Social Accounting Research As if the World Matters: Postalgia and a new Absurdism ,

Social Accounting Research As if the World Matters: Postalgia and a new Absurdism1,2 Rob Gray, Jesse Dillard and Crawford Spence3 Prepared for the IRSPM/EGPA International Workshop on Social Audit, Social Accounting and Accountability, Charles University, Prague, 2008 DRAFT: 3B (February 2008): Address for Correspondence: Rob Gray, CSEAR, Gateway, School of Management, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9SS, Scotland Email: rob.gray@standrews.ac.uk The clearly derivative nature of the title is conscious and deliberate In particular both Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Matter (Schumacher, 1973) and the far more recent and pragmatic contribution of Porritt’s Capitalism as if the World Matters (Porritt, 2004) is woven within what follows Postalgia “refers to a longing for a heavenly future, a desire that is central to change-talk and change initiatives…” Ybema, 2004) Acknowledgements: This paper is derived from a presentation initially prepared for the AOS seminar “Calculating Sustainability” Venice, March 2007 The comments of participants at that seminar and the early stimulus of Anthony Hopwood and Fabrizio Panozzo are very gratefully acknowledged Subsequent comments from, inter alia, David Collison, Sue Gray Anthony Hopwood, Markus Milne, David Owen and participants at the 2007 APIRA and CSEAR (UK) Congresses have had a major influence on the direction of the paper and its long struggle towards completion Thank you Rob Gray and Crawford Spence are respectively Professor and Lecturer in Social and Environmental Accounting at the University of St Andrews Jesse Dillard is Professor of Accounting at Portland State University Social Accounting and Postalgia Social Accounting Research As if the World Matters: Postalgia and a new absurdism Abstract This essay- principally directed at the academy - considers the question “Has the social accounting project failed?” in a deliberately speculative exploration of social accounting in its most inclusive articulation The examination re-evaluates what social accounting is, could and/or should be Our departure point is recent papers from Lehman and Milne, that deal with both the limitations and the possibilities of social accounting and those involved therewith More specifically, we seek to understand whether social accounting could have succeeded more obviously in raising and maintaining an energetic discourse that is reflective of the distorted societal milieu, the crisis-ridden social and environmental context, and the pernicious system that our accounting and our research reifies, supports or, worse, ignores The analysis attempts to offer some new directions and conceptions A new(er) notion of social accountability in complex institutional situations emerges from the analysis reflecting promising advances in shadow, counter, and alternative accountings In looking to the future, we consider: social accounting as an empty signifier; the possibilities of commitment to community overriding concerns for the subject matter; and an overwhelming, even immobilizing, sense of privilege We seek to abandon hubris and the self-indulgence of the precious and embrace what a ‘good’ academic and a ‘good’ social accountant might be Social Accounting and Postalgia “The short-termness of politicians and the media … can be balanced only by confident scholars shielded from political and commercial pressures But academia has become so dependent and demoralised that it can no longer play that vital role” Sampson (2004) p210 Introduction To try and talk about `social accounting’ as a singularity is probably to invite confusion `Social accounting’ embraces an immense diversity of practices – from (for example) environmental management accounting to habitat inventories; from Multi-National Corporation stand-alone `sustainability’ reports to dialogue-based third sector syntheses (Schaltegger and Burritt; 2000; Jones; 1996; Kolk; 2003; Pearce, 2003) It is to this diverse notion of social accounting and to social accounting in the academy that we wish to direct our attention here Social accounting has attracted a range of criticisms over the years for its: quietism (Tinker et al, 1991); masculism (Cooper, 1992; Cooper et al., 1992); managerialism (Neu et al, 1998); attachment to modernity (Everett and Neu, 2000; Andrew, 2000) and liberalism (Shenkin and Coulson, 2007); its (incorrectly alleged) attachment to voluntarism (Gallhofer and Haslam, 1997); its (correctly alleged) attachment to proceduralism (Lehman, 2001); and its under theorised nature (see, for example, Puxty, 1986; 1991) Many of these challenges have substance and various attempts have been made to respond directly to them and/or to re-direct social accounting research, teaching and thinking in the new directions suggested by a synthesis of the resultant dialectic More recent and telling critiques have been offered by (for example) Cooper et al., (2005) and the challenge that their illustration of an entirely different type of social account presented to the potentially conservative, organisationally-based exploration of social accounting More recently still, there have been a series of formal and informal discussions around the possibility that the social accounting project might have failed4; and Milne (2007) has challenged social accountants to consider the narrowness of their enterprise and their own social and environmental behaviours Such challenge is cast into relief by endeavours such as that from Cooper et al and This is not intended as a straw person and the suggestions certainly