From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Critical Perspectives on Accounting journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cpa

From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool Delphine Gibassier [3_TD$IF]Toulouse University, Toulouse Business School, 20 Boulevard Lascrosses, 31068 Toulouse Cedex 7, France

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 27 June 2013 Received in revised form 14 March 2016 Accepted 23 March 2016 Available online xxx

I explore the institutionalization process of an environmental management accounting tool in France. Based on the concept of institutional work, I analyze the role of the French elite in institutionalizing life cycle assessment in France and its consequences. Who are the most influential institutional agents in the construction of environmental management accounting innovations? What work is involved in the creation of environmental management accounting innovations? The study follows the tool historically from the 1990s to 2012, looking at the different phases of institutionalization. This paper not only sheds light on the historical factors leading to an environmental management accounting innovation, but also and more specifically identifies which actors are involved in shaping new accounting techniques and what strategies are advanced for their adoption. ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: écobilan eco-balance life cycle assessment elite institutional work management accounting innovation

1. Introduction Environmental uncertainties, recent global issues such as climate change, and the scarcity of natural resources all affect management accounting innovations (Zawawi & Hoque, 2010). Life cycle assessment (LCA) is today considered to be an institutionalized environmental-management accounting tool. Its international history dates back to the 1970s, but it really became the object of concerted development in the 1990s. It is now considered the “Holy Grail of environmental decisionmaking” (Bebbington, Gray, Hibbitt, & Kirk, 2001). The French Environmental Agency ADEME also states that “its current implementation and dissemination contribute to making it a successful and recognized tool” (ADEME, 2005). Therefore, the particular status of this tool in environmental accounting makes it an especially interesting case study for deconstructing the creative work behind a tool that served to construct and remains an integral part of current environmental policies— especially in the French and European contexts.

Abbreviations: ADEME, Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie (French environment and energy management agency; AFITE, Association Française des Ingénieurs et Techniciens de l’Environnement (French association of environmental engineers and technicians); AFNOR, Association Française de Normalisation (French national standards organization); AVNIR, Plateforme pour l’analyse du cycle de vie (Platform for life cycle assessment); CD2E, Association Création Développement EcoEntreprises (Association for development of eco-enterprises); CERNA, Centre d’économie industrielle de l’Ecole des Mines (Industrial economics research center; CREER, Cluster Research; ECOSD, Eco-conception de systèmes durables (Research network on eco-design of sustainable systems); ELSA, Environmental Life cycle and Sustainability Assessment (Research Group); ENA, Ecole Nationale d’Administration (French national school of administration); FDES, Fiches de Déclarations Environnementales et Sanitaires (Environmental and health declaration forms); INIES, The French reference database on the environmental and health characteristics of construction products; ISO, International Organization for Standardization; LCA, Life Cycle Assessment; MAI, Management Accounting Innovation; REPA, Resources and Environmental Profile Analysis; SETAC, Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry; SPOLD, Society for the Promotion of Life Cycle Assessment Development; UNEP, United Nations Environment Program; US EPA, United States Environmental Protection Agency. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Gibassier). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003 1045-2354/ ã 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

