A SYNOPSIS OF A PHD THESIS (A GHOST OF THINGS TO COME) Accounting and Finance department Manchester Metropolitan University Business School Aytoun Street Aytoun Building Manchester M1 3GH Tel: +44(0) 161 247 3787 Email: j.christian@mmu.ac.uk
A SYNOPSIS OF A PHD THESIS (A GHOST OF THINGS TO COME) Abstract This paper notes how the germ of an idea became a research project. It then adumbrates how the outcomes of the project will be presented in the form of a thesis. The purpose of this paper is simply to share the author s experience of the PhD process. Key words Accounting, Environment, Interpretation, Methodology, Research Question, The way to the future lies in the past In 2007 I first came across the term Environmental Management Accounting. It was in a book review in some paper or another. I was amazed, I had been a professional accountant for 30 years and had never heard the term. Furthermore I had been an amateur naturalist for 45 years and am dearly attached to the environment. I had rambled over moor and mountain, field and fell, vale and valley for nearly as many years. How could I have not heard of Environmental Management Accounting? By one of those chances of fate later that year I changed profession. I took a job as a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School (MMUBS). This gave me the opportunity to investigate this phenomena called Environmental Management Accounting, largely unheard of I might add in my new vocational home, the MMUBS Accounting and Finance Division. Over the next year I learned that Environmental Management Accounting had been around for 25 years. Further there was a Congress of Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) which had been meeting annually for 20 years and in fact was international in that there were CSEAR conferences held in several countries. I attended the 2008 meeting of CSEAR at St Andrews University. I met the individual who founded the Congress and is still one of the leading figures in Social and Environmental Accounting at the present time, Professor Rob Gray. In 30 years of professional accounting I had never heard of Environmental Management Accounting, it had never been mentioned in the scores of meetings I had attended or by the scores of accountants I had met during those years. Why hadn t it been taken up by the profession? I asked Professor Gray and frankly I received no answer at all. He suggested I read The Corporation by Joel Bakan (2004), an interesting book but it did not answer my question. And so my research agenda was set Why haven t professional accountants taken up Environmental Management Accounting? In the course of my research I became much more aware of the objective nature of accounting and the subjective nature of the environment. I eventually concluded that this was the reason why professional accountants shied away from
environmental accounting in its various guises, including environmental management accounting. The main staging posts along this journey of discovery are highlighted in the literature review described below together with evidence from my own research. I finally concluded that accounting for the environment is something that falls outwith the role of accounting as currently understood in the profession, and what is required is a new profession. I discuss the possible nature of that profession in the final chapter of this thesis. I believe this discussion is vital to the future of the environment and therefore humankind who, when all is said and done, are an integral part of that environment. The future mapped out Before I say anything else I should probably warn the reader of this thesis that I intend to continue writing in the first person. In my view I can only describe the world as I find it and relay events as I see them. I make sense of the world through the discourses that I have experienced and make no claims as to the truth of my observations. I can only tell my readers how I have made sense of events and perhaps of any heuristics I have used or built to help me do so. I therefore see little point in pretending that there is an objective world to be described as if it was separate from my own being. For readers who may find this position strange I put forth some philosophical arguments in the first chapter of my literature review. In particular in this chapter I offer an ontology that attempts to explain how we are given Self by Others; and how Self is an aggregation of the discourses we are exposed to, with current and recurrent discourses shifting and constantly rebuilding the nature of Self. This I argue leads to a subjective and pluralistic view of the world and encourages a sceptical view of any Truth claims. I also discuss some threads of psychological thought that support my arguments. This is important because ultimately I argue that the reason why professional accountants haven t taken up environmental management accounting is because of the way their minds are shaped by the training and education they receive. Following the modernity project they are trained to see the world objectively and to discount subjective influences, this precludes any consideration for non-instrumental purposes and values. In the second chapter of my literature review I look at the world through a green lens. Specifically I draw on the work of Arne Naess (Witoszek and Brennan, 1999) in building what he termed deep ecology. I find a way of looking at the world which is very much in keeping with my own philosophy, in particular the acceptance of intuition on an equal footing with rational analysis and logic, and the interconnectedness of all things. I then discuss the role of accounting and possible reasons why environmental management accounting has not been taken up by accountants. I argue that accounting, with its close links to economics, is itself a child of modernity and the accounting profession seeks respectability for accounting as a science, ie as an objective and empirical study. I also note accounting s close relationship with western capitalism, in particular the anglo-american variety with its heavy dependency on individualism and acquisition, and rational self-interest. I conclude by noting how the accounting profession has shaped the training, and with
