Accounting for Grand Challenges: The Case of Modern Slavery

Seminar summary

As society’s awareness of the impacts of business operations grows, organizations are increasingly both choosing, and being compelled, to engage with grand challenges. The accounting profession, key to both collating and analyzing data within organizations and intermediating between firms, has been increasingly involved in addressing grand challenges such as climate change, through its role in social accounting and non-financial disclosure. Modern slavery represents a grand challenge that impacts millions of lives and is the subject of increasing legislation globally, yet the response of the accounting profession to modern slavery is poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a qualitative study of representatives of the UK accounting profession to understand the level of engagement of the accounting profession with organizational responses to the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. Drawing on professional competition theory, our findings suggest a broad disassociation of the profession from modern slavery. We characterize the profession’s lack of proactivity, marginalization of the issue, and its denial of jurisdiction over the issue. We discuss the implications of these findings for the accounting profession, for research on modern slavery, and for professional domains.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We welcome you to join us online on Wednesday 1 May 2024 at 2pm.

Speaker bio

Professor Charles H. Cho

Charles H. Cho is Professor of Sustainability Accounting and the Erivan K. Haub Chair in Business & Sustainability at the Schulich School of Business, York University. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Accounting, a Master of Science in Accounting, and a PhD in Business Administration (Accounting Track) from the University of Central Florida. He also worked for KPMG LLP and other public accounting firms for several years in auditing and taxation. His research interests include Social and Environmental Accounting; Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); and Accounting and the Public Interest. Professor Cho has published his work in leading academic journals such as Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, the European Accounting Review, and the Journal of Business Ethics. He currently serves as an Editor of Accounting Forum; the Accounting and Business Ethics Section Co-Editor of the Journal of Business Ethics; and as an Associate Editor of Business & Society. He is actively involved in the academic community as a Council member of the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research and Chair of its International Associates Committee, is regularly invited as plenary keynote speaker at international conferences and professional events, and solicited by the media. Recently, he was selected as one of the “Top 50 Academic and Research Support Project” from the Republic of Korea’s Prime Minister and Minister of Education; received the Honorable Knight Award from the University of Central Florida’s Hall of Fame; and was recognized as one of the top 2% most cited scholars within discipline worldwide (34th in the world and 1st in Canada) in the Accounting field for 2019.