An Ecological Approach to Sustainability Development: Applications of Ecological Anthropology and Organizational Ecology-Sociology to Accounting Education

Abstract

Sustainability is a subject that has been researched by several interdisciplinary subjects to study the business environment in addressing economic and social development. Anthropology and sociology literature have examined sustainability within the context of evolutionary change processes. The application of the ecological framework in anthropology and sociology is an integrated approach that studies sustainability within the broader context of the environment, and business and society. Ecological anthropology has examined how cultural and social forces have evolved in ecological and land ethics in business education. Organizational ecology has related the resource-based transaction cost approach for the integration of sustainability into the accounting curriculum. The examples from sustainability accounting education from both the emerging and developed economies support the premise that when sustainability is integrated across the accounting curriculum, it can positively influence the attitudes of students, accounting professionals and policy makers. The purpose of this paper is to extend the ecology of sociological and anthropological approaches to study the integration of sustainability into the accounting curriculum in auditing and financial accounting courses, and the professional accounting community.