Placing Sustainability at The Heart of Accounting Analysis

The purpose of this study is to explore issues of sustainable development agenda in the context of accounting analysis. Sustainable development requires the involvement of all people/parties in the agenda and the accounting profession cannot be exempted. Accounting takes place in the center of business information system. Since sustainable development agenda requires significance involvement of business entities, accounting profession should respond to the movement seriously. This study utilized qualitative content analysis as the method to examine ideological mind-sets and themes in the sources studied. The results indicated that, viewed from sustainable development spirit, theoretisation of conventional accounting was deficient. It stays away from the spirit of seeing the world as a system, since it does not include social and environmental aspects from its conception of the world. To support and convince the movement of business venture toward sustainability agenda, the accounting profession should be able to overcome the deficiencies in conventional accounting. Reconstruction of accounting reports, intended to overcome the deficiencies, should be based on efforts directed to incorporate the spirit of sustainable development into the conceptual framework underlying accounting standards and practices.