it the knowledge base, of accountants in such a way that concern for the environment is omitted from serious consideration. Subsequently I return to deep ecology. I argue that this is a view of the world that is precluded from, indeed is at odds with, the accounting view of the world. It is a view that sees humans as an integral part of the environment, not as something separate that can view the environment as an object out there. This line of reasoning takes me to a dichotomy. I see two possible reasons why accountants might take up environmental management accounting. The first is a holistic view based on a deep ecology type perspective that we are an integral part of the environment and to harm it is to harm ourselves. The second, rapidly becoming more popular, view is the notion that the environment is something that can be broken down into various services and these services can be given a monetary value. This latter view has gained much ground over the last three or four years and is very much in keeping with accounting tradition of analysis and rationality. However, I argue, ultimately it is insufficient to protect the environment and the holistic view is the better way. The final chapter of the literature review synthesises the two previous chapters to formulate my research question and guide my research methodology. Essentially I want to know why professional accountants haven t taken up environmental management accounting and I have argued this is because of the training they receive. This gives rise to a number of questions and I focus on two in particular; how do aspiring accountants view the environment prior to professional training and what do they see as the role of accounting. Do they perceive they see the environment as something out there; or do they see it as more subjective, ie emotive and intuitive rather than rational and objective. And what of accounting, does it have any connection with the environment at all? The methodology section follows the literature review and consists of three chapters. In the first of these I explain why I decided to use interviews as a method and how and why my early attempts at interviewing failed. Basically I was attempting to build a model or map of how accountants view the world which was a project doomed to failure. It went against all my instincts of how I or anyone else can see the world. It was an attempt to place people in categories which, given the shifting nature of self, would always be outdated and meaningless. However whilst contemplating this insight I came across a method used in psychology, interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al, 2009). This is an idiographic method drawing on phenomenology to focus on individual experiences of the world, further it recognises experience is an interpretation of the world and draws on hermeneutical enquiry to explain or interpret such experiences. I explain the theoretical underpinnings of the method in the remainder of the chapter. The second chapter of the methodology section discusses hermeneutical enquiry further. Drawing on Alvesson and Skolberg (2000) it outlines a reflexive (primarily interpretative) methodology that requires the interpreter to formulate four different interpretations of a given text. These are an (attempted) objective description of the text, an alethic interpretation, a critical interpretation and a post-modern interpretation. The alethic and the post-modern interpretations can take several
forms and I elucidate on why I chose the forms I did. Alvesson and Skolberg call this approach a quadri-hermeneutic methodology. I finish the chapter by explaining how I used this methodology to interpret my research. The third chapter of the methodology section details how I carried out my interviews including those that failed and those that worked. I argue the former were built around too many questions and that these questions failed because they tried to investigate how the interviewees viewed the environment via the current environmental accounting framework, a framework that essentially views the environment as a resource and excludes any moral consideration. Consequently the interviewees answers lacked any depth or insight. I then explain how I carried out the second interviews, adapting the technique propounded by Smith et al to try and open the minds of the interviewees and so encourage them to speak freely of their experience of the environment and accounting. The next section consists of four chapters and offers four interpretations of my data. In the first of these chapters I focus on three interviewees and try to précis both interviews with each of these individuals. I explain why I have focused on these three interviewees and bypassed the other two. I make every effort to appear objective but I can only report on the world as seen