deserves attention Specific examples of this suggestion occurred both in exchanges prior to and during an AOS seminar in Venice in March 2007 and emerged in an international consultation by CSEAR of its wider membership reconsidered the Centre’s mission, governance and success, (see, for example, Social and Environmental Accounting Journal 26(2) pp1, 14-18) Social Accounting and Postalgia by the growing interest in shadow, silent and counter-accounts Such initiatives offer a challenge to potentially sterile academic pursuits and they act as telling examples of engaged and self-conscious action research (see Gray et al, 1996; for an introduction and summary and see, for example, Gray, 1997; Adams, 20045; Gallhofer et al., 2006)6,7 It is initiatives such as these that remind us that we are engaged in a critical endeavour of debate around accountability, business and society As such, there is a probably a persuasive case for arguing that our only concerns should be that which might demonstrably contribute to a better life – and never forgetting that for many, a better life is any life at all If, then, social accounting discourses and conversations are to more actively (and exclusively) engage the liberationist purpose (that the critical project amongst others has counselled)8 then a case emerges that all conversations which refuse to permit such examination must, of definition, be considered illegitimate If we cannot openly discuss the contention that commerce, in principle at least, cannot be responsible or sustainable then those who would prevent us from so talking must either justify that suppression or have their voices silenced On a planet on the verge of desecration, nicety and parlour manners may have a diminishingly important place So we come to our key questions Our primary concern is to ask how we as accountants and especially as accounting academics might act/speak/be in ways which are commensurate with the immense privilege most of us in the academy enjoy How might an accounting make any positive difference to the brutalised oppressed, a vandalised nature and the wounded planet? Subsidiary to that question we hope to address why social accounting is needed and, tangentially perhaps, how we might start to improve the debates within social accounting In private conversation Carol Adams questions whether her work on Alpha and the reporting-portrayal gap should be thought of as a “counter account” For more information see Gibson et al, (2001a, 2001b) and the associated information on the CSEAR website Action Research – or more especially critical action research as articulated by Richard Baker (Baker 2006) may offer a way of articulating the social accounting project and is being developed in a way that offers a richer way in which to conceptualise engaged work of this sort The ambition here is that social accounting may need to hitch Habermas, Gadamer, Taylor et al., to a more violently liberationist wagon: a suggestion which probably takes us closer to the debates in Butler, Laclau and Zizek (2000) Social Accounting and Postalgia The essay is organised as follows Following this Introduction, Section examines whether social accounting has any importance and whether accountants are indeed the right people to address and develop social accounting Section gets to the meat of the issue and examines whether or not we might think that social accounting has failed before considering whether we can talk about a social accounting in Section The final section of the paper explores, in Section 5, how we might move forward If We Wanted To Get There Would We Start Here? In order to clear the ground a little, we consider that there are four basic questions that deserve revisiting These are as follows First; why is it that social accounting(s) might matter - if at all? Second, does the use of the term “accounting(s)” constrain us in any important way? Third, need social accounting have anything to with themes of conventional accounting? And, finally, need social accounting have any necessary attachment to accountants? To some degree, these may seem trivial questions but if we are to try and re-imagine a new future for social accounting, it behoves us to have some notion of at least some of our built-in biases and historically acquired limitations Why might social accounting matter? Briefly, social accounting within the academy has been predominantly concerned with organisation-based accounts of social and environmental interactions One major theme within this has been a concern to develop accountability in the name of some democratic ideal, (see, for example, Lehman, 1999; Shenkin and Coulson, 2007) The focus, possibly unfortunately, has principally been upon corporations – especially large corporations This has, at its simplest, probably been driven by the conventional focus of traditional accounting academe mingled with a very proper concern over the power and influence of the corporation in the construction of hegemony, (see, for example, Porritt, 2005; Korten, 1995) If conventional accounting matters – and it most clearly does – then social accounting can (a priori) matter at least as much Enquiry into social accounting offers, inter alia, holds the promise of an international industrial and financial complex held substantially accountable for its activities Such an accountability – if applied successfully – would expose much duplicity; it would make transparent the essential and unavoidable conflicts that a global, astonishingly Social Accounting and Postalgia successful (and probably essentially rapacious) capitalism generates The vision – optimistic though it might be – is that even such