Motivating Corporate Sustainability Research in Management Accounting Through the Lens of Paradox Theory*

Abstract

Organizational leaders identify corporate sustainability as a complicated and urgent business imperative that their organizations face. The management accountant's role is to help develop accounting systems to measure and report corporate sustainability, yet several factors contribute to the contemporary management accountant's challenges in satisfying stakeholder demands to integrate sustainability into their practices and operations. Like sustainability, the tenets of paradox theory revolve around salient interdependent tensions with contradictions that persist across time. Therefore, I propose paradox theory as an alternative to the business case framing that currently dominates sustainability decision-making. In this paper, I synthesize the existing literature at the intersection of management accounting, corporate sustainability, and paradox theory. My research also unearths a new paradox, one currently absent from the literature: the corporate sustainability temporal paradox. Finally, I offer a set of theory-based research questions geared toward moving beyond business case thinking in accounting corporate sustainability research.