Personal Reflections on a Tale of Two Books: Social and Environmental Accounting Research in the Past, Present and Future

This paper was requested by the guest editors of the Australasian Accounting, Business and Finance Journal(AABFJ) following the Sydney CSEAR conference. One topic suggested to me was to write a comment onrecent developments leveraging on GG 2007 or that part that has not been published previously. I am pleasedto attempt this but wish also to make reference to another book published at the same time (Unerman,Bebbington and O’Dwyer (UBOD 2007), because I believe that the different perspectives presented areinformative for all scholars in the field of SEAR which is now often referred to as SA. The remainder of thispaper other than the introduction and conclusion will consist of firstly a review of GG 2007, secondly a reviewof UBOD 2007, and thirdly a number of observations based on these contrasting works.