Agenda

This event is part of VSM Lectures, a series of seminars by top scholars from renowned international universities and institutions. Invited speakers present their recent studies, share key findings, and explore the impact of their research on the challenges currently faced by society and organizations.

Accounting and Sustainable Change: Examining the “mind”

VSM lecture held by Massimo Contrafatto, University of Sussex and Ana Tortosa Rey-Stolle, University of Urbino

ABSTRACT 

Our current society and way of understanding and conducting business is fundamentally un- sustainable because it is incapable to ensure a fair, equitable and ecologically compatible model of development. Substantial and structural transformations are required in the current models and practices to envisage, design, construct and implement a more sustainable society and business (Gray, 2002). It could be argued that these sustainably transformations should involve in the sense-making and decision-making of the (societal and economic) actors (e.g., policy-makers, investors, managers, consumers); that is in the processes through which these different actors construct their ‘understanding’ and ‘decision’ about the situations they deal with and their courses of action (Weick et al., 2005). Research in economics, management and organization has proposed rationality-based or sociological-oriented models to the decision-making, according to which agents mobilise the available (accounting) information to take a decision. This research has shown that accounting play a vital role by providing useful information which aids social and economic actors in their decision-making. However, this research largely tends to treat the process of decision making as a black box: it describes the factors, conditions and results of the decision-making without explaining in depth “how” the process occurs and the role of “individual and their interpretations”. This process of “interpretation” and “sense-making” is influenced by the affective aspects such as memories, feelings and emotions (Friedland, 2018). Drawing on recent calls for bringing “the individuals and their sense-giving” back into the organizational analysis (Contrafatto et al, 2025), in this paper we aims to examine: i) how the “accounting and accounts for sustainability” are “internalized”: i.e., they are seen, felt, experienced and memorised by decision-makers; ii). How, once “internalized”, these are re-designed, re-constructed and used in the process of decision-making towards sustainability? As a result of this analysis, we aim at developing a conceptual framework that is able to shed lights on the role of the mind (and its affective elements) and how this is implicated in the internalization, designing & mobilization of Accounting for Sustainable change.