Organisational Effectiveness and Social and Environmental Accounting: Through the Past Darkly

Abstract

Tony Lowe was co-author of one of the first substantive British papers addressing social accounting but he had relatively little to say directly to that emergent field. This was because Lowe saw accounting as a wide, all-embracing, activity at the heart of management control and accountability and his analyses, grounded in systems thinking, came to assume that the broad needs of society and the environment should be seen as no different than the needs of the financial communities. Accounting was for all and, consequently, there was (and is) no need for a separate “social” or “environmental” accounting. This chapter explores what “social accounting” might have become had it followed Lowe’s thinking—and especially that of organisational effectiveness.