Colin Dey, University of Dundee

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Social accounting and the external
problematisation of institutional conduct
Exploring the potential of shadow accounts

• Colin Dey, University of Dundee
• Shona Russell, Landcare Research
• Ian Thomson, University of Strathclyde
• CSR Workshop, September 2008

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Background

• Social accounting project - pragmatic efforts
  to engage with corporate accountability and
  initiate meaningful change
• Initial emphasis on formal, procedural aspects of
  accounting
• Outcome - mounting evidence of appropriation
  rather than change organisation capture of
  language of responsibility and sustainability
• Ongoing efforts to develop new more reflexive
  approaches to empirical study and engagement with
  corporate accountability practices
• Accountability discourses drawn from sociology,
  organisation theory, cultural and media studies,
  etc

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Shadow accounting Accounting for the other by
the other

• External problematising accounts
• Independently produced
• Extend beyond shadowing corporations
• Represent the interests of oppressed social
  groups
• Widen the number and kind of stories that get
  told
• and the actors who tell them
• Oppositional form of accounting
• Resistance - a way of talking back and
  addressing silence
• Surfacing of tensions and contradictions
• Emancipatory? Or an anchor on a bike?
• Are stories and evidence enough?

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• Shadow accounts take many forms

• social audits
• deindustrialisation audits
• silent accounts
• shadow accounts
• portrayal gap analysis
• social accounts
• counter accounts

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Why are shadow techniques important?

• public opinion increasingly alert to debates
  about risk impact of institutional activity
• public trust in NGO groups consistently higher
  than trust in corporations and other institutions
• shadow techniques create counter-expert
  (anti-business) sources of information intended
  to undermine dominant institutional messages
• public opinion may therefore be mobilised in ways
  that damage shareholder value

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• Analysing past experiments with
• shadow accounts some common attributes

• individuals or collectives collect data
• develop theories that draw attention to defects
  in official accounts of events
• construct alternative accounts
• problematise official accounting assumptions
• question origins, presentation and
  interpretation of costs, statistics and other
  evidence
• uncover creative or manipulative accounting
  techniques
• embedded within political discourses designed
  to change policies or specific decisions
• to analyse this in more depth we have used
  Deans Analytics of Governance framework

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• Analytics of Government framework

• develops notions of governing as bodies of
  knowledge, belief and opinion in which we are
  immersed
• components of government include
• objectives
• techniques
• forms of knowledge
• visibilities
• identity construction

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Analytics of Government and Shadow Accounting
Ability to change Emanicipatory??
Utopia
rationality
technologies
visibilities
knowledge
identity
Problematisation
Utopia
Utopia
identity
identity
rationality
technologies
rationality
technologies
visibilities
visibilities
knowledge
knowledge
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Problematising status quo
Exposing reflecting invisible silenced factors
Representing renarrating
Exposing contradictions
Challenge knowledge rationalities
Re-examining situations in light of new
understandings
Critique and challenge undesirable institutional
conduct
Presenting solutions
Shadow Accounts
Lacked awareness of governing regimes
Undemocratic? Potentially oppressive?
Draws its power from power of conventional
accounting
Did not always address obstacles to change
Change not directly related to better evidence
Operated in isolation from other shadow
technologies