Below is a link to slides from my 2022 Accounting, Behavior, and Organizations Conference presentation. Enjoy!
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I’ve been teaching moral accounting to EMBA students. Attached are the slides I’ve used for various lectures. I also have cases and other materials. Let me know if you are interested.
Moral Acconting Teaching Materials
I gave a talk to Cornell University’s Moral Psychology Brown Bag series on September 21st, 2021. Here are my slides. I’ll post the video once it’s available.
A commenter named “nope” replied to my post on the Supply & Demand for Moral Accounting Engagements with two quotes:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglass
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Martin Luther King.
I’ve thought about this type of criticism quite a bit: can we actually make the world a better place by sitting around and having a principled conversation about accountability systems and moral principles? It sure sounds like weak sauce, and the more momentous the issue (e.g., women’s vote, slavery) the weaker it sounds. But I don’t think the quote by Douglass and MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham jail warrant a blanket “nope” on moral accounting. Instead, they clarify its relationship to direct action.
NOTE: This post is a self-contained description of the practical aspects of moral accounting, intended as the basis for interviews with activists, accountants, consultants, and organizational leaders. Those who want more background (including a more scholarly justification of my claims) can read this. Please contact Robert Bloomfield at Cornell University if you are interested in discussing this. A companion piece about the philosophical aspects of moral accounting is available here, intended as the basis for interviews with experts in philosophy, religion, political ideology, or culture.
Introduction
Professionals in accounting, finance and consulting offer a range of services to help organizations live up to their social obligations. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) services help organizations address the concerns of those affected by their actions, while Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) services help investors allocate capital to firms that are socially responsible. Efforts like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and Impact-Weighted Accounting offer reporting standards to aid CSR and ESG. However, those offering such services must confront difficult moral questions. What exactly are the social obligations of an organization? How should parties be held accountable for those obligations? How should employees balance their obligation to their employers and their obligations to society? How should organizations prioritize their social obligations when all cannot be fulfilled?
NOTE: This post is a self-contained description of moral accounting, intended as the basis for interviews with experts outside accounting, especially those focused on philosophy, religion, political ideology, or culture. Those who want more background (including a more scholarly justification of my claims) can read this. Please contact Robert Bloomfield at Cornell University if you are interested in discussing this. A companion piece about the practical uses of moral accounting is available here, intended as the basis for interviews, with activists, accountants, consultants, and organizational leaders.
How should people be governed? This central moral question has been addressed in philosophy, theology, and politics and many other fields, yielding much controversy and many conflicting answers. In this post, I present principles of moral governance, derived from accounting, that I claim will be supportable by anyone, regardless of their philosophy, religion, political ideology, or culture. I am testing this claim by interviewing a highly diverse set of thoughtful and knowledgeable people, who are willing to read this short document and talk with me about four questions, following up on each and otherwise letting the conversation take its course:
One of my EMBA students, Aranthan (AJ) Jones, kindly gave me permission to publish this post, which he submitted to one of the discussion forums in my managerial accounting course. He poses the question in the title. I’ll write a separate post soon offering some possible answers, but for now just let you read the background that makes the question a very good one.
Two court cases struck the news in recent weeks. First, this one:
‘George Serafeim, an Accounting professor at HBS, has been leading a very interesting and impressive project, called the Impact-Weighted Accounts (IWA) Project:
The mission of the Impact-Weighted Accounts Project is to drive the creation of financial accounts that reflect a company’s financial, social, and environmental performance. Our ambition is to create accounting statements that transparently capture external impacts in a way that drives investor and managerial decision making.
In this post, I’ll give some basics of their approach, and highlight how it relates to moral accounting. The upshot is that the impact accounting project proposes a particular improvement to reporting on how businesses affect the world; moral accounting provides a framework for resolving disagreements about what impacts matter, and how to integrate their reports into accountability systems. There will be a lot of such disagreements, and they are going to be distinctly moral disputes.
Many years ago I saw an ad for a running shoe (maybe it was Reebok?) that said something like “At the New York Marathon, three of the five fastest runners were wearing our shoes.” I’m sure I’m not the first or last person to have realized that there’s more information there than it seems at first. For one thing, you can be sure that one of those three runners finished fifth: otherwise the ad would have said “three of the four fastest.” Also, it seems almost certain that the two fastest runners were not wearing the shoes, and indeed it probably wasn’t 1-3 or 2-3 either: “The two fastest” and “two of the three fastest” both seem better than “three of the top five.” The principle here is that if you’re trying to make the result sound as impressive as possible, an unintended consequence is that you’re revealing the upper limit.
The quote above, which came from Phil Price, a guest poster on Andrew Gelman’s must-read blog for statistics wonks, is an application of the pragmatics of speech.