Crisis Narratives and the Abandonment of CSR during the Financial Crisis: Notes from Systems Integrated

Studies of environmental accounting systems within organisations have highlighted significant benefits to the commercial organisation arising upon adoption, insisting that economic and commercial benefits, whilst sometimes being unexpected, are an important driver in adopting such systems. But studies rarely elucidate instances where these apparent benefits are lost. This paper presents the case of Systems Integrated (SI), and provides an analysis of SI’s environmental accounting and reporting systems during the financial crisis in order to elaborate one such case of the abandonment of environmental accounting systems. The case demonstrates that the dogged pursuit of an organisational value creation strategy led to environmental accounting practices being perceived as both a means of reporting social and environmental performance and as a source of potential value creation. However, by the financial crisis, a purely value creation rationale pervaded leading to the eventual abandonment of SI’s environmental accounting system