Title: Science, accounting, and organizing for carbon emissions

Working paper co-authored with Christian Huber, and Jan Mouritsen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Keywords:  Grand challenges, climate change, science, carbon accounting, Scope 3, hiding hand, universities, science objects. 

Abstract:

This paper explores how accounting and science relate in dealing with the complexity of grand challenges, such as climate change. Whereas science tries to capture the ‘grand’ challenge at the global level, organizations are much smaller centres of calculation, pointing to specific aspects of climate change that is however far more complex, with a highly uncertain future. Within these small centres, part of the grand challenge’s complexity is, and has to be, hidden, or forgotten, to allow for action and innovation at the organizational level, that would be otherwise impossible given the magnitude and uncertainty of the challenge. Within this hiding work, we explore the role of accounting, and how it relates to science, in the context of organizational strategies for addressing climate change. We investigate how accounting and science engage in enabling the emergence of ‘science objects’, i.e. objects of intervention that are actionable at the organizational level and related to science. We focus on carbon emissions, one of the main sources of climate change, and explore how they emerge as ‘science objects’ within organizations. We do that by exploring carbon accounting practices of Danish universities, where the preparers of carbon accounts attempt to connect science about carbon emissions with organizational possibilities to reduce them. Our paper contributes to the literature on accounting and science, by showing how they engage through a hiding and rediscovering work: hiding and forgetting about part of the complexity of the grand challenge, and then enabling this to be re-discovered, and remembered, through evolving accounting practices. This also extends prior work on mediation and translation of accounting in relation to science, by showing that science objects emerge within organizations through such hiding (and forgetting) and re-discovering work. We also contribute to the accounting literature on carbon emissions, revealing organizations’ concerns about science objects that need to be actionable while remaining related to science. We found that scientific complexity is hidden through accounting to make a grand challenge ‘small’ enough to inspire creative action at the organizational level, and then ‘grand’ enough through the infrastructural work of accounting relating to scientific categories.

Bio:

Elena Giovannoni is Professor of Accounting at Birmingham Business School, Department of Accounting, where she is also Deputy Head of Department. Currently, Elena is also OTTO MØNSTED Visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Before joining the University of Birmingham, Elena was Professor of Accounting at Royal Holloway University of London, UK, where she was the founder and co-director of CHRONOS (Critical and Historical research on Organization and Society) research center.  

Elena is interested in exploring the design and implementation of accounting and management control systems in different settings (recently, the space sector, the food industry, knowledge-intensive organizations, and arts), and in different time-space contexts, particularly as organizations face the challenges coming from climate change and sustainable development. Her research approach is interdisciplinary, exploring calculative practices in their social, spatial, material and organizing context, bridging critical and historical perspectives in accounting and organization studies. She has published her research in several accounting journals such as Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Critical Perspectives in Accounting, Management Accounting Research, British Accounting Review, European Accounting Review, as well as in Family Business Review, Human Relations, and Organization studies. Recently, she has co-edited a handbook on historical methods for management.