EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Is accounting for sustainability actually accounting for sustainability...and how would we know? An exploration of narratives of organisations and the planet

Rob Gray

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2010, vol. 35, issue 1, 47-62

Abstract: The emergence of sustainable development as the complex notion through which social and environmental issues must be addressed - whether at policy, personal or organisational levels - has had a growing influence in the accounting literature. In addition to explorations of what sustainability may mean for accounting and finance, we have experienced a growth in both critiques of sustainability reporting (sic) and in experiments and speculations on how accounting for sustainability might advance. This growth - as with social and environmental accounting before it - has very properly attracted critique. One convergent theme in that critique has been a challenge that much of the realist and procedural baggage associated with conventional accounting is no longer apposite when seeking to account for sustainability. What may be required, is a more nuanced understanding of what 'sustainability' actually is and how, if at all, it can have any empirical meaning at the level of the organisation. This essay seeks to initiate an auto-critique of accounting for sustainability via an examination of meanings and contradictions in sustainable development which, in turn, leads towards a suggestion for the development of multiple and conditional narratives that whilst no longer realist or totalising, explicitly challenge the hegemonic claims of business movements in the arena of sustainability and sustainable development.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (214)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361-3682(09)00042-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:35:y:2010:i:1:p:47-62

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:35:y:2010:i:1:p:47-62