2

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

Through the institutionalization of LCA in France, this paper seeks to clarify how environmental management accounting innovations (MAIs) are created and developed, with a focus on the unintended effects of creative work, such as when the innovations gradually become detached from their original rationales to become “something else”. It concentrates on the role of actors and their innovation strategies. Management accounting innovations have been thoroughly studied from the point of view of diffusion (Bjørnenak, 1997; Malmi, 1999; Alcouffe, Berland, & Levant, 2003; Ax & Bjørnenak, 2005; Marimon, Alonso-Almeida, Rodríguez, & Cortez Alejandro, 2012; Mellett, Marriott, & Macniven, 2009; Ezzamel, Hyndman, Johnsen, & Lapsley, 2014). More recently, a different approach has been advocated to narrate the development of accounting innovations. This new approach, based on actor-network theory, stresses “disjuncture, accident and a view of the history of ideas as a fragile accomplishment” (Cooper, Ezzamel, & Qu, 2016). These studies capture how innovation changes as an idea travels and how practices vary as they diffuse through the process of translation (Jones & Dugdale, 2002; Alcouffe, Berland, Levant, 2008; Cooper et al., 2016). Very few studies have attempted to study the creation of MAIs (Alcouffe et al., 2008; Chiapello & Berland, 2009; Becker, Messner, & Schäffer, 2013; Rowbottom & Locke,[5_TD$IF] 2016; Cooper et al., 2016). It is true that is it difficult “to witness the birth pains of a newly emergent accounting” (Hopwood, 1987). However, studying the creation of MAIs can help elucidate how management accounting came to function as we now know it, which social issues were involved in its development and shaped the MAI as it is implemented today, and the consequences its creation might have on its diffusion, adoption and implementation (Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, & Nahapiet, 1980). Hopwood (1977) called for research into the “institutional processes that can both facilitate and constrain the development of accounting.” However, studies of innovations using institutional theory are scarce. The study of the institutionalization of innovations emphasizes both the role of social legitimacy, which innovations need to acquire in order to become “institutionalized” (Gehrke & Zarlowski, 2003; Harun, Peursem, & Eggleton, 2012), and how this legitimacy can be gained through tactics such as analogy (Etzion & Ferraro, 2010). However, attention on the locus of the production of management knowledge and the work of actors in the institutionalization process has often been limited (Burchell et al., 1980) and remains to be further explored. New accounting history, according to Napier (2006), should shed more light on the role of actors such as the state, the media and trade unions. Management accounting innovations have been said to be the preserve of practitioners (Miller, 1991), yet the story of activity-based costing (ABC) emphasizes the role of management consultants in the tool’s diffusion (Jones & Dugdale, 2002). In other cases, academics have played a crucial role in developing the discounted cash flow technique in Great Britain (Miller, 1991). This shows that no one particular type of actor generates management accounting innovations, and conditions explaining the construction of historical agency need to be further explored, because not just anyone can articulate ideas about accounting that will be heard or believed (Oakes, Miranti, & Louis, 1996). Therefore, the contributions of this paper are to decipher which actors are involved in shaping new accounting techniques and what strategies are advanced for their adoption in practice (Miller & Napier, 1993). Through this analysis, I will respond to a call made by Hwang and Colyvas (2011) to look at the “institutional construction of actors”, and how “institutional contexts determine what sorts of actors would perform what kinds of institutional work”. Moreover, Lawrence, Leca, and Zilber (2013) claim that the concept of institutional work has only been used peripherally to understand the creation of institutions; therefore this research will also contribute to a deeper understanding of the work involved in creating a management accounting innovation (MAI). This paper analyzes the development in the 1990s of the tool initially called écobilan (eco-balance) in France by focusing on the actors involved and the institutional work they used to bring this tool to life. It reveals the unintended consequences of the creative work on the tool today, emphasizing how the initial tool became “something else”, trying to break out of the initial framework in which it was built. Although the story of LCA is not uniquely French, the focus on its construction in that particular country enables us to highlight a particular set of change agents and to analyze the practices that led to the creation of the tool in a historically and geographically localized context. Moreover, the international LCA standard has been very much inspired by the French standard of 1994, and French contributions in the 1990s to the debates on methodology within international bodies such as SETAC, SPOLD and ISO are acknowledged. Therefore, studying this particular localized context also casts light on the international perception of LCA today. This paper will therefore concentrate on the following research questions: Who are the institutional agents making themselves heard in the construction of environmental management accounting innovations? What work is involved in the creation of environmental management accounting innovations? The purpose of this paper is to broaden understanding of the role played by the French elite in the creation of écobilan through their institutional work, which shaped the very nature of the tool. By exploring the role of particular agents in the making of an environmental management accounting (EMA) tool, this research furthers our understanding of how environmental issues have been shaped and accepted in the French context. By focusing on which agents came to be heard in the development of EMA innovations, I respond to the call made by Jones and Dugdale (2002) for further research into the “locus of the production of management knowledge”. Moreover, uncovering the strategies deployed to create the tool grants a particular insight on how environmental accounting tools play a crucial role in power relations, rendering environmental performance visible to some but invisible to others. Accounting is both one of the stakes and an instrument in a constant struggle for domination; it participates in the production, attribution and reproduction of specific interests (Farjaudon & Morales, 2013).

