local accounting-sus-
tainability hybrids contribute positively to improving eco-ef?ciency, have some impact on
eco-effectiveness, but limited bearing on social justice. Emerging assemblages of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids create capacity for wider sustainability transformations, partic-
ularly through their mediating roles. However, a number of factors combine to frustrate
further sustainability transformations within these organisations and those they are
charged with governing. These factors include the structural constraints of the account-
ing-sustainability hybrids, in?uenced by a relatively weak local sustainability program-
matic and the pressing need to meet increasing service delivery expectations in a period
of severe resource constraints.
Crown Copyright Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
This paper explores the role of accounting in shaping
and reshaping sustainability practices. Accounting-sus-
tainability processes and practices are regarded as central
to embedding sustainability within public service organi-
sations acting as intermediaries between government pro-
grammes of reform and local service imperatives. There are
a growing number of accounting-sustainability hybrids
1
that have been developed to embed sustainability in organ-
isations yet our understanding of how these hybrids interact
with government strategies and policies intended to change
organisations and society to act more sustainably is, both
empirically and theoretically, underdeveloped.
In developing our understanding of the relationships
between accounting-sustainability hybrids and sustain-
ability transformation we draw upon concepts from gov-
ernmentality research (Dean, 1999; Hopwood, 1983;http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2014.02.003
0361-3682/Crown Copyright Ó 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
?
Corresponding author. Address: Department of Accounting Econom-
ics & Finance, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton Campus, Edinburgh EH14
1AS, Scotland, United Kingdom. Tel.: +44 (0)131 451 4342.
E-mail address: [email protected] (I. Thomson).
1
In this paper we use the phrase ‘accounting-sustainability’ to represent a
range of accounting techniques previously referred to as social, environ-
mental, ethical and responsibility accounting. The use of the term
‘accounting-sustainability’ should not be interpreted as meaning that we
endorse the adoption of these accounting techniques or consider them to
facilitate sustainable development.
Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Accounting, Organizations and Society
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006; Miller, Kurunmäki, & O’Leary,
2008). These concepts include programmatics, mediation
and mediating instruments. Programmatics are high level
discourses that frame and legitimate local change and
articulate the plans, projects, policies, aspirations, political
ideals, discursive frameworks and utopian goals of reform-
ers. However for any change to occur there is a need to
translate the aspirations of reformers into the everyday
practices of local organisations. This translation or media-
tion is an important dynamic in any programme of
transformation and normally involves a practice or object
(a mediating instrument, using a term proposed by
Kurunmäki and Miller (2011, p. 222)) that constructs points
of common reference between strategic programmes of
reform and local practices. In this paper we consider
accounting-sustainability hybrids as mediating instru-
ments that could translate programmes of sustainable
reform into local organisations in order to enable change.
Exploring the mediating potential of different account-
ing-sustainability hybrids offers a number of insights that
could inform the evolution of hybrids aligned with sustain-
ability programmatics.
Research into accounting and sustainability covers a
diverse range of accounting processes and practices
(Thomson, 2007) that can be seen as ‘‘new phenomena
produced out of two or more elements normally found
separately’’ (Miller, Kurunmäki, & O’Leary, 2008: 943),
combining aspects from a stable and dominant discipline
(accounting) with an emerging discipline (sustainability)
(Frame & O’Connor, 2014; Kastenhofer, Bechtold, &
Wil?ng, 2011; Pretty, 2011). Examples of these account-
ing-sustainability hybrids include biodiversity audits
(Jones, 1996), carbon accounting (Ball, Mason, Grubnic, &
Hughes, 2009; Hopwood, 2009), corporate social reporting
(Gray, 2010), energy costing (Bebbington, 2010), external
social audits (Georgakopoulos & Thomson, 2008; Harte &
Owen, 1987), full cost accounting (Bebbington, Gray,
Hibbitt, & Kirk, 2001), shadow accounts (Gray, 1997) and
the sustainable balanced scorecard (Figge, Hahn, Schalteg-
ger, & Wagner, 2002). Prior research into the effectiveness
of such hybrids has concentrated on their role in organisa-
tional governance rather than on their potential as mediat-
ing instruments. However, most accounting-sustainability
hybrids can be seen as attempting to lead on organisational
change in local service delivery practices that are aligned
with elements of external sustainability programmatics.
These hybrids are expected to broker or mediate between
exogenous and endogenous frames of reference.
In relation to this, we advance our theoretical under-
standing by developing a holistic framework on the gov-
erning and mediating role of accounting-sustainability
hybrids in sustainable transformations within organisa-
tions. Our framework helps in analysing the process by
which accounting-sustainability hybrids are selected as
mediating instruments and the impact this choice has on
the shaping and reshaping of local sustainability gover-
nance practices. We re?ne the levels of analysis suggested
by prior governmentality studies (Kurunmäki & Miller,
2011) to re?ect upon the complex nature of organisational
changes associated with the emerging sustainability
programmatic. Our holistic framework is drawn from a
number of sources, including the governmentality and
accounting, new public management accounting and
accounting-sustainability literatures. Central to this frame-
work is the middle layer or bridge, referred to by
Kurunmäki and Miller (2011) as the mediating instrument.
We develop additional insights into the relations between
accounting mediating instruments and the programmatic
discourses that give them form as well as local service
imperatives that in?uence their content. In our framework
we distinguish between local and non-local accounting-
sustainability hybrids, with the former referring to
processes and practices generated internally and the latter
offered as generic solutions by external bodies.
While knowledge on internal accounting and sustain-
ability processes and practices is sparse in the academic lit-
erature (Hopwood, 2009), this shortage is more evident in
the public sector (Ball &Grubnic, 2007). Unlike pro?t-orien-
tated organisations, public sector organisations in the UK
have an explicit responsibility to transform along a more
sustainable trajectory and, further, to lead collectively on
this large-scale change (DEFRA, 2005). Public service organ-
isations are considered part of the solution in protecting
against threats to peace and security as would be the case,
for example, if water and food were in limited supply or ba-
sic human rights not safeguarded. In this paper, we respond
to Kurunmäki and Miller’s (2011) call to investigate how
government ideals are made operable through processes
and practices at the unit organisational level and, in so
doing, develop further links between the accounting sus-
tainability and public administration literatures.
In the empirical section of this paper we explore the
role of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the embedding
of sustainability in the Environment Agency and West Sus-
sex County Council. These organisations are both public
service organisations with long-standing strategic commit-
ments to and regulatory responsibilities for sustainability
(Grubnic & Owen, 2010; Thomson & Georgakopoulos,
2010). As UK public service organisations they are subject
to the same nexus of programmatic discourses and con-
strained by their statutory remit as to how (or whether)
they implement government policy initiatives. In both of
the cases, senior managers endorsed the use and develop-
ment of the Connected Reporting Framework,
2
as an
accounting practice for the embedding of the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005)
3
in local processes and
practices. The existence of an authoritative sustainability
programmatic, engagement with a common accounting-sus-
tainability hybrid and different service delivery imperatives
2
Our work originates from a research project on the effectiveness of the
Connected Reporting Framework (Accounting for Sustainability, 2007;
Hopwood, Unerman, & Fries, 2010) as an accounting-sustainability hybrid
object that connects sustainability outcomes with management decision-
making and organisational actions.
3
In the US, the environmental element of sustainable development is the
focus of The President’s Climate Action Plan (Executive Of?ce of the
President, 2013), which outlines measures for dealing with climate change.
To a gathering of university students, President Obama pledged to protect
future generations from catastrophic global warming, refusing to condemn
them to ‘‘a planet that’s beyond ?xing’’ (Obama address, 2013). Many
governments agree that it is necessary to keep global mean temperature
increases to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels in order to
remain within boundary conditions.
454 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
allows the opportunity of identifying the impact of such hy-
brids in the shaping and reshaping of local sustainability
practices. Our empirical sites allow us to analyse account-
ing-sustainability hybridisation processes in order to iden-
tify how the programmatic discourse is interpreted at a
local level, examine the role of local and non-local mediating
instruments on local processes and practices, and assess
how effectively hybrids translate the sustainability pro-
grammatic into governing processes.
The comparative case study approach combined with
the holistic framework identi?es a number of important
empirical contributions to the literature. We provide
information on how accounting-sustainability hybrids
are used in two regulatory hybrid organisations respond-
ing to calls for more research in public services on
sustainability accounting (Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball
et al., 2009). Our analysis allows us to draw out key attri-
butes of effective mediation that are of particular
relevance when developing hybrids intended to be used
for mediating purposes.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Firstly
from our literature review we construct a holistic frame-
work to analyse the development of accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids in our case study organisations. This is
followed by an explanation of the research methods
including a discussion of the rationale for the case selec-
tion. We then present our ?ndings on each case separately.
We ?nish with some general concluding comments from
our analysis of the cases incorporating a discussion of the
wider implications arising from the application of our
holistic framework.
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation – a holistic
framework
‘‘Accounting is constantly engaged in a dual hybridisation
process, seeking to make visible and calculable the hybrids
that it encounters, while at the same time hybridising itself
through encounters with a range of other disciplines.’’
(Miller et al., 2008, p. 945)
Prior literature has documented and developed numer-
ous accounting-sustainability practices such as the sus-
tainable balanced scorecard (Figge et al., 2002) and full
cost accounting (Bebbington et al., 2001; Herbohn, 2005).
We consider these practices to be hybrids of accounting
with different aspects of the sustainability programmatic.
For example, the sustainable balanced scorecard attempts
to integrate the economic, environmental and social pillars
of sustainability into Kaplan and Norton’s balanced score-
card (Kaplan & Norton, 1992) in order to create a coherent
performance measurement system that supports the
implementation of an organisation’s sustainability strategy
(Schaltegger & Wagner, 2006). The sustainable balanced
scorecard develops a widely used management accounting
practice by incorporating sustainability related metrics
into existing balanced scorecards or recon?guring the bal-
anced scorecard containing the conventional four dimen-
sions (for example, ?nancial, customer, internal
processes, learning and growth) to include additional
dimensions, such as, stakeholders, environmental impact,
social responsibility and product life cycle. The sustainable
balanced scorecard attempts to co-opt the perceived
strengths of conventional balanced scorecards to the task
of making organisations more sustainable. Full cost
accounting can also be seen as a hybrid between conven-
tional costing, sustainability science and environmental
economics. Bebbington et al. (2001) de?ne full cost
accounting as a form of costing that allows accounting
and economic measures to integrate all relevant environ-
mental and social externalities. It is argued that full cost
accounting could produce costs that are compatible with
a sustainable development agenda and inform public pol-
icy development (Herbohn, 2005).
Accounting-sustainability hybrids are generally under-
stood as governing practices that seek to make visible, gov-
ernable and thinkable the risks and uncertainties (Miller &
O’Leary, 1993; Miller & Rose, 1990; Power, 2007; Rose,
1991) associated with the sustainability programmatic in
organisations (DEFRA, 2005; Frame & Cavanagh, 2009;
Russell & Thomson, 2009). Such hybrids also play a role
in mediating between accounting and sustainability initia-
tives and in embedding sustainability programmatic dis-
courses into local organisational processes. One such
hybrid which forms part of our empirical study is the Con-
nected Reporting Framework, an accounting-sustainability
hybrid, which Fries, McCulloch, and Webster (2010) argue
was designed as a non-local mediating instrument to
embed sustainability into organisations in order to bring
about sustainable transformations. The Connected Report-
ing Framework is built upon the perceived strengths of
accounting, such as robust quantitative evidence gather-
ing, relevance, materiality, reliability, comparability and
assurability, to articulate the sustainability discourse into
a ‘‘language’’ understandable to organisational decision-
makers and provide clarity for outcomes (Accounting for
Sustainability, 2007; Hopwood et al., 2010).
However, most of the evaluations of the Connected
Reporting Framework (e.g. Bhimani & Soonawalla, 2010;
Brigham, Kiosse, & Otley, 2010; Fries et al., 2010; Lewis &
Ferguson, 2010; Unerman & O’Dwyer, 2010) focus on its
effectiveness in organisational governance through the
creation of greater visibility and knowledge of the ?nancial
consequences of consuming resources and the provision of
a different lens to view organisational practices. Although
there is some discussion on the bene?ts of using the Con-
nected Reporting Framework as a mediating instrument to
embed sustainability into organisations, there is very little
discussion on how (or whether) the Connected Reporting
Framework is selected as a suitable mediating instrument.
