Quest for Alternative Sociological Perspectives on Corporate Social and Environmental Reporting

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to review existing dominant theoretical perspectives used in corporate social and environmental accounting research, identify their limitations and to suggest some alternative theoretical perspectives for further research. Methodology: In order to identify relevant research papers, on the use of different theoretical perspectives on corporate social and environmental accounting research, published in academic journals, different keywords were searched in google scholar. Research papers were then shortlisted according to their relevance to the topic. The results: Among all theoretical frameworks, there is a great variety but accounting researchers remained selective in heir use of the theory and some other aspects of the theory remained unexplored. Apart from this narrow application, repeated application of same theories, especially legitimacy and stakeholder theory) provide very little additional insights. Implication: The dominant theoretical perspectives on CSER do not fully capture the complexity of the phenomenon. This situation demands researchers to explore alternative theoretical perspectives for better and insightful research. The main contribution of this paper is that it suggests the theory of realistic evaluation (RE) and the institutional logics perspective (ILP) as alternative sociological perspectives. This paper invites future researchers to apply these theoretical frameworks and to explore their usefulness.