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

3

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: the second section specifies the theoretical framework used for this study and the third describes the research design. The fourth section develops findings concerning the emergence and further institutionalization of life cycle assessment (LCA) in France, then the final sections will discuss the findings and conclude. 2. Change agents and management accounting innovations Burchell et al. (1980) raised the question of which agents are involved in the emergence and development of accountings. Innovations in management accounting have been viewed as principally the preserve of practitioners, and arising from attempts to address the problems faced by company managers (Miller, 1991). MAIs are not only fabricated internally within firms, but are constructed out of the interrelations between a diverse array of agents including academics, accountants, engineers, consultants and government agencies (Miller, Hopper, & Laughlin, 1991). External change agents often provide the initial inspiration for the innovation, and they frequently help shape and legitimize the innovation as it takes hold (Birkinshaw & Mol, 2006). Discounted cash flow procedures, for instance, were supported by academics (Miller, 1991). Jones and Dugdale (2002) note that the specific role of management consultants was pivotal in black-boxing the ABC innovation. The role of consultants was also central to the birth of budgetary control in France (Berland, 1997). In the literature on environmental management accounting, the role of government and government agencies has been emphasized through the description of several programs in Japan (Kokubu, Nashioka, Koichiro, & Imai S, 2003), Bangladesh (Mia, 2005), South Korea (Lee, Jung, & Kim, 2005) and the USA (US EPA’s environmental accounting program, 1992–2002). Another category of actors involved in the creation of management accounting innovations has emerged. They have been described as ‘social reformers’, i.e. “actors in society who, upon encountering economic or social phenomena they deem regrettable or maybe even highly dangerous, simultaneously produce a critique of society, a diagnosis of the risks it is running, and proposals for reforms, regardless of whether these reforms are considered realistic or utopian” (Chiapello & Berland, 2009). Contrary to elites, social reformers are not necessarily in a position of power and tend to position themselves as forces for opposition (Chiapello & Berland, 2009). Consequently, greater attention should be paid to the locus of the production of management knowledge (Jones & Dugdale, 2002). The only research on the construction of historical agency (Oakes et al., 1996) emphasizes the need to further explore the path that leads change agents to a position where they are heard, and how they then become “institutional entrepreneurs” in their own way. Furthermore, there is a need to study actors within their institutional contexts, since the latter determine “what sorts of actors would perform what kind of institutional work” (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011). Understanding who emerges as the entrepreneurs of new tools in a particular historical and localized context will help understand the creative work involved and the “identity” given to the tool. This, in turn, has consequences on the new tool’s innovation cycle, meaning on its diffusion, adoption and implementation. In the case of LCA, I introduce a new agent of innovation—the elite—and seek to clarify why they have become, in the case of France, the particular locus of the major environmental management accounting tool. 2.1. The elite as agents for innovation “A ruling elite ( . . . ) is a controlling group less than a majority in size that is not a pure artefact of democratic rules” (Dahl, 1958) and whose preferences prevail in all cases of disagreement (Dahl, 1958). An elite is usually composed of individuals who have influence and positions of authority (Genieys, 2011). Therefore, elites are not usually regarded as “a likely locus of change because of their embeddedness and privilege” (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Battilana, 2006; Riaz, Buchanan, & Bapuji, 2011). Several explanations as to why agents are thought to escape this embeddedness and entrenchment (Kilfoyle & Richardson, 2011) have been given in the literature. First, entrenched agents such as elites can become exposed to institutional contradictions, and exert boundary bridging and boundary misalignment (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006). Second, the existence of multiple alternatives can allow a skilled agent to navigate between them (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Entrenched agents can become entrepreneurs, even though they are marginally positioned within a social system, if their deviance is not censored (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009). Therefore, elite actors can respond to an external threat to their power through institutional work as a creative act (Currie, Lockett, Finn, Martin, & Waring, 2012). This can lead to the creation of a management accounting innovation, whose purpose is to maintain the status quo of the elite to which they belong. This study explores why the elite became the change agents in the case of LCA. This focus on the elite will also allow further exploration of their strategic command posts (Mills, 1956), and how they come to shape key policy dynamics to maintain and extend their influence (Zald & Lounsbury, 2010). 2.2. The French elite The French elite is characterized by its academic origin (Bourdieu, 1989). It embodies at the same time the social origin, cultural origin, and future “belonging” to the economic and political elite in France. As de Saint-Martin (1971) states, “the French bourgeoisie finds in the Grandes Ecoles, which place the reproductive function of social and economic capital before the function of knowledge transmission, one of the most effective instruments of its domination.” It is important to recognize

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

4

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

that the elite is trained almost solely within the Grandes Ecoles (Birnbaum, 1978), which are prestigious higher education establishments. Under the Fifth Republic, the scientific elite schools and the ENA (administrative school) have been the main pool from which the ruling class has been drawn (Birnbaum, 1978). The focus in this paper is on the elite from scientific schools (particularly “Polytechnique” and “Les Mines”1 ) as it is they who have framed public debate on the environment in France. The Grandes Ecoles’ mandate is to produce individuals with marked scientific competence; they are expected to train the “technical intelligentsia” (van Zanten, 2009). Polytechnique contributes to the French emphasis on mathematics as the screening tool for the best students, and as the symbol of educational achievement (Bernard, 2010). It embodies the qualities and flaws of academic excellence and social success “à la française” (Belhoste, Dahan, Dalmedico, & Picon, 1994) and is traditionally where the future managers of French industry are trained. After Polytechnique, students are assigned to a technical “corps”, and finish their academic curriculum at a school with the appropriate specialty (Bernard, 2010). One of the most highly regarded and most influential is the “Corps des Mines”, whose members complete their studies at the Ecole des Mines in Paris (Bernard, 2010). The students include the top graduates from Polytechnique, as well as two from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and two from the standard Ecole des Mines course. It is a powerful path towards top management in one of France’s multinationals: “Being ‘mineur’ (i.e. a graduate from the Ecole des Mines) is like holding an aristocratic title in the Ancien Régime. It remains a good passport to running a company” (Biseau, 2002). Moreover “The X-Mines [those who have graduated from both Polytechnique and Les Mines] are still incredibly supportive of each other. They know each other, they are intimate. This machine is formidably effective” (Biseau, 2002). Understanding the “old boy network” of the Corps des Mines decodes much of what happens around managers in the leading “CAC 40” companies and also some of France’s strategic orientations, such as the “all nuclear” decision (Biseau, 2002). François (2010) notes the surprisingly stable origins of the French economic elite, stating that globalization, financialization and economic liberalization have had very little impact on the profile of those who effectively run the French economy. 3. Theoretical framework: institutional work 3.1. Creative work In a situation of possible change, there is a need to understand what strategies entrepreneurial actors will deploy, and why certain strategies are chosen over others (Rojas, 2010). I argue that an innovation becomes an institution due to the institutional work performed by various actors (Perkmann & Spicer, 2008). Creative work is defined as practices through which actors engage in actions that result in the creation of innovations (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). The first type of practice involves mobilizing allies, cultivating alliances and cooperation (Battilana [6_TD$IF]& D’Aunno, 2009) through social skills (Fligstein, 2001), as in the case of ABC (Jones & Dugdale, 2002). One specific form of mobilization is advocacy, defined as “the mobilization of political and regulatory support through direct and deliberate techniques of social suasion” (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Additionally, entrepreneurs need to mobilize resources, a process essential to creative work but considered difficult to achieve (Battilana et al., 2009). The second type of practice is linked to the need to reconfigure belief systems and alter the boundaries of meaning systems (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). This is achieved by constructing identities, changing normative associations, mimicry and education (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). The last type of practice is the creation of structures and rules that stabilize the innovation, forming it into a finalized shape. This includes defining, theorizing, and constructing normative networks (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Naming or labeling is often a critical step that provides the foundation for further theorizing (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Innovation depends to a large extent on the formation of new ways of thinking about the processes in question, so new vocabulary for understanding the roles of accountancy and new rhetorical forms for representing the significance of particular calculative routines have to be created, a process known as “labeling” (Miller & O’Leary, 1990). The actors involved in the creation of the balanced scorecard (BSC) developed abstract categories to stabilize their framework via the use of a specific taxonomy composed of four categories (Cooper et al., 2016). Theorization has a significant impact on the diffusion phase (Strang & Meyer, 1993). The more cultural categories are informed by theorization, the more diffusion becomes rapid and universal, with the result that it is correspondingly less structured by social relations (Strang & Meyer, 1993). For example, the theorization carried out by the creators of the BSC used visual artefacts to win over and mobilize skeptics (Cooper et al., 2016). Although early studies on institutional work gathered an array of practices from previous research (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006), constituting a first glimpse of creative work, this concept has only been investigated in a few studies (Perkmann & Spicer, 2008; Slager, Gond, & Moon, 2012). The present study will therefore continue to explore the different types of work involved in the creation of management accounting innovations, while linking specific institutional work with the corresponding type of agents, and the institutional context in which they take place. 3.2. The elite and institutional work Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) have categorized certain types of work, such as “mimicry, theorizing and educating”, as holding more potential for institutional entrepreneurship on the part of small, peripheral or isolated actors. On the other

