On the use of framing strategies by the Big Four accounting firms: bringing sustainability risks into the mainstream

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the discourse that the Big Four accounting firms have promoted on the notion of sustainability risks, ultimately framing them as economical, technical, tractable and controllable. Drawing on Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1982) anthropological understanding regarding the construction of risk in modern society in combination with frame theory, we study how the Big Four's specialized publications frame sustainability risks and the magnitude of their consequences. Our analysis indicates that four framing strategies characterize the firms’ discourse: representing the Big Four as proactive knowledge producers; promoting quantification and measurability; fostering neoliberal policy-making and de-emotionalizing socio-environmental issues. We maintain that through these framing strategies, the wicked issues of sustainability are overly simplified, transposed into the conventional area of organizational economics, and therefore made manageable in the unbroken pursuit of corporate growth. In other words, the apparent aim is to take sustainability risks into a territory where corporate elites are in the habit of thinking and acting: the economic arena, as delimited by the boundaries of the organization. In so doing, the Big Four create a space for their role as business advisors, ensuring that their profitability is strengthened as companies seek professional help in establishing a meaningful control structure around (narrowly defined) sustainability risks. Instead of bringing sustainability risks into the purview of organizational controllability, we believe there is a crucial need to bring business organizations and the Big Four accounting firms into the purview of responsibility toward the planet.