دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی حسابداری اجتماعی و ایجاد مشروعیت شرکت - نشریه الزویر

abstract

This paper explores how social accounting can generate legitimacy for a company within a local community, and reveals the essential role of the community itself in the process. We take an in-depth case study approach using interviews with both company and community actors, supported by analysis of a nine-year social accounting series. A Bourdieusian frame highlights the unarticulated nature of the roles played by various actors in the co-creation of a local account, and the way that increasing local participation in that accounting process gradually narrates the company into a position of authority. This has lasting impact on the community. Social accounting produces a narrative that acquires symbolic power, directing legitimacy and power to the company, while restructuring the community's social relationships, self-identity, and patterns of accountability. We conceptualise this social accounting process as analogous to mapmaking, iteratively drawing and redrawing the local social geography, prioritising the representation of the company over time in a process of thematic cartography which records growing local acceptance of, and deference to, the company. This has implications for our understanding of the power of account-giving and the impact of social accounting

5. Discussion and conclusion

Recent discussions in the social accounting literature highlight the relative lack of attention to non-corporate perspectives in social accounting research, its sometimes light theoretical framing, and the fact that issues of accountability have not yet been fully explored (Cho and Giordano-Spring, 2015; Gray et al., 2009, 2015; Gray, 2013; Thomson, 2014). At the same time, however, a sense of the possibility of socially impactful research in the area persists (Owen, 2008; Gray, 2013; Thomson 2014). This paper explicitly incorporates non-corporate perspectives while also addressing a need for more diversity in the theoretical underpinning.of research. We use a rich, Bourdieusian theoretical frame to explore how social accounting generates local legitimacy through the pivotal participation of the community. We frame social accounting as a masking narrative that acquires symbolic power to shape relations between the company and its immediate external stakeholders. Elements of Bourdieu’s theory, particularly his work on the logic of price, on corporate patronage of the arts and on symbolic power, help us to separate the effect of social accounting from that of the deployment of economic capital. This reveals the importance of the symbolic value of the social report within the life of the community. “Domination, even when based on naked force, that of arms or money, always has a symbolic dimension, and acts of submission, of obedience, are acts of knowledge and recognition which, as such, implement cognitive structures capable of being applied to all the things of the world, and in particular to social structures” (Bourdieu, 2000:172).