1

The two most prestigious of the French Grandes Ecoles, concentrating on engineering and science.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

5

hand, they have suggested that some elites may disrupt the process by disconnecting rewards and sanctions from different behaviors. This suggests that there is an association between the type of work and the type of actors involved. Moreover, until now, elites have mostly been seen as safeguarding their status, using institutions to protect their position (Fligstein, 2001). For example, Kaplan (2012) describes a self-conscious business elite who proposed a new framework that only readjusted the system as a way of preserving “western civilization”, even though they had recognized the inevitability of social change. In a study of the healthcare profession, the institutional work of healthcare professionals managed to leave institutional arrangements relatively untouched, and even enhanced the social position of the professional elite (Currie et al., 2012). However, in answer to external threats, elite actors can respond through creative acts which are both purposeful and active (Currie et al., 2012). When threatened by a new regulation, for example, elites of the legal profession managed to create a new professional ethos that apparently helped to strengthen their position (Flood, 2011). Therefore, institutional work for elites might be less about defending the status quo and more about “adjusting to change in a way that continues to favor more powerful actors” (Currie et al., 2012). Therefore, this paper seeks to contribute to a more subtle understanding of the link between institutional actors and the work they pursue, with a particular focus on what kind of work the elite practice to maintain themselves as powerful actors, while creating innovations. This will also contribute to further research on more integrative models of institutional dynamics (2013). 4. Research design The focus of this research is to unpack the unofficial history of an environmental management accounting tool, focusing on the actors involved and their work. I believe that studying the history of accounting tools reveals how and why tools that we commonly use today were created and diffused. Firstly, this research takes a longitudinal approach to studying the institutionalization processes of life cycle assessment in France over a period of 20 years (Tolbert & Zucker, 1996). This sheds light on the different contextual phases and different processes of institutionalization up to now. I have analyzed power relations and the networks involved and I responded to the need to “locate the processes historically” as stated by Ball and Craig (2010). The study’s focus on the specific French context addresses the need to address the localized conditions out of which practices emerge (Miller [7_TD$IF]& Napier, 1993). The case study chosen is the development of the tool once called écobilan, now institutionalized in France as “life cycle assessment” (analyse de cycle de vie). LCA is today an institutionalized tool for environmental assessments, recognized internationally for its widespread usage and the existence of a broad and active community of users (Costedoat, 2012). France was one of the first two countries to standardize the methodology in the early 1990s. The particular attachment of France to the tool through to the present, emphasized by the recent experimentation of the labeling program,2 makes it a particularly good example of an institutionalized EMA tool in a national context. 4.1. Data collection Making institutional work visible requires rich, detailed case studies (Lawrence, Suddaby, & Leca, 2009). Therefore, although the institutionalization process is studied ex post, a considerable volume of data has been collected from actors in the institutionalization process, from the French Environmental Agency’s archives, from books and press articles, as well as by attending a workshop on life cycle assessment in November 2011. This research was conducted in three stages. First, I conducted an initial exploratory study exploring the different possible institutionalization forces for EMA tools in France. This initial research led to a better understanding of the institutional context for environmental topics in France, and identified successfully institutionalized EMA tools as potential case studies. Two EMA tools were identified as having been particularly successfully institutionalized in France. One of the tools was much younger than the other, meaning that it was only possible to observe a short ten-year period or so, whereas écobilan could be observed for a period of a little over 20 years. The latter was therefore chosen to illustrate the institutional work of actors in the creation and institutionalization process of an EMA tool in France. Interviews were conducted with French researchers, Members of the French Parliament involved in law-making related to sustainability reporting, a former environmental director of a French company who played an important role in the drafting of ISO 14001, and a manager from the French Environmental Agency, ADEME. The latter is a public agency placed under the supervision of both the Ministry of Ecology and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. It is involved in the implementation of public policies in the areas of the environment, energy and sustainable development. I also met with the accountants’ association sustainability group, read the debates related to the making of the NRE3 law in 2001, and attended a workshop on the Grenelle Environment Round Table discussions, as well as a consultancy conference on carbon accounting. To complete the exploratory research, I interviewed international experts on EMA involved in the US EPA project in the 1990s