a procedurally-based accountability (Lehman, 2001; Shenkin and Coulson, 2007;) would allow for the possibility that a stark clarification of the social injustice and environmental degradation embedded in production, consumption and expansion – indeed in modern financial capitalism -would demand that both civil society and the state act in a manner which has the potential to produce a very different world from the one in which we now live Such an accountability would have the potential to heavily temper – even erase – current notions of success and reputation as the currency of late financial capitalism The uncontrollable financial markets – possibly the most pernicious fora on the planet – would, at least be recognised for what they are and, even, possibly, be subject to questioning and retrenchment, (Gray 2002b) Debates about organisational sustainability and responsibility might be held with evidence rather than entirely through assertion and public relations machines, (Milne et al, 2006) This sense of the potential of social accounting and accountability is not intended as utopian in itself but rather as a means through difference might be able to emerge vision9 The essence, as we understand it, is to re-introduce some intrinsic but explicit ethic to capitalism that might offer a path towards limiting current devastation and injustice and perhaps potentially halt our current headlong plunge towards dystopia It is in this way that we see social accounting mattering and it is these types of underlying principles – albeit reformist rather than directly revolutionary – by which we would like to see social accounting should ultimately judged Social … `accounting(s)’? The creation and communication of accounts in the broad sense has been frequently identified as a ubiquitous human activity, (Abercrombie et al., 1984; Arrington and Puxty, 1992; Arrington and Francis, 1993) Thus a social accounting which envisages a universe of all possible accountings need only engage with the baggage of traditional accounting to a limited – and possibly deliberate - degree This seems, to us, to be a red herring and the considerable literature in social accounting that pays Indeed, any vision of utopia lies beyond our scope here and, as we have argued elsewhere (Gray, 1992; Dillard XXX; Spence 200?), our notion of utopia would be unlikely to possess much in the way of formal accounting and little or no formal social accounting Social Accounting and Postalgia almost no recognisable obeisance to the literature and principles of traditional accounting tends to confirm this, (see, for example, Raynard, 1995; Spreckley, 1997; Pearce, 2003; Pearce and Kay, 2005; Quarter et al., 2003) Social within conventional accounting? It seems important to recognise that for many commentators, social accounting is predominantly concerned with the manifestation of social and environmental issues within the conventions of traditional accounting (see, for example, Solomons, 1974; and for illustrations of this see, for example, Schaltegger and Burritt, 2000; Epstein, 2004; Hughes et al., 2000; Gray et al.,1998) As (for example) risk, asset impairment, environmental liabilities and the implications of carbon trading find their way into the financial numbers of the organisation and the financial statements begin to morph slightly; as (for example) cost classifications develop and investment appraisal takes a longer view; and as audit (for example) adds environmental and reputational risk to its issues of concern, social and environmental issues begin to have some – probably fairly slight – impact on the world of the economic But, the social and environmental issues are only manifest here to the extent that they are translated into the economic: they have no intrinsic social or environmental importance The concerns within this area of the literature appear to owe more to an interest in the conventionally financial and economic than they to an interest in the social or the environmental, per se The interest in social accounting here seems lie in the potential for – albeit incremental – change in conventional accounting practice However, much more substantively, traditional accounting itself must be treated with considerable care if we are to ever think of it as a vehicle for justice or environmental responsibility To the extent that any social accounting is inseparable from conventional accounting, it must fall foul of the penetrating and significant charges of `the’ critical accounting project, (see, for example, Cooper and Hopper, 1990; Gallhofer and Haslam, 1997; Laughlin, 1999; Power and Laughlin, 1992; Tinker, 1984) That is, as we well know, accounting, inter alia, serves vested interests, is masculist, positivist and oppressive,; it silences voices and only recognises that which is and can be priced – and price reflects only what vested interest will allow it to If international financial capitalism is not the answer to your problems then neither is traditional accounting Social Accounting and Postalgia So what about accountants? Medawar has commented (see 1976 as well as in conversation and see Hopwood,1985) that if you were setting off to develop a system of social accounting and accountability you would be well advised not to start with accountants The reasons for Medawar’s concerns are obvious once pointed out Accountants’ attachment to rules and procedures; their general identification with those holding the power; and their largely deserved reputation for conservatism and avoidance of risk and innovation will inevitably limit their ability to innovate Any worthwhile social accounting will involve innovation and an