Blackwell Reference Online

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Recent accounting scandals such as Enron, Parmalat, and WorldCom have concentrated attention on the accountability and governance of corporations. Social accounting has been described and critiqued from a variety of positions, ranging from right-wing neoliberal critiques all the way through to Marxist and deep green critiques. The different positions taken on the desirability or otherwise of social accounting can be understood by considering the type of change that each theorist advocates. The majority of writing and work in the area has come from those who see social accounting as a means of bringing about evolutionary change in capitalism. Social contractarian perspective: evolutionary change. Social accounting is generally understood as an attempt to investigate organizations more broadly. By scrutinizing the impact of the activities of organizations, social accountants seek to highlight the wider social and environmental costs of their operations. The rationale underpinning this approach is that corporations have a wider responsibility than merely making profits for shareholders. Social accounting has similarly been described as an “attempt to deconstruct conventional accounting, expose some of its more unpleasant characteristics and offer new accountings predicated on values wider than making rich managers and shareholders even richer” ( Bebbington et al. 1999 ). The key master ... log in or subscribe to read full text