We position our analysis of accounting-sustainability
hybrids in the governmentality literature that has been
used to explore a range of different aspects of accounting
– including management accounting (Armstrong, 1994;
Ezzamel, Robson, Stapleton, & McLean, 2007; Lambert &
Pezet, 2010; Miller & O’Leary, 2007), accounting and power
(Dean, 1999; Everett, Neu, & Rahaman, 2007; Rose, 1991),
historical emergence of accounting (Hopwood, 1983;
Hopwood, 1987; Hoskin & Macve, 1986), accounting and
auditing in the public sector (Kurunmäki, 1999;
Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006; Miller & Rose, 2008; Nyamori,
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 455
2009), accounting and organisational transformation
(Kornberger & Carter, 2010; McKinlay, Carter, Pezet, &
Clegg, 2010; Vaivio, 2006), accounting and resistance
(Fischer & Ferlie, 2013; Neu & Heincke, 2004) and account-
ing regulation (Mennicken, 2008).
To date there has been limited application of govern-
mentality theories to the development of accounting-sus-
tainability practices (see, for example: Everett, 2004;
Neu, 2000, 2006; Spence & Rinaldi, 2014). However, such
hybrids have been extensively examined and critiqued
from a range of different theoretical perspectives, and con-
cerns raised that accounting practices problematically cap-
ture the sustainability programmatic and suppress ?elds of
visibility, forms of knowledge and techniques of governing
considered essential for any sustainable transformations
(e.g., Cooper, 1992; Cooper, Taylor, Smith, & Catchpowle,
2005; Gray, 2010; Larrinaga-Gonzalez & Bebbington,
2001).
Given the power of accounting in contemporary modes
of public sector governance (Broadbent & Guthrie, 2008;
Broadbent & Laughlin, 2002; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2011;
Llewellyn, 1994), we expect that our research will identify
accounting, and in particular, hybrids of accounting and
sustainability to be central to the (in)effectiveness of how
the sustainability programmatic is hybridised into organi-
sational processes and practices (Ball, 2005, 2007; Ball &
Grubnic, 2007). In order to evaluate the role of these hy-
brids in organisational transformation, it is important to
recognise the governing and mediating roles of accounting
objects
4
(Briers & Chua, 2001; Miller et al., 2008) and, in par-
ticular, that while the governing and mediating roles of
accounting hybrids are inter-related, they cannot be con-
?ated (Wise, 1988, 1995; Wise & Smith, 1989a, 1989b,
1990). Therefore, there is a need for a more explicit theoret-
ical and empirical understanding of the mediating role of
accounting-sustainability hybrids in order to inform the
evolution of those hybrids aligned with the sustainability
programmatic and address the concentration of prior re-
search on the governing effectiveness of such hybrids.
Our review of the accounting, governmentality and
hybridisation literature identi?es a number of key ele-
ments, critical processes and inter-relationships associated
with accounting hybridisation processes. These include
understanding: the nexus of programmatic discourses
framing an organisation; the potential set of non-local
and local mediating instruments; the local organisational
context; the construction of locally relevant hybrid pro-
grammatic discourses; the construction of locally relevant
mediating instruments; and, the design and embedding of
local accounting-sustainability hybrids in the governing of
the organisational processes and practices. From this re-
view we constructed a holistic framework to interpret
our case study ?ndings and also to inform future research
and practice development in this ?eld.
This holistic framework contains four inter-related
dimensions that collectively can be used to gain insights
into how organisations respond to changes at program-
matic and non-local levels. These four dimensions are:
how the local organisations interpret, prioritise and con-
struct their own locally relevant programmatic discourses;
how organisations select and/or construct mediating
instruments to channel the sustainability programmatic
into their local accounting processes and practices; how
organisations construct and embed hybrids of accounting
and sustainability into their governing processes; and ?-
nally, how effectively these accounting-sustainability hy-
brids translate the sustainability programmatic into local
governing processes. The remainder of this section will
present the four dimensions individually and then discuss
how these dimensions may interact in different contexts.
How organisations interpret, prioritise and construct their
local programmatic discourses
One observation from our review of the literature re-
lates to the importance of understanding the program-
matic discourses that impact on organisations, in
particular challenging the assumption of an identi?able
programmatic discourse (Dorrestijn, 2012; Miller et al.,
2008; Power, 2004, 2007). Despite a large body of empiri-
cal evidence (Ball, 2005; Bebbington & Gray, 2001; Herb-
ohn, 2005; Lehman, 2001) many accounting
sustainability studies assume that the impact of the sus-
tainability programmatic can be isolated and that it will
be a powerful force in transforming accounting and organ-
isational practices (e.g. Figge et al., 2002; Fries et al., 2010;
Henri & Journeault, 2010; Lohman, 2009). Van Helden, Aar-
dema, Ter Bogt, and Groot (2010) argue that organisations
(including public service organisations) are framed by a
complex web of competing and contradictory program-
matic discourses. It is, therefore, dif?cult to isolate the im-
pact of a single programmatic, such as sustainability, on a
speci?c hybridisation event (Miller & O’Leary, 2007; Miller
et al., 2008; Wise, 1988; Wise & Smith, 1990). This com-
plex set of programmatic discourses requires public service
organisations to construct their own hybrid programmatic
with which to legitimate any organisational changes in
terms of their identity, responsibilities, priorities, govern-
ing practices and permitted actions.
The freedom and power of organisations to construct
their programmatic hybrid varies. Regulatory hybrid
organisations, such as public service organisations, tend
to have limited capacity to determine which programmatic
discourses should in?uence their actions (e.g., Hyndman &
Connolly, 2001; Kurunmäki, 2004; Kurunmäki & Miller,
2006; Power, 2007). The UK public sector is subject to a
complex, evolving set of programmatic discourses (Ball,
2005; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006; Lapsley & Wright,
2004; Laughlin, 2007) which include New Public Manage-
ment, public welfare, value for money, outcome- and evi-
dence-based governance, deregulation and competition,
individual freedom, national security, economic growth,
risks and most recently the austerity discourse. Sustain-
ability is a relatively recent programmatic discourse that
impacts on the governing of and governing by UK public
service organisations (Ball, 2002, 2005; Ball & Grubnic,
2007; Ball et al., 2009). There are considerable commonal-
ities between public service values and the sustainability
4
We are using the term ‘object’ to represent physical objects, social
constructs, ideas and social processes and practices.
456 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
programmatics, but there are also signi?cant differences
(Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Boyne, 2002; Broadbent & Guthrie,
2008; Lehman, 2001). Our review of the literature suggests
that the impact of the sustainability programmatic will be
mitigated by the impact and/or alignment with other pro-
grammatics that frame individual organisations. Therefore
when analysing any accounting-sustainability hybridisa-
tion it is important to explore how organisations integrate
elements of the sustainability programmatic into their lo-
cal programmatic discourses.
How organisations select and/or construct mediating
instruments to channel the sustainability programmatic into
local accounting processes and practices
There are a number of studies that identify the impor-
tance of understanding how mediating instruments impact
on organisational and accounting transformations. It is
recognised that mediating instruments impose structural
constraints on any hybridisation by de?ning the points of
common reference from which any integration could
emerge (Miller & O’Leary, 1987; Miller et al., 2008; Wise,
1988; Wise & Smith, 1990). Mediating instruments allow
the mutual recognition of potential hybridisations, but any
hybridisation possibilities are restricted by the extent to
which the mediating instrument fully represents the points
of commonality. The importance(andproblems) of account-
ing objects operating as mediating instruments in driving or
shaping organisational transformation is well established
(Hopwood, 1983; Hoskin & Macve, 1986; Miller et al.,
2008; Radcliffe, 1998) and is recognised in the accounting-
sustainability literature (e.g., Gray, Walters, Bebbington, &
Thomson, 1995; O’Dwyer, 2003b, 2005; Puxty, 1991). How-
ever, there is a lack of exploration as to how (or whether)
such hybrids are selected as mediating instruments. As dis-
cussed earlier in this section the Connected Reporting
Framework is one example of an accounting technique that
con?ates the mediatingpotential of accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids with how fully they represent the sustainability
programmatic (e.g., Gray et al., 1995; Henri & Journeault,
2010; MacKenzie, 2009; Russell & Thomson, 2009).
In order to develop our understanding of accounting-
sustainability hybrids’ mediating potential in contempo-
rary organisations we draw upon mediation in the history
of science literature (Cleaver, 1989; Lenoir, 1988; Levallois,
2011) and, in particular, the work of Wise (1988, 1995) and
Wise and Smith (1989a, 1989b, 1990). These works iden-
tify a number of important characteristics of objects that
in?uence their possibility of being selected as mediating
instruments. One rather counter-intuitive observation is
that it is the general awareness of an object rather than
its technical or conceptual sophistication that affects its
selection for mediation. A number of authors conclude that
all parties to any hybridisation must accept a mediating
instrument as legitimate and relevant to them in order
for hybridisation to occur (Wise, 1988, 1995; Wise &
Smith, 1989a, 1989b, 1990). Therefore a mediating instru-
ment needs to be understandable by all parties in the con-
text of their individual knowledge and experiences.
Typically mediating instruments are ubiquitous objects
that play a visible and observable part in different contexts.
For example, Wise (1988) describes how the steam engine
and telegraph cable operated as mediating instruments in
the integration of physical science, political science and
engineering disciplines in the 19th century. Actors from
different scienti?c disciplines were able to relate and
understand these objects on both practical and theoretical
levels, considered them to offer generalisable and plausible
translations of other theories, practices and values and
thus were accepted as mediating instruments (Wise &
Smith, 1989a, 1989b, 1990).
Wise (1988) discusses how people can ?nd it dif?cult to
accept novel programmatic discourses as more relevant
than their everyday experiences that have remained rela-
tively stable over time despite previous radical changes
in the programmatic level. His work suggests that individ-
uals are less likely to choose non-local objects to create
mutually acceptable frames of reference between a novel
programmatic (such as sustainability) and their local
organisational processes and practices. Drawing on the
work of Wise and others (Cleaver, 1989; Lenoir, 1988;
Levallois, 2011; Wise & Smith, 1990), it is more likely that
generally understood everyday objects will be selected to
translate or embed programmatic discourses into local
processes and practices, regardless of non-local objects’
conceptual or practical appropriateness for the task.
How organisations construct and embed hybrids of
accounting and sustainability into their governing processes
There is a large body of work that identi?es the critical-
ity of a shared calculative rationality and the calculability
of ‘‘the other’’ in the development of accounting hybrids,
including accounting-sustainability hybrids (e.g., Fischer
& Ferlie, 2013; Gouldson & Bebbington, 2007; Gray, Dey,
Owen, Evans, & Zadek, 1997; Lambert & Pezet, 2010). Cal-
culation and calculability appear to be central to the iden-
tity and underlying rationality of accounting and
accountants. This suggests that without the possibility of
calculating ‘‘the other’’ there would be very little possibil-
ity of accounting hybridisation. It is dif?cult to see how
accounting and sustainability hybridisation would be sub-
stantially different from the hybridisation of accounting
and other domains or discourses. Therefore the most likely
hybridisation route would be through the calculable risks
and uncertainties of unsustainable development. Elements
of sustainability that have been or can be calculatively cap-
tured possess the greatest potential for accounting-sus-
tainability hybridisation. The wide-ranging literature on
social and environmental accounting, reporting and audit-
ing practices tends to support this observation and many
authors express concerns over what they regard as the
inherent incalculability of sustainability programmatic dis-
courses (e.g., Georgakopoulos & Thomson, 2005, 2008,
2012; Maunders & Burritt, 1991). Another important
observation is the possibility of the local resistance in
shaping the development of accounting-sustainability hy-
brids (Armstrong, 2006; Broadbent, Jacobs, & Laughlin,
2001; Kurunmäki, Melia, & Lapsley, 2003; Miller et al.,
2008).
Many accounting-sustainability hybrids (such as the
sustainable balanced scorecard, Connected Reporting
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 457
Framework, and full cost accounting) appear to be de-
signed as generic accounting practices informed by pro-
grammatic discourses with little consideration for local
organisations and their capability to change pre-existing
service delivery imperatives. In many cases accounting
hybridisation appears to be driven by intra-organisational
dynamics decoupled from programmatic discourses or
framed by mediating instruments constructed from local
processes and practices (Miller et al., 2008). Prior studies
note the complex interplay between programmatic and lo-
cal levels in the development of accounting hybrids and
how the same set of programmatic discourses do not pro-
duce the same local governing processes, practices or out-
comes. In our study both organisations are part of the UK
public sector rather than the large publicly listed compa-
nies that form the basis of most accounting-sustainability
research papers (Thomson, 2007). Arguably this creates
the possibility of a different set of accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids, as public service organisations have responsi-
bilities for governing social, economic and environmental
risks (Ball, 2002, 2005; Ball & Grubnic, 2007) and are more
likely to have calculative measures of social inequality, so-
cial justice, economic inequality and environmental
damage.
