Accounting for Time: The Environmental Crisis and the Crisis of Corporate (In)Action - by Helen Tregidga

Helen’s research focus can be defined by an interest in issues related to the interface of business, society and the natural environment. Underlying all her research is an interest in social and environmental issues and critical aspects of organisations and work. Helen’s primary research has focused on the constructions of sustainable development/sustainability within the corporate context, its consequences, and more recently, the role of academics and others in countering or resisting this discourse.

Helen’s research has received external funding and earned recognition through several awards. Her work has appeared in international journals including Accounting, Organizations & Society, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Business & Society, International Journal of Human Resource Management, and Organization & Environment.

Helen is currently an Editor of Critical Perspectives on Accounting and serves on several editorial boards including Accounting, Auditing and Accountability, British Accounting Review, and Accounting Forum. Helen is an active member of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) currently serving on the Executive Council (elected).

Climate science and biodiversity loss indicators are just some of the illustrations of the extent to which the environment is in crisis (Dasgupta, 2021; IPCC, 2021; Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015; WWF-International 2020). Contemporary discussions are increasingly framed by reference to the environmental and/or climate emergency (Paterson et al., 2021; Rockström, 2020; UN, 2021). Yet whether we are responding and acting at sufficient scale and pace to the environmental crisis is still up for debate. This has arguably become more evident in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a context within which to consider what it means to respond to a crisis. In this seminar, Helen will reflect on the temporal dimension of environmental accounting and its implications. She will structure this in two parts.

First, She will outline the key arguments as set out in Tregidga and Laine (2022). Here, we ask “is it time to rethink long-term environmental accounting?”. We suggest that the construction of environmental accounting as accounting for the long-term, an attempt to contrast it with and overcome the problems with short-term conventional accounting, potentially contributes to the construction of the environment as lacking urgency and potentially enables its marginalisation. We therefore propose that to make the most of accounting’s potential as a constitutive force, capable of participating in transforming preferences, decisions and behaviour in organisations and societies, environmental accounting needs to be about the short-term.

Second, she will raise for discussion some of the implications of the arguments in Tregidga and Laine (2022). Helen will consider how a greater consideration of the temporal dimension of environmental accounting (and accounting more generally) could help to both understand how and why corporations (do not) act in the face of widespread recognition of the environmental emergency, as well as to provide a basis to inform and support more urgent action. She will frame this discussion by outlining current and planned research projects (with Laine) in this area.

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