Introducing climate-related sustainability into accounting curricula: Legitimacy and institutional entrepreneurs

Abstract

Increasingly, in their annual reporting, companies are required to disclose climate-related sustainability risks and opportunities, including their governance and the effects on strategy and finance. While this generates legitimate need for accountants’ knowledge, skills, and capabilities about the entailed accounting practices, evidence suggests some levels of unpreparedness by the profession. Accordingly, our study explores the role of accounting academics in adapting university accounting curricula to prepare future accounting professionals. Based on interviews with 30 academics in Australian and New Zealand universities, findings show curricula adaptations are currently being achieved by entrepreneurial educators whose actions are underpinned by their commitment to societal and regulatory expectations for climate-related sustainability. Participants’ belief in the cognitive and moral legitimacy of adapting curricula to prepare students for professional accounting roles is sustaining their actions. Our focus on the micro-foundations of change show academics’ agency has two dimensions: reflective evaluation of their current position (cognitively valuing the need for accounting education to develop requisite skills), and pre-reflective consideration of their own moral and ethical values (derived from prior knowledge and commitments). As such, some structural constraints affecting change to accounting curricula are being obviated by enabling conditions associated with global imperatives for climate-related sustainability.