Reflecting on Recent History, Challenges and Scholarship Opportunities

ABSTRACT

This Editorial is not our regular overview of the year (it would be odd to do it so early in the year) but it accompanies a less ordinary issue of the Social and Environmental Accountability Journal (SEAJ). In the first issue of 2024, we feel privileged to have had the opportunity to curate a collection of polemic essays that comment, reflect on and critique recent events and developments of problematic nature: inopportune institutional associations with fossil fuels supporters (AAA collaboration with a Saudi Arabian petroleum and minerals university for the organization of a sustainability conference; the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 organized in a Middle East setting) and academic bigotry perpetuating in the new wave of CSR-related research in North America. In this brief Editorial, we first reflect ourselves on the SEAJ history and long-standing tradition to experiment with alternative publishing formats to provide space for engagement with emerging issues that matter for society and our community. We then introduce the collection of articles that form this issue, after which we end by discussing implications of our reflections for the future of social and environmental accounting (SEA)research.

1. Introduction

Social science scholars are often criticised for the time lag between events, their subsequent investigations and scientific publications. This is a consequence of the scientific process that has been in place for centuries. However, critical reflection and commentary on emerging issues, grand challenges or problematic behaviour also has an important part to play in social scientific scholarship. Distinctive to SEAJ (and its predecessors, Social Accounting Monitor and Social and Environmental Accounting Journal) is a tradition of publishing articles that contribute to this wider social and environmental accounting discourse with the intention to inform future research, engagement opportunities, the need for educational intervention, symbolic or direct activism. These essays, polemics, commentaries, rejoinders and review articles report on contemporary events, within and between different academic communities as well as developments in the socio-ecological systems within which our scholarship is entangled. For example, the recent SEAJ collection ‘Distinctiveness and novelty at the heart of SEAJ’¹ includes publications that complement the more conventional empirical studies and have impacted on social and environmental accountability scholarship.

SEAJ has and will continue to embrace alternative methodologies, innovative theoretical framings, different normative possibilities associated with sustainable transformations, promoting future research trajectories as well as calling out problematic scholarship as appropriate. For example, Branco (2024, in this issue) highlights a worrying trend of some scholars framing their research as new and innovative by not recognising previous work in social and environmental accountability and finance (see also Cho 2020; Cho et al. 2015). Challenge, criticism and provocation are legitimate parts of the scientific process, but denying the collective evidence from the peer reviewed findings of others is very rarely appropriate. This SEAJ tradition of constructive challenge, informed commentary, provocation and drawing attention to emerging ‘external’ events lies at the heart of the first issue of 2024. Collectively the authors report on their reflections and concerns on recent history, with the purpose to stimulate reflection, dialogue and action.

The contributions at the heart of this issue are symptomatic of the provocative scholarship we aim to promote in SEAJ. They are distinctive by their rapid response to recent events. These include the United Nations Climate Change Conference (otherwise known as COP28), which was held in November and December 2023 in Dubai, and the Accounting, Governance and Sustainability Conference organised by the American Accounting Association (AAA) for December 2023 in Dharan (now postponed to December 2024). The opportunity to curate this type of contemporary discussion, involving events less than two months ago at time of writing, is something that is normally out of reach of a scientific journal editor, given the longer lead times involved in the peer review process. However, in this issue all contributions have been reviewed by the editors, in line with our policy on commentary submissions. Whilst we would normally seek to provide a balance between this and more conventional peer-reviewed work in each issue, we felt that there was a clear justification in this case to leave the stage clear for commentary-type pieces. This issue has been curated in a way to give voice to scholars located in different parts of the planet, in the spirit of informing the transformative potential of meaningful social and environmental accountability research. Scholarships needs to be informed by the global and local challenges that form the existential realities of billions of humans, mammals, flora and fauna as well as the theories and empirical findings of others. Collectively, these contributions provide a fascinating insight into the ongoing state of our discipline, as well as its engagement with broader efforts to bring about sustainable transformation, including consideration of a global Southern perspective.

2. Introducing the Papers

Our issue begins with a fascinating piece by Gendron (2024) that explores the tensions arising from initiatives within the North American mainstream accounting research community to engage with the sustainability agenda. Prompted by his initial surprise at the ‘atypical’ announcement by the American Accounting Association (AAA) to host a sustainability accounting conference at a middle eastern oil & gas university, Gendron critically examines the AAA’s decision to associate itself with this institution. Highlighting the potential conflicts of interest involved, Gendron cleverly adopts precisely the same kind of instrumental signalling logic normally favoured by mainstream accounting scholars to argue that the AAA’s decision sends out an ‘awkward signal’ that seems difficult to justify.²

Senkl (2024) responds to the questions raised by Gendron by seeking to further open out these issues from pluralist agonistic and feminist perspectives. In doing so, she considers how sustainability is constructed by the AAA’s initiative in Saudi Arabia, highlighting how this raises important additional questions regarding gender equality, colonialist oppression, and indigenous and human rights. Senkl argues that unless it can provide space for authentic dialogue, mainstream accounting’s view of sustainability is symptomatic of a continuing identification with an ‘extractive mindset’ that is applied not only to hydrocarbons but to people and ideas.

