ACCOUNTING FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Accounting for Sustainability

Introduction

The sustainability and business accounting is a topic of growing interest for both practitioners and academics. The Accounting offers a structure for measuring the success of the businesses and plays an important part in the decision making and stakeholder views regarding corporate performance. The aspect of sustainable development is the concept by which complex environmental and social matters should be clarified - whether personal, organizational or political - and the influence is growing in the literature of accounting.

Furthermore, exploration of sustainability may mean finance or accounting; both sustainable and critical reporting in the speculations and experiments has grown on how the sustainable accounting could develop. A theme is that the criticism was a challenge and procedures relating to accounting standard are more relevant when seeking to accounting for sustainability. (Owen, 1996)

Social responsibility is a label for ethical behaviour and social values ??of organizations committed to promoting development, sustainability and global competition. In this regard, if the accounting system aspires to be instrumental in the functioning of internal information, it must develop to respond to discovered and hidden aspects directly related to business.

Common discourse that an organization's financial statements reflect the reality of the economy and are valuable tools in decision-making, comes into question when no one consider the effect of variables involved in the operation. Currently, post modern thought to the values ??question such as: the existence of the intellectual capital for social management, and the importance of management environment. On the contrary, it is argued that the accounting information is an essential resource such as human capital.

So, from the 70's, environmental and social commitment organizations has been institutionalized as variables of international competitiveness, providing them with an economic dimension by rules, conventions and trade agreements, as options "recommended" in the joint operation. Hence, promoting social responsibility with consistent internal values ??of the organization as a proposal for a win, win competition considerations, social justice and quality. (Tinker, 1990)

The problem is, on what are the indicators and concepts of social responsibility and environment in the daily operations of the organizations, whose answer may be that such indicators should be enclosed to the possibilities of the accounting system through a study ontological actions lead to any favour or against the working community and peripheral environment, which consequently affect the same sense of community.

With a general assumption that the control of environmental variables of the operation organization acts favourably in the internalization of social responsibility variables, given that, we need a review of the adequacy of the accounting system to capture, denote and report the management indicators of social responsibility and environmental and results beyond the economic approach. (Lavers, 1995)

The general axis of study, are the theories of management accounting and social accounting. The first as a service to internal users of the organization, whose purpose is to use accounting reports for decision-making, both to measure the efficiency of actions and decisions taken by managers in their management decisions, is in fact a managerial accounting, while social ...