The role of management accounting systems in sustainable and development strategies

Abstract

Abstract The cycle of corporate measures in line with consideration of apprehensions related to supportable progress and communal and environmental accountability broadens the constraint of routine measurement to take into justification social and environmental gauges. The role of management accounting, historically orientated toward the dimension of economic and financial performance, is consequently questioned in its capacity to evolve towards an integration of these standards into the dimension, management and performance reporting fashions. Environmental control Accounting may be understood as an extension of outmoded management accounting (Anthony 1988, Simons 1995) toward environmental control (Boiral 2007, Renaud 2009). Conversely, several pieces of research tend to indicate that, some distance from integration, we’d rather witness phenomena of loose coupling among monetary, environmental and social performance systems. Management accounting could then be refocused on management and reporting of economic and economic overall performance, even as different functions of the enterprise might be in charge of the social and environmental dimensions of overall performance. This can be seen as an instance of Brunsson’s (1989) thesis on organizational hypocrisy. The purpose of this paper is to look at the position of management accounting structures in sustainable and development techniques. Specifically, it is a concern of interrogating closely the speculation of a decoupling that would bring about the focusing of control accounting systems on the sole scope of financial and economic measures and reporting. The study will use a survey method of quantitative research to examine the impacts of the inclusion of environmental and social dimensions to the management accounting basic functions. It will engage workers of entities working in Lebanon. A survey will examine management accountants’ perceptions about the Environmental Management Accounting. The results will show the possibilities of actions of the environmental management accounting and the arbitration between financial priorities, environmental and social issues and will propose different configurations of environmental management accounting.