AAAJ Literature and Insights 36.5 Editorial

Abstract

Walk on by? This issue features two compelling creative pieces. One deals with the potential difficulties of personal life in the world of accounting. The other takes a global view in addressing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. These might seem like very dissimilar topics, but both are pertinent to the immediate concerns of accounting as a discipline that can and should enable key concerns about the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants to be raised. One of the critical aspects of a person’s success is how each of us faces the day at its very beginning. What do we feel about our own attitudes and abilities when we wake? Are there tasks ahead that we will embrace, or do they seem to pose challenges we fear we might not be able to overcome? It’s possible to do both; in effect, to willingly embrace the difficult. Easy or hard, welcome or unappealing, personal or work-related, these things all help to define us. In fact, each obstacle can offer a new kind of self-awareness as we rise to the occasion. Such selfreflection does not lock us in to a single sense of our abilities but reinforces a feeling of evolution, of growth yet to come. This is something that Jana ına Dourado stresses in the creative contribution “Mourning”, which speaks of surmounting such hurdles and of the capacity for personal re-invention. Many management accounting students learn to do this over and over; by themselves and also with the help of peers and mentors. The wide-ranging nature of internationally focused aims is laid before us in Radiah Othman’s piece, “Fraud Mitigation: A hope for United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030”. On the one hand, the poem offers a mixture of noble aspirations for greater equity, with a strong accent on human need and, on the other, it expresses profound concerns about the impact of fraud that would deny the achievement of those. These SDGs might seem to pose a huge and overwhelming field of problematic matters involving an overload of players and competing interests. As they say, however, one should still set targets, start with small steps that can be accomplished, identify who can take positive action to achieve them, measure the outcomes, learn from the results and repeat the process. Sounds to me like management accounting fits nicely there. Let’s take an example of dealingwith information.Many of usknowhow tempting chocolate can be. Perhaps fewof us know that huge numbers of children are exploited inwhat amounts to trafficking and slave labour in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, principally in the production of cocoa, where almost 60% of it is produced (Ungoed-Thomas, Online 2022). Even fewer might know that these two countries have the world’s highest rates of deforestation; again, in order to meet the demand for agricultural production, including cocoa (Asiedu, Online 2019). Who operates and profits most from the chocolate industry? It’s a handful of corporations in the more developed world, including Nestl e, Mars Wrigley, and Mondel ez International. These are controlled by people who often figure in the top five richest within their own countries. It won’t surprise you that claims of environmentally sustainable operations are also frequently false or misleading, so trusting the label when you check the product in your store is not a reliable indicator for ethical choice.