How effectively organisational accounting-sustainability
hybrids translate the sustainability programmatic into local
governing processes
A recurrent theme from our literature review is the
need to evaluate the extent to which accounting hybrids
represent programmatic discourses in organisational
practices and processes (Broadbent & Laughlin, 2005,
2008; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2011; Llewellyn & Northcott,
2005). For example, prior research into UK public sector
reforms using accounting mediating instruments notes
that the emergent accounting hybrids have not always
been aligned with the state’s programmatic and distorted
the aspirations of the intended reform (e.g., Broadbent &
Guthrie, 2008; Broadbent et al., 2001; Hyndman &
Connolly, 2001; Kurunmäki et al., 2003). Prior research
suggests that the scope of accounting-sustainability
hybrids will impact on its sustainable governing and
transformative potential (Frame & Cavanagh, 2009;
Larrinaga-Gonzalez & Bebbington, 2001; O’Dwyer,
2003b, 2005). Generally the closer the alignment of any
accounting-sustainability hybrid with the sustainability
programmatic then the more likely it will problematise
existing actions and evaluate future decisions in line
with sustainability transformation (Cooper et al., 2005;
Frame & O’Connor, 2014; Harte & Owen, 1987; Russell
& Thomson, 2009). However, much of the prior research
identi?es that most accounting-sustainability hybrids
only incorporated eco-ef?ciency aspects of the sustain-
ability programmatic, associated with ‘‘win–win’’ envi-
ronmental measures (Figge et al., 2002; Gray, 2010;
Gray et al., 1995; Henri & Journeault, 2010). This privi-
leging of eco-ef?ciency in such hybrids creates a poten-
tial structural problem when these hybrids are used in
a mediating role and may restrict any embedding of
the sustainability programmatic related to social justice,
community development or eco-effectiveness.
5
The re?exive relationships among the programmatic,
mediating and local practice levels
The ?nal observation from our literature review is the
re?exive nature of accounting hybridisation processes in
organisations. Miller et al. (2008) note that ‘‘hybridising
is a continually inventive process, in which proliferation
and multiplication is the norm’’ (p.961.). The creation of
a new accounting hybrid does not only change the
accounting processes and practices but can change ‘‘the
other’’ (e.g., engineering, medicine, health and safety, re-
search and development, marketing, medicine, teaching,
risk management) and the wider societal context
(Armstrong, 1994; Rahaman, Everett, & Neu, 2007; Walker,
2010; Young, 1995). The adoption and implementation of a
new accounting hybrid can substantively alter the organi-
sation through both its governing and mediating potential.
It can trigger a wider series of changes (see Armstrong,
2006; Miller & O’Leary, 1993) through creating new
problematisations and possibilities for change, through
new accounting hybrids acting as mediating instruments
to link previously distinct parts of the organisation and
facilitating and shaping further transformation (Briers &
Chua, 2001). This is not always a positive phenomenon
and these secondary level changes driven by accounting
hybrids can lead to a colonisation of organisations by
accounting rationality and governing techniques, such as
the spread of New Public Management in the UK and other
countries.
Prior research into accounting hybridisation suggests
that accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes will
not follow a ‘‘non-local to local’’ trajectory but may include
‘‘local to non-local’’ and ‘‘local to local’’ dynamics. Given
the continual nature of accounting hybridisation in local
settings (Miller et al., 2008) the subject of analysis should
not be a single hybrid but rather the evolving assemblage
of accounting-sustainability hybrids (Miller & O’Leary,
1993, 1994) within the organisation. The impact of any hy-
brid should be evaluated in the context of the local bundle
of accounting practices and any potential synergistic im-
pacts they carry.
Adopting our holistic framework enables the research-
er to observe sequences of inter-connected transforma-
tions. The holistic framework developed in this section
provides additional insights into our theoretical under-
standing of how to facilitate the development of more
effective assemblages of accounting-sustainability hy-
brids and how to analyse their emergence in practice.
We will now outline the research methods used in this
study, including case selection criteria and how we ana-
lysed the case studies.
5
Eco-ef?ciency is concerned with reducing the resources consumed to
meet a given social or environmental objective without questioning the
sustainability of that objective. Eco-effectiveness involves problematising
and rede?ning these objectives to be in alignment with the sustainability
programmatic and its focus is on systematic changes to enable sustainable
transformation.
458 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
Research methods
In order to explore the role of accounting-sustainability
hybrids in the embedding of the sustainability program-
matic into the local practices of the Environment Agency
and West Sussex County Council, we selected a compara-
tive case study research approach (Yin, 2003). This re-
search design allowed insights into the choice and
suitability of local and non-local accounting practices as
mediating instruments, and into the impact they have on
the integration of a common and authoritative sustainabil-
ity programmatic. In particular, we sought to identify what
aspects of the programmatic are rendered visible, calcula-
ble and governable by these local accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids.
The rationale for choosing our case organisations was
fourfold. Firstly, both organisations are regulatory hybrids
and subject to the same nexus of programmatic discourses
including the UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA,
2005). Secondly, both organisations have long-standing
strategic commitments to sustainable transformation and
are considered to be exemplars in this area in the UK public
sector (Grubnic & Owen, 2010; Thomson & Georgakopou-
los, 2010). Thirdly the Environment Agency and West Sus-
sex County Council were trialling the Connected Reporting
Framework to further embed the sustainability program-
matic (DEFRA, 2005) into their local processes and prac-
tices. Fourthly, while both organisations have regulatory
responsibilities associated with sustainability, the nature
of these responsibilities differ substantively.
Therefore, while the two case organisations exhibited
similarities to justify comparative analysis they also pre-
sented suf?cient differences. For example, while West Sus-
sex County Council has some responsibilities for the
environment, more of its legal responsibilities and service
delivery imperatives are concerned with social welfare, so-
cial justice and community building. Therefore West Sus-
sex County Council has more potential for embedding
social justice dimensions into its accounting-sustainability
hybrids than the Environment Agency. The Environment
Agency has some responsibilities in relation to social and
economic matters but most of its responsibilities, service
delivery imperatives and accountability relationships have
to do with climate change and environmental protection.
The Environment Agency should, therefore, possess more
potential for embedding eco-ef?ciency and eco-effective-
ness into its practices, including regulating others to im-
prove resource ef?ciency, and reducing waste and
harmful emissions as part of a transformation to a low car-
bon economy.
In the UK public sector the sustainability programmatic
is articulated through a series of sustainability strategies
adopted by the relevant UK parliaments, for example the
UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005). These
strategies are collections of policies, programmes and pro-
posals to transform all aspects of UK life including public
service organisations. Public service organisations are not
only required to transform their practices but also the
way they govern others, while remaining within their stat-
utory limits to act. While we do not discuss how effectively
these strategies capture global political and scienti?c sus-
tainability discourses, we interpret the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) as an of?cial represen-
tation of the UK government’s sustainability strategy in
England and Wales that forms part of the nexus of pro-
grammatic discourses that frame our case organisations.
The UK sustainability strategy is consistent with the
underlying liberal ideology that currently informs the
governing of the UK (Dean, 2007; Oels, 2005; Russell &
Thomson, 2009). The UK Sustainable Development Strategy
(DEFRA, 2005) presents sustainability as a model for the
good governance of a civilised, responsible society that at-
tempts to balance social justice, community building and
equality of opportunity with environmental protection
and enhancement and strong economic growth.
Our research methods were emergent in nature when
investigating the case studies. Methods and themes co-
developed as the data and interpretations accumulated,
allowing each interview to build on previous ?ndings. Rep-
resentatives fromthe organisation(s) were interviewed un-
til a degree of empirical saturation was reached. In
addition, we examined and incorporated into our analysis
a range of documents including strategy statements, web-
pages, policy documents, internal reports and annual ac-
counts. These secondary sources were analysed using
themes developed from an initial analysis of the interview
data.
The interviews in the Environment Agency and West
Sussex County Council were undertaken in the period April
to August 2009. Table 1 outlines the job description or title
of those interviewed. In both cases the interview process
began with a general round-table discussion with initial
contacts to explore the scope of our research and identify
key organisational representatives to interview. We at-
tempted to develop understanding from a range of differ-
ent disciplines operating within both organisations rather
than limit interviews to accounting-related employees.
The employees interviewed included chief executives,
accounting staff, staff who designed the accounting-sus-
Table 1
Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council representatives
interviewed.
Environment Agency West Sussex County Council
Chief Executive Chief Executive
Director of Finance Cabinet Member for Finance
and Resources
Head of Financial Management Group Manager, Customer
and Communities Finance
Chair of Audit Risk and Governance
Committee
Sustainability Group
Manager
Head of Environmental Finance Sustainability Group Team-
Members (3)
Environmental Finance Manager Economic Research Assistant
Team Manager – Internal
Environmental Management
Systems
Internal Communications
Manager
Human Resources Manager Training Manager
Regional Operational Director Business Change Project
Manager
Senior Emergency
Management Advisor
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 459
tainability hybrid practices and processes, staff who oper-
ated the accounting-sustainability hybrid practices and
staff who used the accounting-sustainability hybrid prac-
tices and processes. In addition, we were able to interview
a member of the Environment Agency’s Board of Directors,
who was also chair of the Audit Risk and Governance Com-
mittee and an elected member of West Sussex County
Council holding the position of Cabinet Member for
Finance and Resources.
The range of representatives interviewed allowed the
exploration of accounting-sustainability hybridisation
from multiple perspectives such as different levels of man-
agement, expertise and practical experiences. All but one
of the interviews were conducted on site, the remaining
interview being conducted by telephone.
Almost all of the interviews lasted approximately 1 h.
Interviewees were co-operative, open, friendly and sup-
portive. All interviews were recorded and summary notes
written up as soon as possible after the event. The inter-
views were transcribed and the transcripts analysed using
protocols described by O’Dwyer (2003a). Emerging themes
were informed by notes taken, post-interview discussions
and documents provided by the case organisations.
By systematically comparing interview transcripts, we
were able to discern the factors that in?uenced strategic
decisions on implementing and promoting sustainability,
evidence of the mechanisms associated with accounting-
sustainability hybridisations and perceived problems and
obstacles to the embedding of sustainability. Our interview
protocols allowed us to gather information from different
positions and perspectives within the Environment Agency
and West Sussex County Council and to sense check their
‘‘description’’ with that provided by others and the avail-
able documentary evidence.
In our analysis, we considered for each case the rela-
tionships between mediating instruments, programmatic
discourses and local practices and the relationships within
these levels. This holistic analysis provided insights into
how organisations interpret, prioritise and construct their
own locally relevant version of the nexus of programmatic
discourses; how these organisations select and/or con-
struct mediating instruments to channel the sustainability
programmatic into their local accounting processes and
practices; how these organisations construct and embed
hybrids of accounting and sustainability into their govern-
ing processes; and ?nally how effectively these account-
ing-sustainability hybrids translated the sustainability
programmatic into local governing processes. The next
two sections apply this framework to interpret and present
the evidence gathered from the Environment Agency and
West Sussex County Council.
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation: the
Environment Agency
The interpretation, prioritisation and construction of the local
programmatic discourse
The publication of the UK Sustainable Development Strat-
egy (DEFRA, 2005) did not bring about a radical transfor-
mation in the Environment Agency’s programmatic
discourse, but it strengthened their position and legitimacy
within the UK regulatory framework. Since 1996 The
Environment Agency
6
has played a central role in delivering
the environmental objectives of the UK government
(www.environment-agency.gov.uk/aboutus/default.aspx),
including promoting sustainability. Their strategy docu-
ment
7
(Environment Agency, 2006) outlined their ?ve key
roles as follows:
‘‘We will
Work directly to tackle environmental problems as an
ef?cient operator.
Work with businesses as a modern regulator to help
them reduce their effect on the environment.
But we can’t do it all ourselves. We also need to:
Be an in?uential adviser and an effective partner, per-
suading others to act and to work with us.
Highlight the problems facing the environment and
explain the need for action as an active communicator.
And we will:
Be the champion of the environment (in the context of
sustainable development) and advise on environmental
issues, whilst taking account of economic and social
issues.’’
(Environment Agency Corporate Strategy 2006–2011, p. 3)
(Emphasis added by authors to denote links to other pro-
grammatic discourses.)
