"Social Accounting And The Obstacles To Implementation For Ontario's Co-operatives"

Social Accounting is an instrument of measuring organizational performance that takes a comprehensive approach (usually including social, environmental and economic factors). Conventional financial accounting is increasingly seen as insufficient in revealing the full picture of a business’ performance (Mook 22; Mook and Sumner 160). By ignoring negative social/environmental externalities, conventional accounting (CA) influences our values and behavior – directing our attention only to financial performance and not other factors. Using academic literature, I investigate the core issues of conventional and social accounting, and especially the latter’s ability to produce genuine sustainability data that is of high quality. The specific SA systems that will be analyzed below are the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Consumer Co-operative Sustainability and Planning Scorecard. There are serious criticisms, which I outline below, of GRI and GRI-like systems as mere management tools intended to protect corporate brands. Although SA systems may face credibility issues because, for example, they allow high flexibility in terms of material issue selection, it is also true that civil society stakeholders have not shown enough interest in using them or trying to make these systems more reliable. Co-operative enterprises claim to have broader objectives than just financial success, which makes them and Social Accounting apt for each other, according to some scholars. Using empirical data from an online survey and in-depth interviews of cooperatives in Ontario, I explore the obstacles co-operatives face in implementing SA systems, which include costs, time requirements, lack of understanding of its benefits, and others.