Crawford Spence

Social and environmental reporting and hegemonic discourse

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the construction/reproduction of capitalist discourse through social and environmental reporting (SER) and, from this, to consider the implications that this may have for the function that SER serves. Design/methodology/approach - The paper employs the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe to frame SER as a hegemonic practice. Laclau and Mouffes discourse theory is also used as a lens by which to interpret the findings of an empirical study exploring managerial perceptions of SER motivations and organisational-socio-environmental interactions. Findings - The paper finds that both SER and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are driven by numerous motivations, although these motivations essentially form part of a business case. In turn, the necessity of this business case appears to shape and constrain the ideologies that underpin and are communicated through SER. Research limitations/implications - The debate within the SER literature around which set of motivations best explains the existence of SER is challenged here by the notion that the vast majority of these motivations may be understood as falling into some sort of business case. Moreover, this business case is one that constrains the perceived function of practices such as SER and CSR. One limitation of the study relates to the importance of SER in wider processes of ideology construction and dissemination. SER may be peripheral in this regard. Practical implications - A practical implication of this paper is the recognition of the structural and ideological impediments to fuller accountability that are faced by corporate managers. Originality/value - The paper explores SER combining both critical theory and qualitative fieldwork. It is one of very few papers to interpret SER explicitly through the lens of discourse theory.

Social disclosure, legitimacy theory and the role of the state

Purpose - The principal objective of this paper is to expand the scope of legitimacy theory (LT) through a detailed analysis of the links that exist between the legitimising strategies of firms and the characteristics of the political environment in which they are developed. Designs/methodology/approach - A discourse analysis was performed on the social and environmental disclosure (SED) of a multinational in the automotive sector with an established presence in Spain, in the context of the relational dynamics between the firm/society/state. Different channels of information were compared to capture both the official discourse as represented in the annual reports of the multinational and the discourse of employees and the State as represented in the media. Findings - The results of the research show that the firm under study used SED strategically to legitimise a new production process through the manipulation of social perceptions, and that this strategy was supported implicitly and explicitly through ideological alignment with the State. Research limitations/implications - Despite a widely-held assumption of a pluralist political context, the State is presented here as aligning itself with corporate management as opposed to the welfare concerns of employees. Thus, future research calling for regulation of SED should preface such calls with consideration of the orientation of the State. Originality/value - In contrast with the dominant approach to LT that considers the relationship of the firm with its stakeholders, the present study widens the scope of LT to consider the interplay between firm legitimating strategies and state support for such strategies.

Being a Successful Professional: An Exploration of Who Makes Partner in the Big 4

Accepted by Yves Gendron. We would like to thank seminar participants at both the United Arab Emirates University and Newcastle University for comments on previous versions of this paper. Additionally, Michel Magnan and Glenn Rioulx were both particularly helpful in facilitating interviews for the Canadian branch of the study, as well as in offering general advice at the outset. The financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is also warmly acknowledged. The detailed comments offered on each of the papers various iterations by Yves Gendron and two anonymous reviewers are greatly appreciated. Any remaining errors are our own.

An exploration of the professional habitus in the Big 4 accounting firms

The meaning of professionalism is changing, with the commercial pressures of globalization exerting dramatic pressures on the nature of professional work and the skill sets required of professionals. This article engages with this debate by reporting on a qualitative, empirical study undertaken in a domain that has been largely neglected by sociology: professional accounting. Focusing on the elite ‘Big 4’ accounting firms, the ways in which partners and other senior accountants embody institutional logics into their habitus are analysed. It is shown that the embodiment of different logics is inextricably linked to the establishment of hierarchy within the Big 4, with a commercial-professional logic accorded a significantly higher status than a technical-professional logic. Further, the article responds to critics of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, highlighting how habitus does not merely denote the passive internalization of external structures, but is also capable of disembodying constraining institutional logics, thereby highlighting scope for professional self-determination.

Towards a more systematic study of standalone corporate social and environmental: An exploratory pilot study of UK reporting

1 This paper relates to work undertaken for the ICAEW’s Information for Better Markets Conference in December 2005. Their financial support is gratefully acknowledged. 2 Without wishing to be either comprehensive or exclusive we are thinking particularly of the work of Carol Adams, Geoff Frost and Jeffrey Unerman here. Introduction We need no reminding of the considerable growth in (principally) voluntary social and environmental disclosure by (typically) the larger corporations over the last 15 years or so. As a few minutes with the SEAJ Reviews section of the CSEAR website will confirm, this growth has been accompanied by an equally significant growth in research into the phenomenon. A considerable proportion of this literature has been based upon corporate disclosures made in annual reports – and for all the usual reasons. It is unlikely that we have reached the end of productive analyses of annual report disclosures but it is probably the case that other, non-annual report, disclosures are of increasing importance. Increasing use of the web is attracting substantive research enquiry and we are hearing more calls for us to cast the disclosure net wider and/or to undertake archive work. However, it is with the “stand alone” reports: the free-standing (and typically but not exclusively hard copy) variously entitled reports (see below) we will focus upon in this short paper. In the years since 1990 (the year Norsk Hydro, British Airways and Noranda first produced stand alone reports) the rise in the number of voluntary standalone reports has been astonishing. (Astonishing, not least, in that nobody predicted (as far as we are aware) this growth or its longevity). Data from organisations such a Corporate Register, SustainAbility, TruCost and KPMG suggest that something in the region of 1500 standalone reports – including both web and hard copy – are produced annually in the world. The data also suggests that the upward trend in the number of organisations reporting which we have observed until now is beginning to flatten off. Equally, data is fairly unequivocal that the quality of the reports (other than perhaps those of the very best organisations) has risen little and, currently, shows little sign of doing so. Enthusiasm for the arrival of the standalones was, in all probability, fuelled by the apparent openness of some of the early reporting pioneers. This led, in turn, to a considerable (personal) optimism about the democratic potential for the initiative of voluntary social and environmental reporting. Indeed, the triple bottom line – for all its flaws – looked like a real possibility for a while. The flattening off of the numbers reporting, the failure to improve the quality of the reports plus the lack of any apparent widespread will amongst the corporate sector and its worker bees to seriously embrace accountability, transparency, social responsibility or sustainability leaves us much less excitable. We find ourselves with a body of data in the

