The managerial turn in environmental regulation and conceptions of ‘responsible’ corporate Self – An organizational identity perspective

Accounting and Management Control

Speaker: Marek Reuter (Stockholm School of Economics)

Room T036

Abstract:

Driven by the spread of the audit society to the realm of the natural environment and the associated proliferation of certification practices we have witnessed a ‘managerial turn’ in environmental regulation that operates under highly technocratic and market-based ideals. Extant environmental accounting and auditing scholarship has drawn attention to this development’s value-displacing tendencies and highlighted its implication in the social construction of images of ‘responsible’ corporate Self. Less attention has been paid to whether and how the adoption of managerial technologies of environmental accounting and auditing feature in members’ beliefs about their organization as a responsible entity. The present paper addresses this concern by problematizing contemporary environmental regulation from an organizational identity perspective. Drawing on an in-depth case study, the article illustrates how regulatory premises and requirements can become entangled with locally embedded narratives of responsible organizational Self. Such identity-regulation entanglements, as is argued, emerge due to inter-temporal identity dynamics and have the potential to both render fragile locally embedded identity beliefs as well as rock members’ faith in corporate environmentalism as such. The article contributes to the literature by highlighting how capture of the environmental agenda by managerial interests is not always and necessarily without tension and conflict at the level of organizational meaning systems.