The New Wave of CSR-Related Mainstream Accounting Research: On the Performative Effects of Literature Reviews

ABSTRACT

This commentary/reflection offers a critical analysis of four articles presenting literature reviews concerning Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) research in accounting published in North American-based or inspired accounting research journals and of the research on which they focus. This analysis is presented against the backdrop of [Gond, J.P., S. Mena, and S. Mosonyi. 2023. The performativity of literature reviewing: Constituting the corporate social responsibility literature through re-presentation and intervention. Organizational Research Methods 26, no. 2: 195–228] conceptualisation of the performative effects of literature reviews, examinations of the recent resurgence of CSR research in top-tier North American-based accounting journals offered by well-established social and environmental accounting (SEA) researchers, as well as in light of some of the many reviews on the same or similar lines of research. Whilst previous examinations of such resurgence focused on regular articles, this reflection focuses on literature reviews, which I consider a negative development in view of what they represent in terms of the self-referencing behaviour already present in the literature they review. This commentary serves the purpose of cautioning those interested in becoming acquainted with accounting research on CSR-related topics that the reviews examined should not be used as an entry point, given that they offer a rather incomplete picture of such research. Rather, they should only be used after having acquired a global view of CSR-related literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Social and environmental accounting
• corporate social responsibility
• corporate social responsibility reporting

1. Introduction

This commentary/reflection was prompted by the readings of four papers offering reviews on corporate social responsibility (CSR) research in accounting¹ that were published in North American-based or inspired² accounting research journals: Journal of Accounting Literature (JAL) (Huang and Watson 2015; Stuart et al. 2023); International Journal of Accounting (IJA) (Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu 2018); and Foundations and Trends® in Accounting (FTA) (Grewal and Serafeim 2020). They came to my attention because, among the readings I suggest to graduate and postgraduate students who approach me seeking advice on how to begin their studies in this area of research, I always include some literature reviews, and I try to keep updated regarding this type of article. It was only very recently that I read Stuart et al. (2023), who present their purpose as that of complementing Huang and Watson (2015). I knew this and the other two less recent reviews. Albeit I included them in my suggestions to students, I forewarned them that they focused on a specific type of research. The reliance of Stuart et al. (2023) on Huang and Watson (2015) spurred me to reflect on the influence of review articles on subsequent literature reviews and on regular articles, as well as their wider impacts on the research field.

This endeavour led me to Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi’s (2023) pioneering article on the performativity of literature reviews. These researchers offer a conceptualisation of the performative effects of literature reviewing emphasising the co-constitutive role of reviews regarding the literatures and, eventually, the correspondent research fields. These researchers refer to a ‘dual movement’ of: re-presentation, which concerns the construction of accounts that are by nature separate from and fractional to the original research work they are supposed to describe; and intervention, which pertains to the addition to, and potentially reconstruction and shifting of the ‘literature development by the token of producing a review’ (197).

Regarding the re-presentation aspect, Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi (2023, 198) argue that literature reviews portray and constitute ‘the meaningfulness of the preexisting literature’, thus constructing ‘an account of the field that is necessarily different from the original literature’. This is likely to have detrimental effects, especially when literature reviews become entry points to the literature for newcomers to a field and shape how they ‘approach and engage with this field because of the way it is re-presented in these reviews’ (211). Concerning the second movement, these researchers put forward that reviews ‘also intervene in the field they describe, in the same way that producing a map can help perform new journeys’ (211). One example offered by Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi of the ways in which reviews have an intervening effect is the use of calls for future research present in them by regular articles to motivate their studies (210). The four reviews and Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi’s analysis reminded me of related perspectives offered by Cho (2020a), Cho et al. (2015), Patten (2013, 2020) and Roberts (2018) ³ concerning the recent (dating from the late-2000s) resurgence of CSR research in top-tier North American-based accounting journals, such as Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR), Journal of Accounting and Economics (JAE), Journal of Accounting Research (JAR), and The Accounting Review (TAR). As the perspectives offered by these researchers, the one presented in this article is critical regarding the type of research predominantly published in the North American-based or inspired journals. I view the focus of such journals on specific types of research that are based on a market-focused vision of such research, almost completely eschewing issues of environmental and social justice, as highly detrimental to their ability to contribute positively to CSR-related policy and practice. Grounded on these discussions and some literature reviews on CSR-related accounting research, this note offers an assessment of whether the reviews would fit the general spirit of such resurgence, that of failing to ‘engage with, or even recognize, the substantial body of CSR research that precedes it’ (Cho et al. 2015, 17). It also offers some reflections about the implications of literature reviewing such as the one that culminated in the publication of the four reviews, as well as concerning the type of research on which they focus. Some of the questions are whether the reviews are likely to have detrimental performative effects and how can one counteract such effects.

The discussions regarding the new wave of CSR-related research by the mainstream accounting community gain increased importance in view of the recent developments concerning sustainability reporting standard-setting. The emergence of initiatives such as the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) promoted a move away of the discussion from firms’ social and environmental impacts to enterprise value and the sustainability-related opportunities and risks that inform its assessment (Abela 2022). Since then, distinctions such as ‘investor-focused versus societal/stakeholder-focused standards’ (De Villiers, La Torre, and Molinari 2022, 743; see also Luque-Vílchez et al. 2023) or narrow versus broad interpretations of sustainability (De Villiers and Dimes 2022) have become increasingly common in CSR-related reporting research.

This type of distinction is also used concerning research itself. For example, in a very recent reflection on environmental accounting research published in the European Accounting Review (EAR), Bebbington et al. (2023) suggest that such research can be analysed in terms of ‘the (often implicit) assumption' about who such research is for, ‘whether it is conceptualized as being for society or for capital market participants’ (1112). The focus of top-tier North American journals on capital market research (Hussain, Liu, and Miller 2020; Moses and Hopper 2022; Raffournier and Schatt 2010), which translates into publishing primarily CSR research for capital market participants, is likely to have some weight on how the discussion regarding sustainability reporting standard-setting proceeds. Given the importance of these journals for the mainstream accounting research community and the CSR-related research they publish being mainly for capital market participants, this research will likely influence the discussion in favour of investor-focused standards.

This study critically discusses the emergence of literature reviews that depict CSR-related research as being primarily published in North American-based or inspired journals. It adds to the discussions regarding the new wave of CSR-related research by the mainstream accounting community, which focused on ‘regular articles’ and has not acknowledged the potential effects of the development of literature reviews with the characteristics of those commented on in this article. This note focuses on such literature reviews and argues that they are a powerful instrument for promoting certain types of research. Inspired by Patten’s (2013) depiction of accounting research by the mainstream accounting community as the occurrence of ‘three waves (and a ripple)’ (10), the emergence of these reviews is portrayed as the swell of the new wave.

The following section is devoted to offering a background for the discussions concerning the resurgence of CSR research by the mainstream accounting community related to the dichotomised state of accounting research in general and SEA research in particular. The third section presents the discussion on the recent resurgence of CSR research in mainstream North American-based accounting journals. The fourth section briefly comments on the four reviews this note focuses on, presenting the main criticisms and evaluating whether they fit the general spirit of such resurgence. The final section is used to offer some final remarks focusing on the potential performative effects of the type of literature reviewing examined and its implications for the accounting research community. It also offers some reflections on how this community in general and the CSEAR community in particular could countervail the dominance of the views promoted by the reviews and the research on which they focus.

