Green Management Accounting System. Improving Eco-Efficiency of Firms

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, language: English, abstract: Rapid rate of technological developments in the last century has increased our dependency on the industrial organisations to meet the needs of goods and services. These enterprises have played a formidable role in establishing the role of economic viewpoint in measuring benefits of economic activities and negotiating anthropocentric use of resources, ignoring larger perils of economic cycle and forcing sustainability to evolve as the central theme of contemporary debate. Even though accounting practices have offered pragmatic solutions to understand and interpret business activities by translating the performance of firms within the economic paradigm, the translation remains bounded within monetary considerations and contractual terms. In absence of suitable mechanism within the economic viewpoint to interpret and evaluate environmental aspects and its impacts, the externalities that the firms produce fail to find a place as part of its performance, shadowing the larger concerns regarding environmental risks and societal costs. Although management accounting support internal and external decision-making needs of organisations, its capabilities are yet to develop a language that could integrate externalities and help businesses ingrain sustainability as part of its existence. Recognizing the gap that exists within management (managerial) accounting in supporting the environmental sustainability of firms, this research is an effort to explore and support green cost and management accounting and help firms move beyond eco-efficiency outlook. Following the tradition of field investigation, the project has conducted three case studies to explore the shortcomings of prevailing green methodologies and understand complexities that are characterized by multitude of definitions, undefined boundaries, and multiple uni