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Within the emergent professional field of carbon accounting, we analyse the institutional work that gives birth to a nascent profession in a multi-actor arena. We therefore contribute to enhancing our understanding of the birth of professions – in their very first steps and infancy.

This study employs a qualitative approach. We collected data from 1999 to 2015 and conducted 15 semi-structured interviews. One of the researchers was active in the field for two years and participated in carbon accounting events in France as a “participant observer”.

Our research contributes to an understanding of the dynamic professionalization process in which the different actors mobilize both creative work and sabotage work. We further theorize how nascent professions structure their project around knowledge, identity and boundary work. At the same time, we develop the notion of sabotage work, which is comprised of two sub-categories of institutional work: counter-work and the absence of work.

To our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts to analyse the birth of an environmental accounting profession. We emphasize both creative work and sabotage work in the professionalization project. We conclude on further research that could be performed on environmental accounting professions.

The purpose of this paper is to review the contributions of the special issue papers while presenting four broad research avenues.

The paper is based on a review of current literature on climate change and carbon accounting.

The authors propose four broad avenues for research: climate change as a systemic and social issue, the multi-layered transition apparatus for climate change, climate vulnerability and the future of carbon accounting.

The authors connect this study with the requested institutional changes for climate breakdown, making the paper relevant for practice and policy. The authors notably point to education and professions as institutions that will request bold and urgent makeovers.

The authors urge academics to reconsider climate change as a social issue, requiring to use new theoretical lenses such as emotions, eco-feminism, material politics and “dispositifs” to tackle this grand challenge.

This paper switches the authors’ viewpoint on carbon accounting to look at it from a more systemic and social lens.

Cities are key actors in the fight against climate change. They have developed integrated strategies harnessing the power of information and communication technologies (ICT) as part of the move towards smart(er) cities. In spite of our knowledge of the role of technological infrastructure in tackling climate change, the role of governance mechanisms to actively pursue environmental sustainability is often understated. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyse governmentality mechanisms developed by a small town in Europe to render energy savings and new energy sources visible and to create new identities with which the citizen and other cities could then identify with, thereby participating in the fight against climate change.

Data were gathered through non-participant observation, interviews and access to internal data from the city’s energy control project.

The outcome of these governmentality mechanisms was to create two new identities: the “good citizen”, responsible to lower his impact on climate change, and the “model city”, a laboratory that would serve as a guide for future policies to tackle climate change at the city level. While the “model city” was successful and identification happened with other small cities taking example from it, the “good citizen” failed and inhabitants did not identify with this role model that was defined for them as a way to participate in the fight against climate change.

This case study is a concrete example, based on a longitudinal study, of a city’s strategy and actions on climate change. Other small cities will be able to use this case study to gauge their possibilities for action on climate change. Notably, it is an example of how a network of mechanisms can achieve results in CO₂ emissions reduction. It also demonstrates the difficulty to enrol citizens into an environmental sustainability scheme.

This paper has implications for how climate change can be tackled in rural areas by small cities. While the role of organizations and large cities (e.g. C40 city network) has been acknowledged, there is a possibility for smaller local actors to act upon grand challenges with local strategies and their own governmentality mechanisms.

The case study contributes to the literature on cities, bringing new insights into how they can become actors of climate change beyond acting on internal controls, and the literature on governmentality by demonstrating how mechanisms can act upon a population without being calculative.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the process through which an International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) pilot company adopted “integrated reporting” (IR), a management innovation that merges financial and non-financial reporting.

A seven-year longitudinal ethnographic study based on semi-structured interviews, observations, and documentary evidence is used to analyze this multinational company’s IR adoption process from its decision to become an IIRC pilot organization to the publication of its first integrated report.

Findings demonstrate that the company envisioned IR as a “rational myth” (Hatchuel, 1998; Hatchuel and Weil, 1992). This conceptualization acted as a springboard for IR adoption, with the mythical dimension residing in the promise that IR had the potential to portray global performance in light of the company’s own foundational myth. The company challenged the vision of IR suggested by the IIRC to stay true to its conceptualization of IR and eventually chose to implement its own version of an integrated report.

The study enriches previous research on IR and management innovations by showing how important it is for organizations to acknowledge the mythical dimension of the management innovations they pursue to support their adoption processes. These findings, suggest that myths can play a productive role in transforming business (reporting) practices. Some transition conditions that make this transformation possible are identified and the implications of these results for the future of IR, sustainability, and accounting more broadly are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to first empirically illustrate the construction of accounting for sustainable development tool (Bebbington and Gray, 2001) and, second, to discuss the operationalization of accounting for sustainable development (Bebbington and Larrinaga, 2014).

This research is based on a unique intervention-research approach, the main author having worked part-time for four years on the development of the tool for a business organization in the organic food sector.

This paper proposes an operationalization of sustainable development within an accounting tool and presents the results of the calculations. It also touches briefly upon the organization’s decision not to adopt the tool. The research concludes on the difficulty of operationalizing the economic, social and environmental capitals while proposing results that demonstrate “unsustainability”.

