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This thesis heeds calls for social and environmental accounting researchers to intervene directly to develop new accountings and promote practical change, and to measure the type of change and reasons for non-change using theoretical frameworks. The thesis first selects and develops an appropriate meta theoretical framework from the social and environmental accounting literature for analysis purposes, drawing on dialogics, organisational change theory and institutional theory, as well as Soft Systems Methodology tools. Existing Full Cost Accounting (‘FCA’) applications are critiqued using this framework and a utopian vision for a new application is constructed. The thesis then undertakes a new, explicitly dialogic application of Full Cost Accounting (‘FCA’) in a new sector (Higher Education). It does so following calls in the literature to develop further FCA as a worthwhile technique to correct prices and redress the asymmetry of information found in (un)sustainability reporting, towards something that better demonstrates the (un)sustainability of an organisation’s practices. The new application is undertaken in a deliberately dialogic manner as the literature posits that social and environmental accounting engagements incorporating dialogic motifs are more likely to engender change. Methodologically, the thesis utilises a variant of Action Research, Soft Systems Methodology, to conduct dialogic model building and calculations via learning for action cycles. The new application is then critiqued using the theoretical framework constructed, in order to answer the objectives of the thesis, which are to: (a) further evaluate the difficulties inherent in the FCA process; (b) determine whether advances in scientific knowledge and sustainability awareness now make FCA calculations more feasible (as compared to previous FCA applications); and (c) ascertain whether FCA engagements conducted in an explicitly dialogic manner lead to organisational change. |