The Environment Agency Corporate Strategy (Environ-
ment Agency, 2006) contained a number of key attributes
from other UK public sector programmatic discourses
(see bold above), for example: new public management,
public welfare, value for money, deregulation and compe-
tition, partnership working and economic growth and risk
management (e.g., Lapsley & Wright, 2004). The Agency
adopted into their local programmatic elements of the UK
Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) that were
aligned with their existing portfolios of powers and
responsibilities, for example climate change,
8
pollution
prevention, regulation and eco-ef?ciency. We considered
the Environment Agency to be a regulatory hybrid organisa-
tion (see Power, 2004, 2007) and despite their support of the
UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005), they
6
The Environment Agency was created in 1996 by the merger of
National Rivers Authority, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution and other
waste regulation authorities. Many of the Agency’s accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids can be traced back to, for example, the National Rivers Authority
Environmental Reporting established in 1987.
7
Note that their Strategy document for 2010–15 (Environment Agency,
2009) also contained a similar blend of these programmatics, but their
vision statement contained a stronger emphasis on people and community.
We focussed on the 2006–11 Strategy as this was active during the main
period of our ?eldwork.
8
The Climate Change Act (2008) granted the Environment Agency
powers to enforce the UK’s carbon emission reduction regime (accessiblehttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/27/contents).
460 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
argued that as an Executive Public Body of the UK Government
they had limited scope to change beyond their statutory re-
mit. This was described by the Environmental Finance Man-
ager as follows: ‘‘Its [Environment Agency’s] focus is very
much around environmental things, so you know, putting a
lot of time and effort beyond the environmental connection
would be more dif?cult for us.’’ However, many of the risks
contained within the UK Sustainable Development Strategy
(DEFRA, 2005) associated with unsustainable development
were considered potentially catastrophic and in need of ur-
gent action, for example climate change.
‘‘We’re still in the middle of a big economic crisis and that
pales into insigni?cance, compared to what the world is
going to be like in a hundred years’ time if we do not crack
climate change. We won’t need to worry about economic
crises, we’ll be struggling to live.’’
(Head of Financial Management)
A key element of the Agency’s local programmatic was
to be recognised as a best practice organisation in environ-
mental management. This involved the development of
management processes and practices that could be
adopted by all organisations and the integration of busi-
ness-like characteristics into their public service program-
matic such as the ‘‘business case for sustainability’’ as part of
their commitment to ‘‘practise what they preached’’.
The need for the Environment Agency to become more
sustainable in all it did was recognised, but how this was
implemented was mediated by their ability and authority
to change. Speci?cally the Agency sought to demonstrate
the feasibility of change to others, balanced with risks from
the nexus of programmatic discourses. This led to an eco-
ef?ciency bias in the elements of DEFRA (2005) that
formed part of the Agency’s strategic discourse.
The selection and construction of sustainability mediating
instruments
The power and problems associated with accounting
mediating instruments in organisational transformation,
including sustainability, is well documented (e.g., Kurunmäki,
2004; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006, 2011; Kurunmäki et al.,
2003). Within the Agency the selection of ‘‘sustainable’’
mediating objects was in?uenced by the normal interac-
tion among staff conducting their day-to-day work. All
staff interviewed viewed eco-ef?ciency as part of their role
as the guardian of the natural environment. The following
quote from the Chief Executive Of?cer illustrated the
justi?cation of the use of accounting-sustainability hybrids
to mediate between the sustainability programmatic, the
Agency’s strategy, local practice and staff motivation and
values.
‘‘Most of our staff believe that the reason we’re doing a lot
of our work is to improve the environment and therefore,
by us doing this, we’re helping directly, doing our bit for
the environment. Second is that by being as green as we
can be, we’re setting an example for others and that makes
it easier when we’re going out and doing our work because
quite often people will say ‘Well what do you do and how
are you doing it?’, and they will copy us. And a third one is
that by using less gas, by doing less mileage, you’re saving
money and that money can be reinvested. . .In a private
organisation that would be pro?t, but for us it’s reinvesting
it in doing more work for the environment. So recycling
stuff and reducing waste and making sure that money is
used to good effect.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
The selection of mediating instruments in the Environ-
ment Agency was affected by their widespread use of
accounting-sustainability hybrids. The Agency has devel-
oped and used such hybrids since 1996 and environmental
accounting (a form of accounting-sustainability hybrid)
was considered normal practice throughout the Environ-
ment Agency, for example.
‘‘Environmental monitoring and reporting is part of the
Environment Agency’s DNA. The Environment Agency is a
special case in this context with high levels of know-how
continuously being developed.’’
(Head of Financial Management)
‘‘Since the beginning of the Environment Agency, we’ve
had carbon, waste and water usage data for internal man-
agement systems and have set targets on reducing and
monitoring these things.’’
(Head of Environmental Finance)
The existence of local accounting-sustainability hybrids
impacted on the perceived usefulness of non-local hybrids
as mediating instruments between the sustainability pro-
grammatic and the Agency’s activities. Within the Agency
there was a specialist Environmental Finance Team whose
function was to develop and implement best-practice
accounting-sustainability hybrids. The Environmental
Finance Team were considered the local experts in select-
ing appropriate mediating instruments.
Environmental Finance Team members described how
their hybrids evolved through the systematic application
of basic accounting concepts to the problem of reducing
environmental impacts, and believed that accounting, if
applied appropriately, could positively contribute to the
sustainable development of organisations. Team members
were committed to the evolution of accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids that built incrementally on measurable suc-
cesses and the gradual integration and normalisation of the
more radical elements of the sustainability programmatic.
The ability of non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids
to ?t into or enhance the existing hybridisation process
was an important criterion as to whether it was adopted
for mediating or governing in the Environment Agency.
Prior successes of the Agency’s accounting-sustainabil-
ity objects in mediating and de?ning common points of
reference between the sustainability programmatic, organ-
isational values, statutory responsibilities and the motiva-
tion of individual employees was already well established.
For example:
‘‘On the whole, we’ve tried to demonstrate there have been
savings from doing this in terms of pounds savings and
physical savings. So we’re trying to link the two together,
pounds and physical units; that’s probably been the biggest
success and the biggest heart-winner, heart and mind win-
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 461
ner, because people can latch onto that, ‘Ah, I can see the
value of that now, I wondered why you’ve been doing
that’.’’
(Regional Operations Director)
‘‘It is a good thing to be able to understand what your envi-
ronmental impacts are . . . to be able to understand what it
is costing you to be able to deliver bene?t and know-how.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
The existing level of expertise and general satisfaction of
the Agency’s senior management with the Environmental
Finance Team’s accounting-sustainability hybrids in medi-
ating the sustainability programmatic meant that any non-
local accounting-hybridwas subject toa highlevel of critical
evaluation as to its ?tness for purpose in the Agency.
Environment Agency accountants were active (often in
leadership roles) in accounting networks, standard setting
processes and policy forums, (e.g., the Association of Char-
tered Certi?ed Accountants, Socially Responsible Pensions,
Accounting for Sustainability, and HM Treasury’s Financial
Reporting Advisory Board
9
) and had an extensive knowl-
edge of accounting-sustainability hybrids. The Agency
10
was involved in the development of a number of such gen-
eric hybrids, including the Connected Reporting Framework.
The developers of the Connected Reporting Framework
claimed it was designed to link a holistic understanding of
sustainability with the strategy and activities of an organisa-
tion, including social welfare, fair trade and lifecycle impacts
of its products and services (Fries et al., 2010). However, the
Environmental Finance Team selected their local hybrids in
preference to the Connected Reporting Framework despite
claims that it could be an effective sustainability mediating
instrument. Team members were positive about the mediat-
ing role the Connected Reporting Framework could play in
other organisations, but were ambivalent about its useful-
ness to the Environment Agency. The Connected Reporting
Framework was described by one interviewee as ‘‘like putt-
ing on an old shoe’’. The following quotes illustrate their
reaction to the Connected Reporting Framework.
‘‘It [the Connected Reporting Framework] is another
framework, it’s got some aspects that we’ve done before,
so let’s take the good bits, let’s use the bits that we were
already going to do anyway and let’s throw out the bits
that we actually think don’t work. I don’t think we’ve rad-
ically changed what we’ve done.’’
(Environmental Finance Manager)
‘‘Let’s import what you know, so let’s make this as sort of
sensible and pragmatic as we can make it.’’
(Director of Finance)
‘‘Our internal environmental management systems were
much better developed than the actual reporting required
for the Connected Reporting Framework.’’
(Head of Environmental Finance)
The Connected Reporting Framework was not consid-
ered to add signi?cant value to the Agency over their exist-
ing accounting-sustainability objects, although it was
credited with the re-invigoration of their external environ-
mental reporting and internally legitimated their planned
programme of accounting-sustainability hybridisation.
Environmental Finance Team staff identi?ed a number of
technical de?ciencies in the Connected Reporting Frame-
work,
11
but it was the Connected Reporting Framework’s
lack of ?t with the Agency’s everyday experiences that mit-
igated against its selection as a mediating instrument. How-
ever, Environmental Finance Team staff acknowledged that
their assemblage of hybrids did not fully account for their
sustainability impacts (positive or negative). For example
the Environment Finance Manager stated that, ‘‘It [their sys-
tem] is not sustainability reporting in the truest sense, it is envi-
ronmental reporting.’’
This self-criticism was supported by the Chief Executive
Of?cer who argued that they did not account for all their
material environmental impacts or include the sustainabil-
ity outcomes of their activities. The Connected Reporting
Framework did incorporate more social concerns than
the Environment Agency accounting-sustainability hy-
brids, but this was insuf?cient to justify its adoption in
the Agency. The Connected Reporting Framework could
have mediated more elements of the sustainability pro-
grammatic to the Environment Agency yet it was not ac-
cepted as a plausible or generally understood mediating
instrument. However, as will be discussed later, it also
could have seriously disrupted the Environment Agency’s
more systematic approach to the hybridisation of account-
ing and sustainability.
The construction and embedding of accounting-sustainability
hybrids into governing processes
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation in the Environ-
ment Agency was a continual process that utilised the gov-
erning and mediation possibilities of different hybrids
(similar to the ?ndings of Briers & Chua, 2001; Miller &
O’Leary, 1993, 1994; Miller et al., 2008). The Environmen-
tal Finance Team’s objective was to create an effective
assemblage of accounting-sustainability hybrids rather
than to perfect individual techniques. The Team developed
a pragmatic approach based on solving locally de?ned
problems (such as the reduction of energy consumption).
This involved developing accounting techniques, in con-
junction with local experts, experimenting with different
hybrids and re?ecting on their effectiveness in answering
speci?c local problems. They re?ned these hybrids until
consensus emerged that they were effective in governing
that problem and, where appropriate, integrated these hy-
brids into their normal accounting processes and practices.
The Environmental Finance Team used the measurable
success (and failures) of these new governing techniques
to problematise other aspects of their activities and cre-
9
HM Treasury’s Financial Reporting Advisory Board is the body respon-
sible for setting public sector ?nancial reporting standards in the UK.
10
Not all of the Environmental Finance Team were involved in the initial
development of the Connected Reporting Framework although they were
involved in its piloting and adaptation for public sector reporting.
11
The Environment Agency successfully promoted a highly modi?ed
version of the Connected Reporting Framework to be included in the UK
Public Sector Accounting Reporting Standards (UK Treasury, 2012). A full
discussion of this process falls outside the scope of this paper.
462 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
ated new possibilities for change, similar to the iterative
processes observed by Miller and O’Leary (1993, 1994).
For example, the integration of of?ce energy consumption
data into their budgeting and performance measurement
systems enabled more effective governance of their energy
use in buildings, but the measurable success of this energy
governance technique was also used to problematise the
use of other resources in their buildings (such as paper,
water and waste) and created possibilities of developing
systems to govern and reduce the consumption of these re-
sources. The accounting hybrids that successfully reduced
water use and waste in Agency buildings were then used
to evaluate other Agency activities in an attempt to iden-
tify further possibilities for water and waste reduction.
As these hybrids were normalised within the account-
ing system they also created the capacity to respond to
new problems as they emerged, such as climate change.
For example, the availability of energy consumption data
for buildings and transportation combined with carbon
conversion metrics allowed the Environment Agency to ex-
tend their energy governance system to a carbon gover-
nance system that channelled the climate change
programmatic into all parts of the Agency that consumed
energy.
A good example of how an individual accounting-sus-
tainability hybrid ?tted into the wider assemblage was
the Agency’s Low Carbon Staff Travel System. Over time
the Environment Agency developed a set of staff travel
practices and processes that merged expertise from a wide
range of professions and disciplines. These included pro-
curement, transport management, carbon management,
air emissions, management and ?nancial accounting, logis-
tics, management controls and performance measurement.
