Corporate accountability and the physical environment: Social responsibility and accounting beyond profit

Abstract The social responsibility debates of the last thirty years have resolved little and have had only peripheral effects on traditional business behaviour. Social responsibility issues are re‐emerging in the light of the environmental crisis and are far too important to be once again marginalised by traditional business thinking. Economic and environmental criteria will, increasingly, be in conflict and accountants ‐ like all business professionals ‐ are implicated in this, not least because it is accounting that defines the rules, keeps the score, announces the results and determines who shall see them. The paper attempts to re‐examine social responsibility and accountability in the light of the re‐emerging environmental concern and suggests some ways in which accounting might contribute towards an organisation's attempts to become less unsustainable.