6 June 2023 - Workshop on the history of social and environmental accounting and of its precursors, fringe event of CSEAR France 2023
Call for submissions, deadline on April 30, 2023
This workshop is a complementary event to the CSEAR France 2023 congress, organised by the thematic groups 2 and 5 of the Association Francophone de Comptabilité. The call for contributions will be open from November onwards, so watch this site.
The dealine for submissions is April 30 2023. Evaluations will be sent back to you by May 6 2023. You are invited either to submit an extended abstract (3 000 words), or the first draft of a full paper. Make sure the fike is anonymous when submitting it.
Although it is still a young disciplinary field in comparison with the history of management and organisations, social and environmental accounting has been identified as a subject since the early 1970s, with a first article by Corcoran and Leininger (1970) on the reporting of environmental exchanges. The subject of corporate social responsibility, in which the development of social and environmental accounting takes place, is also relatively young, since the first article using the term dates from 1953 and concerned the social responsibility of the businessman (Bowen, 1953).
For the past 50 years, there has therefore been material with which to write a history of social and environmental accounting as an object in its own right (see for example Antheaume, 2018 for a history of social and environmental accounting in France).
However, social and environmental accounting was not born in a historical and conceptual vacuum. It is based on concepts that have their own history and that have contributed to its foundation (the notion of externality, the idea of circularity, the concept of the life cycle, the way in which the relationship between the economy and ecology is thought of).
Sometimes, old accounting techniques, especially in the field of agricultural accounting, are also still a source to which researchers in social and environmental accounting can return. We are therefore proposing a workshop on the history of social and environmental accounting, but also on the history of the concepts that have forged the discipline.
Contributions may include, but are not limited to
- The history of agricultural accounting and what it reveals about the way in which the relationship between human societies and nature was conceived;
- The concepts of natural capital and natural resources by studying their origins and the networks of thought that led to this concept
- A history of how ideas from other sciences 'travel' to accounting and how accounting takes them up
- The history of social and environmental accounting in one country
Following the workshops, Bernard Christophe, the first researcher to have defended a thesis in environmental accounting in France, will give a closing speech.
We will soon be inviting you to submit contribution proposals on this website. The workshop participants will be the people whose contributions have been selected, as well as the discussants.
Participants will have the opportunity to attend the CSEAR France events organised on the same day, outside of the workshop time and closing speech. This workshop and the closing speech will be open to all CSEAR France conference registrants.
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