Accounting and incentives for sustainability in higher education: an interdisciplinary analysis of a needed revolution
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this interdisciplinary paper is to explore the constraining role of accounting in the higher education pursuit of sustainability goals and to provide recommendations to transform accounting in ways that create incentives for sustainability and a dialogic reporting culture in higher education accounting. Design/methodology/approach Critical social theory and “strong” sustainability provide the theoretical framework for this interdisciplinary analysis. A literature review and collection of anecdotal evidence supports conceptual development of accounting technologies that provide incentives for sustainability practices in higher education. Findings Conventional accounting practices are founded on positivism, managerialism, and neo‐classical economics, creating a psychic prison for the accounting discipline that fails to recognize the socially constructed nature of accounting reports and their explicit valuation role. University rewards structures, reporting mechanisms, and curricular foci dictate against the transformation of accounting technologies toward sustainability. Other anecdotes illustrate how accounting processes hinder sustainability initiatives in higher education. Research limitations/implications The paper recommends five changes that could be made to existing accounting reports for higher education institutions. It also proposes the adoption of both narrative reporting and a dialogic model of sustainability reporting and expansive learning in higher education organizations that would provide a transitional process for change. Originality/value Little literature has addressed the role of accounting in sustainability practices. This paper offers a sociological analysis of the assumptions built into the accounting profession and a reconceptualization of accounting practices that could be pioneered on the campuses of higher education institutions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it