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Current Trends within Social and Environmental Accounting Research:

A Literature Review.

Chung, Jieun¹Cho, Charles H.²
Accounting Perspectives. Jun2018, Vol. 17 Issue 2, p207-239. 33p.
主题语:
*ENVIRONMENTAL auditing
*ENVIRONMENTAL compliance
*COMPLIANCE auditing
*ENVIRONMENTAL policy
ENVIRONMENTAL reporting
关键字:
Corporate social responsibility (CSR)
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG)
Social and environmental accounting (SEA)
Sustainability
Comptabilité sociale et environnementale
Cotes environnementales et sociales et cotes de gouvernance
Développement durable
Responsabilité sociale de l'entreprise

Abstract: Given the recent rise in the evolution and maturity of social and environmental accounting (SEA) research and scholarship, we provide a literature review of the current trends within this area in a concise and harmonized manner for a wider audience in academia and practice. More specifically, we visit the current state of scholarly work, which can be useful in facilitating future research questions and further development of SEA research associated with relations between corporate social performance (CSP), corporate social disclosure (CSD), and corporate financial performance (CFP). Our goal is to offer insights to the current state of SEA research that is informative to both novice and expert SEA scholars, with the hope to promote and stimulate further advancement of research in this particular area. Drawing knowledge from relevant disciplines such as accounting, management, finance, and economics, this article visits the current trends within SEA research in terms of definition, research topics, theoretical viewpoints, methodological approaches, as well as suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been in existence for a relatively long time, but the most noticeable developments have occurred in the past 20 years. As society became more aware of environmental and social issues such as global warming, endangered wildlife, and sweatshops, we observed changes in the role of corporations and a significant increase in “social responsibility” and “sustainability” at the organizational level, engaging in a partnership with societal stakeholders (Blowfield and Murray, [21] : 117–23). The ethical principle of CSR touches upon various parts of a business. According to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada ([88] ), CSR assists in “supporting operational efficiency gains; improved risk management; favourable relations with the investment community and improved access to capital; enhanced employee relations; stronger relationships with communities and an enhanced license to operate; and improved reputation and branding.”

As in the traditional business model, accounting plays an important role in CSR and its development. Specific to the accounting field and profession, some of those advancements include the issuance of the first Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines in 2000 (GRI, [74] ), and the initiation and expansion of services offered by accounting firms regarding climate change and sustainability services (Garforth, [72] ). The area of social and environmental accounting (SEA) encompasses various branches of research — management accounting research for social and environmental issues; accounting for sustainable development; accounting for human rights and biodiversity; social accountability; relations between corporate social performance (CSP), corporate social disclosure (CSD), and corporate financial performance (CFP). Given the popularity and maturity of the academic research involving the latter research sub‐theme, we provide a literature review of this specific branch of “SEA research”[2] for a wider audience, ranging from novice to expert SEA scholars. In particular, we examine the current state of scholarly work which can be useful in facilitating future research questions and further development of SEA research associated with relations between CSP, CSD, and CFP.

Nowadays, corporate sustainability and CSR constitute an integral part of modern day business and their importance have become undeniable. This is partly illustrated by the issuance of annual stand‐alone sustainability or CSR reports by the majority of large and influential corporations today, in addition to their annual reports and financial statements (KPMG, [96] ). A content analysis of the top 100 U.S. retailers’ corporate websites revealed that most companies had CSR integrated into their mission statement or had a separate statement for CSR (Lee and Fairhurst, [102] ). Investors can monitor sustainability performance of a given company through the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) or The Financial Time Stock Exchange's FTSE4Good, and there are several portfolios of socially responsible investments (SRI) actively traded in the market. According to the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (2016), SRI in the U.S. totaled 8.72 trillion U.S. dollars at the start of 2016, which represents a 14‐fold increase since 1995.

The emergence of CSR as a key societal concern and the costs borne by firms that deceive their stakeholders on CSR‐related issues can be illustrated with the two following cases. First, a photo of a young boy sewing a Nike football triggered intense publicity in the late 1990s (Wazir, [163] ). However, the Nike scandal involving sweatshop workers in southeast Asian factories did not have a severe impact on the company's financial position at the time. The decrease in financial and market performance in the late 1990s was blamed on the Asian financial crisis, and despite speculations, there was no empirical evidence that the decline in financial performance was directly associated with the mistreatment of factory workers (BBC News, [15] ; Boje, [22] ; Mocciaro Li Destri, [119] : 125–26). Nonetheless, Nike was heavily criticized by the public, and the company had to exert great effort to ensure that the wage issues in their overseas factories were rectified (Cushman, [50] ; Nisen, [126] ). Twenty years later, when the well‐known automotive company Volkswagen violated the Clean Air Act in 2015, its stock price plunged almost 30 percent in a matter of days as a direct consequence (La Monica, [99] ). While the speed of information has improved drastically since the 1990s through advancements in technology, CSR is no longer solely an issue of bad publicity — there are now financial consequences clearly linked to CSR activities.

As illustrated in the anecdotal evidence above, CSR evolved into a crucial part of conducting a business, and as a response to the rising interest (and concerns) from society for environmental and social issues, the number of academic research published on the topic increased exponentially. Historically speaking, the first round of breakthrough in CSR research development occurred in 1970 when Committee for Economic Development conducted an original study on CSR (Lee, [103] ). Nevertheless, the notion of ethical and social obligations of business entities had become known much earlier (Bowen, [23] ). But while the initial research by Bowen ([23] ) recognized the existence of the ethical and social responsibilities of a corporation, it remained relatively abstract and with some level of uncertainty around the concept. The attempt to link firm performance with CSR started in the 1970s, and since then, CSR and its relationship to financial performance and economic consequences has progressed into an emerging area of research over time.

