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1. Introduction
I was asked by the guest editor of this issue of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ) – Garry Carnegie – to provide a retrospective/prospective commentary about a Special Issue of AAAJ for which I was the guest editor. Specifically, the Special Issue to be discussed is entitled Social and environmental reporting and its role in maintaining or creating organisational legitimacy. It was published back in 2002 (Vol. 15, No. 3), and consisted of five separate papers. Given that it has been 16 years since this Special Issue was published, and given the subsequent growth in research exploring social and environmental reporting and its linkage to organisational legitimacy, it does now seem timely to provide this commentary.
My commentary is organised as follows: Section 2 provides an overview of the apparent importance, or impact, of the 2002 Special Issue in the overall context of AAAJ. Section 3 provides a brief summary of each of the five papers comprising the Special Issue, and identifies some of their respective contributions together with some of the suggestions they made for future research. Section 4 then provides some further insights into the contributions that the 2002 Special Issue, and the application of legitimacy theory, have made to the broader accounting literature, and in particular with respect to the development of knowledge, and theory, in the social and environmental accounting area. The apparent simplicity and parsimonious nature of legitimacy theory are raised in Section 4 as being a characteristic of the theory that has been favoured by many researchers. Section 5 then identifies some apparent shortcomings in legitimacy theory, and Section 6 then provides some possible reasons why these shortcomings are apparent within the theory. In doing so, Section 6 draws upon the history of the development of the theory in the social and environmental accounting literature. Section 7 then provides some suggestions for how we might advance legitimacy theory, thereby responding to calls for advancement that date back as far as the 2002 Special Issue. Section 8 will then provide some concluding comments and prescriptions.
2. The 2002 special issue within the broader context of AAAJ
To this point in time, and relying upon data provided by Google Scholar, the 2002 Special Issue is...