2. Accounting Research as a Dichotomised Discipline

It is relatively common to depict accounting research as a segmented or dichotomised discipline, with a chasm between those who adopt a positivist approach and those who prefer critical, interpretive, and interdisciplinary approaches (Baker 2011; Brooks, Schopohl, and Walker 2023; Hussain, Liu, and Miller 2020). This dichotomy seems to have translated into the types of research published in different types of journals, with a strong relation to their geographical origin (Dhanani and Jones 2017; Hussain, Liu, and Miller 2020; Moses and Hopper 2022; Pelger and Grottke 2015, 2017; Raffournier and Schatt 2010). The three top-tier US-based accounting research journals (JAE, JAR, and TAR) are usually depicted similarly, as focusing on a relatively ‘limited number of research fields and methodologies (financial accounting studies using a positivist perspective and statistical methods)’, revealing little interest concerning ‘differences in the institutional characteristics of countries’, and being little prone ‘to publish articles that use heterodox analysis frameworks’ (Raffournier and Schatt 2010, 162). These are also the characteristics attributed to the US mainstream accounting research (Pelger and Grottke 2015, 2017).

The Review of Accounting Studies (RAS) is another US journal usually considered to possess these characteristics (Dhanani and Jones 2017). Although based in Canada, the CAR is often viewed as a positivist journal (Dhanani and Jones 2017). Hussain, Liu, and Miller (2020, 5) refer to it as ‘certainly another predominantly positivist outlet’ and appearing in most US ranking lists behind the three leading US journals. In their RAS retrospective between 1996 and 2020, Baker et al. (2022) refer to these journals as the ‘top five accounting journals’. They present evidence that the top six journals citing RAS articles are these five journals and the Journal of Business Finance and Accounting (JBFA). In terms of the ‘subject matter themes’ of the research published in them, corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related themes do not appear mentioned autonomously (eventually, they appear in the theme ‘other’), with the theme ‘financial accounting’ remaining the ‘dominant focus’ across all these journals (7). Concerning research methodologies, the archival one is by far the first, representing between 79.59% (CAR) and 89.47% (RAS) in the period 2016–2020. These findings are entirely consistent with the characteristics presented above. Baker (2011, 209) notes that by the 2000s, the positivist field ‘had come to define quality accounting research to include only articles appearing in a few “top” journals (e.g. TAR, JAR and JAE), as well as a select number of other journals’, such as Accounting and Finance, CAR, Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance (JAAF), JBFA, and RAS.

Journals such as Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ), Accounting, Organizations & Society (AOS), and Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) are often presented as the leading journals promoting the other approaches (Baker 2011; Hussain, Liu, and Miller 2020). Accounting Forum (AF) and The British Accounting Review (BAR) are other relevant journals with good records of support for such approaches. Dhanani and Jones (2017, 1028) go as far as suggesting that ‘two distinct sub-disciplines are emerging, each being supported by different geographical regions’, with the US becoming ‘more and more positivist’, whilst ‘Europe (including the UK) and Australia’ conducting ‘broader research that embraces non-positivist research’.

This same dichotomy seems to exist within the specific area of SEA, in which the recent debate on sustainability reporting standard-setting seems to have further accentuated the conflict (Hummel and Laun 2022). Patten (2013) and Cho et al. (2015) use, respectively, the expressions ‘mainstream accounting community’ and ‘mainstream accounting research’ to refer to the work in the three top North American research journals mentioned above. In their identification of SEA-related research published in ‘selected North American-based journals’ from 1988–2007, Cho and Patten (2013) distinguished between the top-tier such journals and the second-tier ones. The first type of journals included the top three mentioned above and CAR. These four journals published only seven SEA articles. The second-tier journals they considered were Accounting Horizons (AH), International Journal of Accounting (IJA), JAAF, JAL, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy (JAPP), and RAS (which has not published a single article). They considered the findings regarding these latter journals ‘only mildly encouraging’ and identified the JAAP as the only ‘potentially significant outlet for SEA researchers’ (165).

Thus, in the case of SEA research, an additional issue must be considered: the low proneness to publish this type of research revealed by most of the North American-based journals until relatively recently (Cho 2020a; Cho and Patten 2013; Cho et al. 2015; Patten 2013, 2020; Roberts 2018). As Chung and Cho (2018, 210) explain, because of the growth of CSR-related instruments, such as CSR awards and sustainability indices, from ‘being considered to belong outside the so-called “mainstream” domain’ of accounting research, CSR research in accounting has become an interest of ‘financial market researchers’. These mainstream scholars’ research is mainly conducted on the basis of publicly available archival data, using quantitative methods, with the prevalence of research questions related to corporate social performance, corporate social disclosure, and corporate financial performance (Chung and Cho 2018). However, considering the relatively long history of CSR-related research, this is a recent trend. In the next section, the evolution of CSR research by the mainstream accounting community and the characteristics of this new wave of such research are examined further. Discussions of which journals have been more supportive of such research and have become the main outlets for it and critiques of mainstream CSR-related accounting research are also offered.

3. SEA Research Outlets Over Time and the Waves of CSR Research by the Mainstream Community

3.1. SEA Research Outlets: Taking Stock of Existing (Non-Mainstream) Literature Reviews

In the mid-2010s, Parker (2014, 87) commented that SEA research ‘has been becoming a centre stage research agenda area at least in comparison to its former marginalised state in the accounting literature’. He mentions an ‘anti-SEA bias of many leading accounting journals such as’ CAR, JAE, JAR, and TAR (89). In effect, according to Cho and Patten’s (2013) examination mentioned above, these four journals published only a handful of SEA articles between 1988 and 2007.

In a previous review analysing the period 1995–2006, Deegan and Soltys (2007, 75) had already identified that ‘within the sample of “high quality” journals (the “top 5”)’, which included the first four journals mentioned above and AOS, apart from this latter journal, ‘there was an absence of social accounting research’. Considering that a ‘more informed approach’ to gain insights into SEA research efforts would be to ‘determine whether a specific effort has already been made by other researchers to determine the “best place” to find social accounting research in particular’ (75), they resorted to the ‘journals guide’ provided by the ‘leading international centre for research into’ SEA at the time, the CSEAR. Besides AOS, the accounting journals included in the guide were: AAAJ, Accounting Education, AF, CPA, and EAR. But the guide also included Business Strategy and the Environment (BSE) and Journal of Business Ethics (JBE). Deegan and Soltys (2007) also considered BAR and Accounting and Business Research, as well as Accounting and Finance and the Australian Accounting Review (AAR) (given that their focus was SEA research published by Australasian accounting academics). Of these other journals, those with better double-digit records (over 20) of publishing SEA research were: AF (51 articles), AAAJ (43), BSE (42), JBE (36), CPA (31), and BAR (22).

Since Deegan and Soltys (2007) published their review, these journals continued to be among those with better records in terms of support for SEA research. In their review of CSR reporting research published in top-ranked accounting journals between 1976 and 2019 (September), Andrew and Baker (2020) found that of the 245 studies they examined, 31.7% were published in AAAJ, 16.5% in BAR, 13.2% in AOS and 8.6% in CPA.