The third contribution to this issue continues the theme of critically reflecting on mainstream accounting’s engagement with, and reconstruction of, sustainability. However, the focus switches to recent trends in the published work of the North American accounting community. Branco (2024) explores the emergence of literature reviews in the ‘new wave’ of CSR-related research produced by this community. Drawing on notions of performativity, Branco argues that these reviews have further reinforced the self-referential tendencies within this academic community and will continue to do so in the future. He concludes that such trends exacerbate the already incomplete and misleading state of this body of literature and suggests that it should be avoided by anyone seeking to become acquainted with sustainability accounting research for the first time.

Last but by no means least, our final contribution reflects on another very recent event in the Middle East: COP28. Lee, Channuntapipat, and Charnock (2024) offer a fascinating insight into climate negotiations from a south-east Asian perspective, drawing on their own experiences of working in Singapore and Thailand. In doing so, the authors highlight the overarching importance of social justice as the dominant frame through which climate initiatives must be justified. The commentary highlights the intricate problematics at play when climate justice should be considerate of issues related to the global scale of climate frameworks and respect for national sovereignty. Lee et al. also pose an array of provocative questions to our research community, which we hope will serve as a starting point for interesting research projects.

3. What is Ahead for SEA Community?

Having reflected on SEAJ history and tradition and introduced the papers in this issue, we now turn our attention to discuss the implications of these reflections for future developments in social, environmental accounting and accountability scholarship. While there is a recognition that SEA research is now vibrant, theoretically and methodologically diverse (see for example, Bebbington et al. 2021 and Laine, Tregidga, and Unerman 2021), we believe there is further potential for different forms of scholarly engagement with these and other contemporary challenges. Lee, Channuntapipat, and Charnock (2024, in this issue) is inspirational in their discussion of climate change from a social justice angle that is topical in many non-Western settings, while Senkl’s (2024, in this issue) essay is powerful in connecting discourses of sustainability with the creation of social boundaries and exclusions. Further to these insightful discussions, we believe there is much work to be done with developments such as Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, the Degrowth movement and other examples of sustainable consumption activism. Calls for engagement with organisations (Adams and Larrinaga 2007; 2019; Correa, Laine, and Larrinaga 2023) and normative research (Brander 2022) are nothing new to SEA scholarship, but we would like to encourage contributions on the many other global and local challenges that have not yet formed part of SEA scholarship.

SEAJ is interested to provide a space for discussion of a diversity of forms of engagement with the world of practice and highlight a few of these possibilities. One is policy and standard setting processes, where academics participation has been rather marginal and to some extent ignored by the scholarly community. This issue does raise concerns over the relative invisibility of prior social and environment accountability and accounting research. Addressing this academic, practice and policy invisibility is an important challenge for this journal and for wider social and environmental accounting scholarship. There are encouraging signs of academics’ increasing appetite to meaningful engage with regulatory bodies such as EFRAG or ISSB, or international regulatory spaces of negotiation such as COP, although we do not underestimate the challenges of doing so. We are keen to publish research reports on the regulatory processes pertaining to sustainability accounting, reporting and assurance. Most importantly, we wish to provide a platform to disseminate academics’ experiences, positive and negative, with these forms of engagement. Lee, Channuntapipat, and Charnock (2024) is an exemplary piece of work in this respect, providing a close-up look into the intricate workings of climate negotiations and, most importantly, serving as inspiration for how academics can reach out to significant issues of our time.

A second area of interest arising from our reflections of articles in this issue relates to the possibility of academic activism (Samkin 2023; Thomson 2014) including academic interventions into processes that appear to be perpetuating unsustainable policies, processes and practice. As Gendron’s commentary in this issue showcases, engagement emerges organically when constant sensitivity to apparently minor facts is coupled with vigilant scholarly consideration of issues that matter for the health of the planet and its inhabitants. Honouring its roots, SEAJ aims to remain open to those wishing to voice concerns on derisory, inadequate or perplexing developments in academia, organisations and elsewhere.

Hardly any day passes without news concerning the state of the natural environment or the many social issues and challenges our society faces. Unlike some decades back, a quick glance through the (online) pages of a newspaper promptly exposes storylines of failed corporate sustainability initiatives, violations of human rights, recurring ecological incidents and endemic greenwashing. Despite the limitations of certain social media platforms, digital technologies provide almost real-time transparency on the activities and impacts of a network of international institutions involved in sustainability governance. Enhanced accountability creates more opportunities for critical investigation and engagement, and when interactions are dialogic in nature, opportunities emerge for knowledge creation (Bebbington et al. 2007), emerging from an inclusive collective effort (Correa and Larrinaga 2015).

We hope you will enjoy this issue and find inspiration in the passionate engagement of its contributors with matters of interest for us and society.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 The collection is available online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/reaj20/collections/heart_of_SEAJ.

2 In the name of fairness, we reached out to AAA executives and offered space in this issue to accommodate an official reply to Gendron’s polemic piece. All our attempts did not come to fruition, unfortunately. We wish to express special thanks to Yves Gendron and Michelle Rodrigue (former Joint Editor of SEAJ) for all their efforts in this respect.