2 The French Grenelle 2 law decided upon a nationwide experimentation of environmental labeling on products and services based on a simplified LCA methodology. This ran from July 2011 to 2013. 3 French Law on new economic regulations: Nouvelles Régulations Economiques, Law No. 2001–420 dated May 15, 2001. Article 225–102 was the first regulation in France to oblige listed companies to communicate on the social and environmental consequences of their economic activities.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

6

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

and in the drafting of the EMA report at the United Nations, to gain an understanding of how EMA had developed outside of France. (See Appendix A for descriptions of interviews in the exploratory phase.) The second stage of the research was conducted from January 2011 to March 2013. Because of the tentative focus on the institutional work of actors, the identification of major actors was key to elaborating the history. Actors were not selected on the basis of their belonging to the French elite, but on their role in the écobilan institutionalization process. However, for the period from 1990 to 2000, as well as for people connected to the former “Ecobilan” consultancy, the vast majority of the actors interviewed are from the French elite, as defined in the prior section. The names of contacts within the consultancy were first obtained via the book “L’Ecobilan” written in 1995 by the journalists Blouet and Rivoire. Names were further collected by gathering press articles related to life cycle assessment in France. Two key contacts were made through personal networks. Further interviews were made through snowballing, asking interviewees to provide the names of key actors in the history of life cycle assessment who could provide further insights. Contacts were not always easy to make due to the fact that many people involved in écobilan’s creation and institutionalization had either left the field, retired or simply did not want to reflect on that period. Some contacts took more than a year to accede to my request for an interview. Interviews provided access to the making of LCA through different angles and time periods. First, I was able to conduct interviews not only with consultancies, but also receivers (users in the industry), government agencies, and one non-governmental organization (NGO) involved in the process. I was also able to interview people who were active at the beginning of the period (1990–95), some of whom were active from the early 1990s until now, and others who were more active recently. (See Appendices B and C for descriptions of interviews in the second phase.) Interviews were conducted by the author face-to-face whenever possible, or by phone if geographical distance so required. All the interviews were recorded, and notes taken during the interview process. Questions were tailored to each respondent, as their particular role in the development of life cycle assessment was different. However, common topics included development of the methodology, strategy of the consulting firms, strategy of clients, limitations of the tool, standardization of the tool in the French and international context, development of the LCA market in France, role of the government and government agencies in the development of LCA, and the most recent period with the impact of the French environmental law (Grenelle) on the latest developments. Four interviewees asked to reread extracts from their interview, and made modifications to clarify matters or, in one case, to delete the names of the companies involved. One interviewee asked me to specifically destroy interview data once the research was over. Alongside the interviews, secondary data were collected from the media (archival search on Lexis Nexis with the words écobilan, analyse de cycle de vie (LCA), BIO Intelligence Service,4 and the names of prominent actors in the field), manuals, and the journal published by elite school Les Mines, “Responsabilité & Environnement” (Responsibility & the Environment). Accessing secondary data such as manuals enabled me to see how LCA was objectified and packaged. I also had access to the archives of the French Environmental Agency. Moreover, in November 2011 I attended a one-day workshop organized by the AFITE association and called “Reinvestir l’analyse de cycle de vie” (reinvesting life cycle assessment). AFITE is an association “whose members consider that the dynamic and balanced protection of the environment [ . . . ] must be drawn from adequate technical and regulatory measures, supported by a neutral, technical and scientific approach attentive to the expectations of society” (AFITE, 2013). The collection of secondary information allowed triangulation of data, to show that independent measurements go in the same direction, or at least do not contradict our results (Miles & Huberman, 2003). (See Appendices D and E for descriptions of secondary data.) The last stage of the research was conducted between November 2013 and January 2014. To shed light on how the French LCA story connects to the international LCA story, and how the development of LCA in the French context had a decisive influence on how LCA is practiced today, I collected additional data. First, I was granted access in January 2014 to archives concerning the French and international standardization of life cycle assessment in the 1990s by AFNOR. This access had been requested in 2012, but not granted previously. It allowed the gathering of 496 pages of documentation. Second, I conducted six additional interviews, totaling 239 minutes, with prominent figures in the international LCA story, including one person from Canada, one from the USA, one from the Netherlands, and two from Switzerland. Both additional sources of data complement the earlier sources on the links between the “French” story and international developments around LCA since the 1990s.

