Social Accounting, Ethics and Solidarity

Abstract

Nowadays social accounting is becoming ever more widespread, and as a result its principles and guidelines are coming under closer scrutiny. Social accounting and business ethics are closely interconnected. First of all this is because the ethical aspects of business and also social accounting both pose a series of specific ethical questions, such as transparency, neutrality and coherence in relation to all those involved in a business activity, secondly, because the objects of social accounting are often data and information ‘with a high ethical content’ such as, for example, standard business praxis or the attitude and behaviour of a company towards its employees and consumers.Social accountants often use stakeholders as a reference point. Indeed, the ‘stakeholder approach’ is commonly used, albeit acritically and without distinguishing between different approaches such as strategic, descriptive and ethical. For example, when senior management holds itself responsible to ‘influential stakeholders’ such as US consumers or large, established European trade unions, we must ask ourselves the following question: what criteria can we use to distinguish between the authentic application of ethical principles and the adoption of sophisticated business strategies?The debate on ‘managing stakeholders’ also needs to clarify terminology: who really are stakeholders and what procedures should companies adopt to guarantee transparency in their dealings with them? An interesting debating point could be to relate the stakeholder approach with ‘solidarity.’ This concept centres on the primary importance of the human personality and can serve as a link with and between individual stakeholders and the wider aspects of the motivations for social accounting. It is in this context that the paper examines relations between the Social Doctrines of the Catholic Church (focusing on Social Encyclicals, in particular, ‘Centesimus Annus’) and business ethics and social accounting.