The Low Carbon Staff Travel System evolved into a set of
decision protocols and metrics designed to reduce carbon
emissions by prompting consideration of the need for tra-
vel and the selection of the lowest carbon option available.
Fig. 1 illustrates how the Low Carbon Staff Travel System
was embedded within the Agency’s management and
accounting systems.
The accounting processes and practices contained with-
in the Low Carbon Staff Travel System were in?uential in
making visible both the costs and carbon impacts of staff
travel choices and legitimated low carbon travel practices
through the calculation of cost savings. Staff travel miles
and costs of individual staff travel choices were captured
in the Agency’s ?nancial ledger and formed part of the
budgetary systems, corporate scorecards, key performance
targets and internal benchmarking. The Low Carbon Staff
Travel System was fully integrated into the Agency’s
accounting, management, procurement and investment
practices and processes.
Fig. 1. The connectivity of Low Carbon Staff Travel System within the Environment Agency. Source: Thomson and Georgakopoulos (2010, p. 139).
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 463
The success of the Low Carbon Staff Travel System was
used by the Environmental Finance Team to problematise
other climate change impacts of the Agency, including pro-
curement and outcome measures. The Environmental Fi-
nance Team extended the principles of the Low Carbon
Staff Travel System to evaluate the embedded (lifecycle)
carbon in all goods and services purchased and the net life-
cycle carbon emissions of their civil engineering pro-
gramme, including the ?ood prevention infrastructure.
The further development of lifecycle carbon accounting hy-
brids enabled the Environment Agency to make radical
step-changes to reduce their impact on climate change
and build the capacity to mediate with other aspects of
the sustainability programmatic in their supply chain, such
as human rights, fair trade, health and safety.
Contrary to prior research, accountants were attributed
with helping the Agency become more sustainable. For
example:
‘‘Its [engagement with environment] opened up the
?nance team and they’ve become much more colleagues
rather than gatekeepers. And I think our business is bene-
?ting enormously in having what I call ‘user-friendly
accountants’.’’
(Chair of Audit Risk and Governance Committee)
In the literature review we noted that the calculability
of ‘‘the other’’ was important in resisting or enhancing
the development of most accounting hybrids, as well as
accounting-sustainability hybrids (e.g., Georgakopoulos &
Thomson, 2008; Maunders & Burritt, 1991). We observed
that calculative rationality, evidence and measurement
formed a major part of the Agency’s values and activities
not just in the accounting department. Employees
throughout the Environment Agency were highly knowl-
edgeable about sustainability, the science underpinning
their regulations and methods of calculating environmen-
tal impacts. Measuring the environment was normalised
12
within the Agency and there was little resistance and con-
siderable scope to further hybridise accounting with the
measurable elements of sustainability that fell within the
Agency’s statutory remit. Elements of the environment were
already calculatively captured by scienti?c methods and in
regulatory instruments and therefore hybridising with
accounting was not viewed as problematic by other disci-
plines in the Environment Agency.
How effectively the accounting-sustainability hybrids
translate the sustainability programmatic into local governing
processes
In this section we analyse how effectively the Environ-
ment Agency’s organisational accounting-sustainability
hybrids translated the sustainability programmatic into
their local governing processes. In particular we evaluate
the potential of the Agency’s hybrids to govern the sustain-
able transformations contained in DEFRA (2005). We also
consider whether these accounting-sustainability hybrids
could distort the embedding of the sustainability program-
matic in the Environment Agency. We analyse the Agency’s
hybrids in order to establish whether they problematised
their unsustainable actions, supported decisions to pro-
mote sustainable change or focussed on the limited eco-
ef?ciency concerns commonly found in ‘‘for-pro?t’’
organisations.
We identi?ed a wide range of individual accounting-
sustainability hybrids that operated in the Environment
Agency, which are summarised in Table 2. These hybrid
practices were mostly concerned with the establishment
of the ?nancial bene?ts of adopting eco-ef?cient practices
and the problematisation of poor eco-housekeeping.
Accounting-sustainability hybrids have been effective in
embedding an eco-ef?ciency programmatic throughout
the Agency, for example in their Low Carbon Staff Travel
Protocol; but have been largely ineffective in areas such
as social justice or community building.
A number of the Environment Agency’s hybrids could
be considered to be underpinned with a concern for eco-
effectiveness rather than eco-ef?ciency (Table 2, third col-
umn). Eco-effective accounting-sustainability hybrids with
their emphasis on more system level changes have much
greater potential to govern transformation along a sustain-
able trajectory. However, as mentioned earlier, there were
a number of constraints on the ability of the Agency to
transform sustainably, but there was evidence that they
were building in-house capacity to enable future changes.
This included working with suppliers to provide physical
Table 2
Examples of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency.
Eco-ef?ciency accounting-sustainability hybrids Eco-effectiveness accounting-sustainability
hybrids
Energy costing, budgeting and KPIS Environmental reporting Life-cycle costing
Water costing budgeting and KPIS Corporate scorecards Social responsible investment monitoring of
pension funds
Staff travel protocol Environmental innovation
competitions
Carbon calculators for suppliers
Pollution prevention costing Water costing budgeting and KPIS Building design environmental impact analysis
Internal environmental performance league tables and
benchmarking
Environmental investment appraisal
techniques
Environmental procurement processes
Environmentally signi?cant expenditure monitoring Environmental internal auditing Carbon accounting
‘‘Environmental’’ bookkeeping systems and invoices Staff appraisal and review systems
12
For example, acceptable air emissions in urban areas are de?ned in
terms of speci?c pollutants such as lead, nitrous-oxide, carbon monoxide
and by speci?c measures, for example, lead emissions. The latter are
problematic if they exceed 0.5 lg per cubic metre or less, when expressed
as an annual mean.
464 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
quantities on invoices, requiring suppliers to provide car-
bon calculations, the incorporation of physical measures
in their ledger, the capture of resource usage in expense
forms or department returns, environmental speci?cations
in procurement processes, building environmental impacts
into capital expenditure analysis, as well as training
accounting staff in environmental management.
The Agency’s assemblage of accounting-sustainability
hybrids has the potential to problematise the eco-inef?-
ciency and eco-ineffectiveness of its actions. This assem-
blage was used to systematically support eco-ef?ciency
initiatives throughout the Environment Agency and to
make substantive progress on the development of viable
eco-effective hybrids.
Key ?ndings and insights from accounting-sustainability
hybridisation in the Environment Agency
The accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes
in the Environment Agency did not follow a ‘‘non-local to
local’’ trajectory, but were more complex with strong
‘‘local to non-local’’ and ‘‘local to local’’ dynamics. Hybrid-
isation in the Agency was driven by strong, cooperative
intra-organisational dynamics framed by local accounting
practices, partially decoupled from the sustainability
programmatic but in?uenced by the wider set of programmatic
discourses associated with UK public service organisations.
Within the Agency there was a widely held belief that
accounting-sustainability hybrids could assist organisa-
tions develop sustainably. This belief was based on the
cumulative, measurable environmental and ?nancial bene-
?ts attributed to (and measured by) their hybrids. These
included signi?cant environmental improvements in car-
bon emissions, resource use, energy use, water use and
waste produced (Thomson & Georgakopoulos, 2010). These
improvements were not attributed to any single hybrid but
to the systematic nature of their hybridisation process and
the synergistic impact of their evolving assemblage of
accounting-sustainability hybrids.
When viewed from the perspective of developing such
an assemblage of hybrids we observed the emergence of
a positive sequence of transformations where individual
accounting-sustainability objects both governed speci?c
organisational problems and priorities and allowed for
the creation of new possibilities of change through local
mediation. However, we also recognise that the Environ-
ment Agency may be a special case in relation to account-
ing-sustainability hybridisation. They have considerable
expertise in sustainability; there was no substantive con-
?ict between their activities and the sustainability pro-
grammatic; they were assigned resources and the
responsibilities to develop sustainability; they had power
over others on environmental issues; they were under-
pinned by a calculative culture; their staff were committed
to environmental governance; the measurement and cal-
culation of the environment was normalised; their
accounting staff were acknowledged leaders in the ?eld;
and, engagement with accountants in the Agency was wel-
comed. Environment Agency accountants were aware that
the Agency’s assemblage of accounting-sustainability hy-
brids was far from complete and recognised that there
was anurgent needtodevelopaccountingpractices andpro-
cesses to make visible and render governable the sustain-
able outcomes of their actions. In particular, the
accountants were keen to move beyond eco-ef?ciency and
develop eco-effective accounting-sustainability hybrids.
Most of the obstacles to the development of hybrids
that were found to exist in other organisations did not ex-
ist in the Environment Agency and this perhaps explains
our positive evaluation of the future potential of their hy-
brids. Our analysis of the Agency con?rms many of the crit-
icisms of past researchers into the role of accounting on
sustainability transformation but also identi?es a number
of important insights that could inform the development
of more effective organisational assemblages of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids.
The next section presents our analysis of the role of
accounting in the shaping of sustainability practices in
West Sussex County Council. West Sussex County Council
shared with the Environment Agency a high level commit-
ment to embedding sustainability throughout its activities
but, as mentioned earlier, its regulatory remit in relation to
the sustainability programmatic was very different. The
following section will follow the same structure as the
Environment Agency, which allows a holistic evaluation
of hybridisation in the Council and facilitates comparison
between the two cases.
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation: West Sussex
County Council
The interpretation, prioritisation and construction of the local
programmatic discourse
Interviews with key representatives from the County
Council Cabinet and Chief Executive’s Board, as well as
respondents from the Sustainability Group,
13
revealed a
nexus of programmatic discourses impacting on accounting-
sustainability hybridisation. As implied in the literature (for
example, VanHeldenet al., 2010), the UKSustainable Develop-
ment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) was hybridised with other dis-
courses, acting as a ?lter on activity at the Sustainability
Group level and throughout West Sussex County Council.
While respecting the guiding principles and shared pri-
orities for UK action contained in the UK Sustainable Devel-
opment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005), it was clear from the Chief
Executive Of?cer and Cabinet Member for Finance and Re-
sources that these were viewed as a snapshot in a moving
trajectory. The Cabinet Member, for example, pointed to
improving upon A Time for Action: A Strategy for a Sustain-
able West Sussex (West Sussex Sustainability Forum, 2005),
a two-page document translating the UK Sustainable Devel-
opment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) to West Sussex: ‘‘We had A
Time for Action which was the sustainable strategy. But I felt
we could do a lot more and wanted to take it further.’’ In part,
this attitude may be attributed to the prior positions held
by these Board members requiring knowledge of the
13
The Sustainability Group is a small designated specialist unit of four
workers charged with championing sustainability and directing efforts
towards integrating sustainability into the everyday activities of West
Sussex County Council.
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 465
importance of environmental protection and sustainabil-
ity. The Chief Executive Of?cer previously held of?ce as
the County’s Director for Environment and Development,
and the Cabinet Member for Finance and Resources had
previously been responsible for the Environment and
Economy. The Chief Executive Of?cer had been involved
in the 1992 Rio Climate Change Convention negotiations,
suggesting both familiarity with the foundations of the
UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) and
the ?uid nature of debates on sustainability.
Notwithstanding the above, the UK Sustainable Develop-
ment Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) was broadly interpreted as
requiring changes in the Council’s decision making pro-
cesses. The Cabinet Member presented the Council’s ap-
proach to sustainability as ‘‘360° vision, 360° thinking
and 360° of sustainability’’. The 360° vision, a catch-all
phrase, incorporates the pursuit of an innovative and pro-
ductive economy, a strong, healthy and just society, and a
protected physical and natural environment, which is con-
sistent with the goals for UK Government and Devolved
Administrations included in DEFRA (2005). Decision-mak-
ing practices in West Sussex County Council could be seen
to depart from these goals as they encouraged consider-
ation of environmental and social issues alongside ?nancial
issues rather than integrated as evoked in the UK Sustain-
able Development Strategy.
The sustainability programmatic as presented in the UK
Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) was further
hybridised from two other main sources. Firstly, the dis-
course was ‘‘up-dated’’ with the expert knowledge of lead-
ing political activists. Here, the Cabinet Member revealed
the in?uence of inspirational master classes hosted by the
Council and delivered by Professor Jonathon Porritt (June
2006) and Lord Nicholas Stern(June 2008). The choice of ex-
perts in the political domain rather than the scienti?c ?eld
played a part in swaying the agenda more readily towards
in?uencing behaviour than concentrating on precise mea-
surement and calculation (Ascui & Lovell, 2011).
The master classes held more resonance with the Cabi-
net Member than A Time for Action: A Strategy for a Sustain-
able West Sussex (West Sussex Sustainability Forum, 2005).