But, still considering only accounting journals, there are some important ones that only subsequently to Deegan and Soltys (2007) publication came on stage as relevant peer review journals. Among these, two specialist journals must be mentioned. The first is the Social and Environmental Accountability Journal (SEAJ) (created in 1993, but relaunched as a peer-reviewed journal in 2008). This special mention is deserved not only for the earliness of its creation and the importance it has assumed but also because of its association with the CSEAR, established in 1991 (at the University of Dundee) by the late Professor Rob Gray (Collison 2021). More recently, in 2010, the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) published its first number. These are only two examples, possibly the most successful ones. For example, in a period of little over ten years, the SAMPJ has become one of the most important journals for SEA research (Patten and Shin 2019; Hsiao et al. 2022).

Hsiao et al.’s (2022) review of SEA research for the period 2014–2020, which examined a more extensive set of accounting journals compared to Andrew and Baker (2020) and also considered non-accounting journals, reveals that in terms of accounting journals, SAMPJ (93 articles) is only surpassed by AAAJ (127). Thereafter follow SEAJ, with 52 articles, Meditari Accountancy Research, AF, and CPA, all with over 30 articles. Hsiao et al.’s (2022) findings reveal that AOS (with only 16 studies) and EAR (11) do not seem to be major outlets for SEA research in this more recent period. But the North American-based accounting journals fare even worse. Of these, only JAAP and Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory (AJPT) published a little over ten articles (12 and 10, respectively). One can count on the fingers of one hand the SEA-related articles published in each of the following journals: JAE, JAR, TAR, and RAS. But CAR has managed to publish 8 studies.

Worthy of note is that when considering also non-accounting journals, journals such as BSE, JBE, and Journal of Cleaner Production (JCP) are similarly or even more important in terms of SEA research publication. Hsiao et al. (2022) reveal JCP (263 papers; 20.5% of the sample⁴) and BSE (137; 10.68%) as having the highest proportions of the final set of papers they examined, followed by AAAJ (9,9%), JBE (9.66%), and the SAMPJ (7.25%). In their ‘overview of the formation of research in sustainability accounting regarding disciplines and paradigms’, in which they analysed 7,758 articles on sustainability accounting published in journals from business-related disciplines, Hummel and Laun (2022) present a list of 15 journals in which 43% of the articles they examined were published. At the top of the list appear the JBE and BSE.

Based on a social network analysis that allowed them to ‘compile a database of 100 papers that represent the knowledge base’ of SEA research (607), Isack, Mittelbach-Hörmanseder, and Aschauer’s (2022) findings are not inconsistent with the evidence above. These researchers used a sample of 461 articles published from 1973–2015 containing 26,872 citations. They measured how important an article is based on two metrics: betweenness centrality; and degree centrality. The former measures the number of articles ‘that are channelled through’ the focal article ‘and reach the reference lists of other papers’ (595). The latter measures ‘the number of direct citation-links between’ an article and other articles in a network (595). Isack, Mittelbach-Hörmanseder, and Aschauer reveal that the journals contributing the highest proportions of papers are non-accounting journals, namely BSE (with 17) and Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management (CSREM) (10). Thereafter, with over 5 papers, appear some of the journals with an identified good record of support for SEA research: AOS (10), AAAJ (9), AF (7), and BAR (6). Then we have AAR (5), JBE (5), JCP (5), and CPA (4). TAR also appears in the database compiled by Isack, Mittelbach-Hörmanseder, and Aschauer (2022) but with only one paper. The other ‘top 5’ North American-based journals do not appear at all. Hence, when examining SEA research, not considering these non-accounting journals will surely lead to unreliable findings. Benameur et al.’s (2023) bibliometric review of sustainability reporting research for the period 2000–2022 provides similar evidence. The JCP accounted for about 17.2% of the articles published in what these researchers called ‘top 20 productive journals’ or the ‘core journals’ (8), followed by the CSREM with 10.9%. Thereafter follow two accounting journals, AAAJ and SAMPJ, with 9.9% and 9.7% respectively. The fourth journal is BSE (9.5%). The top 10 core journals include some of those that have been mentioned above: AF, JBE, and Meditari Accountancy Research.

Regarding the top-tier North American-based accounting journals, it was only in the late-2000s that, after a period in which their record of publishing SEA research can only be depicted as very poor, some of these journals began (again) to consider such research as worthy of real consideration (Cho 2020a; Cho and Patten 2013; Cho et al. 2015; Patten 2013, 2020; Roberts 2018; Roberts and Wallace 2015). One may call this, in the wake of Cho et al. (2015, 15), the ‘new wave of CSR research in the mainstream accounting community’. Patten (2013) had previously depicted the evolution of accounting research by the mainstream accounting community as having passed through ‘three waves (and a ripple)’ (10). The first wave occurred between the late 1960s and mid-1970s and was limited to publications in TAR, consisting ‘almost exclusively of essays exploring the expansion of the traditional role of accounting’ (11). The second wave took place between late 1970s and early 1980s and ‘was exclusively empirical in nature and also breached the pages of’ JAR (12). The third wave has been unfolding since late 2000s. Regarding the ripple, Patten refers to it as a ‘limited resurgence’ that occurred during the 1990s and early to mid-2000s, focused on the importance of environmental information for investors (14).

Notwithstanding this evolution, considering the findings of recent reviews of relevant literature, the record of support for this type of research by these journals is still relatively poor. For example, in their review of sustainability accounting research between 2014 and 2020, Hsiao et al. (2022) found that CAR, JAE, JAR, RAS, and TAR, together, are responsible for only 18 of the 1,283 articles reviewed. In contrast, considering only generalist accounting journals, AAAJ published 127, AF 36, and BAR 32. All these latter journals are included in Benameur et al.’s (2023) list of core journals publishing sustainability reporting research in the period 2000–2022, but none of the former are. Hummel and Laun’s (2022) list of the 15 journals that published more articles mentioned above does not include a single one of the North American journals mentioned thus far (not even JAAP). It does, however, include AAAJ, AF, AOS, and CPA. Given that all of them are ‘associated with a critical–interpretivist paradigm’, these researchers interpret these findings as supporting ‘the claim by the critical accounting community that sustainability accounting research originates in this stream of research’ (10).

3.2. Recent Critiques of Mainstream CSR Accounting Research

In spite of the ‘substantial body of CSR research’ that precedes the new wave of CSR-related research by mainstream accounting researchers, there is a failure on the part of these researchers ‘to engage with, or even recognize’ such body of research (Cho et al. 2015, 17). In effect, ‘a close reading of the articles and papers comprising the recent wave of mainstream interest in CSR suggests the authors are either unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the body of research that investigates both the early CSR reporting and, more generally, corporate social and environmental disclosure over the past three decades’ (15).