interactive and developmental approach to the new craft Accountants are trained (see, for example, McPhail, 1999; Annisette, 2000; Gray and Collison, 2002; Gray et al., 2001) to believe themselves, for example, to be impartial, technical and concerned with precision and accuracy, (Hines, 1988) when they are, of course, none of these things Accountants are by no means disinterested (see, for example, Morgan, 1988) and there is little evidence to suggest that, as a group, they would be your first choice to embrace a public interest which privileged civil society and the disenfranchised over capital and the powerful And yet, to see the social accounting initiatives from accountants over the years as only exercises in (say) legitimation or appropriation of territory seems contentious, (see, for example, ASSC, 1975; AAA, 1973; but see also Hopwood, 1978) Indeed, the frames, methods or disciplines acquired by accountants have potential value10,11 In many regards, the most important talent of the accountant probably lies in the design, recognition, assessment and control of information systems both within and outside an organisation In putting these internal and external systems together, the accountant can generate data, evaluate its probable reliability and determine its appropriateness to the issues under consideration These factors, together with an experience in the communication of information, suggest a range of talents that seem essential for much social accounting of whatever form 10 There is the more difficult issue of the extent to which accountants will adopt the baggage of traditional accounting through unconscious attachment rather than as a conscious rational choice 11 These comments are drawn from Gray (1990) which was designed to encourage accountants to engage in environmental accounting practices Whilst the statements may well be accurate, they are also fairly naïve in a number of regards Amongst the most striking is that accountants appear to value themselves for abilities that actually they not possess – like valuation and the like, (Gray, 1990; Gray et al, 2001) Social Accounting and Postalgia Whilst it may very well be that it is the attachments to the baggage of the accountants that attracts the most telling of the criticisms of `the social accounting project’ as manifest in the accounting literature (that social accounting is managerialist, marginalist, liberal, procedural, reformist etc) Nevertheless, we retain a (wary) association with accounting/accountants for the time being We this reasons both pragmatic and moral First , there is a moral, deontological case for the development of social accounting by accountants This rests on the notion that, faced with poverty, injustice, environmental degradation and so on, our position of awesome privilege demands that we seek to reform, not just our own lives and our roles in civil society, but our professional and employment lives as well So a natural moral question is to ask “what can accountants qua accountants do?” – and one answer is to make accounting more “social” Social accounting is one possible manifestation of that Second, as the critical accounting project has so vividly and convincingly demonstrated, accounting and finance are deeply implicated in the state of society and the natural environment That suggest a moral responsibility to understand, ameliorate and possibly reverse the negative aspects of that implication If accounting (and finance) are closely associated with poverty, injustice and environmental degradation can a more social accounting offer a better prospect for the species (and, indeed, other species)? This seems a project worth pursuing – although the answer is far from clear A crucial caveat needs spelling out Nothing we say here is suggesting that accounting is the best or only place to start But having made some prior decision (for whatever reasons) to remain an accountant albeit one in the academy, examination of the possibilities offered by accounting seem an appropriate place to start There is no suggestion that social accounting is any more important than a social finance; social business, social law, or even social activism outside the academy etc etc.12 (See, for example, Shenkin and Coulson, 2007, for one tentative foray in this direction) 12 What seems remarkable (and perhaps tells us something useful about accounting and accountants) is the diverse traction that social accounting does appear (we stress `appear’ as we have no empirical support or this) to have gained The hypothesis may be worth exploring; explanation might be interesting 10 Social Accounting and Postalgia accountability by capital have been shown to be empty; through the analysis of “completeness”, voluntary disclosure has been exposed as cherry picking; the claims for responsibility and sustainability are exposed as hollow; and we now know how to undertake substantial social, environmental and sustainability reporting The claim that “it cannot be done” is no longer tenable And each of these achievements has been made within the language and terms of business - and ought to be less refutable as a result (That business – and most of business academe - chooses to ignore them is not entirely the fault of social accounting) Engagement with practice and policy The social accounting academic community can take some (in places considerable) credit for innovations: the leading edge reporting by “values-based” organisations like Traidcraft and Landcare; the experiments in accounting for sustainability in Landcare and BP; the engagement and support of SRI and its community; work with trades unions; work with social accounting