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.