Theorising and Modelling Social Control in Environmental Management Accounting Research

Environmental Management Accounting: The Missing Link to Sustainability?

“…We think that further research is warranted on how a business organisation can organise and imagine its control system outside of its legal entity that is how can it lead and incentivise suppliers, customers and competitors to achieve sustainability. While several authors have started investigating how informal and social controls can play a decisive role in leading to engagement with sustainability (Ditillo and Lisi 2014;Johnstone 2018), they call for further engaged research within organisations on those topics. We will also not achieve EMA 'for sustainable development' without changing, creating and imagining new tools and controls that incorporate the notions evoked in our introduction.…”

“…Finally, the inclusion of sustainability considerations within policies and procedures, such as supplier charter or capital expenditure policies will ensure full deployment of sustainability within an organisation (Ditillo and Lisi 2014). Thirdly, Johnstone (2018) and Ditillo and Lisi (2014) further argue that corporate culture is a strong control for the embedding of the environment within organisations. This includes reference to the environment in mission and vision statements for example.…”

“…According to Bebbington (2001, 146), 'the way in which a defensible, coherent and complete account of sustainable development could be created is some way off and depends on a great deal more experimentation and imagination'. (2) As the environmental management control literature is developing rapidly, we would like to question how more or less 'integration' brings organisations closer to being sustainable, and how more or less social controls (Johnstone 2018), informal or formal controls, belief systems would achieve a better 'sustainability package' (|Ditillo and Lisi 2014). (3) Thirdly, research should endeavour to seek to understand the role of change-makers within organisations.…”

Environmental management decisions in CSR‐based accounting research

“…legitimacy and stakeholder) help to explain how internal strategic environmental management decisions are made as the result of external stimuli. Notwithstanding, such decisions are progressively coming under the pressure of external legislative disturbances in the form of both hard and soft law (see Johnstone, ). Thus, the internal locus of control of accounting decisions is becoming complicated by external pressures.…”

“…In this sense, structuration theory offers a useful perspective to explore how organizations affect – and are affected by – their institutional environment via a duality of structure, paving the way for the fourth wave of active CSR 4 . Further, it recognizes that individual agents, beyond managerial tiers, within organizations are also instrumental for the assimilation, adoption, implementation and diffusion of environmental management, responding to recent advances within the literature (see Johnstone, ; Sundin & Brown, ).…”