in third sector organisations; the policy developments of GRI, ISEA and, especially, the ACCA (and now worldwide) reporting awards; the EMAN project and so on These (and other such examples) are not trivial achievements in any sense However, the community has really (of course) failed to transform capitalism (!?) and whilst it has supported the growth in increasingly substantive social and environmental reporting, it has not managed to encourage mainstream organisations to adopt full social and environmental accountability Perhaps most telling, social accounting academics – and practitioners have had mixed success in burrowing into policy, government, regulation with some successes reported in Australia and Denmark and less obvious impacts in (say) the UK and USA It seems inevitable that our exploration must take us into a brief examination of the social accounting “community” itself A Social Accounting Community? If there is such a thing as a social accounting “community” it is a somewhat amorphous and shifting one: whether considered by reference to its personnel or by reference to its interests22 In the early years the range of interests that were initially 22 We will maintain an heroic and potentially improper assumption that there is a social accounting project and that such a project can be conflated with CSEAR and its network Of course this is facile and some major actors have (it seems) actively disavowed involvement with the CSEAR network, (such as, for example, Everett, Neu, Friedman and Miles, Gallhofer and Haslam) Other work, most obviously that appearing in the North American positivist 16 Social Accounting and Postalgia considered with the ambit of social accounting was extremely diverse and seemed to encourage anything which was not hard, mainstream accounting: issues in lesser developed countries, behavioural aspects of accounting, accounting for employees and value added statements all appeared in the pages the Social Accounting Monitor (SAM) SAM, however, probably served a more important role than encouraging the parameters of a field to develop: its existence from the late 1970s until 1992 (when it was transmuted by CSEAR into the Social and Environmental Accounting Journal) provided the first hints of an emergent community that wanted to talk to others of vaguely similar interests23 This desire manifested itself in the formation of CSEAR in 1991 and has remained a fairly dominant characteristic of the community since It is as though through some sense of being marginalised, a range of individuals (mostly but by no means all accounting academics) have felt a need for community and so a the community is formed We suspect it is more than this though At the heart of social accounting one does not find some coherent notion of intellectual structure (despite the attempts by some of us to make it so) A serious interrogation would probably suggest that a collective sense of beleaguerment and marginalization contribute more to group cohesion than does intellectual coherence or shared political vision However, central to the heart of the social accounting movement is a set of shared values – in effect, an epistemic community These values are not necessarily consciously about being marginalised but are almost certainly about wanting something which is not the traditional (accounting) academic and practitioner experience and, at least tacitly, are grounded in a commitment to democracy There is a shared notion that we must move back from the compartmentalisation of life and that life lived without a reflective notion of the good life at its heart, is no life at all This brings us to two speculations of potential interest First, it may actually be that for most members of the social accounting community, the social accounting project is either relatively unimportant or not a matter on which a collective view is needed journals would probably not be any part of a social accounting project – except as a straw person for the purposes of occasional illustration In 2006, CSEAR undertook a selfevaluation exercise designed to ensure an inclusive ambience rather than a clique-y or exclusive attitude In addition, personnel are not consistent: for example, key characters such as Ralph Estes, Marc Epstein and Trevor Gambling made many substantive contributions to the field and then moved off to consultancy and activism and retirement (although Epstein returning more recently, see, for example, Epstein and Freedman, 1994; Epstein, 2008) 23 The role of Reg Mathews in this construction of a community is celebrated in Gray and Guthrie (2007) 17 Social Accounting and Postalgia That is, it maybe that the social accounting community is the project and it is the existence of a place where individuals can think and talk freely, supported (in perhaps warm but vague and un-critical ways) that makes the community There is little doubt that new accountings are going to need places where the noise of individualist clutter does not drown out the silence and poetry of community Therefore, it might be that any attempt to articulate the project (as opposed to articulation of a project around which a community may assemble) could be seriously counter-productive Such articulations could expose differences which could destroy community, (as, indeed, many examples of research into the calculable and explicit have shown - see, for example, Dey et al 1995) Maybe attempts to articulate the social accounting project are actually very personal, almost solipsistic articulations and of no formal community value – except that each acknowledge the right – perhaps even duty – of each to make such an articulation24 If