Social and Environmental Accountability Journal (SEAJ) is the official Journal of The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research. It is a predominantly refereed Journal committed to the creation of a new academic literature in the broad field of social, environmental and sustainable development accounting, accountability, reporting and auditing. The Journal provides a forum for a wide range of different forms of academic and academic-related communications whose aim is to balance honesty and scholarly rigour with directness, clarity, policy-relevance and novelty.
SEAJ welcomes all contributions that fulfil the criteria of the journal, including empirical papers, review papers and essays, manuscripts reporting or proposing engagement, commentaries and polemics, and reviews of articles or books. A key feature of SEAJ is that papers are shorter than the word length typically anticipated in academic journals in the social sciences. A clearer breakdown of the proposed word length for each type of paper in SEAJ can be found here.
Corruption is a global phenomenon, whose multifarious and far-reaching consequences are difficult to grasp in their entirety. While the economic consequences of corruption are relatively well known, recent advances in literature also document the myriad of implications that corruption has on societal relationships, the lives of people and the natural environment. Importantly, venality can decelerate or discontinue progress made in our sustainability agenda. Devoting attention to “the good, the bad and the ugly” of accounting with respect to corruption plays a significant role in the ability of our societies to fight with contemporary social and environmental ailments, such as environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and social inequality. Accounting scholarship has yet to catch up with these academic developments.
Social and environmental accounting research is yet to provide insights on the implications of corruption, misuse of power, corrupt conducts and institutional (un)accountability on ecological and social vulnerabilities and their impacts on human rights, intragenerational and intergenerational equity, particularly in resource-rich nations. The consequences of these precarious and structural weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the public, private and third sector on citizens, local communities and the ecology need to be brought to the fore to understand its sustainability and human rights impacts.
To this end, we invite contributions to this special issue of Social and Environmental Accountability Journal (SEAJ). We welcome papers that contribute to our understanding of the limitations and potentials of accounting in addressing corruption in relation to social and environmental phenomena, particularly in relation to accounting, auditing and accountability issues. Submissions are welcome from a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches as long as they are consistent with this call for papers and SEAJ requirements.
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LoginSEAJ has a lively reviews section, which provides an important forum for academic discussion. We publish article reviews, book reviews and thematic reviews. Thematic reviews generally cover 3 or 4 recent papers on a similar topic. Our reviews section includes recent articles, books and themes that may be typical to SEAJ readership, but we also hope to introduce readers to articles, books and themes that may be novel to them. We accept proposals for reviews from authors at any stage of their career.
Find out more about the reviews on the aims and scope page.
For this special issue the guest editors invited authors to consider the practice of accounting and the mobilisation of accountability in the contested spaces where worlds and values coexist in pluralist societies. The special issue considers how accounting, as a technical practice, privileges market or economic interests and reflect on the implications for accountability to non-economic actors. Despite the limitations of accounting as merely technical, there is potential for accounting in a broader sphere to be enabling.
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The Reg Mathews Memorial Prize is an annual award for the paper considered to have made the most significant contribution towards the social and environmental accounting literature published in Social and Environmental Accountability Journal ( SEAJ). The paper is selected by the Editorial Board of SEAJ and is named in memory of Professor Reg Mathews, a leading figure in the development of social and environmental accounting. The award was established in 2013, and first awarded for papers published in 2012.
Professor Reg Mathews was one of social accounting’s earliest and most influential pioneers. An academic for most of his life, he was a prolific author and an exceptionally generous colleague. His influence on the emerging field of social accounting was manifest equally in his tireless support of new academics and in his important papers on such matters as education, approaches to practice and state-of-the-art reviews of the subject. He was the founding joint editor of Social Accounting Monitor, which paved the way for the international CSEAR community and which developed over time into what we now know as Social and Environmental Accountability Journal.
The CSEAR community honoured Reg with a Festchrift entitled Social Accounting, Mega Accounting and Beyond in 2007 and it is entirely fitting that his inestimable contribution be remembered in this annual prize. Reg passed away in 2012 after a long illness.
Learn more about previous prize winners.
About the Prize