Discussing more specifically the recent resurgence of CSR research in TAR, which seems to have been initiated by Simnett et al. (2009) and Dhaliwal et al. (2011), Roberts (2018, 73) refers to it as an example of ‘research narrowness’ producing ‘old wine in new bottles’, which is what TAR is attempting to ‘sell’. Referring to prior CSR accounting research published in non-mainstream journals such as the ones mentioned above and offering as an example two articles, one citing only three papers published in such journals and the other citing none, Roberts asserts that ‘more recent TAR articles on CSR also generally ignore’ such prior research (Roberts 2018, 74).

According to Patten (2020, 1014), five of the eleven articles published by TAR over the period 2010–2016 ‘fail to cite any non-mainstream North American CSR disclosure studies whatsoever’. Patten specifically refers to a 2016 TAR article (Christensen 2016) as a ‘poster child’ for these troubles with this resurgence of CSR research in TAR. According to him, the article in question fails to cite many of the existing studies presenting similar evidence and refers to its findings as providing novel evidence. But Patten (2020) also mentions Dhaliwal et al. (2011) in similar terms. In effect, of previous relevant literature, these latter researchers only mention Al-Tuwaijri et al. (2004) and Richardson and Welker (2001), both published in AOS.

Referring namely to a ‘Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility Research in Accounting’ published by TAR editor Harry Evans III in 2012, Roberts (2018, 74) uses a very suggestive image to describe this situation, by asking the readers to ‘imagine the European Accounting Review having a forum on earnings management, yet ignoring all of the earnings management scholarship produced in CAR, TAR, JAR, and JAE’ (74).

But this new wave research also has a qualitative side to it. One aspect of it has been identified by Cho et al.’s (2015, p 15) as that of such research seeming ‘only to focus on the assumption that the disclosure relates to informing investors’. This is inextricably related to the two distinctive characteristics of new wave research compared to research on similar topics made by the critical accounting community (Cho and Giordano-Spring 2015, 2), to wit, that it bases itself ‘on a very naive conception of CSR disclosure’, and that whilst the mainstream community looks at CSR-related information from the perspective of its ‘contribution to the assessment of the firm by its financial agents’, the critical community examines such information ‘from an environmental protection and human rights perspective’ (2). This is what Bebbington et al. (2023) allude to when suggesting that research can be analysed in terms of the conceptualisation of those who it is for, society or capital market agents. This difference is in line with what one would expect considering the dichotomised nature of accounting research presented in the previous section.

Hummel and Laun (2022, 14) provide some evidence supporting the arguments presented above. Their analysis reveals the existence of five clusters, two primarily comprising management literature and three primarily comprising accounting literature. One of the latter clusters, the ‘capital-market’ one, is the youngest (having as its average publication year 2016), ‘focuses clearly on finance and capital markets perspectives’ and is ‘dominated by large-scale empirical studies’ (14). It is also characterised by a low presence of accounting journals ‘typically associated with the critical-interpretive paradigm’ (14). These researchers note that only three of the papers they identified as belonging to this cluster have been published in this latter type of journals: AAAJ, AOS and CPA. Despite the strong presence of accounting journals ‘that represent the functionalist-positivist paradigm’ (14), none of them is among the 8 most important outlets for this type of research identified by Hummel and Laun (responsible for about 40% of the 825 articles included in the cluster). These most frequent journals include BSE and JBE, as well as Journal of Banking and Finance and Journal of Corporate Finance (33). Whilst the JBE and the BSE are among the most frequent journals regarding all clusters, the two finance journals are only included as such in this cluster. Hummel and Laun consider these findings as an indication that this cluster ‘represents the newest “wave” of mainstream accounting studies on sustainability’ (14). Moreover, the small number of articles (3) in this cluster published by journals such as AAAJ, AOS and CPA, leads these researchers to suggest that it is a research cluster ‘that is isolated from the critical accounting literature’ (14). The capital-market cluster can be confronted with the ‘disclosure cluster’, which is the oldest (with an average publication year of 2009), has as its most frequent journals, besides BSE and JBE, AAAJ, CPA, AOS, and AF, with none of the main outlets of the mainstream accounting community being represented in it. Hummel and Laun (2022, 16) suggest that this latter cluster is made up of the CSR-related critical accounting literature. They further argue that their findings allow the conclusion that ‘there are indeed two independent accounting research clusters that form along the two paradigms’ (16). In the next section, the four reviews that prompted this commentary are criticised in light of this dichotomy in CSR-related accounting research.

4. The Swell of the New Wave of CSR Research by the Mainstream Accounting Community

The critiques of the new wave discussed in the previous section focused on ‘regular articles’ and had nothing to say regarding literature reviews. However, literature reviews have a performative double impact on academic fields: they influence subsequent literature reviews; they have effects on regular journal articles that refer to these literature reviews taking what is presented in them for granted (Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi 2023). As the editors that offered valuable comments and suggestions regarding an earlier version of this note very helpfully pointed out, ‘the key point seems to be that these four reviews represent further significant strengthening of the ongoing self-referential behaviour within this narrow literature, that has not been captured by previous critiques.’ In what follows, the four reviews are commented and criticised with a view to emphasise their role on such ongoing self-referential behaviour.

4.1. Casting Aside Relevant SEA Research Outlets (and Thus a Broad Part of Academic Discussions)

The main criticism of the reviews which are the object of this note pertains to their focus on sets of accounting journals that do not consider those with stronger records of support for CSR-related accounting research. Of the four reviews considered in this note, only Grewal and Serafeim (2020) do not present a list of the journals analysed. Notwithstanding, we have included it in this commentary based on the references of the study. In Table 1 information on the journals analysed in the four reviews is presented. In the case of Grewal and Serafeim (2020), only the accounting journals considered in the references are included in the table.

Table 1. Journals examined.

Journal	Region	Grewal and Serafeim (2020)*	Huang and Watson (2015)	Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu (2018)	Stuart et al. (2023)
Accounting and the Public Interest (API)	North American				✓
Accounting Historians Journal (AHJ)	North American				✓
Accounting Horizons (AH)	North American	✓			✓
Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS)	Other		✓	✓	✓
Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory (AJPT)	North American		✓	✓	✓
Behavioral Research in Accounting (BRA)	North American		✓		✓
Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR)	North American	✓	✓	✓	✓
Current Issues in Auditing (CIA)	North American				✓
European Accounting Review (EAR)	Other		✓	✓
International Journal of Accounting (IJA)	North American			✓
Journal of Accounting and Economics (JAE)	North American	✓	✓	✓	✓
Journal of Accounting and Public Policy (JAPP)	North American		✓	✓	✓
Journal of Accounting Literature (JAL)	North American		✓		✓
Journal of Accounting Research (JAR)	North American	✓	✓	✓	✓
Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance (JAAF)	North American			✓
Journal of Business, Finance and Accounting (JBFA)	North American			✓
Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting (JETA)	North American				✓
Journal of Financial Reporting (JFR)	North American				✓
Journal of Forensic Accounting Research (JFAR)	North American				✓
Journal of Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting (JGNA)	North American				✓
Journal of Information Systems (JIS)	North American				✓
Journal of International Accounting Research (JIAR)	North American				✓
Journal of Management Accounting Research (JMAR)	North American			✓	✓
Journal of the American Taxation Association (JATA)	North American		✓		✓
Management Accounting Research (MAR)	Other		✓		✓
Review of Accounting Studies (RAS)	North American		✓	✓	✓
The Accounting Review (TAR)	North American	✓	✓	✓	✓
Total		5	13	13	23

* As mentioned above, Grewal and Serafeim (2020) do not formally identify the journals analyzed. The accounting journals in Table 1 presented as being examined by these researchers were identified on the basis of the journals that are cited in the references and include only accounting journals.