The content of the transcript of the seminar on ‘‘Adapting
to Change’’ delivered by Lord Stern clearly spells the risk
of non-action on production and consumption in terms of
temperature increases; highlights responsibility at the
individual level by making explicit links from activities to
climate change; and, has a practical orientation in drawing
attention to targets on emissions on a per capita basis. In
contrast, the Council’s strategy refers to a number of key
threats to the quality of life; positions itself on collective
as well as individual action; and, is generic on achievement
across the three spheres of sustainable development.
The in?uence of political activists, in conjunction with
the passion for and sensitivity to environmental issues by
key representatives of the Board, contributed towards a
bias to action on climate change. The Chief Executive Of?-
cer commented on reducing carbon emissions:
‘‘[It] has become such a totemic issue around the environ-
ment and sustainability. Things like the Stern Report have
conquered the economic Everest on this. The underpinning
for being able to tackle sustainability on those sorts of
issues in economic and environment terms is now so
strong it’s sort of irresistible.’’
Social issues, in contrast, were perceived as diffuse and,
by implication, dif?cult to get to grips with:
‘‘That [social issues] is the $64,000 question. And that’s
partly I think why in the last sort of seventeen years since
Rio, it’s not embedded in the same way. The social aspects,
the community and cohesion aspects of sustainability have
sort of been second runners in this.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
Secondly, and more pervasively, the programmatic was
hybridised with the government’s new public manage-
ment/ef?ciency/austerity programmatic discourses. As
the Chief Executive of?cer explained: ‘‘I’m afraid money is
such a central priority at the moment, it takes most of my
time.’’
The new public management/ef?ciency/austerity pro-
grammatic overshadowed the sustainability programmatic
and held greater ‘‘political potency’’ for the Board, leading to
short-term economic interests prevailing over longer-term
environmental concerns (Boston & Lempp, 2011) and con-
signing sustainable development as a secondary consider-
ation within the organisation as a whole. As a result,
environmental considerations were mostly framed by the
more economic discourses put forth by government.
The programmatic discourse was hybridised with the
arguments of political activists in order to engage individ-
ual members of staff and yet was permeated by the UK
Government’s economic programmatics. An example of
this was the lack of reference by interviewees to, say,
Strong and Prosperous Communities (DCLG, 2006), implying
that equivalent pressures were not felt in the social arena.
The selection and construction of sustainability mediating
instruments
From the mediating instruments available for channel-
ling the sustainability programmatic and achieving organ-
isational transformation, the Council selected Forum for
the Future’s (2010) Sustainability Standard
14
and the Con-
nected Reporting Framework. These were described by a
number of organisational participants as compatible with
each other.
On the one hand, the Sustainability Standard was used
by Council Members and Senior Of?cers to mobilise action
across staf?ng groups. There was recognition by the Cabi-
net Member and Chief Executive Of?cer that sustainability
champions alone were insuf?cient in driving organisa-
tional transformation, particularly if sustainability was to
be viewed as a routine part of work roles. The Sustainabil-
ity Standard helped in offering a benchmark matrix as a
means for undertaking a self-assessment and providing a
score mirroring those used by the Audit Commission in
14
The Sustainability Standard was developed by Forum for the Future and
its local authority partners and is intended to encourage continuous
improvement toward sustainable development through suggesting prac-
tical steps for the achievement of desired outcomes.
466 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
the Comprehensive Performance Assessment.
15
As a conse-
quence, the weak to fair rating (‘‘not awful but not great’’)
held resonance with members of staff and signalled a need
for improvement. The Sustainability Standard also helped
in providing steps to mainstreaming sustainability in a local
government context.
On the other hand, the Connected Reporting Framework
was used to add momentum to a prior decision to integrate
sustainability more widely in the Council. As articulated by
the Chief Executive Of?cer:
‘‘. . .it seemed to us that the whole project and the whole
reporting framework were going to provide the impetus
for a coherent and holistic approach to what our footprint
was environmentally across a whole range of issues. So this
seemed to offer the way forward for us to make a single
commitment that would have a multiple impact, if you
like. So rather than on each occasion when we looked at
a new building or on each occasion at a new policy or
whatever, trying to start the whole argumentation again,
we made a single corporate commitment to achieving
greater sustainability.’’
Although the Connected Reporting Framework was per-
ceived as legitimising organisational commitment to sus-
tainability, the Council retained agency on how the
framework hybridised with their existing organisational
processes and practices. In other words, the Sustainability
Group did not legitimise the general orientation of the gen-
eric Connected Reporting Framework or, indeed, the use of
the Accounting for Sustainability decision-making tool (see
Spence & Rinaldi, 2014) to ensure sustainability factors
were taken into account. This is pertinent as the tool has
the potential to render many of West Sussex County Coun-
cil’s service delivery imperatives visible, such as commu-
nity building, community engagement and social justice.
The Council’s programmatic hybridisation and local pro-
grammatic discourse had the effect of imposing structural
constraints upon the implementation of the Connected
Reporting Framework. In addition, the Sustainability Group
Manager revealed a hybrid ‘‘business case’’ Connected
Reporting Framework in framing initiatives:
‘‘A lot of people go on about sustainability; they take the
three core areas now: social, environmental and economic
impacts. But what we’re trying to do is take those three
areas and then that is surrounded by ?nance.’’
(Sustainability Group Manager)
The Connected Reporting Framework, as presented by
the Accounting for Sustainability project, lay outside the
Council’s points of reference and, accordingly, was nar-
rowed in focus when used as part of their sustainability re-
form process.
Consistent with the interpretation and perceived tech-
nical aspect of the Connected Reporting Framework, it
was seen as a means of securing more involvement from
the accountants in the Council’s sustainability journey. As
expressed by the Sustainability Group Manager, the input
of accountants was critical: ‘‘So we can do sustainability,
but where’s the ?nance people? And they’re the main people
that you need to take forward sustainability.’’
A ‘‘business case’’ Connected Reporting Framework was
in keeping with the hybrid discourse of advancing sustain-
ability in a period of reducing resources. The Council
undertook a Fundamental Service Review of all activities
following a series of poor ?nancial settlements coupled
with minimal government grant increases and a pledge
to keep Council Tax affordable. Speci?cally, the Council
was charged with identifying ef?ciency savings to a total
value of ?fty million pounds sterling. As a consequence,
the Sustainability Group Manager was keen to demon-
strate positive economic and environmental bene?ts in
the improvement of eco-housekeeping within the Council.
In order to further induce the involvement of accoun-
tants, members of the Sustainability Group used their prior
knowledge of accounting processes and practices to dem-
onstrate the ?nancial bene?ts of their initiatives. In this
way, the Sustainability Group reasoned that identifying
?nancial savings from their initiatives would be suf?cient
in convincing accountants in the Council to support and
further develop these accounting-sustainability hybrids.
As shown, the Council selected Forum for the Future’s
Sustainability Standard and Connected Reporting Frame-
work to add impetus to the sustainability agenda and help
engage with staff. The Sustainability Group adapted the
Connected Reporting Framework with the effect of com-
promising on some of the objectives as asserted by
Accounting for Sustainability (Hopwood et al., 2010). Posi-
tive environmental and economic impacts were actively
sought while positive impacts on society and social cohe-
sion were assumed to occur on ful?lment of the changes
in the other two spheres. The accountants, if not silent, as-
sumed a supporting role in the implementation of the Con-
nected Reporting Framework.
The construction and embedding of accounting-sustainability
hybrids into governing processes
At local level, the Sustainability Group developed three
accounting-sustainability hybrids (Sustainability Work-
place Tool, Sustainability Appraisal and Carbon Model) that
drew upon their accounting expertise, processes and prac-
tices (Grubnic & Owen, 2010). Development of these
accounting-sustainability hybrids, and to varying degrees,
their use in organisational governing, relied upon top level
managerial and political support as well as internal and
external networks.
Given the breadth of the sustainability programmatic
discourse, the Sustainability Group Manager assigned one
team member to lead on the construction of each account-
ing-sustainability hybrid. The group members were well
versed in the hybridised local sustainability discourse
although, generally, less familiar with the realities of prac-
tices inherent in an organisation responsible for the deliv-
ery of a diverse range of services. Work on the hybrids
offered team members the opportunity of becoming more
knowledgeable on current and incoming legislation,
managerial regimes within the Council, publicly available
15
The Comprehensive Performance Assessment used an audit and
inspection framework to determine an understandable benchmark rating
of the performance of councils as well as identify areas for improvement on
delivery of services to the public.
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 467
strategic documents and political plans. Accordingly,
Sustainability Of?cers located hybrids in government
directives in addition to governing processes of the Cabinet
and Chief Executive’s Board.
The construction of the accounting-sustainability hy-
brids varied in terms of approach taken. When developing
the Sustainability Workplace Tool and Sustainability Ap-
praisal the staff started with external best practice exem-
plars and tailored them to their local needs. In the case
of the Carbon Model they used a process of experimenta-
tion building on local know-how and experience. The Chief
Executive Of?cer and Sustainability Group Manager were
not adverse to using ideas developed elsewhere:
‘‘We certainly have no dif?culty with the notion that other
people are doing things that we’d quite like to steal.’’
(Chief Executive Of?cer)
‘‘We always try and use tools that are currently the best
practice in the market.’’
(Sustainability Group Manager)
Seeking practices established in another location can be
linked to a lack of human resources within the Group and a
desire to promote behavioural change sooner rather than
later. The Sustainability Appraisal, for example, was based
on the Integrated Appraisal Toolkit for the North West
(NWRA, 2003) and, speci?cally, the idea that the sustain-
ability of projects can more readily be shaped at the initial
scoping stage. The North-West Toolkit had the added ben-
e?t of re?nement subsequent to an extensive consultation
exercise with bodies such as the Health Development
Agency and Environment Agency. The lead worker on the
Sustainability Appraisal focussed her work on incorporat-
ing objectives from the West Sussex Sustainable Community
Strategy (WSCC, 2009a) into this local accounting-sustain-
ability hybrid in order to ensure relevance to in-house
projects.
The Sustainability Appraisal and, to a greater extent, the
Sustainability Workplace Tool, included assessments de-
signed to ensure more eco-ef?cient practices. As an exam-
ple, the Sustainability Workplace Tool sought to promote
energy reduction practices among members of staff such
as the unplugging of computer terminals at the end of a
working day. In this way, the hybrids collectively focussed
on reducing negative environmental consequences and,
with particular reference to the Sustainable Workplace
Tool, largely ignored the sustainable consequences of ser-
vices delivered.
The experimental approach undertaken in developing
the Carbon Model both utilised and extended the knowl-
edge of the Climate Change Of?cer. The Of?cer justi?ed
experimentation on the basis of general recommendations
submitted by a group of consultants including the need for
‘‘?nancial innovation’’ within the Council. For the develop-
ment of this hybrid, innovation was greatly facilitated
through access to extensive documentation generated by
the Fundamental Service Review. This incorporated dia-
grammatic depictions of processes integral to delivering
services. The Of?cer also secured cooperation and substan-
tial input from two senior managers with responsibilities
for two distinct areas (road maintenance and residential
site management). In this way, the hybrid was tailored to
the local setting and services delivered.
Similar to the Sustainability Workplace Tool and Sus-
tainability Appraisal, the Carbon Model was justi?ed on
the basis of local service imperatives. As the Climate
Change Of?cer articulated:
‘‘We can’t afford not to do something about our carbon
emissions. Reducing our emissions will not only reduce
the negative effect we have on climate change, but by
reducing our energy bills, we will also save the County
Council large amounts of money.’’
(WSCC, Sustainability Report 2007)
However, in mediating between the need for eco-ef?-
ciency on the one hand and compliance to national indica-
tors on the other, the Of?cer envisioned the Carbon Model
as promoting social gain. Information generated by the
model permitted the Climate Change Of?cer in conjunction
with the Service Manager/Owner to contemplate the
restructuring of services such that social outcomes would
be achieved.
The Carbon Model, as a technical tool, encompassed
both carbon dioxide emissions arising from service deliv-
ery lines and ?nancial values relating to energy usage.
Using diagrams on service processes, the Climate Change
Of?cer, with some reliance on the expertise of the senior
managers, mapped energy relating to accommodating
staff; travel; off-grid fuels (such as diesel and propane);
and, contractors. Data for the Carbon Model was then de-
rived from annual electricity and gas bills, an internal team
focussed exclusively on transport (‘‘anything in terms of
transport, it will be under a cost code’’) and contractors. Sim-
ilar to activity-based costing, the Climate Change Of?cer
designed the Model in a way to enable service managers
to identify and remove non-value adding energy units
and costs.