Global ends, local means: Cross-national homogeneity in professional service firms

An expanding institutionalist literature on professional service firms (PSFs) emphasizes that these are ridden by contradictions, paradoxes and conflicting logics. More specifically, literature looking at PSFs in a global context has highlighted how these contradictions prevent firms from becoming truly global in nature. What it takes to make partner in the Big 4 is at the core of such interrogations because partners belong to global firms yet are promoted at the national level. We undertake a cross-country comparison of partner promotion processes in Big 4 PSFs in Canada, France, Spain and the UK. Synthesizing existing institutionalist work with Bourdieusian theory, our results suggest that PSFs in different countries resemble each other very closely in terms of the requirements demanded of their partners. Although heterogeneity can be observed in the way in which different forms of capital are converted into each other, we show there is an overall homogeneity in that economic capital hurdles are the most significant, if not the sole, set of criteria upon which considerations of partnership admissions are based.

Resonance tropes in corporate philanthropy discourse.

This paper explores corporate charitable giving disclosures in order to question the extent to which corporations can claim that their philanthropy activities are charitable at all. Exploration of these issues is carried out by means of a tropological analysis that focuses on the different linguistic tropes within the philanthropy disclosures of 52 companies, namely metaphor and synecdoche. The results reveal a number of complex and contradictory things. Primarily, the master metaphor of ‘altruism’ projected by the corporate disclosures is ideologically at odds with the more business case-oriented discourse that shapes the disclosures. This contradiction is put into starker contrast by the existence of a root metaphor, whereby the recipients of corporate philanthropy are presented as the ‘deserving poor’. Synecdochal devices are present within the corporate disclosures, whereby employee initiatives that are independent of corporate strategies are used to confer attributes onto the disclosures that bolster the master metaphor of ‘altruism’. As such, corporate philanthropy is presented by the paper as a structurally incoherent discourse and yet one that has implications for both extracting greater value from various societal groups and in defining, on behalf of civil society, what is a worthy cause.

‘No French, no more’ : language-based exclusion in North America's first professional accounting association, 1879–1927

1This paper draws on Bourdieus sociolinguistic theory to interpret the overrepresentation of Anglophone accountants vis-à-vis Francophone comptables in the formative years of North Americas first professional accounting association. In a linguistic market, where English was taken for granted as the official language of commerce, we find that the founding members of the Association of Accountants in Montreal (AAM) possessed a ‘distinctive’ cultural and linguistic habitus. We observe that the AAM enacted for many years a number of exclusion strategies to effectively limit its admittance of Francophone compatibles who possessed a different cultural and linguistic habitus. When the AAM eventually did explicitly embrace Francophone memberships, this was in order to counter the threat of a rival accounting designation.

Tracking habitus across a transnational professional field

The sociology of the professions has shied away from cross-national comparative work. Yet research in different professional jurisdictions emphasizes the transnational nature of professional fields. Further work is therefore needed that explores the extent to which transnational professional fields are characterized by unity or heterogeneity. To that end, this article presents the results of a qualitative interrogation of the habitus of partners in ‘Big 4’ professional service firms across, primarily, five countries (Bangladesh, Canada, France, Spain and the UK). Marked differences are observed between the partner habitus in Bangladesh and the other countries studied in terms of entrepreneurial and public service dispositions. In turn, these findings highlight the methodological relevance of habitus for both the sociology of the professions and comparative capitalism literatures: for the former, habitus aids in mapping the dynamics of transnational professional fields; for the latter, habitus can elucidate the informal norms and conventions of national business systems.

Scoping an agenda for future research into the professions

Purpose - – This paper is premised on the understanding that professions remain central means of institutionalising expertise in society. A summary of major issues that are prominent in recent studies of the professions is presented in order to inform the paper’s central objective which is to scope out an agenda for future research in the area. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach - – This is a desk-based study informed by, but not limited to, the other papers appearing in this special issue. Findings - – This paper identifies and summarises a number of central themes: globalisation and neo-imperialism, the role of the state in professional projects, the rise of tax avoidance as a moral issue, the implications of tax professionals moving from the public to the private sector, the study of small-scale accounting firms, the rise of new expert groups and the emergence and implications of new audit spaces. Research limitations/implications - – The value of this paper is in bringing together a number of important but eclectic themes to scope out an agenda for the future study of the accounting profession and expert labour more broadly. The paper questions whether the term profession is still meaningful in a context where many professions have been re-made in the image of commercialism; it suggests that a focus on experts might be more apposite. Originality/value - – In scoping out an agenda this paper calls for greater attention to be paid to: examining the role of experts and their role in some of the major crises of the times; exploring how professions have often undermined their own legitimacy; understanding better the relations between professions and the state; the extent to which the next generation of partners will behave very differently to the current incumbents; the way in which digitalisation opens up new vistas of expertise; and in investigating the position of different expert groups in relation to societal elites. The paper reiterates that major societal issues are framed through various forms of expert knowledge and as a corollary it is essential to engage with experts and the implications of their proposed solutions.