this is the case, then it may be worth speculating upon the possibility that “social accounting” is an empty – or at least a floating – signifier (Laclau1990; 1996; 2005; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) The term has no fixed meaning – nor should it It is a label under which people of incoherent desire and dissatisfaction meet to exchange poetry in arena which explicitly eschew the aggressive testosterone of other academic displays And maybe this is all it is? But from this ill-formed empty signifier has emerged a community and substantial body of research that, having achieved a good deal, now (we think) needs to be re-energised The social accounting `community’ has used its networks, its communications, its journals, and its conferences to tease out new and innovative ideas; they are places where (albeit a limited expression of) the speculative, the personal and the spiritual can sit alongside the conventionally rigorous, the engaged and the publishable Any sense of a/the project stalling is wrong then There is no “project” as such Repetition and mundane research are the manifestations of the apprenticeship that new academics have to pass through; to demand only novelty in an increasingly busy area maybe foolish `Normal science’ is also the currency of the realm of the academy – the bedrock of traditional scholarship No discipline, as we currently conceive them, can exist without it And maybe what we are facing is now a period of recharging and renewal grounded in a broader and deeper base If imagination is important, then the social accounting community needs to provide a context whereby 24 “Hello, my name is Social Accounting and I am a paradigm” 18 Social Accounting and Postalgia innovation can germinate – is, perhaps, even demanded But we also need to find a way to apply these imaginings in ways which are both communicable and rigorous: a need for innovation is no excuse for indulgence and triviality Imagination, Social Accounts and the Future As a response to Lehman’s (2006; 2007) exhortations to abandon the epistemology of economic modernity and to escape its “economic terms of reference” (2006, p767) and Shenkin and Coulson’s (2007) counsel to move from the “corpo-centrism” of most social accounting, we would wish re-empower a sort of Brechtian adherence to doubt and imagination and a seeking out of a greater authenticity as Sartre would have it And, at its heart, we would wish to maintain a key notion of guilt about injustice that acts as an imperative to ensure that our awesome privilege to engage with these issues is as close (in a Rawlsian sense) to the issues of concern as we can make them This is scholarship as a path to redemption and wisdom not as a career option or the trappings of a life of leisure (or “academic labour”)25 Whilst we may continue to struggle with the ways to energise imagination and produce a literature of imagination and engagement (Gray, 2002; Adams and Larrinaga, 2007) we have already seen that much important work takes place in social accounting In addition to the success with experimentation and, in particular, the qualified success with accounting for (un) sustainability (see, for example, Bebbington, 2007; Spence and Gray, 2008) The innovative use of a social account by Cooper et al., (2005) offers a remarkably powerful way to switch the accounting entity and engage directly with issues of policy The early work on both social audits and empowering “stakeholder” groups has a long and noble history (see, for example, Harte and Owen , 1987; Geddes, 1991; and see especially Owen, 2007a) and this has gained a new lease of life in recent years with initiatives such as the CSEAR silent and shadow accounts; what Adams calls the reporting portrayal gap and what Gallhofer et al rediscover as counter-accounting, (Gibson et al., 2001a; 2001b; Adams 2004; Gallhofer et al., 2006) There is likely to be a very considerable series of opportunities to offer alternative accountings in a variety of settings 25 See Bebbington and Dillard (2007) for a robust development of this suggestion 19 Social Accounting and Postalgia Such recognitions can encourage us to cast our net yet wider26 For example, Collison et al (2007) and Gray (2006) offer ways in which global or national level data may be employed to change the focus of how we conceive of the accounting entity and thereby challenge much empty rhetoric in corporate modernity whilst the dialogic accounting suggested by Thomson and Bebbington (2005) offers a new de-centred approach to accounts What we have here, in all probability, are the emergent threads of new conceptions of what a social account might become But it may well be in the public and the third sectors where the most vibrant examples of and opportunities for new accountings reside Whilst for many such organisations the drivers for social accountability may be broadly economic in nature, the values which underpin the purpose of the organisation and its activities are more likely to be in tune with the anxieties of the social accounting community Seeking out the contours of values-based organisations – whether social enterprise or NGO, for example - and seeking to actively work with their creation offers considerable promise, (see, for example, Spreckley, 1997; Quarter et al, 2003; Capron and Gray, 2000;Young and Tilley, 2006 ) Beyond this lies the even more tantalising prospect of seeking the transformation of conventional organisations to “new models” whatever that might be Many of the ingredients will lie in values based organisations and in NGOs and community businesses and their social audits can become the seed of these processes