A Journey in Social and Environmental Accounting, Accountability and Society

The goal of our research is to present a referred selection of chapters from the present academic discussion about social, environmental, and sustainable accounting and accountability. In the past the importance of accounting for the construction of social reality (Gray, Bebbington, and Walters, 1993; Gray, Owen, and Adams 1996; Gray, Adams, and Owen, 2014) and the need for cultural change to drive movement towards a new and better world have been stressed. The authors consider the subject of environmental problems and at present how to manage these problems and to face the challenges that derive from them. So, the economic measurement process requires rigid system orientation. Then there can be a transition phase and in the other changing contexts, such as civil economy, new dimensions can be created. Civil economy requires new elements to measure and to account for. This matter engages current literature in this field because there is an urgent need to find decision-making tools to help managers to respect environmental and social problems (see, for example, Bebbington et al. 2017; Bebbington and Unerman, 2018). The selected papers, deriving mainly from the 7th Italian Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) conference–Urbino in 2018 and blind reviewed, want to contribute to the discussion about social and environmental accounting and reporting in academic and practitioner contexts, involving different sectors and both for-profit and not-for-profit companies of different sizes.