Bridging the Understanding of Sustainability Accounting and Organisational Change

The contribution of Accounting, Management and Organisation Studies (MOS) to the acceleration of human-induced global ecological disruption is increasingly recognised. Hence, the proposed geological period of the Anthropocene calls for a profound rethink-ing of disciplinary epistemological, theoretical, and methodological grounds as well as research agendas (Bebbington et al. 2019; Ergene, Banerjee, and Ho ff man 2021). For the past four decades, social and environmental accounting scholarship has been con-cerned with the potential of sustainability accounting and reporting to trigger transformative organisational change. Its impacts have been called into question inside and outside the fi eld (Bebbington and Gray 2001; Gray 1992, 2010, 2019). Garcia-Torea, Larrinaga, and Luque-Vílchez (2022) show that the interest of organisational studies in the transformative potential of sustainability accounting is limited, especially when compared to the attention paid to this issue in the social and environmental accounting fi eld. They argue that the relationship between SAR and organisational change is still an open question. The authors conducted an in-depth literature review in MOS and accounting journals of 53 papers focusing on the interplay between organisational change and SAR, with nine out of ten published in accounting journals. After laying out the main characteristics of the reviewed articles, they map these along fi ve key features: theoretical frameworks, methods, SAR type (i.e. internal or external) , and, more importantly, the type of connection between SAR and change and the explanation provided. They build on this analysis to outline fi ve bridges towards