4.2. Data analysis The transcribed interviews were first skimmed through, then reread and notes taken. Initial ideas emerged from the reading and annotating of data manually. I analyzed both interview transcripts and all secondary data described above with the Dedoose5 qualitative data analysis software, which allows line-by-line coding of data. In all, 512 excerpts were coded. I used thematic content analysis, the codes being inferred by theory on institutional work, complemented by additional codes that emerged from analysis of the material. General codes came from both theory (creative institutional work, work to

4 5

BIO Intelligence Service was the main competitor of Ecobilan at the time. Dedoose, formerly called EthnoNotes.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

7

maintain the status quo) and general themes from the interviews (the Ecobilan consultancy, the tool, elite relationships). Some codes were renamed and recombined after several rounds of analysis, such as “theorizing and standardization work”, which was renamed “locking work”, or elements of the strategy of the Ecobilan consultancy, which were renamed “gatekeeping work”. 4.3. Research object: life cycle assessment Life cycle assessment (LCA) can currently be considered an institutionalized environmental management accounting tool. Although sustainability is not easy to measure, any successful way of doing so “will be based on methods derived from life cycle thinking, with LCA as the core element” (Klöpffer, 2006). LCA is defined as: A quantified assessment of flows of materials and energy entering and leaving at the borders of a system representing the life cycle of a product or service. (Grisel & Osset, 2004) The LCA process as defined by the ISO standard is composed of four steps: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. In the case of comparative analysis, ISO 14040 imposes a peer review of the LCA. The main usages of LCA related to product performance are product improvement, to design breakthrough products through eco-design, to choose the materials for new products, and to make choices regarding products’ end of life. LCA results are also used for eco-labeling (ISO 14025, and life cycle thinking is behind both the European and the French NFEnvironnement eco-labeling schemes), for supply chain management (“green” procurement practices), and for communication between organizations in the same industry, such as ISO TC 59 in the construction industry. LCA results are also used within European policies and public tenders (Osset & Grisel, 2004). According to Osset (2011), all the indicators indicate a widening practice of LCA. Today, this can be seen by internalization of LCA practices within organizations, the growing number of training courses and education programs integrating LCA knowledge, the number of regulations integrating LCA, and the number of public tenders integrating LCA results. Two major initiatives have recently used LCA as the calculative pillar of their program: the Sustainability Consortium (USA/International) and the French product labeling experiment. The history of LCA is associated with an initial study for Coca-Cola in 1969, and with REPAs (Resources and Environmental Profile Analysis) in the USA during the 1970s. The US EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) became interested in the tool, but very quickly found it impractical, as it required the micromanagement of private businesses (Hunt & Franklin,[8_TD$IF] 1996). Several research centers and consultancies in Europe also emerged during the 1970s and ‘80s to work on the environmental performance of products, including the Boustead consultancy, the CML research center (Centrum voor Milieukunde Leiden) and the Swiss EMPA at St Gallen. I know of no French initiatives until the very end of the 1980s. At the time this research began, in 1990, there was no standardized methodology for LCA and there was room for new entrants to define how LCA should be standardized. While the specific historically and geographically localized context of this study should not be understood as deemphasizing the international nature of LCA, it reveals the decisive influence the French work had on the methodological debates and international standardization in the 1990s. Therefore, this research in a localized context also reflects the way LCA is currently perceived in the international arena (Fig. 1).

[(Fig._1)TD$IG]

Fig. 1. Chronology of events.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

