Accounting for Social Value

Accounting for Social Value. Edited by L Mook. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 272 pp. ISBN: 9781442611467.Laurie Mook's recent edited collection of essays on social accounting practices, Accounting For Social Value (2013), presents social accounting as a complex knowledge practice with implications both for social economy organizations and society at large. Building on her rather substantive list of influential publications in the field, Mook brings together a series of essays that re-imagine accounting for specialists and non-specialists alike. Social accounting is a practice defined as "a systematic analysis of the effects of an organization on its communities of interest or stakeholders, with stakeholder input as part of the data that are analyzed for the accounting statement" (Quarter, Mook, & Richmond, 2007, p. xxx). It has as its intention the broad measurement of an organization's performance (including economic, social, and environmental factors), and has, as its audience, a broad number of groups, extending to stakeholders throughout the community at large.In this collection, Mook introduces the history of social accounting practices through three historical waves (1970s, 1990s onward, and 2000s onward) in terms of their methodology, expectations, and applicability. Each subsequent essay engages specific instantiations of social accounting practices "on the ground. " In so doing, they each explore the successes and failures of social accounting practices, the challenges of implementation and establishing a common language of account, and the relevance of social accounting for contemporary social economy organizations.As Max Weber pointed out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the peculiarity and pervasiveness of the Occidental capitalist form was in part a consequence of rational bookkeeping. Indeed, accounting as a knowledge practice both shapes and transforms economic practices, at the same time as it attempts to reflect the "truth," or the measurable content, of the economic world. The dialectical nature of accounting as a social practice has been explored by many in the field (e.g., Bebbington, Brown, Frame, & Thomson, 2007; Hopper, Storey, & Wilmott, 1987; Morgan, 1988), and yet Chapter 9 in this volume, "The Role of Intermediaries in Social Accounting" by Katherine Ruff, brings to light the shifting register of truth in the history of accounting. What today appears to be a universally valid truth (e.g., the mathematical calculation of profit by means of financial accounting) was, at its inception, perceived as an immensely complex, even impossible, task. Ruff points out that "a common understanding of profit had to be created" (p. 232) before there could be a relative degree of uniformity in financial accounting. In much the same way, we see throughout all the essays in this collection that social value will need to be collectively imagined in order to create a common language with which to assess it. For such a reason the need for strong intermediaries, those who "distill complex information" (p. 243) but are neither the stakeholders nor members of the organization at hand, runs as a theme throughout this collection. Quite poignantly, Bryn Sadownik (Chapter 6, "The Demonstrating Value Initiative") shows the importance of developing reporting and measurement mechanisms by exploring how the Demonstrating Value Framework (the result of a Vancouver community- based initiative that started up in 2004) "guides social enterprises to fully identify their information needs for managing, planning and demonstrating their value" (p. 140). A fundamental contradiction runs throughout the text, however, whereby effective social accounting practices are heralded in terms of the revenue-oriented benefits they hold for the social economy organizations that use them. While stakeholder engagement and community inclusion are also lauded under the general banner of increased democratic participation in economic structures, ultimately the attraction of greater capital investment, publicity, and membership are the most frequently cited incentives to social accounting practices. …