Review of the Handbook of Accounting, Accountability and Governance edited by Garry D. Carnegie and Christopher J. Napier

The Handbook, edited by eminent professors of accounting Garry D. Carnegie (Australia) and Christopher J. Napier (the United Kingdom), was published by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd in September 2023 in the “Research Hand-book on Accounting” series. This comprehensive publication (pp. 507 + XVI) is a compendium of knowledge on the interconnections between accounting, accountability, and governance. It includes an Introduction by the editors and 21 chapters authored by 45 specialists in the fields of accounting, accountability, and governance. The authors come from various countries, including the United Kingdom and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, some Western countries of continental Europe (Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain), as well as Canada, the United States of America, and Saudi Arabia. The general thesis of the entire collection of chapters is that “accounting, accountability and governance go beyond being technical practices to be learned, adopted and repeated, and must be studied as social and moral practices.” In turn, the purpose of the Handbook is to provide confirmation that accounting, accountability, and governance are interrelated “as three sides of a triangle”. The editors synthesized the links between these three social practices as follows: “accounting performs accountability, accountability nurtures governance, governance presumes accounting” (Carnegie, Napier, 2023, p. 1). According to the definition recently formulated by Carnegie, Parker, and Tsahuridu (2021, p. 69), accounting “is a technical, social and moral practice concerned with the sustainable utilisation of resources and proper accountability to stakeholders to enable the flourishing of organisations, people and nature.” They added: “Accounting is not a mere neutral, benign, technical practice” (2021, p. 72). This redefinition of accounting is applied by Carnegie and Napier (2023, p. 20). Accountability and the provision of useful information for decision-making by various stakeholders of an economic entity are the main functions of accounting. Mattessich (1995, p. 2) even stated that accountability is “the beginning and end of accounting.” He emphasized that the importance of accounting “lies in its function as a cybernetic mechanism (a feedback that controls and regulates) that preserves confidence in the trustees of public and private resources and financial markets no less than in the entire economic system” (Mattessich, 1995, p. 2). Accounting influences the actions and behav-iors of people, economic entities, and other parties in socio-economic and natural environments. While accounting is a technical practice, it is also a social and moral one, making it a multidimensional practice with the potential to shape a better world (see, for instance, Carnegie, 2023). Accountability means “the duty to provide an account (but by no means necessarily a financial account) or reckoning of those actions for which one is held responsible,” and it “involves two responsibilities or duties: the responsibility to undertake certain action (or forbear from taking actions) and the responsibility to provide an account of those actions” (Gray et al., 1996, p. 38). Accounting is a key device for the discharge of accountability both within and outside organizations (Carnegie, Napier, 2023, p. 19). An economic entity’s internal and external accountability requires periodic internal reports, financial statements and non-financial or sustainable development reports. Tradi-tionally, financial accounting and management accounting have been the primary traditional tools for providing information for these reports. The notion of governance dates to ancient times and it is of interest to political science and many social science disciplines. Accounting scholars, investors and regulatory bodies have developed a wide interest in corporate gov-ernance, especially since the early 1970s (Lai et al., 2023, pp. 28–29). “Corporate governance involves a set of relationships between a company’s management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders. Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined” (OECD, 2015, p. 9). The need for internal and ex-ternal (economic, social and environmental) accountability shapes the design, implementation and operation of corporate governance. Given the connections expressed above, the Handbook identifies three dimensions of accounting – technical, social and moral practices – as inherent to accountability and governance in this era of the concern for, and need to operationalize, sustainable development globally, particularly in alignment with the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015, p. 14). Highlighting the interconnectedness of accounting, accountability and governance is essential to achieving better outcomes for organizations, society and the planet.

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