An account of sustainability : Failure, success and a reconceptualization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of sustainable development (SD) has a pre-eminent place in the environmental policy agenda where it is defined as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromizing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (United Nations World Conference Environment and Development, 1987, p. 8). Within the accounting literature, research activity has focused on what SD may mean for business and accounting activity (see, for example, Batley & Tozer, 1993; Canadian Institute Chartered Accountants, 1993; Gray, et al., 1993; Gray, 1994; Rubenstein, 1994; Geno, 1995; Stone, 1995; Gray & Bebbington, 1996; Milne, 1996; and Bebbington & Thomson, 1996). As part of this literature Gray (1992) proposes the construction of an “account of sustainability" utilizing the idea of a sustainable cost calculation (SCC) which attempts to measure the additional costs which would be borne by the organization if the organization’s activities were not to leave the planet worse off at the end of an accounting period. This paper reports on an attempt to construct a SCC for Manaaki Whenua, Landcare Research New Zealand Ltd. The paper explains why such an account was attempted, outlines the SCC, reviews the attempt to perform the calculations and reflects on the tensions which emerged from the case. The case, while being unsuccessful because it failed to produce the numbers expected, was successful in that it highlighted conceptual mis-specifications of the SCC. This paper builds on this insight and attempts to theorize the research process and reconceptualize the SCC in a manner which seeks to avoid the pitfalls of the original SCC.
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.
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 | 0.036 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.037 | 0.048 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".