A reassessment of the "open model" of social account proposed in the mid 1980s: are some insights still useful for the current social accounting debate?

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the discussion of a project of a social account model that was proposed by the Author in Italy in the mid 1980s’, when social accounting was experimenting a decline of interest in the international context. The social account proposal commented on here, is named “open model” (OM), because it mixes and adds many experiences and methods of calculus from new points of view, putting itself forward as a sort of theoretical guide to achieving an adequate accountability, avoiding both managerial capture (Owen et al. 2000) and preventing the collapse of social accounting’s credibility. It is true to say that the OM project in Italy met with the favourable opinion in general of many accounting scholars, above all because of the influence of the view of the firm in Economia aziendale (Contrafatto and Rusconi, 2005). The aim of this paper is to help scholars and practitioners to face the focal issues of modern day social accounting more rigorously, doing so above all by comparing OM with the current more diffused international (GRI and AA1000) standards: consideration will be given to the contrived strict separation of the Triple Bottom Line view, the role of quantitative/qualitative information; the role of social accounting in the accounting discipline and so on.