In their review of CSR research in accounting, Huang and Watson (2015) used a set of 13 journals. With the exception of AOS and Management Accounting Research (MAR), all journals are North American-based or inspired. These researchers do not present the criteria they used to select the set of journals. The closest to an explanation that one can find in this article is the statement that the paper presents a review of recent CSR research in accounting ‘focusing on studies published in 13 top accounting journals’ to address the gap in the literature related to the inexistence of ‘recent, broad review of CSR research published in the preeminent accounting journals’ (1-2). It is true that Huang and Watson (2015, 2) also identify their focus on articles published in the decade previous to their review of the 13 journals they selected as an important limitation to their review. And they also direct the readers of the review to ‘four articles that review CSR research in different scopes’ (Berthelot, Cormier, and Magnan 2003; Cohen and Simnett 2015; Gray, Kouhy, and Lavers 1995; Gray and Laughlin 2012) and state the intention of attempting to ‘avoid significant overlap with them’ (2-3). But they do not really engage with these other reviews. The reader gets the idea that the 13 journals selected by the authors are the ‘preeminent journals’ that are deemed worthy of consideration. They reveal as ‘the most prolific outlets for CSR research’ AOS, AJPT, JAPP, MAR, and TAR (2).

More recently, also using a set of 13 journals (9 of them included in the set used by Huang and Watson 2015) and not explaining how they selected them, Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu (2018), in their attempt at providing a CSR framework for accounting research, provided ‘a list of studies published in the accounting literature to provide a quick reference for accounting scholars interested in embarking on CSR research’ (279). Although most of the journals considered by Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu are North American-based, they opted to include the AOS and added two other European-based journals: EAR and JBFA. Not surprisingly, these researchers found the JAAP to be the main outlet for CSR studies (with 30 studies), followed by AOS (22), the EAR (15), and IJA (13).

Even more recently, in their effort to review and synthesise CSR disclosure literature examining disclosure quality, Stuart et al. (2023) focused on ‘23 of the most prominent accounting journals’ (1), by adding to the journals used by Huang and Watson (2015), of which they consider their study to be an extension (6), 10 journals published by the American Accounting Association. The only non-North American-based journal these researchers considered was AOS. Stuart et al.’s attempt at justifying their choice of journals is more consistent than those of the other two reviews. Their ‘approach to journal selection’, state the authors, ‘closely follows many reviews performed in the accounting literature which tend to concentrate on papers published in the highest-quality journals’ (3). They then refer to Huang and Watson’s (2015) review, considering that those two researchers ‘selected 13 of the highest quality accounting journals because their primary objective was to serve the accounting research community’ (Stuart et al. 2023, 6). These researchers ended up analysing 68 articles, 11 of which were from the JAPP, 10 from AJPT, 8 from the AOS, and 7 from the JIAR.

Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi (2023, 206) detected similar justifications in the case of recent review articles in the CSR field. These reviews tend to focus on top journals as defined with reference to their impact factors or appearance in journal lists such as the Association of Business Schools’ Academic Journal Guide and usually justify this choice with reference to ‘the methodology used in previous literature reviews in targeted journals’. The problem identified by Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi with ‘[s]uch a reliance on previous reviewing approaches to selection’ is that it ‘meant less diversity in reviewing the field’ (206). As these researchers put it, this reliance on previous review articles ‘highlights the intervention of earlier reviews in the field: Their methods and selection criteria are reproduced, often without much justification.’ (206) This is clearly the case with this more recent review.

Hence, in all three reviews most of the more relevant accounting journals in terms of research on CSR reporting are excluded. And, at least in the case of Huang and Watson (2015), it is somewhat difficult to understand such exclusion. One of the literature reviews to which these researchers refer is Gray and Laughlin (2012), who consider AAAJ, AOS, AF, and CPA as the ‘accounting journals which represent the bedrock of the field’ of SEA, and mention specialist journals that emerged as important outlets to researchers in this field, such as the SAMPJ and the SEAJ (237). Huang and Watson (2015) could have confronted their findings with those of literature reviews that examined these other journals.

In view of this, it is difficult to depict Huang and Watson’s (2015) study as having done ‘an excellent job of providing a broad overview of the history of CSR research in accounting journals organized around the common research topics at that time and identifying important gaps in our knowledge’, as Stuart et al. (2023, 2) argue. For the same reasons, one cannot consider that either Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu (2018) or Stuart et al. (2023) have done excellent jobs in their attempts at providing useful reviews. Despite their claim, Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu (2018) do not succeed in providing the ‘listing of studies published in the accounting literature’ able of serving as an adequate ‘quick reference for accounting scholars interested in embarking on CSR research’ (279), or at least they provide an extremely biased one. Stuart et al. (2023) also do not succeed in ‘comprehensively reviewing and synthesizing the CSR disclosure quality literature’ as their introduction maintains (2).

Grewal and Serafeim’s (2020) review is different from the other three on which this note focuses in that they do not restrict the examination to the accounting field of research. They also do not identify a list of journals. Their focuses are the measurement, management, and communication of corporate sustainability performance. They claim to ‘provide an overview of key papers in the corporate sustainability literature and directions for future research’ (4). However, in the case of accounting research, they do not seem to sufficiently engage with the relevant literature. For example, they claim to have found that ‘accounting researchers, although experts in performance measurement, have spent little effort to measure corporate sustainability performance’ (4). However, one cannot see in the references (47-55) any from AAAJ, AF, AOS, BAR, CPA, or SAMPJ. But they include five references from TAR, three from JAR, and two from CAR. From the JBE, related to accounting, they refer only two papers, one in which they were co-authors (Grewal, Hauptmann, and Serafeim 2021), the other on sustainability reporting assurance (Perego and Kolk 2012). No papers from other journals identified as relevant above, such as BSE, CSREM and JCP, are considered.

Interestingly enough, in a literature review on sustainability measurement research (Mura et al. 2018), publications from accounting researchers that are not considered in Grewal and Serafeim’s (2020) review and accounting journals other than the five mainstream top-ranked accounting journals figure prominently. Of these journals, the only one appearing in the top 20 publishing journals list provided by Mura et al. (2018) is TAR, in the last place in the list. The JCP and the JBE are the top-publishing journals, but they are followed by AAAJ and AOS. Other accounting journals in the top 10 are CPA and BAR. Another relevant finding in Mura et al. (2018) is that 11 of the top 20 most cited documents are articles from AAAJ (3) and AOS (8). Among the 5 most cited articles, 3 are from AAAJ and 2 are from the AOS. None of these articles appears in Grewal and Serafeim’s (2020) list of references.

