Rohani-Najafabadi, Solmaz (2015) Towards a critical understanding of the implementation of environmental accounting and discloure practices. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

By recognising Climate Change and man-made environmental problems as global issues of 21st century, human has increasingly started to ‘account’ for his environmental impacts by means of accounting-based practices and ‘report’ on his environmental performance via publishing Corporate Social Responsibility reports even though accounting’s potency in serving environmental spheres is criticised. This research, by drawing on Foucault’s ‘bottom-up’ approach of practice, studies ‘accounting as discourse and practice and in practice’ to investigate how and how far the ‘experience’ of implementing environmental accounting practices is made to happen.

In seeking to explore ‘what accounting is’ and ‘what accounting does’ where and when it plays role in generating environmental solutions or being part of environmental problem-solving, this study first begins with historical context to the emergence of ‘green’ discourses and practices of our ‘present’. An ethnographic fieldwork within two dissimilar organisational sites is also carried out through observing how implementation of environmental accounting practices is made to happen by subjects acting as Report Preparers (RPs) in process of composing CSRoriented reports.

This study sheds light on backstage of CSR-oriented reports to explore role and functioning of accounting wherever and whenever it shows environmental intervention. This study discovers that how ‘green accounting’ has emerged as a ‘trans-disciplinary’ knowledge-based technique with ‘green power’ and ‘truthrevealing’ performance in three possible ‘green roles’. It also shows that how RPs’ ways of thinking, acting, and strategising are shaped through their interplay with the forms of accounting that they are implementing, who are consequently constituted as ‘green ethical subjects’ that act on non-environmental actions of others. By demonstrating the ways in which practices of ‘naming and counting’ in conjunction with cost-benefit thinking and three interconnected issues of ‘Economy’, ‘Efficiency’, and ‘Effectiveness’ may enable management of man-made environmental problems, this study contributes to critical accounting and environmental accounting literature.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5601 Accounting
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Environmental auditing, Social responsibility of business, Natural resources -- Accounting, Environmental economics, Sustainable development, Organizational change -- Environmental aspects
Official Date:	August 2015
Dates:	Date Event August 2015 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Warwick Business School
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Frandsen, Ann-Christine ; Nicolini, Davide
Extent:	xii, 341 leaves : illustrations, charts
Language:	eng

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