CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

A Conceptual Framework is an impossible possibility

A Conceptual Framework is an impossible possibility

Introduction

Social accounting takes a wide variety of forms and appears under various labels. 'Social accounting' is used here as a generic term for convenience to cover all forms of 'accounts which go beyond the economic' and for all the different labels under which it appears - social responsibility accounting, social audits, corporate social reporting, employee and employment reporting, stakeholder dialogue reporting as well as environmental accounting and reporting. Some exploration of themes which comprise social accounting are considered later.

Social accounting has always struggled to find its place in the accounting firmament. It continues to do so. Social accounting is neither an established part of corporate and/or accounting practice nor is it enthusiastically adopted or admired by any of the different branches of the alternative/critical project. Thus it is neither a part of 'conventional accounting' nor an obvious part of the research literature in which that accounting is addressed, analysed and critiqued. Whilst different parts of social accounting seek to resonate with elements of either conventional accounting as currently conceived or with streams of argument within the alternative/critical project, the heart of the social accounting project tries to create and occupy a new disciplinary space which seeks some manifestation of what an 'alternative/critical' accounting might look like whilst heavily tempered by recognition of reporting practicalities and realpolitik.

We might, for the purposes of this discussion, typify the social accounting project as one which seeks change in the form of new accountings, a project which (ideally, at least) is deeply sympathetic to (and increasingly influenced by) the different streams of the alternative/critical project but a project which 'gets its hands dirty' and is, consequently, partially mired in the impurities of pragmatism.

For these (and, indeed, other reasons which we shall touch upon in due course) social accounting has consistently attracted a small but substantive array of criticisms - even attacks: social accounting is "not accounting"; it is inappropriate for accountants; it is managerialist; it disrupts capital markets; it is trivial and/or irrelevant; it is ethnocentric; it is anthropocentric; it is phallocentric; it is under-theorised; it threatens profitability; and so on. Not surprisingly, therefore, the social accounting 'project' is probably rather more self-conscious than most areas of accounting research.

Such self-consciousness seems inevitable as we struggle to tell stories that make sense of social accounting, respond to critique from all branches of accounting and finance and to seek an articulation that justifies its study and practice in the shifting sands of collegiate disdain, abuse and (perhaps worst) indifference. This sense of the project being unloved and beleaguered is, at times, so overwhelming that it is difficult to know whether the project (in a somewhat trite, perhaps, 'ideal type' Kuhnian world) should be abandoned altogether as it is so unacceptable to such a large proportion of the academy. Or is it, perhaps, that attacks from all sides actually tell us that social accounting is doing something so unpopular that it must(?) ...