4.2. Casting Aside Non-Accounting Journals (and Thus the Interdisciplinary Nature of Socio-Environmental Issues)

The second criticism is that regarding the particular area of research examined by the reviews, the non-consideration of non-accounting journals, such as JBE, JCP and BSE, means that an important part of the relevant research is not considered. This much is evident based on the findings of reviews such as those of Hsiao et al. (2022), Hummel and Laun (2022), and Isack, Mittelbach-Hörmanseder, and Aschauer (2022). Hummel and Laun’s (2022) findings regarding the ‘capital market cluster’ are particularly interesting in this respect. Some of the most frequent journals are not accounting and finance journals. They are journals already identified above as relevant outlets of SEA research, such as BSE and JBE (which is by far the most important outlet, with a little over 50% of the articles).

Regarding the particular field of environmental accounting research, Marrone et al. (2020) provide evidence of a plethora of studies published in non-accounting journals. These researchers examined environmental accounting research ‘both within and outside of accounting journals’ (2167) and found what they portrayed as ‘an exponential increase’ in such research published outside of accounting journals since the mid-2000s (2180). The JCP appears as the leading journal, followed, at a distance, by Ecological Economics. The first accounting journal in the list, SEAJ, appears in third, and AAAJ appears in fourth.

Based on this evidence, one can only repeat that when examining SEA research, not considering these non-accounting journals will surely lead to incomplete findings. What the reviews on which this commentary focuses do is concentrate on accounting journals, not on accounting research. Their authors seem to work on the basis of the belief that relevant accounting research on the topic they purport to examine gets published only in accounting journals. In the case of this particular topic, such belief is not correct because many of the most relevant research has as outlet non-accounting journals. This is consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of SEA, which is well depicted by Gray’s (2010, 22) assertion that SEA literature ‘draws widely from all the disciplines from which accounting and inter-disciplinary perspectives on accounting draw’ but ‘then adds insights’ from a number of fields such as those in the natural sciences. He goes on to emphasise how difficult it would be to engage with SEA while staying ‘intellectually rooted within the conceits and conventions of conventional mainstream (whatever that is) accounting scholarship and practice’ (22). In their analysis of environmental accounting research and reflecting upon the fact of the majority of the most cited researchers being Australian or European, Cho, Jérôme, and Maurice (2022, 1006) refer to the ‘publication dilemmas’ that US researchers focusing on environmental accounting have as being related to the fact that ‘journals focusing on environmental topics’ (such as BSE and CSREM) ‘which are interdisciplinary in nature’ have difficulty in seeing ‘their high academic impact (in terms of citations) reflected in rankings and reputation’. These researchers claim that the pressure to publish in top-tier journals may have had a dissuasive effect on American researchers nudging them not to conduct research in the field. These researchers also reflect upon the need for accounting research ‘to open to other disciplines to remain relevant given the current societal issues’ and call for journal rankings to ‘better reflect the relevance of interdisciplinary research’ (1005).

4.3. Casting Aside Prior Literature Reviews (and Thus Again, Broader Academic Discussions)

The third criticism has to do with what one might consider a lack of sufficient engagement with previous reviews. None of the reviews commented in this note engage sufficiently with relevant literature reviews existing at the time. Huang and Watson (2015) refer to only four reviews, with two of them reviewing the literature published in periods previous to the one examined by Huang and Watson: one published in AAAJ (Gray et al. 1995), and the other published in the JAL (Berthelot, Cormier, and Magnan 2003). The other reviews mentioned are Gray and Laughlin (2012) (published in AAAJ) and Cohen and Simnett (2015) (published in AJPT). And these are not systematic reviews. What is more, Huang and Watson (2015) do not engage with these other ‘reviews’ when presenting and discussing the findings of their own. Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu (2018) refer only to Cohen and Simnett (2015) and Huang and Watson (2015). Stuart et al. (2023) fare even worse, given that they only engage meaningfully with Huang and Watson (2015).

More importantly, at the time all these researchers were preparing their studies, there was a wealth of reviews published in other journals some of which have become quite influential. In the case of Huang and Watson (2015) and Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu (2018), they could have engaged with Deegan and Soltys (2007), Cho and Patten (2013), Eugénio, Lourenço, and Morais (2010), Fifka (2012), Hahn and Kühnen (2013), and Parker (2005, 2014). Grewal and Serafeim (2020) and Stuart et al. (2023) could have engaged with these as well as with Ali, Frynas, and Mahmood (2017), Andrew and Baker (2020), Brooks and Oikonomou (2018), Chung and Cho (2018), Crane and Glozer (2016), Dienes, Sassen, and Fischer (2016), and Patten and Shin (2019). Other reviews of SEA research than the four commented in this note engage substantially with previous reviews. Isack, Mittelbach-Hörmanseder, and Aschauer (2022) and Marrone et al. (2020) provide detailed tables describing many of them. Singhania and Chadha (2023) offer a table summarising 60 literature reviews over the period 1976–2023.

The evolution of the three reviews mentioned above in terms of engagement with previous ones is viewed in this text as a sign of danger to CSR-related research in accounting. They represent a reinforcement of established practices of self-referential behaviour in these journals. The new wave of CSR research by the community of mainstream accounting researchers seems to have crossed a threshold and spread to the literature reviews published by such community. They not only do not review most of the relevant literature on CSR-related topics but also do not engage with other literature reviews that do not commit the same mistake. Adapting Unerman’s (2020, 8) words (which were focused on the US), one could see such ‘failure to even acknowledge prior literature published outside’ these journals as ‘a manifestation of self-referential echo chamber confirmation bias that is likely to hinder’ their ability ‘to make a substantive contribution to rapidly developing’ policy and practice on CSR-related issues. This has dire consequences, one of them being that, by substantially reducing the range of the literature cited, it narrows ‘the opportunity for cross-fertilisation of ideas’ and reduces the possibility of becoming ‘less self-referential and thereby break out of subdisciplinary peer review echo chambers that reinforce confirmation bias’ (Unerman 2020, 8).

In the final section of this commentary, besides some concluding observations regarding the topic of this note, some reflections concerning some of these consequences as well as on opportunities for the SEA community are offered.

5. Final Remarks

5.1. The Performative Nature of Literature Reviews

The failing to ‘engage with, or even recognize, the substantial body of CSR research that precedes it’ adduced by Cho et al. (2015, 17) as a characteristic of the new wave of CSR-related research by the mainstream accounting community does not seem to have improved, at least when considering anecdotal evidence. Some recent studies published in mainstream North American-based accounting journals do not fail to cite the reviews on which this note focuses but do not really engage with previous relevant literature. Publishing in JAR, Fiechter, Hitz, and Lehmann (2022) were able to examine the effect of the non-financial reporting directive (Directive 2014/95/EU) on companies’ CSR activities without any kind of engagement with the wealth of literature on such directive presented in Korca and Costa (2021). But they refer to Grewal and Serafeim (2020). Another example, Downar et al. (2021), who, in an article published in RAS, examine ‘the impact of a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions on firms’ subsequent emission levels and financial operating performance’ (1137), do not fail to refer to Grewal and Serafeim (2020) and to three other studies (Christensen et al. 2017; a working paper version of Fiechter, Hitz, and Lehmann 2022; Grewal, Riedl, and Serafeim 2019) ‘for a comprehensive assessment of the many recent studies on corporate sustainability management’ (1138). But they fail to engage with the literature on carbon disclosure presented by Hahn, Reimsbach, and Schiemann (2015) and Borghei (2021). These are good examples of the performative effects of literature reviews on regular articles to which Gond, Mena, and Mosonyi (2023, 208) draw attention. These researchers refer to the dangers of the reutilisation of the categorizations of review articles by regular ones and the danger of these latter articles taking such categorizations for granted. One cannot but conclude that the state of affairs discussed and criticised by Cho et al. (2015), Roberts (2018), Patten (2013, 2020), and Cho (2020a) seems to have worsened and given birth to what one can only call ‘new wave of CSR-related accounting research reviews’ and depict as a swell in the new wave. Such reviews should not be used by newcomers to the research in these areas as entry points into the literature given that they provide a very biased view of research in them, narrow and self-referential. As the editors that helped improve the paper substantially very thoughtfully have stated, ‘this view casts aside key socio-environmental considerations, wider stakeholders, other forms of accounting and accountability, contributing to reinforce a market-focused vision of CSR accounting research – all the more because it is published as literature reviews.’

