Taking a Long View on What We Now Know About Social and Environmental Accountability and Reporting1*)

Abstract

Sustainability and social responsibility appear to be occupying a place of increasing importance 
in the discourse surrounding business and organisation. As this discourse gains acceptance or
ganisations seek for ways to measure and manage their interactions in the field. Simultane
ously, societal concerns for the way in which organisations represent themselves with respect to 
social responsibility and sustainability stimulate a need for wider accountability. This essay 
joins a steadily growing trickle of papers which attempt to articulate and make sense of social 
accounting, accountability and reporting and, in so doing, offer suggestions for future direc
tions in research, teaching and/or practice. The primary purpose of this paper is to offer a view 
of developments in social accounting in the last decade or so and to emphasise something I fear 
we are in danger of losing – namely that sense of the importance of social accounting and the 
considerable critical potential of the social accounting project. The paper provides a brief intro
duction to the growth in the social accounting literature; a typology of research approaches to 
the area; and a polemic on the crucial potential importance of social accounting. With this 
background, the essay then takes a broad review of the social accounting literature and seeks to 
offer some contentious perceptions on that research in the hope of stimulating debate.