perhaps (See, for interest, Ball, 2007)27 What we are driving towards here are accountability regimes that are more actively normative and that start to look more like, and may indeed act in partnership with, the better forms of journalism To summarize, we propose three interrelated strata of activity for those who comprise the social accounting project The first is the conceptualization of new things through innovation in imagination The second is to identify and describe new modes of accountability being contemplated or used by practitioners and third sector organizations Third, develop new accounts of new or different entities in different units with different notions of usefulness and 26 We would acknowledge a suggestion from Alan Lowe at this point in which he notes that the pragmatic approach to change which has often informed the social accounting community bears a more than passing resemblance to the arguments of Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory – a matter deserving of further exploration, (see, for example, Latour, 2005) 27 Perhaps worthy of note are the efforts of a colleague at St Andrews University, Nick Barter, whose PhD is intended to articulate just such an idea 20 Social Accounting and Postalgia accountability For this to happen, we speculate that the social accounting community may need to make a number of conscious decisions Perhaps the most obvious of these decisions would be to learn how to escape the dead hand of business hegemony on the thoughts actions and self-disciplined imaginations of social accounting We suspect that, without necessarily embracing the often intellectually lazy kant of remote revolution, we must learn to treat any notion that the economic power of the business world necessarily provides any sort of morally or intellectually valid warranty to intellectual endeavour as entirely absurd We must learn a language that makes this absurdity evident and find empirical domains whose engagement is not subject to the conservative reluctance of capital This is not to suggest that all associated with business must be held in contempt; quite the opposite It is, however, to ensure that the business of business is not thinking and researching; that is the business of academe If the social accounting community is to the develop, getting out from under business hegemony may be an essential step Abandoning accounting for organisations – at least commercial organisations - may, it seems, also prove an inevitable further step Equally obvious, and following from the foregoing, is the need to embrace more actively the excellent and diverse work that takes place in the third and public sectors For those who have laboured in this field both within (see, for example, Burritt and Welch, 1997; Cotton et al, 1997; Spedding, 1997; Lewis, 2000; Quarter et al., 2003; Ball and Grubnic, 2007;) and without (see, for example, Zadek and Evans, 1992; Raynard, 1995; Spreckley, 1997; Pearce, 2003; Pearce and Kay, 2005;) academe, such a suggestion must seem galling in its presumption And yet here, as with the social enterprise and values-based organisation sectors (see, for example, De Leeuw, 1995; Capron and Gray, 2000; Gray et al., 1997; Dey, 2007), there is relatively little that has systematically found its way into the academic literature (as far as we know, that is) There is more important work to be done here in systematically refining and evaluating this work and laying foundations for more developed academic study (See, especially, Ball and Grubnic, 2007; O’Dwyer, 2007; Unerman and O’Dwyer, 2006 for important initiatives in this area.) So, let us finish with a call to arms Let us replace theory and normal science with dirt under the fingernails Let us be explicitly and daily conscious of our privilege and seek an empathy with a mother who cannot provide a drink of water for her son or a 21 Social Accounting and Postalgia father who cannot protect his daughter Let us maintain a watchful eye on a planet which will threaten our children’s existence Let us only ever account for these things Maybe we can learn how nature accounts – if at all Maybe we must learn how we account, person to person, how market alien values (Thiellemann, 2000) are the stuff of human existence; and how commerce is valuable but dangerous Maybe we are stretching towards a new empowerment of accountability and accounting as language – a re-examination of, for example, Cooper (1995); Hanninen (1995); Mouck (1994); Simmons and Neu (1997); Harney (2006) and looking beyond the imagination suggested there to a place where we study social accountability as the very glue that binds persons together and which separates persons from their nature We need to learn new ways to authentically grant warranty in debate and deny all suppression from others We should abandon that which cannot be seen as commensurate with a good life, and expose our taken for granted assumptions more explicitly – despite the discomfort that will bring We may learn to transform old organisations or to build a “new model” of entity We may very well enjoin an abandonment of organisations as entities altogether Perhaps we can respond to the analysis of Albrow and Glasius (2008) and focus on a new global civil society embedded in new and better understood forms of communication and democracy Maybe then we will face the conflicts and decide who will suffer in the transition to a less unjust world We suggest that closeness and authenticity will become our criteria and a recognition of absurdity our chief weapon 22 Social Accounting and Postalgia REFERENCES Abercrombie 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