Social accounting research: An Australasian perspective
As background to this paper, in 2005 one of the authors of this paper (Deegan) was kindly asked by Professor Rob Gray of the University of St. Andrews (and notably also of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research which is now housed at the University of St. Andrews) whether there would be interest in contributing a chapter to a book that was being prepared in honour of the 2005 retirement of Professor Martin Reginald Mathews (Reg) (Gray, 2007). Given Reg’s contribution to the area of social and environmental accounting – particularly the generous assistance he provides to ‘up-and-coming’ researchers – there was immediate interest in contributing a chapter. This paper represents an extended analysis and discussion of the data relative to that included within this earlier chapter.1
The topic initially provided by Rob Gray for the book in honour of Reg Mathews, and the topic thereafter embraced for this paper is ‘Social Accounting Research—an Australasian perspective’. There are obviously various ways a topic like this could be addressed but after some deliberation it was decided that a number of research questions could be addressed under the umbrella of the topic. Specifically, the issues addressed in the earlier chapter, and subsequently in this paper, are as follows:
1. What presence internationally have Australasian accounting academics had in social accounting research?2
2. What has been the focus of the Australasian social accounting research?
3. What is the level of concentration in Australasian social accounting research? That is, is there a broad or narrow group of individuals involved in the research activity?
To answer the above questions, a review was be made of the papers being published in a number of leading international accounting journals. This review in turn allowed us to also address the following additional question:
4. Which accounting journals appear relatively more likely to publish social accounting research?
2. Research method
In answering the above research questions it was necessary to identify a number of international accounting research journals which were likely to publish social accounting research. This is an interesting task as some journals tend to emphasise particular areas of research, to the possible exclusion of others. Further, and somewhat obviously, different journals will vary in terms of the perceived quality of their published articles. If we are going to commence our analysis by considering ‘high quality’ accounting research as it relates to social accounting research then perhaps we start our search by looking at what might be considered ‘high quality’ accounting journals. Determining quality in this context is not necessarily a straight forward exercise, but one starting point is to review various published studies that have attempted to identify which journals are deemed – typically by virtue of a sample of accounting academics – to be of the highest quality across the broad discipline of accounting (rather than specifically in relation to social accounting research). Such studies include Lowe and Locke (2005), Brown (2003), Ballas and Theoharakis, 2003 A. Ballas and V. Theoharakis, Exploring diversity in accounting through faculty journal perceptions, Contemporary Accounting Research 20 (2003) (4), pp. 619–644. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (24)Ballas and Theoharakis (2003), and Johnson, Reckers, and Solomon (2002). However, Bonner, Hesford, Van der Stede, and Young (2007) provide a summary of 16 articles that have ranked academic accounting journals – including those just listed – and whilst the 16 articles use different methods to rank journals, according to Bonner et al., five journals rank consistently within the various studies as being within the ‘top’ international accounting research journals—these ‘top 5’ journals being Accounting Organizations and Society (AOS), Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR), Journal of Accounting and Economics (JAE), Journal of Accounting Research (JAR), and The Accounting Review (TAR).3
As part of our research method we then reviewed the contents of these five journals over an 11-year period (1995–2006) to identify the individual articles that addressed issues under the broad gamut of ‘social accounting research’. This period was arbitrarily chosen, but is long enough to provide an insight into patterns of social accounting research publications. For the purpose of this research, ‘social accounting research’ was deemed to cover the following themes:
• reviews of organisational social and environmental (and ‘triple bottom line’, and ‘sustainability’) reporting, including analysis of the motivations and determinants to report;
• stakeholder (inclusive of ‘market’) reactions to the disclosure of social and environmental information;
• discussions or commentaries about new systems of accounting designed to incorporate social and/or environmental performance;
• focussed discussion about the role of accounting in specifically promoting, or undermining, the environment and/or particular stakeholders within society;
• social and environmental audits;
• development of theories to explain or inform social accounting practice;
• discussion of method and methodological issues associated with social accounting research.4
We found that within the sample of ‘high quality’ journals (the ‘top 5’), apart from AOS, there was an absence of social accounting research. We will address the possible reasons and implications of this in our results section. Hence, in terms of our research method, it became clear that confining our research to the ‘top quality’ journals (as perceived through the various surveys of ‘accounting’ research in general) was not going to yield great insights into the research efforts of Australasian social accounting researchers. Perhaps rather than considering journal ‘quality’ in a broad manner that supposedly encapsulates accounting research in general, a more informed approach would be to determine whether a specific effort has already been made by other researchers to determine the ‘best place’ to find social accounting research in particular. One leading ‘hub’ for social accounting research is The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting (CSEAR) at the University of St. Andrews, as discussed above, which is arguably the leading international centre for research into social and environmental accounting. CSEAR’s website (see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/management/csear/) provides a ‘Journals Guide’ for people interested in reviewing social accounting research.
Our review therefore incorporated those journals included in the CSEAR ‘Journals Guide’, and these were: Accounting Education; Accounting Forum; Accounting, Organizations and Society; Accounting Auditing and Accountability Journal; Business Strategy and the Environment; Critical Perspectives on Accounting; European Accounting Review; and Journal of Business Ethics.
All the journals identified by CSEAR were known to the authors as journals that do publish social and environmental accounting research and were journals that were typically referred to by the authors when undertaking their own research. To this list was added a number of Australasian-based journals, specifically Accounting and Finance which is the journal of the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (AFAANZ)—the largest accounting academic association by membership within Australasia, and the Australian Accounting Review. For additional international coverage, British Accounting Review and Accounting and Business Research were also added to the sample on the basis of a view that they were also thought to have published social accounting research.
Tags: social accounting