This commentary was written with the ‘primary objective’ of serving ‘the accounting research community’, to use Stuart et al.’s (2023, 6) words. It serves the purpose of cautioning those interested in becoming acquainted with accounting research on CSR-related topics that these reviews should only be used to acquire some understanding of the research published in the specific journals in which they focus, not of the wider literature. And they should only use them after having acquired a global picture of CSR-related literature. In spite of their many merits, none of these reviews are adequate to serve as a ‘quick reference for accounting scholars interested in embarking on CSR research’, to put it in Radhakrishnan, Tsang, and Liu’s (2018, 279) terms.

This commentary also serves the purpose of cautioning the CSEAR community against the mistake to which this article is pointing, that of exploring only a specific type of the CSR-related literature. The CSEAR community should be well versed in all types of accounting research, including that which is predominantly published in North American-inspired journals. As Patten (2015, 48), I also consider that research from alternative approaches ‘inform and advance each other’ and that they ‘should be complementary’. With Patten, I also put forward that ‘researchers from any camp would be well served to explore on a regular basis, other types of works’ (48). This means that they should be well-versed in these alternative approaches and able to build bridges between them. What is more, they should also be as well-versed as possible in research areas that are of interest to SEA. Commenting on the publication of a Rob Gray’s book review on finance (Gray 2020), Rodrigue and Tregidga (2020, 162) refer to his ‘dedication to read broadly’ and ‘desire to challenge social accounting scholars to develop their contextual awareness’. In the case of SEA scholars, this means that they would benefit immensely from reading natural sciences literature, such as Richardson et al. (2023), one of the most recent studies on planetary boundaries, or Krauss (2021), on the physics of climate change.

Roberts (2018) and Patten (2020) identified some of the consequences of the new wave research. Referring to North American accounting Ph.D. education, Roberts (2018, 75), for his part, shares his concerns regarding the eventual lack of fostering of the research that exists outside the top-tier North American journals, but also in connection with the likelihood that ‘other views of reality and knowledge, and the scope and purpose of accounting research are never found, much less respectfully articulated’. Patten (2020, 1016) goes even further and argues that the new wave mainstream accounting community, namely by brushing aside the SEA body of work and the legitimacy theory works, ‘is complicit in reinforcing the managerialistic view that CSR reporting is not only adequate in its voluntary setting, it is beneficial’, by allowing to reduce the cost of capital, leading to better analyst forecasts, helping to enhance shareholder value, as several articles published by members of said community have suggested (1016). The questions that are missing are the most important ones: ‘what about the costs to society’, and ‘the costs to the environment’? (1016) This brings one back again to Bebbington et al.’s (2023) distinction between research for society versus for capital market participants.

The core issue is that the investor-focused sustainability reporting initiatives, such as the ISSB, and the mainstream accounting CSR-related research are narrowly conceived relative to the complexities of their CSR context. They adopt the narrow interpretation of sustainability, ‘based on a rational investor’s perspective and the need to maximise shareholder value’ and are primarily concerned with how firms themselves address sustainability-related concerns to reduce risks and identify opportunities with a focus on financial performance (De Villiers and Dimes 2022, 212). Abhayawansa (2022, 1375) goes as far as arguing that the way that the ISSB operationalises ‘the concept of sustainability-related risks and opportunities (…) assumes a sociopathic investor as the intended audience and a morally bankrupt capitalist society.’

These complexities require that research on these topics privileges interdisciplinarity and methodologic variety. As argued by Unerman (2020) the range of issues covered by SEA is much wider compared to financial accounting, and such issues interact in manifold dimensions. Hence, SEA is, in comparison, most likely an ‘even more complex arena to research’ and calls for ‘interdisciplinary approaches and research methods suited to the added complexity’ (10). Such complexity requires namely privileging what De Villiers and Dimes (2023, 287) call ‘a broader notion of organisational accountability’, rather than a ‘narrower, more investor-focused interpretation of sustainability’.

5.2. Reflections on Ways to Counteract the Pitfalls of This performativity

I deem particularly important the need for other forms of accounting and accountability. There are at least two strands of CSR-related research directly associated with this issue that are completely marginalised by North American-based or inspired journals, those focusing on dialogic accounting and external accounting. Research on them has seen a growth spurt in the past two decades (Manetti, Bellucci, and Oliva 2021). Monologic accounting focuses on the needs of investors and assumes that, in satisfying them, everyone else, independently of their disparate political stances, is also served (Manetti, Bellucci, and Oliva 2021). Dialogic accounting is based on the interaction of multiple stakeholders to help develop ‘accounting and reporting models that are based on a multidimensional approach and are sensitive to power differentials in society’ (251). For its part, external accounting can be broadly defined as the production of accounts ‘by, or on behalf of, individuals who are beyond, or “outside”, the control of the entity that is the subject of the account’ (Thomson, Dey, and Russell 2015, 810). Manetti, Bellucci, and Oliva (2021) found that the main outlets for these types of research are the CPA (44 articles) and AAAJ (37 articles). SEAJ, with 5 articles, is also an important outlet.

Tregidga (2017, 513) calls for further consideration regarding whether external accounting is dialogic and opens ‘spaces for multiple voices and perspectives, or anti-dialogic by maintaining existing forms of government or presenting another (limited) perspective’. This researcher questions whether this type of accounting needs ‘to be dialogic to be emancipatory’ (513). Following Brown (2009, 321), I take the view that well-functioning democracies cannot exist without ‘a robust clash of democratic positions’ and require the ‘provision for agonistic public spheres where democratic confrontations can take place’. But I also acknowledge the ‘complexity of prevailing power dynamics’ and take the view that ‘competing perspectives and interests cannot be resolved through logic or reason’ (Dillard and Yuthas 2013, 114). Hence, I cannot uphold the view that dialogue is enough. It may be the case that what is more critical is the provision of ‘discursive “ammunition” to contest, re-form, and/or resist prevailing institutional behaviour’ (Dey and Gibbon 2014, 109). But these ideas are completely absent from the research conducted by the mainstream accounting community and from the articles published in mainstream accounting journals. Thus, they are also absent from literature reviews focusing on these journals, which means that for those who use exclusively such reviews and such journals, research on dialogic and external accounting does not exist, or it is not considered accounting research.

