Research

Professor Elena Giovannoni, University of Birmingham 

"Hide and then seek! Accounting for Net-Zero"                                                                                                     

Wednesday 4 March 2026 12:00-13:30, Room 588AB The Adam Smith Business School building

Abstract

This paper explores accounting calculations and the problem of intervention for climate, at the organizational level. Whereas it is clear that organizations have to act and intervene in relation to ‘grand’ phenomena, like climate change, and that collective action is needed to achieve ‘Net-Zero’, how objects of intervention for climate emerge and unfold ‘internally’ at the organizational level is less clear. We take carbon accounting practices of Danish universities as our empirical setting, researching how they relate to climate change and deal with organizational possibilities to tackle it. We show that whereas climate change becomes poorly actionable when accounted for through global data, reports and structures, it becomes more actionable at the local, micro, organizational level, where the attempt to calculate ‘climate’ leads to a proliferation of possible objects of intervention, which get divided indefinitely and multiply. This happens through two types of accounting infrastructural work: hiding the complexity of a phenomenon (and forgetting about its magnitude), and enabling its complexity to be re-discovered (and the magnitude to be remembered) through an unfolding process. We found that, through such forgetting/hiding and remembering/re-discovering work of accounting infrastructures, possibilities for interventions crack, divide, and thereby proliferate indefinitely in a multiplicity of increasingly smaller, positive and negative, objects - including hypothetical, desirable, absent, and counter objects – of intervention, ultimately recombining again into a utopian ‘Zero’. This explains what happens as organizations attempt to ‘internalize’ climate through accounting, questioning the boundaries of the entity principle at the ‘micro’ level of intervention, where the ‘macro’ rests.
(paper co-authored by Elena Giovannoni, Christian Huber, Jan Mouritsen)

 

Bio

Prof. Elena Giovannoni. Elena is Professor of Accounting at Birmingham Business School, Department of Accounting, where she is the Head of Department. Her work bridges critical and historical perspectives and methods for researching accounting, calculative practices and organizing, at the intersection of materiality, space and time, also in relation to grand challenges, Earth sustainability, and the future. She has published her research in several accounting journals such as Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Accounting History, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Management Accounting Research, British Accounting Review, European Accounting Review, as well as in Family Business Review, Human Relations, Management & Business History, Organization Theory, and Organization Studies.

---

For further information, please contact business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk

We foster a positive and productive environment for seminars through our Code of conduct.

First published: 10 February 2026