Motivating Corporate Sustainability Research in Management Accounting Through the Lens of Paradox Theory*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Organizational leaders identify corporate sustainability as a complicated and urgent business imperative that their organizations face. The management accountant's role is to help develop accounting systems to measure and report corporate sustainability, yet several factors contribute to the contemporary management accountant's challenges in satisfying stakeholder demands to integrate sustainability into their practices and operations. Like sustainability, the tenets of paradox theory revolve around salient interdependent tensions with contradictions that persist across time. Therefore, I propose paradox theory as an alternative to the business case framing that currently dominates sustainability decision‐making. In this paper, I synthesize the existing literature at the intersection of management accounting, corporate sustainability, and paradox theory. My research also unearths a new paradox, one currently absent from the literature: the corporate sustainability temporal paradox. Finally, I offer a set of theory‐based research questions geared toward moving beyond business case thinking in accounting corporate sustainability research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".