Introduction

This book advocates for an expressivist language of accountability that enables a moral endeavour beyond the constraints of a narrow economic focus. The main aim of the book is to offer alternative possibilities to reflect on the damage unleashed by technical accounting and neoliberal ideology. It challenges current approaches to reform accounting processes that often embed assumptions such as commodifying nature as a reserve for consumption with little regard for values external to human representation.

Transformative action in the form of an evaluative framework is offered to embrace discursive priorities for accounting to better enable ecological (and thereby moral) understanding. In recent times, modern management and processes of accountability have been subject to critical scrutiny. This problem arises because these processes have focussed on markets and efficiency without full consideration of their environmental and social impacts. Often these problems arise because bureaucratic managerial processes mask these factors in the design of all-encompassing business procedures. These problems are not new, but they have been made increasingly salient with reports of companies damaging relationships with employees, other members of our community, and the natural environment.

The accountability, environmental and management perspective, offered focuses on how we conceive the meaning of Nature and its importance to the project of ‘emancipatory accountability’, enabling the creation of a richer encompassing narrative and policies to protect Nature.¹ Interpretation is a critique of accountability researchers’ over-reliance on the methods of the natural sciences advocating objectivity, arguing truth is not correctness as espoused by such research. Rather, truth emerges from an interpretivist process that involves how values are expressed through language.

The examination, analysis, and arguments are based on the values and views expounded by interpretative thinkers who bring a particular focus to politics, conflict resolution, and the ideas of a civil society. By taking an interpretivist perspective, the argument offers a framework that critiques the excessive reliance on procedure and a certain procedural form of moral naturalism that dominates the social sciences. In philosophy, naturalism is the supposition or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world. Challenging naturalism involves an interpretivist turn that offers frameworks of evaluation.

Interpretivist evaluation in conjunction with an expressivist language debates issues in accountability, politics, and environmental ethics. It refashions moral realism through engagement with frameworks such as accountability, critical theory, liberalism, and ecological theory to name a few. The view of politics that arises is neither derived from moral philosophy nor simply adapting liberalism in a market direction. It eschews the contradictions in modern forms of deconstruction and postmodernism that separate humanity from Nature or the cosmos. The framework developed contends that neutral, instrumental, and procedural management approaches are unable to solve problems that emanate from humanity’s relationships with Nature. That is, modern accountability, management, and neoliberalism use precise and scientific techniques which are more appropriate for the natural sciences. Understanding dilemmas such as coal mining, global warming, and pandemics requires a complex politics that engages with reality.

The interpretive perspective, as adapted in this accountability, environmental and management book, has also been used to examine the dangers of instrumental political perspectives which have neglected the social consequences of unlimited economic growth (Latouche, 2012; Taylor, 1978). This approach, it is worth noting, animates broader political attempts to escape the problems of environmental harm and cultural conflict that have engulfed the procedural and bureaucratic politics of today.²

Throughout the text that follows, modern accountability, management and political perspectives are seen to rely on free markets. However, market approaches do not focus on significant local cultural values and assume that procedure and technique can predict human behaviour. In reality, people work in contexts, and this involves understanding the beliefs, perspectives, and values of workers. This understanding is unlikely to be created when managers and politicians rely solely on the technical and scientific management practices (Dreyfus & Taylor, 2015).

Notes

• 1 For present purposes, the meaning and beauty in Nature are revealed through a focus on the role of language. Some of these ideas can be found in the philosophy of pragmatism, which was defined by the Oxford philosopher Schiller (1947) as originating from ‘a criticism of fundamental conceptions like “truth”, “error”, “fact”, and “reality” the current accounts of which it finds untenable or unmeaning. “Truth”, for instance, cannot be defined as the agreement or correspondence of thought with “reality” for how can thought determine whether it correctly “copies” what transcends it?’ (pp. 413-414).
• 2 Underlying this management argument lies a series of environmental issues concerned with limits to growth and how they will be managed. To move towards what Taylor (1978) calls a 'steady state society’, economic systems will have to recognise and operate within these limits.

Bibliography

Dreyfus, H. L. & Taylor, C. (2015). Retrieving Realism, Harvard, Harvard University Press.

Latouche, S. (2009). Farewell to Growth, Cambridge, MA, Polity.

Latouche, S. (2012). Degrowth, Whether You Like It or Not. Blog. Retrieved from https://Degrowth.Org/2012/02/02/Degrowth-Whether-You-Like-It-Or-Not/.

Laughlin, R. C. (1987). Accounting Systems in Organizational Contexts: A Case for Critical Theory, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 12, pp. 479-502.

Schiller, F. C. S. (1947). Pragmatism. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Volume 18, pp. 413-414.

Taylor, C. (1978). Politics of the Steady State. New Universities Quarterly, Volume 32, Number 2, pp. 157-184.

Part I