Social and environmental accounting, organisational change and management accounting: A processual view

Core values as a management control in the construction of “sustainable development”

“…This illustrates the potential for management controls to take an active role within sustainable development. However, despite the opening up of space and time, the actions that resulted were still largely in terms of profit seeking (Contrafatto and Burns, 2013, Norris and O'Dwyer, 2004, Spence and Rinaldi, 2014. That is, without enrolling specific sustainability related actors, such as planetary boundaries, intra-and inter-generational equity, this allowed for profit seeking, an ever present actor, to monopolise and bring the core value into its own translation.…”

“…Hence the core value acted to create activities that were still largely in line with profit seeking (Contrafatto and Burns, 2013, Norris and O'Dwyer, 2004, Spence and Rinaldi, 2014. This may be as a result of the original core value being ambiguous as to what sustainability was and therefore the actors that engaged with it enrolled the support of management controls that still had profit seeking largely as their remit (Ball, 2007, Bebbington andThomson, 2013).…”

“…Future research may, therefore, examine how such core values can enrol specific sustainability related actors and be prevented from being enrolled into the translation of profit maximisation. However, this research would need to be mindful that the translation sought by such a core value may need to align itself with the translation of profit maximisation in order to be able to continue to travel through time and space (Contrafatto andBurns, 2013, Spence andRinaldi, 2014).…”

“…Within these studies, a smaller subset utilise the lens of management control. This is surprising given that any efforts within an organisation to implement sustainable development will be reliant on the information flows facilitated by management controls (Contrafatto and Burns, 2013). One contributing factor for this lack of focus may be that the management controls currently utilised are inconsistent with sustainability and sustainable development (Ball and Milne, 2005).…”

Has Management Accounting Research been critical?

“…However, reports of such efforts are not encouraging. For example, businesses that bent to such pressure promised to introduce sustainability systems to gain legitimacy but their materialisation proved unlikely (Bouten and Hoozee, 2013); introducing performance measurement into management controls to help managers improve energy efficiency and integrate environmental matters in a Finnish petrochemical firm failed to do so (Virtanen et al, 2013); in an Australian public sector water business existing and accepted accounting practices, external political discourses, environmental management system procedures, risk management systems, regulatory compliance measures, water conservation and greenhouse emission targets led to sustainable accounting becoming decoupled from other issues (Moore, 2013); an Italian multinational introduced social and environmental accounting into its strategic planning but this had to be consistent with increasing profits (Contrafatto and Burns, 2013). Similarly, management controls in French listed companies and a Canadian multinational extractive company could only contribute to sustainable development if they benefited investors (Arjaliés and Mundy, 2013;Rodrigues et al 2013).…”