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
Background
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‘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
Shadow accounting:
Accounting for the other by the other
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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?
Shadow accounts take many forms…
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social audits
deindustrialisation audits
silent accounts
shadow accounts
portrayal gap analysis
social accounts
counter accounts
Why are shadow techniques important?
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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’ (antibusiness) sources of information intended to
undermine dominant institutional messages
public opinion may therefore be mobilised in
ways that damage shareholder value
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 Dean’s 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
identity
visibilities
rationality
knowledge
technologies
Exposing & reflecting
invisible & silenced
factors
Re-examining
situations in light of
new understandings
Problematising status
quo
Challenge
knowledge &
rationalities
Representing &
renarrating
Exposing
contradictions
Presenting
solutions
Critique and challenge
undesirable institutional
conduct
Shadow Accounts
Lacked awareness of
governing regimes
Did not always address
obstacles to change
Undemocratic?
Potentially
oppressive?
Operated in isolation from
other ‘shadow’
technologies
Draws its power from power
of conventional accounting
Change not directly related
to ‘better’ evidence