Reclaiming the Public Sphere : Problems and Prospects for Corporate Social and Environmental Accounting

This article encourages accountants to consider their role in the debates concerning social and environmental accounting. It outlines a placement ethic which provides a framework to explore various schools of thought on social and environmental accounting. A placement ethic uses ideas central to Habermas and Rawls to provide a continuum model to explore whether an arbitrated political consensus concerning social and environmental accounting is a possibility. It also advances some ideas to overcome the procedural limitations of the Rawls-Habermas debate that have been used by accounting reformers. In this context, it is possible to move beyond the usual deadlock between procedure and critique to combine insights from different traditions to construct new critical and democratic social and environmental pathways