Scope of the Literature Reviewed

Following the literature review continuum proposed by Massaro, Dumay, and James ([112] ), we implemented some rules to define the scope and purpose of this article. First, with the recent rise (and “rediscovery”) of CSR in “mainstream” accounting research (Cho and Patten, [38] ; Roberts, [145] ), the main aspects discussed in this article are limited to the relations among CSP, CSD, and CFP in publicly traded companies. We argue that it is reasonable to confine the scope of review to those large public corporations, as they initiated the disclosure and societal awareness of CSR activities and performance (Buhr and Gray, [28] ). Partly based on the methods suggested by Massaro et al. ([112] ), we searched for a mixture of keywords presented below on Google Scholar.[3]

Not so long ago, SEA research was considered to belong outside the so‐called “mainstream” domain or “major area” of accounting research. However, the recent explosion of socially and environmentally responsible awards, certifications, investments, and portfolio indices has recently caught the attention of financial market researchers. Furthermore, during that time — when corporate sustainability amalgamated into a component of every firm's business model — SEA research also started to capture the interest of a broader group of academics. To illustrate, a keyword search of various terms including, yet not limited to, “CSR,” “corporate social responsibility,” “sustainability,” “environmental accounting,” and “CSR disclosure” in journals affiliated with the American Accounting Association (AAA) (see ) published between 2000 and 2017 generated approximately 30–280 matches, albeit with many duplicate results — and we noted that the majority of the publications occurred in the current decade. For instance, the keyword “sustainability” resulted in 279 articles, with 208 of them published after the year 2010. We concede that these numbers represent a small portion of the SEA research universe as tens of thousands of matches were found using more specific phrases such as “sustainability + accounting,” and “corporate social responsibility + accounting” on Google Scholar; however, we also argue that this represents a significant development considering that the same set of keywords resulted in less than 10 matches in total between 1970 and 1999 for the same group of journals affiliated with the AAA. Moreover, despite the increased attention from the mainstream accounting researchers, their scope of the CSR literature appears to be (much) narrower than the reality of the SEA field. For instance, the articles in The Accounting Review's 2012 Special Forum on CSR research in accounting omitted a vast number of references to existing scholarly work in SEA, and also seemed to be unaware of the existing SEA research journals other than “theirs” (Cho and Patten, [38] ; Roberts, [145] ).

Given this awkwardness in SEA research and scholarship, as well as the evolution and maturity of this topic, we provide a literature review of SEA research related to CSP, CSD, and CFP, in a concise and harmonized manner for a wider audience in academia and practice. The so‐called “mainstream” research mainly involves publicly available archival financial data for quantitative analyses, and research questions regarding these tri‐factors are prevalent. In order to narrow the gap and to encourage communications between the two research communities, we chose some of the most common topics in SEA.

Second, we review articles published between 2000 and 2017, inclusively. As previously mentioned, the most noticeable developments in CSR occurred in the past 20 years or so. Since this article focuses on the relations between CSP, CSD, and CFP in public companies, we set the starting point of the literature covered immediately around the period where the GRI, DJSI, and FTSE4Good were launched as these initiatives are largely relevant in this subdivision of SEA research. In addition, we are aware of several literature reviews on SEA research. For example, Huang and Watson ([85] ) review CSR research published in accounting journals, but only cover articles from the top 13 accounting journals in the recent decade. Gray and Laughlin ([77] ) focus on a critical review of SEA research. Some literature reviews focus on certain areas within CSR research, such as CSR assurance (Simnett and Vanstraelen, [150] ), environmental disclosure (Berthelot and Cormier, [19] ), and social and environmental reporting (Gray and Kouhy, [76] ). Our article aims to complement the existing literature reviews to contribute to the body of knowledge in the field without being repetitive. Its objective is to offer insights to the current state of SEA research that is informative to both novice and expert SEA scholars, with the hope to promote and stimulate further advancement of research in this particular area. To this end, and because it is increasingly common to see SEA academics cross publish their works in multiple disciplines, we expand the scope of journals covered by embracing a variety of journals in accounting, and by drawing knowledge from other related disciplines in business such as management, finance, and economics. In order to be harmonious yet concise, we include some seminal papers by the veterans, and “standing on the shoulders of giants” (Massaro et al., [112] ), we gather additional scholarly works that cite or base their foundation on such research, to provide insights to the current trends in a cohesive manner. Whenever possible, findings from multiple perspectives are discussed to illustrate a theoretical tension, and to achieve comprehensiveness. The number of citations was the main guideline for identifying “giants” in the groups of literature examined. Ideally, the search results should be sorted by the number of times an article was cited. However, Google Scholar makes it only possible to sort the search results by either relevance of the keywords used for a particular inquiry, or by dates published.[4] It is worth noting that the number of times an article is cited also depends on the exposure of the journal (i.e., impact factor), seniority or fame of the author(s), and the date published. Therefore, we had to exercise a certain degree of professional judgment when identifying the articles reviewed. Once a well‐known paper was identified and reviewed, we were able to view other publications citing the article (this information is available by clicking a “Cited by” link provided on Google Scholar results, or following a customized link provided by the journal's website). The title and abstract of those articles were then scanned, and subsequently examined based on the relevance to this literature review. In total, 137 papers from academic and practitioners’ journals, 17 websites and news articles, 10 books and book chapters, a conference paper, and a working paper were reviewed for this paper. While do not claim the literature reviewed in this article to be exhaustive, we do attempt to provide a systematic view of the focused area of SEA, by not limiting the journal titles.

The rest of this article will (re)visit the current trends in SEA research in terms of definition, research topics, tensions between competing theoretical viewpoints, methodologies applied in SEA research, as well as suggestions for future research.

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