Centre For Social And Environmental Accounting Research Research Articles

‘We Don’t Need No Thought Control’ – Rob Gray’s Fight Against ‘Indoctrination’ in Accounting Education

ABSTRACT I have written about Rob before – about his colossal influence on social and environmental accounting research and practice and his immense contribution to accounting academia more broadly. Not only did Rob establish the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) and Social and Environmental Accountability Journal (SEAJ), but he was instrumental in establishing the British Accounting and Finance Association (BAFA) and The British Accounting Review (BAR). For these reasons alone, there are probably thousands of accounting scholars across the world who have benefited enormously from Rob’s trailblazing achievements. In this contribution, I want to remember Rob for another significant aspect of his scholarship. More specifically, I want to remember Rob as an inspirational accounting educator – as someone who cared deeply about his students, his subject and his profession.

Raising our Collective Game: CSEAR Future(s)

The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) network is an international community of academics and practitioners engaging in social and environmental accounting scholarship. CSEAR has developed from a small number of UK-based researchers in 1991 to an international network of 246 members today from academia and practice. In 2012, the CSEAR Council initiated a review of CSEAR activities in an effort to discuss and develop future plans for the Centre based in St Andrews, Scotland, and activities across the world.This article describes the activities associated with two plenary sessions focused on discussing (1) the Future of the Field and (2) the Future of CSEAR, which were undertaken during the 25th CSEAR International Congress on Social & Environmental Accounting Research at St Andrews, held in September 2013. These activities aimed to create a space for Congress delegates to celebrate achievements, discuss challenges and imagine possibilities for the Network and the field of social and environmental accounting. The Futures sessions resulted in the endorsement of a Vision, Mission, Values Statement for CSEAR and are continuing to inform the plans by CSEAR Council and the broader CSEAR community to ‘raise our collective game’ in order to mobilise accounting scholarship to enable a more sustainable society.

Towards the Use of Action Research to Promote Sustainability

The purpose of this article is to discuss how action research might be utilized to enhance sustainability in organizational settings. While it has been argued that active engagement by researchers in implementing organizational change risks organizational capture, action research is a methodology that may be able to withstand organizational pressures, thus allowing researchers to implement sustainability practices from within organizations. The article summarizes the history and principles of action research. In addition, The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) is discussed as a case study of action research which seeks to further the goals of sustainability through its efforts on a worldwide basis.

Agonistic Pluralism and Imagining CSEAR into the Future

The recent success of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) specifically, and social and environmental accounting (SEA) generally, has been an occasion for both celebration and reflection. We celebrate the heightened level of interest and accomplishment while reflecting on how we can maintain this momentum into the future. How do we imagine CSEAR into a future that is informed, but not inhibited, by predispositions and past practices? We propose agonistic pluralism as providing useful insights into how we might sustain and enhance a pluralistic ethos within CSEAR. Agonistic pluralism suggests that consensus-oriented practices too often deny alternative viewpoints, obscuring unresolved contestation and masking power asymmetries. In proposing agonistic pluralism, our purpose is not to provide solutions but to suggest a heteroglossic rendering that creates space for those with divergent ideological orientations to imagine and debate CSEAR into the future. If CSEAR can sustain and enhance its pluralistic ethos, it can maintain its energising critical perspective and, thus, continue to be a source of ingenuity and energy to its members, the larger SEA community and beyond.