8

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

The special status achieved by LCA among other environmental performance measurement systems makes it a particularly interesting case study to deconstruct. Moreover, the tool is a constitutive part of current environmental policies, especially in the French and European contexts. 5. Findings The findings of this longitudinal case study are presented in chronological order. Sections 5.1 to 5.4 relate to the 1990– 1995 period, when the French elite took environmental accounting on board. Section 5.5 relates to the 1995–2000 period, and section 5.6 to the 2007–2012 period. From 2000 to 2007, France was quasi absent from the international LCA scene, with near to no implementation in French industry, very little consultancy development and no research and development at universities. Therefore, the “rebirth” of LCA in France starts in 2007. 5.1. Institutional context of environmental topics Institutional contexts determine what types of actor perform what kinds of institutional work (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011). The green movement goes back to the 1960s, with the foundation of the WWF and the publication of seminal books such as “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. It quickly picked up in the 1970s, fueled by environmental catastrophes such as the Amoco Cadiz and Torrey Canyon oil spills or the Seveso industrial accident. At the same time, the first worldwide political declaration of 1972 in Stockholm marked the recognition of an ever-growing environmental issue. However important the environmental issues had become worldwide, ecology was marginalized in France, whether in politics or in associations. First, In the 1970s, French public opinion was not focused on environmental issues. The French population was sparse in vast regions, and pollution affected only a minority. Most French people also have a “firm and Cartesian belief in progress”, which was contrary to the ideas of ecologists, who tended to question certain technological innovations such as nuclear power (Giblin, 2001). Therefore, democratic and civic mobilization around these issues has been and remains very weak in France. Even in politics, “ecology took a long time to emerge as an important political question” (Jacquiot, 2007). This is because in France, ecology—at least until the mid-1980s—was confined to the protection of nature, and was not associated with the defense of the environment as a parameter of human health (Jacquiot, 2007). Secondly, the marginalization of ecology in France is mainly linked to the exceptional use of civil nuclear energy to provide electricity in France. Environmental NGOs in France have clearly had in mind the reduction or cessation of the use of nuclear power for providing energy in France since the very beginning. However, the widespread use of nuclear power plants in France contributed to creating a clear and strong bond between nuclear use and the French national identity (Hecht, 2007). Environmental NGOs were therefore stigmatized as not only anti-nuclear but even clearly “anti-France”, since they were challenging an element of the national identity. Nuclear power has been considered a question of national security and independence, outside the realm of ecology: the French president, for instance, even excluded it from the Grenelle agenda (Bezat, 2012). Finally, elites have always been present in the state apparatus for the environment, both at ministry and environmental agency levels. As the environment entered the French government as a ministry in 1971, it had to be measured. “Science was not in our mind, the science of vague things,” according to a Mines graduate engineer in the first French Ministry of the Environment (Moyen, 2007). The first Ministry of the Environment was staffed by engineers from elite schools: . . . specializing in Rural Engineering, Water and Forestry; graduates of the Ecoles des Mines familiar with the industrial world, its techniques, its constraints and its harmful effects; and civil engineers (Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées) used to working on major infrastructure projects and experts in the risks they may pose to the natural environment (Poujade, 2007). Ecologists in the 1970s were denouncing “technocracy”, that is, specialists who would take decisions in the name of science in the place of elected representatives (Lalonde, 2007). Yet, when the French Environmental Agency (ADEME) was created in 1992, it quickly focused on recruiting pure technical experts (Escande, 1993) managed by elite directors from Polytechnique and ENA. Therefore the “thought style” of the French elite has always dominated the environmental debate at a political level, and they have monopolized positions at both the ministry and the environmental agency since their inception. A thought style “leads perception and trains it and produces a stock of knowledge” (Douglas, 1986). It penetrates the minds of members, defines their experience and sets the poles of moral understanding (Douglas, 1986). Therefore, “the thought style not only frames the way issues are addressed but also closes off alternative and incompatible perspectives” (Murphy, 2012). Since the beginning of the 70s, the thought style of the French elite, and how it is applied to the environment, defines what is acceptable, and closes off other perspectives that might be expressed in NGO discourses or by environmental political parties. The thought style of the elite defines the environment first and foremost as a scientific problem: Environmental problems have today almost always a scientific connotation. ( . . . ) The scientist is indeed involved in environmental issues almost against his will. Discourses about the environment must obviously be subject to the control

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

9

of experimental knowledge. We too often hear public discourses that are totally disconnected from scientific truths. (X-Environnement, 1996 6 ) The French elite considers the environment as a topic that is measurable and quantifiable. Decisions related to the environment have to be taken based on quantified outputs: Research in the field of environment requires specialized assessments and extreme precision in general, as it involves considerable methodological difficulties. It is important not to philosophize before having measured. (X-Environnement, 1996) Elite engineers consider themselves as the most suitable resource to address environmental issues: It seems to me that students from the French system of Grandes Ecoles and particularly of the École Polytechnique are able to assimilate complex problems quickly. They have the training and the general spirit of synthesis, which should enable them to contribute effectively to solving major environmental problems. (X-Environnement, 1996). 5.2. Threats to the elite In the early 1990s, several envisaged regulations emerged as potential threats to French industry, which urgently needed a way of assessing their possible effects. Industrial bodies appealed to the Ecole des Mines to carry out initial impact studies. The first environmental life cycle assessment study carried out was for the steel industry. The study focused primarily on energy and CO2, as the main purpose of the study was to anticipate the potential effects of a carbon tax on the steel industry. At the time, there was a strong context of environmental regulations at European level, with projects that could seriously impact some industrial sectors. [ . . . ] The demand for LCA was therefore in many cases based on industry’s need to anticipate the potential impact of regulatory projects, to get figures on which negotiations could be based, or to get an idea of weak and strong ‘environmental’ aspects of specific products or materials in comparison with their competitors. In short, LCA was used in a defensive or preventive way in many instances; only in a few cases at that time were LCAs used in a proactive way, for instance in the eco-design of new products or services. (Consultant, Interview 2) The écobilan tool (which later became LCA) was seen as a means of defending French industry, or of preventing potential attacks from competitors or emerging regulations. It was fundamental at the time for French industry to construct a coherent inter-sector approach to defend its interests on the international scene (Greave, Labouze, & Rousseaux, 1996). Additionally, écobilans were used against attacks from ecologists: The big manufacturers started asking their engineering teams to look at the . . . , let's say ‘life cycle’, to try to quantify the impacts and risks. They published that and clearly, they were criticized by people who found that it was too favorable and that they didn’t take everything into account. So there was a reverse push by ecologists and certain scientists and that is when neutral players came on the scene. (Consultant, interview 14) 5.3. Creation of the Ecobilan consultancy as a defensive measure The “Ecobilan” consultancy was set up to play a defensive role on behalf of French industry, helping develop the expertise of écobilans in France. This defensive and anticipative effort to maintain the status quo was sustained through creative work: developing a new tool, and a new consulting service around it, which was considered a national service to the French economy: [For Ecobilan] it was meeting an expectation in France. Both the government and manufacturers said we want life cycle assessment expertise in France. (Consultant, interview 17) Ecobilan was created within CERNA, the Industrial Economics Research Center of the Paris Ecole des Mines. At that time, there were several doctoral theses being prepared at the Center on the economic aspects of competitiveness between materials, and research into materials at the Ecole des Mines was considered a point of excellence for the school. Research on life cycle assessment, as a concept, already existed and was ongoing at the Center. The first contracts started to come in through the relationships between academia and industry, such as when the first industrialist working for the chemical industry, who at the same time managed the biotechnical option at the Ecole des Mines, formulated the first research proposal on life cycle assessment. At that time, the founder of the Ecobilan consultancy started working on the topic with academics to develop the methodology. Gradually, contracts came in and the founder saw the commercial potential of the tool. When he felt that it could stand on its own two feet, as CERNA was playing the role of incubator, he created the Ecobilan consultancy with the help of two CERNA researchers. Founded in 1990 with these two start-up partners, it developed quite quickly through networking:

