Sustainability + Accounting Education: The Elephant in the Classroom

Abstract

Despite the growing importance of sustainability and the sustainable development agenda, and despite the growing presence of papers recognising the critical interaction between sustainability and accounting and finance (and, indeed, with all social science), there has been a relatively muted response apparent within the accounting education literature itself. This relative lack of literature may well be unexpected but what is not unexpected is the difficulty that accounting and finance teachers have in developing such demanding new ideas with accounting and finance students in the classroom. Without in any sense gainsaying the considerable impediments to innovation, this explicitly polemical essay seeks to address a more fundamental difficulty: that of the way in which sustainability is approached and represented in both the literature and the classroom itself. The contention is that, unless sustainability is ‘keeping you awake at night’, you do not understand it. The paper seeks to support this contention and then offers an example of one undergraduate course that is explicitly designed to stop students sleeping peacefully.

Keywords:

• Sustainability
• social and environmental accounting
• disturbance
• imagination
• conflict
• cognitive dissonance

Acknowledgements

I am pleased to acknowledge the early helpful suggestions from Neil Marriott, Ian Thomson and Sue Gray. Additional comments from the participants at the BAFA Special Interest Group on Accounting Education Conference, Winchester, May 2011, and especially those from Alan Sangster and Ursula Lucas are very much appreciated. The guidance and stimulation of two anonymous reviewers is gratefully acknowledged, as is the help from Ian Thomson in bringing the paper to fruition.

Notes

At least the quotation is widely attributed to Burke, although a range of scholars suggest that the exact quotation cannot be found.

This is an assertion, but one which is consistent with the continuing presence of journals such as Accounting Education: an international journal, Issues in Accounting Education, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Management Education. Equally, there is a rich literature of education papers in a range of more generalist journals in accounting, finance and management. The emergence of initiatives such as the UK's Higher Education Academy also speaks to this claim.

I seek to support this contentious assertion later in the paper.

For the sake of simplicity, we can assume here that accounting profit represents the market-based goal of the corporation, especially those for which shares are traded in financial markets. It is fully recognised that this over-simplifies the assumed motivation and goals of the organisation and that the ubiquity of the business case is a very much more complex issue. This, however, is a matter beyond the scope of the present paper.

There is an interesting irony that such observation might suggest that the sort of courses I will advocate are impossible and, more specifically, that the types of courses I teach may be threatened. The irony lies in the probable explanation that, as the students to whom the course is delivered are largely privileged and well-connected, they can be allowed to engage in seditious enquiry; somebody needs to know what the real issues are.

This matter includes the obvious statement that there are a potentially infinite number of ways in which a species and a planet might coexist and therefore in which sustainability might be defined. Perceptions and dominance of a Western notion of what this entails are also illuminating (Collins and Kearins, 2010).

The purpose of this is to offer a challenge to evidence-free claims of powerful and competing discourses. Brutally, a lack of a drink of water for one's child or an inability to protect that child against rape are not (at least in my world) discourse categories (Gray, 2010).

I acknowledge this particular derivation of the Brundtland definition from Kelly and Alam (2009, p. 30). Conventionally, sustainable development is a process through which the state of sustainability might be achieved.

For a digest of related and stimulating but largely depressing nuggets of statistics and data see www.gatt.org/. The page purports to be a WTO site but in all probability it is not!

It does seem clear that life satisfaction and well-being do not increase with economic measures and social cohesion declines with inequality (Jackson, 2009).

Save the Children argued that 1.6 million children in the UK live in ‘severe poverty’ (Guardian, 23 February 2011, p. 16).

Such data can be misleading, not just in that the amount is so small but it can disguise its susceptibility to (mainly) food price rises: something which became acute in 2010/2011 and, according to the World Bank, dragged a further 40 million into real poverty. Larry Elliott, ‘World bank warns of threat of soaring food prices’, Guardian, 16 February 2011, p. 23.

There is a lovely aphorism that states that ‘the root of all human mistakes, [is] people putting things right, before they have finished finding out what is wrong’. Quoted by Neal Acherson, Observer, 20 March 2011, p. 41.

http://www.accountingforsustainability.org/home/

In addition, of course, there are a range of excellent support sources, of which the stimulating and lively Higher Education Academy's Education for Sustainable Development project on www.heacademy.ac.uk/esd is well worthy of note.

Examples of the analogues included the immediate sustainability of the enterprise itself and assumptions that (for example) eco-efficiency, win-win opportunities and technological investment are sufficient to deliver a sustainable future. I remain entirely unaware of any evidence to this effect and there is legion evidence that counters it.

See Quinn, Gaughran and Burke (2009) for a development of this case into engineering education.

For illustration, see Walck (2009); Rusinko and Sama (2009); Clark (2010); Rusinko (2010); Rowe and Wehrmeyer (2010), Wilhelm (2008); Springett (2005); Christensen et al. (2007); Thomas (2005); Kearins and Springett (2003); Bergeå et al. (2006); Starik et al. (2010); Shrivastava (2010) and see Rands and Starik (2009) for more detail.

It is hardly scientific but nevertheless illustrative that the last two publishers’ catalogues I consulted, Sage Business and Management and Oxford Business and Economics, had no reference to sustainability or sustainable development at all, and the Sage one had no reference to environmental issues either.

That is exploring the steps through which an innovation was introduced and the processes that supported it and emerged from it.

I am grateful to one of the anonymous referees for this term. I have been unable to trace down the origins or even the full meanings of the term but in trying to do so I have engaged with a range of challenging work that forces me to ask what I think I am trying to do with these young people. In a sense, the referee has engaged in precisely this phenomenology of disruption.

Trivial examples are useful here. Students believe themselves to be responsible and committed to sustainable development but go shopping on a weekly basis and throw perfectly good stuff away. Students only have two feet but have n pairs of shoes. Somebody is ‘causing’ unsustainability, and it is probably not just the poor people.

The most prominent being that corporations can be responsible, sustainable and profitable. There is no evidence for this unless one defines these terms in very trivial ways.

These topics still do not encourage ‘banking’ (Thomson and Bebbington, 2004), but recognise that different students have different capacities for intellectual discomfort and cognitive dissonance. For some, making an intellectual choice is exceptionally disturbing. The students at least learn that there are implied consequences to that inability.

Examples of these include: five-minute reviews of articles; presentation of the group project; bring a list of three things that annoy, excite or confuse you; and – the most successful if exhausting – dialectic very small group work.

Incidentally, one interesting (and initially unexpected) theme that emerges every year in the course is that a substantial minority of students want ‘solutions’. This is, of course, admirable and something to be sought, but only when we know what problem we are seeking to solve. As a consequence, more of the module is spent trying to identify the parameters of the ‘problem’ than is spent offering solutions. Some students are frustrated by this; I try to use that frustration.

I introduce them early on to my version of John Keats’ Negative Capability: ‘I believe absolutely in X whilst accepting without reservation that not-X may be the case’. This seems to help!