The evidence presented in this commentary has several implications for SEA practice and SEA research, and also for the CSEAR community. Given the relevance of North American-based or inspired journals for the accounting research community (in terms of hiring and career promotions), the fact that CSR-related research published in them is mainly for capital market participants, promoting narrow interpretations of sustainability and sustainability reporting and favouring investor-focused standards is most likely to skew the discussion towards this latter type of standards. A different type of implication is that it is likely to influence those who are entering the accounting research community to embrace CSR research for capital markets participants at the detriment of research for society.

Notwithstanding, some scholars seem to have a certain degree of optimism. For example, Roberts and Wallace (2015, 82) suggest that, despite the scarcity of citation of critical SEA researchers by the mainstream accounting community, this (re-)entry of CSR research in top-tier North American journals ‘may provide an opportunity’ for the former ‘to engage in relevant academic debates’. A first attempt at such engagement has been made by Chung and Cho (2018) in their literature review of SEA research. Recognising that mainstream accounting researchers have indeed increased the attention paid to CSR-related issues, Chung and Cho also acknowledge that ‘their [mainstream] scope of the CSR literature appears to be (much) narrower than the reality of the SEA field’ (210–211). They went as far as designing their review with the purpose of narrowing ‘the gap and to encourage communications between’ the mainstream research community and the SEA research community (211). In effect, given that ‘the so-called “mainstream” research mainly involves publicly available archival financial data for quantitative analyses’, and the prevalent research questions pertain to corporate social performance, corporate social disclosure and corporate financial performance, Chung and Cho opted to provide a review of SEA research related to these three aspects (211). Their aim of narrowing the gap and encouraging ‘communications between the two research communities’ led to choosing only some of the ‘most common topics in SEA’ (211). This would have been a particularly relevant review for the two more recent of the reviews commented in this article to have engaged. Their failure in doing so may be a sign that Roberts and Wallace were being excessively optimistic.

Nonetheless, this type of endeavour seems to be a worthwhile one. Given that specific topics seem to be attracting research from the mainstream accounting community, such as mandatory CSR reporting (Fiechter, Hitz, and Lehmann 2022) or carbon disclosure (Downar et al. 2021), literature reviews on these topics aiming at encouraging communications between the two communities may have beneficial impacts for both. In addition to this type of efforts, aware of the potential detrimental consequences of the dominance of mainstream accounting research on CSR-related issues for sustainability reporting standard-setting, SEA researchers could do more normative research on how SEA should be done (Brander 2022) and ‘to produce and promote their research that impacts’ standard-setting issues, as Thomson and Charnock (2022, 2) have called for regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change processes. As Rodrigue and Tregidga (2020, 158) recall, Rob Gray considered normative research as uttermost important ‘as a means to move ideas, people and transformation forward’. This must be the goal.

Regarding normative research, focusing on how SEA researchers can contribute to the development of how current sustainability reporting is made (in a monologic way) is a valuable endeavour. Yet, I would also suggest that SEA researchers could engage by doing normative research on external and dialogic accounting. Cho et al. (2018, 881) emphasise the importance of considering multiple voices in CSR-related reporting if it is to ‘foster a broader (and hopefully more complete?) portrayal of corporate activities’. But these voices express, more often than not, antagonistic interests and competing perspectives and it is extremely difficult to attend to them by way of common representations. Notwithstanding, maybe this is just what is necessary to establish some common, albeit temporary, ground between some of these voices (surely not all of them). Maybe this is just what is necessary to establish what some researchers, inspired in the work of Laclau and Mouffe, call ‘chains of equivalence’ (e.g. Brown 2009; George, Brown, and Dillard 2023). These chains are defined by George, Brown, and Dillard (2023, 23) as ‘alliances that link a range of democratic struggles together (e.g. those of workers, immigrants and environmentalists) to form a broader popular movement to oppose a dominant hegemony.’ ‘Could accountings help to articulate and communicate chains of equivalence’, ask Gallhofer and Haslam (2019, 13). I believe they can. However, this endeavour requires the creation of representations that focus on what is common between different voices.

Concerning the issue of producing and promoting research that impacts standard-setting issues, Charles Cho, Erica Pimentel and Yi Luo have put forward a number of ways in their contribution to ‘Opening accounting: a Manifesto’ (Alawattage et al. 2021, 239–240). They refer namely to ‘finding opportunities to engage with practitioners and policymakers in their field’ and to disseminate research through media such as social media and journalistic articles. Regarding the first way, I would like to emphasise the importance of engaging with standard-setters, for example, by submitting comment letters to standard-setting organisations. I submit as examples the ‘Open Letter regarding the IFRS Foundation’s Consultation Paper on Sustainability Reporting’ from Professors of Accounting researching Sustainability Accounting and Reporting (Adams et al. 2020) or Charles Cho’s comment letter regarding the same document (Cho 2020b).

These are only some of the avenues the SEA research community can embrace to ensure that the performative effects of literature reviews such as those reviewed in this commentary are not detrimental to our field and its underlying causes. Many other avenues most certainly exist: it is up to us to continue the discussion.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. Without their assistance, this paper would be much less clear and reasoned. The views expressed and any failings of the article remain the responsibility of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although this research is known to the readers of this journal as SEA research, in this note the term CRS(-related) research in accounting is the most often used one. Reasons for this include this term being the one used by three of the four literature reviews analyzed and being the term used by the majority of the most recent analyses of the new wave of such research by the mainstream accounting community (Cho et al. 2015; Cho 2020a; Patten 2013, 2020; Roberts 2018). Given that this paper also intends to engage with the readers of the reviews mentioned above and caution them regarding their biasedness, it seems appropriate to use this term. Other analyses use the term SEA research (Cho and Giordano-Spring 2015; Cho and Patten 2013; Parker 2005, 2014). Other alternatives to ‘CSR’ and ‘social and environmental’ are ‘sustainability’ and, ‘more fashionably ‘ESG (environmental social and governance)’’ (Cho 2020, 627).

2 Guthrie et al. (2019, 12) use the expression ‘North-American or North-American inspired journals’. The Journal of Accounting Literature (JAL), which was established in 1982 at the University of Florida and was published by this university in the period 1982–2012 and by Elsevier between 2013 and 2019, was until 2019 a North American-based journal. In 2022 (after two years of inactivity), after its acquisition by Emerald, it resumed its publication as part of Emerald’s Accounting & Finance collection. Although probably one cannot presently consider this journal a North American-based journal, in view of its long history as such, it is considered here a North American-inspired journal.

3 Charles Cho, Den Patten and Robin Roberts are prominent members of the Centre for Social and Environmental Research (CSEAR) North American community. Den Patten and Charles Cho feature in CSEAR’s web page as international associates and Cho is a member of the CSEAR council. For example, they all have been on the organizing committee and/or the scientific committee of the 8th CSEAR North America Conference (in 2022) and Cho and Roberts are in the organizing committee of the forthcoming 8th CSEAR North America Conference (to occur in June 20-21, 2024).

4 Noteworthily, the JCP publishes a great deal more of numbers per year compared to all the other journals. For example, in 2023 over 50 volumes were published.