Professor Jan Bebbington

Jan works at Lancaster University as the Director of the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business. She published on topics such the Sustainable Development Goals; sustainability science; motivations and rationales for standalone reporting; carbon accounting; sustainability assessment and accounting education. Jan is involved in a long-term collaboration between ecologists and sustainability scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre that aims to provide knowledge to a practice-based cohort of seafood companies who are seeking to actively contribute to ocean stewardship (focusing on SDG 14 – Life Below the Water). The project is yielding insight into the differences between accountability and stewardship as well as the issues in establishing organisational control over supply chains and reporting meaningfully on performance. Alongside her academic work, Jan has also contributions to the practice and policy communities in a variety of roles including, for example, being the Vice Chair (Scotland) of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2006 to 2011. The role of the Commission (a part of the UK Government) was to promote sustainable development across the UK and all sectors of society, particularly within Government. In 2021 Jan was part of a panel of experts for the Intergovernmental Panel of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the Business and Biodiversity working group.

Professor Martin Messner

Martin Messner is a professor of management accounting and control at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His main research interests include planning and budgeting, performance measurement, and the work of management accountants. His research is mainly of empirical nature, employing primarily qualitative methods. Martin is currently co-editor-in-chief of Accounting, Organizations and Society and, together with colleagues from other universities, organises the annual “Workshop on Management Accounting as Social and Organizational Practice” (MASOP).

Professor Dean Neu

Professor Dean Neu is a faculty member in the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto, Canada. Prior to joining the faculty, he was the Director of the Centre for Public Interest Accounting and faculty member at the University of Calgary. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto and Universidad de Autonoma del Estado de Morelos in Mexico. He is the former co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Accounting. As an accounting scholar and activist Dean is committed to unveiling the presence of accounting where we might not otherwise expect to find it. He has in numerous articles and public appearances revealed how accounting plays a mediative role between governments and population segments. Dean’s research and writing demonstrate how accounting, working hand in hand with bureaucracies, shapes and constructs societal governance. In this work, the disguise of accounting as a boring benign appendage to business and government is stripped away to reveal how accounting numbers play a crucial role in shaping public policy and the perceptions the public has of those policies.