through my eyes. And it is inevitable that in summarising the interviews I am reducing, even reshaping the thoughts and ideas relayed in the course of the interviews. I attempt to explain that which I know I have omitted and why. In the second chapter I search out metaphors and I also review the interviews with a view to finding a fusion of minds. In the first part I look for metaphors that describe the environment but I also find how the environment itself is also is used as a metaphor, in particular a metaphor for peace. In the second part I note instances where the interviewees comments and perceptions gel with my own and I note points where we differ. There is little doubt that all three interviewees have a significant space for the environment in their worldview, though their experience of it differs and accordingly their understanding of it differs also. The next chapter goes some way to addressing these differences in understanding, drawing on what Alvesson and Skolberg refer to as the hermeneutic of suspicion. In this chapter I take a critical perspective drawing on Foucault in particular. I seek out the voices or discourses underlying the interviewees perceptions of the environment, drawing out the threads of power that have probably helped shaped their understanding and knowledge of the environment and accounting. In the final chapter or interpretation I deconstruct the interviews and identify the underlying voices. I then bring these voices together to discuss the nature of the environment. There are secular and religious voices; there are voices, albeit faint voices, that value the environment simply because it is there and voices that value it as a resource; and there are voices from the environment that are heard by some and not by others, these are the non-human voices which we feel but do not hear, which shape our lives but somehow by-pass rational understanding. This chapter builds on the previous interpretations bringing them together to show how humans
are a part of the environment but how each of us only has a partial understanding of it. I conclude this thesis in three chapters. In the first of these I summarise the findings of my research. I note that my three aspiring accountants all have positive feelings about the environment; indeed it is very important to each of them, albeit for different reasons. None of them saw it as a service, although in part they did value it in instrumental terms. However there was also evidence that they felt it had some sort of intrinsic value. I believe this is an important finding because it highlights the subjective nature of the environment and hence the difficulty in accounting for it. It also shows the environment is important to future accountants and begs the question why is it all but ignored in accountancy training, in particular in the training of future management accountants. In the penultimate chapter I return to the nature of accounting. I turn again to its links with economics which in turn is rooted in the Modern project. As such it seeks to be objective and empirical. My research indicates that the importance of the environment is of a subjective nature and is therefore outside the scope of accounting (as accounting is currently seen by those in the profession) and is therefore all but ignored by the profession - in training and in practice. I then return to the current trend towards attaching monetary values to so-called ecological services. I suggest that given the subjective nature of the environment this is nothing more than an accounting sleight of hand attempting to control the growing concern about human impact on the environment. By attaching monetary values to the environmental agenda the accountancy profession can capture this agenda and bring it under its sphere of influence. Finally in the last chapter I argue that far from bringing the environment into the accounting profession what is needed is a new profession. A profession built on a pluralistic view of the world allowing for the subjective nature of reality, a view of the world that is a far cry from the standardised, objective world so beloved of the accounting profession. This profession would not seek to reduce the environment to single measure money but would report on it in many and varied terms. Measures would include some numbers, perhaps the number of different types of flora or fauna in a given area, but would also include visual and oral records together with much more emphasis on narrative records. The reporting entity would not just be the individual organisation but the district, locality or community, and report content would be decided at that level. (Organisations would be expected to contribute to the report but again how and what would be decided at local level.) The obvious place for this report to be filed is the local library or museum and it is probably true that the new profession is more akin to librarianship than accounting. The chapter, and thesis, finish by suggesting how such a new report might be trialled.
References Alvesson, M. and Skoldberg, K. 2000. Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research, London: Sage Publications Ltd. Bakan, J. 2004. The Corporation, London: Constable. Smith, J. A., Flowers, P. and Larkin, M. 2009. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory Method and Research, London: Sage Publications Ltd Witoszek, N. and Brennan, A. 1999. Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Naess and the Progress of Ecophilosophy, Lanham: Rohan & Littlefield Publishers.