How Useful Are Shell's Reports for Stimulating Dialogue

This paper provides insights into how the language used in social/environmental accounts/reports contributes to the maintenance and reproduction of understandings, identities and social relations. While I develop the ‘radical critique’ within the social/environmental accounting/reporting literature, I also attempt to respond to calls for critical contributions to the social/environmental accounting/reporting literature to offer some pathway for change and development (Gray, 2002). To this end, I explore social/environmental accounting/reporting within developing discourses about corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. I do so in a way that attempts to make a contribution to three longstanding debates in two literatures: how business organisations become socially responsible; whether social/environmental accounting/reporting contributes to business and social change; and the critique of social/environmental accounting because of its constitutive properties