Social and environmental accounting roles: experimenting with committed SMEs

Part of the academic community in the field of social and environmental accounting is keen to help companies move towards greater sustainability. In particular, it is experimenting with accounting innovations - such as multi-capital accounting - with large companies to identify the theoretical keys to sustainable practical change. While the role of accounting in society and its performative effect on agents are already widely accepted in the accounting literature, to our knowledge these roles have not been studied in relation to practitioners involved in intervention research. This article therefore proposes to examine the way in which experimentation with multi-capital accounting in intervention research reveals the tensions and difficulties experienced by company directors. Firstly, because SMEs are poorly represented in the accounting literature, even though they account for the vast majority of the world's economic fabric. Secondly, because the tensions experienced by these managers despite their commitment can shed light on the difficulties experienced by companies in achieving sustainable change. This article proposes a re-reading of the role of accounting in society in the light of what an experiment in social and environmental accounting can reveal about the experiences of practitioners. This research also suggests that social and environmental accounting, beyond its instrumental aspects, is also a means of investigating the transformation of organisations in the human and social sciences.