In contrast to the Carbon Model, the Sustainability
Workplace Tool and Sustainability Appraisal, at the time
of research, did not incorporate measurements in the form
of ?nancial savings. Rather, these accounting-sustainabil-
ity hybrids were developed on the assumption that savings
would accrue from changing behaviour. In a newsletter
placed on the intranet, the Sustainability Group argued:
‘‘The Carbon Trust suggests that at least 10% of all energy costs
can be reduced by improving staff behaviour’’. However,
there was evidence of secondary hybridisation in rendering
visible the cost of poor resource management in the future.
Governing with the Sustainability Workplace Tool re-
quired subjective judgements rather than more precise
measurements. Lacking accounting input, internal legiti-
macy was attempted by assigning a Staff Sustainability
Group Member to manage the use of the Sustainability
Workplace Tool. This involved an assessment of six areas
(waste, energy, procurement, water, people and transport)
for an individual department, team or building, which gen-
erated a percentage score, and a requirement to improve
that score by at least ?ve percentage points the following
year.
Both the Sustainability Workplace Tool and Sustain-
ability Appraisal used a traf?c light system to show re-
sults. As with Forum for the Future’s Sustainability
468 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
Standard, this held more resonance with staff members,
highlighting areas requiring attention. Partly re?ecting
its stage of development, the Carbon Model relied to a
greater extent on the close interaction between the Cli-
mate Change Of?cer and respective service managers to
better understand local service provision in order to effect
change.
The Council had a small but dedicated resource for
developing accounting-sustainability hybrids. At one end
of the scale, the Sustainability Workplace Tool encom-
passed eco-housekeeping measures applicable to all staff
groupings. Because of its generic nature, the hybrid did
not infringe upon regulatory regimes imposed by Central
Government or necessarily require changes to service
delivery beyond exercising thrift. At the other end of the
scale, application of the Carbon Model demonstrated po-
tential in promoting change of a more transformational
nature. The hybrid was designed to reveal unknowns in
terms of energy consumption and, furthermore, prompt
discussions on how to improve service delivery including
social outcomes.
How effectively the accounting-sustainability hybrids
translate the sustainability programmatic into local governing
processes
As with the Environment Agency, accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids were effective in translating eco-ef?ciency
in relation to Council activities into their local governing
processes and recognising the importance of eco-effective-
ness. The Sustainability Group sought to contribute to so-
cial justice directly through implementation of the
Sustainability Appraisal and, indirectly, through the
embedding and piloting of the Sustainable Workplace Tool
and Carbon Model.
Members of the Sustainability Group had heightened
awareness of the need for eco-effectiveness and, consistent
with the messages of Lord Stern, regarded the manage-
ment of environmental risks as a local imperative. As a re-
sult, all three local accounting-sustainability hybrids
sought to reduce energy use and, in so doing, contain car-
bon dioxide emissions. Metrics following completion of the
Sustainable Workplace Tool were collated at directorate
level and improvement targets monitored via incorpora-
tion in the Corporate Sustainability Programme 2009–2013
(WSCC, 2009b).
As a pre-requisite to formal tracking, the hybrids had
the backing of the County Council Cabinet and Chief Exec-
utive’s Board in the expressed ambition of getting their
‘‘own house’’ in order as well as providing leadership and
direction to other public service organisations and the sur-
rounding local community. As the Chief Executive Of?cer
expressed:
‘‘There’s two real issues on that; one is the environmental
footprint of the organisation as an organisation and the
other, and much broader answer, is around policy and
other leads. [What] does the County Council give West
Sussex as community leaders, as the providers of 80% of
local government services? [What does it provide] to oth-
ers, to pursue more sustainable approaches?’’
In a complementary move to focus attention on the
importance of climate protection, and counter potential
resistance, interview respondents cited using ‘‘visible’’
examples such as how recent droughts impacted on local
reservoirs as part of their governing processes.
Eco-effectiveness was assumed by the Sustainability
Group to be linked to eco-ef?ciency in that better house-
keeping measures incorporated into the hybrids would re-
sult in the release of ‘‘?nancial dividends’’. Although there
were targets on more parsimonious use of resources, the
Sustainability Group Manager admitted to work needed
on quantifying ?nancial savings. For example, he suggested
dual hybridisation of accounting in developing increased
understanding of whole-life costing and lifecycle assess-
ment. However, one by-product of non-inclusion of calcu-
lable savings in the Sustainable Workplace Tool was the
promotion of respect for the environment and, moreover,
operation within environmental limits as a worthy journey
in its own right among staff members.
The Sustainability Group as a conduit for the Chief Exec-
utive’s Board sought to contribute directly and, more so,
indirectly, to the achievement of social outcomes. The Sus-
tainability Appraisal, for example, in line with the articu-
lated 360° vision, attempted to include social concerns
when reviewing new project proposals. Nevertheless, it is
fair to say that managing environmental and economic
risks consumed most of the effort of this Group, as re-
?ected in the general orientation of the hybrids and the
content of the Corporate Sustainability Programme 2009–
2013 (WSCC, 2009b). Social commitments in the latter
were con?ned to equality of employment within the Coun-
cil, increasing numbers of staff engaged in community vol-
unteering and reducing workplace bullying.
Given the above, it would be incorrect to infer that is-
sues such as creating safer and stronger communities,
improving the quality of life of older people and children,
young people and families as risk, promoting healthier
communities and raising standards across schools, identi-
?ed in the UK Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA,
2005) as within the remit of local government, were not at-
tended to by the Council. Indeed, the Council recently
underwent a restructuring of the Chief Executive Board
in order to promote a uni?ed team assuming responsibili-
ties across the social spectrum of the sustainability pro-
grammatic. Following on, social imperatives were viewed
as main council business, with all professional enclosures
and staff groupings responsible for realising county
strategy.
As argued by the Sustainability Group Manager, devel-
opment and implementation of accounting-sustainability
hybrids contributed to the maintenance of front-line ser-
vices and, therefore, indirectly, current social outcomes.
To make his point, the Manager cited the tracking of
expenditure on energy and water over an eight-year peri-
od, with exponential growth revealing consequences on
Council budgets. Crudely, the line of reasoning undertaken
followed the logic of environment plus ?nance equals the
protection of core ‘‘social’’ services. As rationalised by
him: ‘‘We keep saying, if you want to keep paying [major en-
ergy supply company] money, ?ne, but I’d rather pay our
child protection of?cers money.’’
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 469
In summary, the local accounting-sustainability hybrids
practiced by the Sustainability Group centred on the more
recently identi?ed environmental risks and sustainable
consumption of resources in order to safeguard the planet
as well as Council funds. When evaluated against the sus-
tainability programmatic, lack of further inclusion of social
issues into the hybrids constituted a missing link between
the social, economic and environmental. As a result, a dee-
per understanding of commonalities among elements, as
well as risks and uncertainties following trade-offs, was
foregone.
Key ?ndings and insights from accounting-sustainability
hybridisation in West Sussex County Council
The accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes
in the West Sussex County Council, similar to that ob-
served in the Environment Agency, exhibited a range of
different trajectories including some ‘‘non-local to local’’
and relatively strong ‘‘local to local’’ and ‘‘local to non-lo-
cal’’ dynamics. Accounting-sustainability hybridisation
was driven from the top of the Council and operationalised
via the Sustainability Group rather than from the main-
stream accounting function. The hybridisation processes
was affected by a nexus of programmatic discourses affect-
ing the UK public sector and in particular by the new pub-
lic management and austerity discourses. Despite the clear
commitment to sustainability reform the sustainability
programmatic was perceived as relatively weak in a con-
text of increasing service delivery imperatives and poor
?nancial settlements.
Similar to the ?ndings of the Environment Agency,
interview respondents within West Sussex County Council
believed that accounting-sustainability hybrids could as-
sist them in developing sustainably based on the cumula-
tive, measurable environmental and ?nancial bene?ts
attributed to (and measured by) their assemblage of hy-
brids. However, unlike the Environment Agency the Coun-
cil’s assemblage of accounting-sustainability hybrids
remained distinct from the mainstream ?nancial account-
ing processes and practices. These hybrids ran in parallel to
the mainstream accounting systems providing greater vis-
ibility to the bene?ts of eco-ef?ciency initiatives. The Sus-
tainability Group was active in trying to engage with the
mainstream Council accountants in order that these
accounting-sustainability hybrids would eventually be-
come part of the mainstream accounting systems.
There was some evidence of a con?ict between the po-
tential implications of embedding sustainability and the
?nancial settlements to the Council from Government
impacting upon organisational budgets. This helps explain
the emergence of a ‘‘business case’’ for sustainability,
which concentrated on ?nancially bene?cial activities that
did not substantively challenge everyday organisational
activities. However, the Sustainability Group, working with
very limited resources and outside the mainstream
accounting function, was able to create a range of innova-
tive accounting-sustainability hybrids and in?uence gov-
erning processes. The hybrids resulted in a signi?cant
improvement in the eco-ef?ciency of council operations
and created a growing awareness of the importance of con-
sidering the Council’s eco-effectiveness. Collectively, the
hybrids created substantial potential for further local sus-
tainability mediation and change.
The next section presents our concluding comments
and a discussion of the main implications of our analysis
of accounting-sustainability hybridisation in the Environ-
ment Agency and West Sussex County Council.
Conclusion
The main purpose of this paper was to explore the role
of accounting-sustainability hybrids in shaping and
reshaping sustainability practices. As part of this explora-
tion, we developed a holistic framework from our review
of the accounting, governmentality, public sector, sustain-
ability and hybridisation literatures (for example, Gray,
2010; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2011; Miller et al., 2008; Wise,
1988). We used this to analyse the factors and processes
that shaped the implementation of the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) in the Environment
Agency and West Sussex County Council. Our analysis re-
vealed a number of empirical insights into accounting-sus-
tainability hybrids and led to the realisation that this
holistic framework could be usefully applied in other stud-
ies that seek to investigate the complex interactions be-
tween accounting and sustainability. This framework
enables a more in-depth understanding of accounting
and sustainability hybridisation at a theoretical level as
well as when analysing different empirical sites. It can also
be of use to researchers and practitioners seeking to design
and embed accounting-sustainability hybrids into local
organisational settings that will enable, rather than con-
strain, sustainable transformations.
Theoretical contributions
We believe that our holistic framework further re?nes
the insights offered by prior governmentality studies in
helping to understand the relationship between account-
ing and organisational change. In addition to considering
the dynamics from policy injunctions to the embedding
of these ideals at local level (see Kurunmäki & Miller,
2011), we propose an iterative holistic approach. Our main
theoretical contribution is in developing a more detailed
exploration of how (or whether) accounting-sustainability
hybrids are selected as mediating instruments and the im-
pact of this selection process on the local embedding of the
sustainability programmatic, as well as any further
accounting-sustainability hybridisation. In particular the
work of Wise (1988, 1995) and Wise and Smith (1989a,
1989b, 1990) suggests that this selection process will be
biased towards the existing everyday practices within an
organisation and biased against more abstract, novel ideas
at the programmatic level. This observation poses a num-
ber of questions as to the effectiveness of developing gen-
eric, non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids that draw
mainly from the programmatic level, based on their gov-
erning potential.
Another theoretical contribution for future research is
the distinction between the governing and mediating roles
470 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
of speci?c accounting-sustainability hybrids. The govern-
ing potential of such a hybrid relates to its ability to man-
age a de?ned organisational risk, while the mediating
potential relates to the hybrid’s ability to channel aspects
of the sustainability programmatic into other areas of the
organisation (or beyond) as a precursor to further transfor-
mation. Past research (and developments in practice) has
failed to adequately address this difference. The attributes
of effective governance and effective mediation are differ-
ent and therefore should not be con?ated. From a theoret-
ical perspective, there is a lack of explicit consideration as
to how, in general, key actors select (and ignore) mediating
instruments as legitimate at local level. This may partially
explain the relatively low adoption of accounting-sustain-
ability hybrids that re?ect the non-eco-ef?cient aspects of
the sustainability programmatic.
Our holistic framework allowed us to make a number of
empirical contributions in response to a general call for
more research on sustainability accounting in the public
services (Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball et al., 2009) and to
understand the complex inter-relationships between
accounting, sustainability and local service delivery imper-
atives. Our analysis challenges the appropriateness of non-
local ‘for-pro?t’ accounting-sustainability hybrids for
mediation and governance in regulatory-hybrid organisa-
tions (see for example Broadbent et al., 2001; Kurunmäki,
Lapsley, & Miller, 2011; Miller et al., 2008), but also recog-
nises the power of locally legitimate ‘public sector’
accounting-hybrids in promoting and restricting sustain-
able transformations.