This research in operationalizing sustainable development paves the way for future potential use of the tool described, and future developments to address the model’s current shortcomings, notably in interconnecting social and economic capitals with natural capital.

The non-adoption of the accounting tool raises questions about the acceptability among practitioners of visualizing the unsustainability of their own organization, in particular within “green” and “socially responsible” businesses. Moreover, it raises the question of growth and decoupling of the organization’s impact from its economic growth.

This paper makes three contributions to the current literature. First, it furthers the discussion on how to operationalize accounting for sustainable development, notably by trying to implement capital as a liability (a debt), placing its “maintenance” at the very heart of the design. Second, it offers an initial operationalization of “system thinking” within a tool to account for sustainable development. Finally, it contributes to the literature on “engagement research” through a four-year intervention-research project.

The purpose of this paper is to further elaborate on the topic of standardization bodies and standards “wars” within the “market for virtue” (Vogel, 2005). This paper is a commentary on the paper by Zinenko et al. (2015) who analyze the fit between different CSR instruments at the field and the organizational level.

This is a commentary based on secondary data analysis.

This commentary reviews the implications of Zinenko et al.’s (2015) paper for research on the CSR reporting landscape and provides some additional insights into coopetition practices and the impact on organizations. It elaborates both on the development of marketization strategies and the impact of this “marketization” on what the CSR standards were initially designed for.

This commentary provides six avenues for research, which are: coopetition between standard-setters, the influence of adopters on the development of standards, the key intermediary role of investors and analysts, the governance processes of standard-setting organizations, the role of the state in the arena of private CSR instruments and, finally, the disruption and maintenance of work linked to existing standards.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on carbon accounting as one aspect of accounting for impacts on the environmental capital and to detail the “convergence” process between two emergent corporate carbon management accounting approaches within a multinational company. In contrast to the reporting stakeholder and regulatory focus, company-internal issues of carbon accounting have so far rarely been investigated in depth. Based on a qualitative analysis of this in-depth case study, questions about what could be considered an effective carbon management accounting system are raised.

The research has been conducted with an in-depth case study, using participant observation (Spradley, 1980). The authors follow a pragmatic research approach, and the proposal of Malmi and Granlund (2009) “to create theories useful for practice is to solve practical problems with practitioners and synthesize the novel solutions to a more general form”.

This case study demonstrates that it is possible to connect two corporate carbon management accounting approaches focusing on products and the organization into a combined carbon management accounting system. This has potential impact in making carbon management accounting in organizations leaner, and more efficient in terms of performance measurement and external communication.

This research is based on a single case study, and more case studies in different industries could highlight further practical implementation difficulties and approaches to overcome.

This paper unveils that different carbon management accounting approaches can emerge in parallel in the same corporation. The paper discusses possibilities and challenges to converge them in terms of methodology (emission factors for example) and/or in terms of information systems, on which the calculations are based.

This is, to our knowledge, the first case study of an organization explicitly acknowledging the existence of multiple emerged carbon management accounting approaches and trying to make sense of them in a convergence process to create an overarching carbon accounting system.

The research objectives of this chapter are threefold. First, we explore what is the current status of corporate water accounting tools and methodologies. Second, we develop a framework for analyzing corporate water accounting and reporting. Third, we investigate what French CAC 40 companies account for and report in relations to the water challenge.

We collected annual and sustainability reports from all CAC 40 companies as well as their water Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) responses when available. We also collected all publically available corporate water accounting methodologies to assess the international water accounting field. We coded the data according to our designed framework via qualitative data analysis software.

Although water is seen as equally important to climate change (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), 2009), French multinationals have a very immature reporting on this topic. Most still do not report to the water disclosure questionnaire of CDP in 2014 and rely on basic figures such as global water consumption. We analyzed the multiple water accounting, reporting, and risk assessment frameworks that have mushroomed since 2000, and question the impact of this fragmented field on the maturity of the water performance reporting by French companies.

The developed framework for analysis of water reporting can be used for sustainability teaching at university level.

We developed the first comprehensive analytical framework for water corporate reporting assessment. Moreover, this research is the first comprehensive study of water reporting in Europe. We therefore contribute to extend our comprehension of corporate maturity in water stewardship and water performance reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the body of literature on environmental management accounting (EMA) and provides a quantitative overview of the academic as well as the professional literature constituting the field. By doing so, the paper discusses whether EMA has developed as a discipline.

Based on a database containing 814 (396 of them published in academic journals) publications in English, German and French with a publication date prior to 2012 a bibliometric analysis is conducted. Data on the publications, journals, authors and citations were collected, double‐checked and examined by applying bibliometric measures.

The bibliometric analysis identifies trends in EMA research publications which show that EMA has developed as a young discipline, but is still faces challenges to get better established in mainstream accounting and management research. Although the publication number is growing, a substantial part of the publications have been published outside mainstream accounting journals in non‐accounting journals, books and reports. A recent trend towards establishing specialised environmental (and sustainability) accounting journals is also rendered apparent. The low number of highly cited publications of few authors, however, indicates that EMA is still to become a mainstream field of research.

The paper discusses with the help of bibliometric analysis and measures whether EMA has developed as a discipline and whether it has become part of mainstream accounting research.