The Crossover CFO: Accounting with a Sustainability Hat On

Despite the general discourse of the accounting profession (ACCA, IFAC, ICAEW.), its engagement in sustainability has been scarce (Bebbington et al., 1994; Williams et al., 2010; Wilmshurst and Frost, 2001; Kuasirikun, 2005; Zvezdov, 2012). Therefore, we identified a “paradox of expertise” (Nelson and Irwin, 2014) in this profession. It occurs when “a group has existing mastery of a function with close ties to their occupational identity that limits their ability to recognize the value of” new standards (sustainability accounting standards) “that attempt to mimic, alter, improve that function in ways that does not match the group’s current understanding”. However, we also believe that occupational identities are not static and are rather a process, and inherently shifting (Nelson and Irwin, 2014). Therefore, we will explore the moment and reasons why an occupational identity (here that of the accounting profession) is ripe for “renegotiation”, the context in which members’ social constructions of an occupational identity may be renegotiated and altered. More precisely, we will focus on the process through which individuals socially construct expansions and contractions (Kreiner et al. 2015) of the occupational identity of the accounting profession. Indeed, we believe that rendering an occupational identity more “plastic” or enabling “stretchwork” or “boundary spanning” might be the answer to the paradox of expertise identified in the accounting profession. More precisely, we borrow from the organizational identity literature the concept of “identity elasticity”, defined as “the socially constructed tensions that simultaneously stretch identity while holding it together, akin to the boundaries of a balloon or rubber band expanding and contracting” (Kreiner et al. 2015) to analyze the identity work pursued by the sustainability CFOs we interviewed in changing the occupational identity of the accounting profession. Indeed, Kreiner et al. (2015) encouraged research in individual identity applying the notion of “identity elasticity”, the manifestations of which we will explore in the context of occupational identity. Our research is based on the methodology of “oral history”, where we interviewed sustainability CFOs on their career and job for 2 hours on average. The phenomenon of “sustainability CFOs” is emerging and we have identified four of them, two of which have been interviewed. The results of this preliminary research will be presented.

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