We will now summarise the ?ndings revealed through
application of the holistic framework to our case studies.
We also re?ect on the power of the local in accounting-sus-
tainability hybridisation, the lack of resistance from non-
accounting staff, the normalisation of calculative capture
of the environment and the transformative, governing and
mediating potential of accounting-sustainability hybrids in
the Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council.
The interpretation, prioritisation and construction of the local
programmatic discourse
Given that local hybrid programmatics are used to
frame and legitimate any organisational transformation,
understanding how they are constructed is critical to
understanding the hybridisation of accounting and sus-
tainability. We observe in both cases that the impact of
the sustainability programmatic on the local strategic dis-
courses of the Environment Agency and West Sussex
County Council was diluted due to other programmatics
such as new public management, public welfare, value
for money, deregulation and competition, economic
growth, and austerity. Elements of the sustainability pro-
grammatic are evident in the respective local strategic dis-
courses, but typically relate to existing institutional
responsibilities and resource constraints. The UK Sustain-
able Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005) appeared to legit-
imate existing commitments to the sustainability
programmatic rather than to transform it.
Our analysis suggests that the sustainability program-
matic may not be a powerful driving force for change in
relation to the in?uence of other programmatics thus sup-
porting prior studies on the limited capacity of regulatory
hybrid organisations on responding to voluntary program-
matics such as sustainability, unless they are backed up
with speci?c regulatory changes (e.g., Kurunmäki, 2004;
Lapsley & Wright, 2004; Laughlin, 2007; Llewellyn &
Northcott, 2005).
The selection and construction of sustainability mediating
instruments
Both the Environment Agency and West Sussex County
Council have accounting-sustainability hybrids tailored to
their strategic priorities and service delivery imperatives.
In both organisations these hybrids are considered to have
been effective in reducing their negative environmental
impacts. Particularly in the Environment Agency it was
the success of ‘‘home-grown’’ hybrids that in?uenced their
selection as mediating instruments. Our ?ndings are con-
sistent with prior research (for example, Broadbent &
Guthrie, 2008; Wise, 1988, 1995) that the everyday power
and presence of costs, ?nance and resource constraints in
working practices helps the selection of accounting-sus-
tainability hybrids as mediating instruments. These
accounting-sustainability hybrids that were constructed
and adapted to local priorities appear to create a legiti-
mate, plausible conceptual link between eco-ef?ciency
and improved service delivery outcomes. The ?ndings ap-
pear to suggest that in the context of sustainability, local
factors seem to be more powerful than the non-local. The
preference to select the known and the mundane as medi-
ating instruments, particularly when responding to novel
programmatics (Wise, 1988), regardless of any perceived
technical or conceptual superiority of the external ’’expert’’
solution, is an important insight into the development of
accounting-sustainability hybrids. The power of the local
context and importance of local actors in determining
what they consider to be acceptable mediating instru-
ments should not be under-estimated but does create a po-
tential obstacle to programmatic led reforms.
The construction and embedding of accounting-sustainability
hybrids into governing processes
The accounting-sustainability hybridisation processes
in both cases exhibited most of the characteristics identi-
?ed in accounting-sustainability, new public management
accounting and management accounting hybridisation re-
search (e.g., Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball et al., 2009; Kur-
unmäki et al., 2011; Miller et al., 2008). The accounting-
sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency and
West Sussex County Council were formed (and reformed)
in the intersections and repeated interactions among pro-
grammatic discourses, resource constraints, political prior-
ities, local accounting practices, the organisation’s legal
responsibilities, accountability relationships, existing
assemblage of governing practices, existing knowledge of
the sustainability programmatic and everyday service
delivery imperatives.
In both cases, the accounting-sustainability hybrids did
restrict the points of common reference for hybridisation
I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476 471
possibilities (Miller & O’Leary, 2007; Miller et al., 2008;
Wise, 1988) by privileging what both organisations were
already doing and their existing local programmatics.
These hybrids did not re?ect all of the possible intersec-
tions of the sustainability programmatic with the local ser-
vice delivery responsibilities in the Environment Agency or
West Sussex County Council and therefore could restrict
the full implementation of the UK Sustainable Development
Strategy (DEFRA, 2005).
Our ?ndings are consistent with prior studies (e.g., Clea-
ver, 1989; Lenoir, 1988; Levallois, 2011; Wise, 1988) that
stress the need for mutual acceptance and understanding
of the legitimacy of any mediating instrument and the abil-
ity of a potential mediating instrument to offer plausible
translations of other theories and practices into their do-
mains. It would appear that one consequence of the
accountingisation of the UK public sector (Ball & Grubnic,
2007; Ball et al., 2009; Kurunmäki & Miller, 2006, 2011)
is the greater awareness and understanding of accounting
throughout public sector organisations. The normalisation
of accounting-public service hybrids over a sustained per-
iod has led to accounting objects possessing many of the
characteristics associated with mediating instruments
and thus increasing their likelihood of being part of any
programmatic led reform.
Non-accounting workers involved in the sustainability
transformation initiatives appear to have welcomed the
development of accounting-sustainability hybrids. The
hybridisation of accounting with sustainability is seen to
grant greater power and legitimacy to local initiatives
and improve their eco-ef?ciency. Non-accounting staff ap-
pear either unaware or unconcerned with the problems
identi?ed in accounting-sustainability research studies,
such as managerial capture, problematic calculative cap-
ture, lack of challenge to unsustainable business as usual
assumptions, and the inability for accounting to incorpo-
rate unmeasurable aspects of sustainable development
(e.g., Cooper, 1992; Cooper et al., 2005; Everett, 2004;
Everett & Neu, 2000). This suggests a need for more effec-
tive engagement by the accounting research community
with all disciplines involved in sustainability reforms, par-
ticularly given the lack of independent critiques of many
generic non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids that
claim to be effective sustainable mediating and governing
technologies.
As noted earlier the calculability of ‘‘the other’’’ was not
a major obstacle to developing accounting-sustainability
hybrids in these two cases. For example, measuring the
environment was a common practice in the Environment
Agency and those elements of the environment already
calculatively captured offered a number of locally legiti-
mate accounting-sustainability hybridisation possibilities.
However, it was the combined impact of a number of dif-
ferent factors that led to a majority of hybrids being under-
pinned by eco-ef?ciency concerns.
We challenge other researchers to identify appropriate
local measures of the sustainability programmatic in order
to convince practicing accountants of the existence of
acceptable measures of ’’the other’’ by ’’the other’’ and
demonstrate how these measures can be integrated into
accounting processes and practices. This allows the possi-
bility of combining the calculative techniques with the
contemporary power and legitimacy of accounting in
organisational governance in the context of sustainable
transformation. However, this has to be tempered in light
of concerns raised that accounting practices problemati-
cally capture the sustainability programmatic and sup-
press ?elds of visibility, forms of knowledge and
techniques of governing considered essential for any sus-
tainable transformations (e.g., Maunders & Burritt, 1991;
O’Dwyer, 2003b; Puxty, 1991; Russell & Thomson, 2009).
How effectively the accounting-sustainability hybrids
translate the sustainability programmatic into local governing
processes
Accounting-sustainability hybridisation in the Environ-
ment Agency and West Sussex County Council involved
patterns of complex and re?exive dynamics as suggested
by our holistic framework. Accounting-sustainability hy-
brids were present in the construction of local program-
matic discourses and used to mediate between local
practices and the sustainability programmatic. The in?u-
ence of local hybrids at all stages of the sustainability
transformation could create a self-referential dynamic
with all subsequent hybridisations dominated by account-
ing characteristics with the risk of decoupling local prac-
tices from the sustainability programmatic. Our analysis
of the cases demonstrates that this multi-level involve-
ment of accounting-sustainability hybrids was partially
responsible for the predominance of accounting-eco-
ef?cient hybrids although without these hybrids it would
be less likely that the eco-ef?ciency improvements in the
Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council
would have occurred. For example, it was the everyday
accounting-sustainability practices, rather than non-local
accounting-sustainability hybrids such as the Connected
Reporting Framework, that were selected as mediating
instruments between the sustainability programmatic
and local processes and practices. The construction of local
hybrids as mediating instruments was seen to omit signif-
icant elements of the sustainability programmatic but, on a
pragmatic level, they did facilitate local changes in relation
to climate change impacts, energy use, resource use and
waste reduction. Our analysis suggests that these hybrids
allowed elements of the weak sustainability programmatic
discourse to hybridise with more powerful discourses (e.g.,
new public management, austerity, and modernisation)
thus enabling change in local organisational practices.
Key ?ndings and insights from accounting-sustainability
hybridisation
Despite the public sector context of our case studies
(Ball & Grubnic, 2007; Ball et al., 2009), it would appear
that our ?ndings on the content and nature of account-
ing-sustainability hybrids are largely consistent with re-
search into for-pro?t and third sector organisations
(Figge et al., 2002; Fries et al., 2010; Henri & Journeault,
2010; Herbohn, 2005), with a privileging of accounting-
eco-ef?ciency hybrids associated with cost-effective
’’eco-housekeeping’’ activities (Ball & Grubnic, 2007) or
472 I. Thomson et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014) 453–476
regulatory compliance (Georgakopoulos & Thomson, 2005,
2008, 2012). Despite the regulatory responsibilities of the
Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council,
their hybrids tended not to encompass all aspects of the
sustainability programmatic (DEFRA, 2005).
The assemblages of accounting-sustainability hybrids
are only partial representations of the sustainability pro-
grammatic, and as a result they are unable to support sys-
tematic reforms along a sustainable trajectory (Russell &
Thomson, 2009) and could distort the intentions of the sus-
tainability programmatic. Currently, such hybrids are pow-
erful governing and mediating instruments (Hopwood
et al., 2010) in these two public service organisations, but
they ignore signi?cant elements of the sustainability pro-
grammatic. These accounting-sustainability hybrids privi-
lege one, albeit important, aspect of this programmatic
and appear under-developed in terms of enacting the rad-
ical social transformations contained in the UK Sustainable
Development Strategy (DEFRA, 2005). However, the inter-
views in the Environment Agency and West Sussex County
Council identify a desire to develop hybrids that are capa-
ble of making visible, calculable and governable social jus-
tice, community building, eco-effectiveness and eco-justice
in order to support wider sustainable transformations.
They identi?ed a number of obstacles that are preventing
them from moving beyond accounting for the negative
environmental impacts of their existing service delivery
imperatives. There does appear to be a programme of re-
forms that suggests a potential for breaking through the
‘‘green-business’’ ceiling.
Final thoughts and implications
This paper raises a number of important insights into
how and whether accounting can enact this more radical
transformation and we identify a number of challenges
for further research. This paper extends our understand-
ing of how accounting practices structure, legitimate
and constrain discourses around the governing of society
and nature. We have attempted to highlight how
accounting-sustainability hybrids could (mis)translate
the sustainability programmatic and strip it of its radical
vision and potentially relegate it to a footnote of the mod-
ern, neo-liberal programmatic. We believe that this may
not be an inevitable consequence and we observe the
emergence of hybrids with the potential to challenge
and transform, particularly when we consider organisa-
tional assemblages of accounting-sustainability hybrids
such as in the Environment Agency and West Sussex
County Council.
Creating plausible accounting-sustainability mediating
instruments grounded in local contexts yet re?ecting the
sustainability programmatic remains a challenge for the
development of more effective accounting-sustainability
hybrids. Our ?ndings support the arguments of others
(e.g., Gray, 2010; Lehman, 2001) that researchers should
develop hybrids by understanding the sustainability pro-
grammatic (political and scienti?c) in order to develop sus-
tainability-accounting hybrids that support and facilitate
sustainable transformation. There is a similar challenge
for researchers to develop and disseminate the ‘‘sustain-
ability case’’ for business rather than relying on the more
restrictive ‘‘business case’’ for sustainability.
Acknowledgements
We wish to acknowledge the contributions of Professor
David Owen as lead academic on one of the cases and
thank him for his continued support during the process
of framing and writing this paper. We are very grateful to
Professor Chris Chapman and Professor Jeffrey Unerman
and two anonymous journal referees for their guidance
and constructive comments at all stages of the reviewing
process. This work was presented at the International Con-
gress on Social and Environmental Accounting Research
(2010 and 2013), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Accounting (2011) and the Irish Accounting & Finance
Association Annual Conference (2012) as well as a number
of internal seminars at our respective institutions. We
thank participants for their helpful comments. Last, but
not least, we thank the organisers of the Accounting for
Sustainability Project and employees at the Environment
Agency and West Sussex County Council. In conjunction
with the Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies
(CCAB), our case organisations contributed to the funding
of our project.
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