Data di Pubblicazione:
2013
Citazione:
QUELLO CHE CONTA. A SOCIO-LEGAL ANALYSIS OF ACCOUNTING FOR SUSTAINABLE COMPANIES / D. Monciardini ; supervisori: H.Hyden, V.Ferrari; coordinatore: P.Ronfani. UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO, DIPARTIMENTO DI SCIENZE GIURIDICHE "CESARE BECCARIA", 2013 Jul 24. 24. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2011/2012. [10.13130/monciardini-david_phd2013-07-24].
Abstract:
During more than three decades, corporate non-financial and sustainability reporting has been widely conceived as a voluntary practice, a matter of going beyond the requirements of the law. Therefore, it has been traditionally overlooked by legal and socio-legal scholars. However, during the last decade things have rapidly changed. We are currently witnessing the emergence of a mix of mandatory and voluntary regulatory approaches to Corporate Sustainability Accounting (CSA) and the integration of some elements of non-financial reporting into accounting standards. What explains these changes in CSA regulation within the EU arena, at different levels of regulation and through varying modes of governance? More specifically, which political and socio-economic actors are driving the current emergence of CSA regulation? What are their interests? How are these different actors organizing and mobilizing themselves? How and why they succeeded in creating regulatory changes?
This research has been based on three main sources of data: documents analysis; literature review; in-depth élite interviews (26). It has also been strengthened by a participant observation of five months at the EU Commission, collaborating to the legal drafting and Impact Assessment of the new EU directive on non-financial reporting. The criteria for designing the fieldwork have been based on the idea of mapping the position of six groups of actors interested in shaping the emergence of CSA regulation. The groups of actors considered are: managers of large corporations; organized labour; civil society and NGOs; institutional investors; public authorities; and professional experts (accountants; financial analysts; lawyers). The analytical framework deployed by this study is a Bourdieusian reflexive socio-legal approach (see Madsen and Dezalay 2002; Madsen 2011), used as an over-arching research strategy in conjunction with the existing literature (see Gourevitch and Shinn 2005; Graz 2006; Crouch 2011; Streeck 2011).
The study claims that the struggles for regulating CSA should be seen as a lens for analyzing broader changes in the field of European corporate governance regulation and in the relation between business and society. A main finding of the Doctoral Thesis, something that has been argued for throughout the study, is that the accounting field has developed a historically specific relation of structural homology with the economic field. Therefore, Chapter 3 argues that the emergence of ‘social accounting’ regulation, in the 1970s, mirrored contemporaneous debates about ‘industrial democracy’. Similarly, the ‘financialisation’ of the 1990s and 2000s has mirrored the structuration of accounting standards narrowly focused only on financial information. Today, the emergence of ‘sustainability accounting’ regulation in Europe reflects and constructs the political attempt to build a regime of capital accumulation aimed at creating longer-term and ‘sustainable’ growth.
More specifically, drawing on interviews with key informants and documents analysis, the study argues that financial turbulences and corporate scandals at the beginning of the 2000s fostered the inception of a European ‘transparency coalition’ (see Gourevitch and Shinn 2005) led by investors and including NGOs and part of the trade unions, which drove a series of reforms in the areas of corporate governance and corporate responsibility. The 2008 financial crisis worked as a catalyst for strengthening this regulatory trend and for fostering a stronger role of the state in its regulatory role. Therefore, we are also witnessing the integration of corporate sustainability in company law and corporate governance regulation and the convergence of financial and non-financial aspects
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Keywords:
corporate social responsibility; CSR; corporate governance; sustainability; accounting; EU; European Union; accountability; company law
Elenco autori:
D. Monciardini
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