6

X-Environnement is an association of Polytechnique alumni with an interest in environmental issues.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

10

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

And all of this played out against the backdrop of the kind of discreet lobbying, I would say, no press, no . . . Let's say, zero outside communication, only single, person-to-person contact. I suppose it's a rather unique way to launch a small business and that was only possible because of Corps des Mines networking. (Consultant, interview 8) A few former doctoral students from Les Mines followed the founder in the start-up consultancy, including one graduate from Polytechnique, and another from Agro Paristech.7 A second Agro Paristech graduate, who had also done some work for CERNA at that time, became the first employee of Ecobilan. By the end of 1990, there were three to four people working for Ecobilan. The consultancy developed very quickly, expanding up to 30 employees with a division in the United States. Most Ecobilan employees were generalist engineers from the French elite schools—mainly Polytechnique and Les Mines (Blouet & Rivoire L’écobilan, 1995). 5.4. Creative work 5.4.1. Mobilization The ability of a new institution to become sufficiently widespread depends on the willingness of actors to adopt it (Zietsma & McKnight, 2009). Ecobilan’s consultants strongly mobilized elite ties between academia, industry and government. They used networking to create a consensus in favor of the new tool and services. The French Environmental Agency was one of the first to be mobilized and to contract for écobilans to be performed. Secondly, the economic elite from French industry was also mobilized: The Ecole des Mines [engineering school] is closely tied to the Corps des Mines [engineering corps]. The Corps des Mines is or was especially heavy-industry oriented ( . . . ). So there were a lot of the engineers from the Corps des Mines in a certain number of industrial sectors, and [ . . . ] networks were used, especially the network of Mines engineers, to get orders. (Academic, Interview 3) Finally, strong ties were formed directly with the Ministry of the Environment: There was lobbying within the ministry by executives, especially by [the director of Ecobilan]. The idea was to get the Ministry of the Environment to understand that at cabinet level, not at department level, the position of France was the position of Ecobilan. To simplify, roughly speaking, that’s what it was. (Consultant, interview 8) The French government supported écobilans by initiating research programs on methodological issues. The main program was on agricultural and food products. Launched in 1992, it was co-financed by the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as 12 companies in the food sector. 5.4.2. Identification: mimicry of respected elite professions Leveraging existing sets of taken-for-granted practices, and associating the new with the old, are ways to ease adoption of innovation (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). The new “profession” was associated first with elite groups such as the Anglo-Saxon strategy consultancies: As a consequence, it was often the strategic directorates of industrial groups (or their federations) which were our customers; not their environmental departments. The topics were rather strategic. (Consultant, interview 2) It was priced as a high-end strategic product: companies invested between 200,000 and 1,000,000 French francs8 per study (Alberganti, 1993) or 7,000 francs9 per day (Blouet & Rivoire L’écobilan, 1995). Additionally, it was linked to the activities of chartered accountants (experts-comptables), to associate it with the idea of a highly ethical profession, and the idea of “expertise”: One key credo of Ecobilan, and a message that Ecobilan used to convince customers and sell its services, was the idea that accounting and assessment of material and energy flows would progressively become an absolute necessity for the industry (just as financial accounting had become).[ . . . ] The inventories (or ‘écobilans’) were the basis of such accounting. To further the comparison with accounting, the idea was that, just as there are internal accountants and chartered (independent) ones, there would be a need for the industry to internalize LCA expertise and carry out their own inventories and LCA exercises; but there would always remain a need and room for independent experts who could certify inventories or LCAs, just as chartered accountants certify company accounts . . . (Consultant, interview 2) More than just associating écobilan consultants with professional accountants, there was a willingness to create a truly new and independent profession that would be similar to the audit profession. Ecobilans would become the equivalent of financial accounting, gradually becoming internalized, while écobilan consultants would become the auditors of companies’ environmental accounts.

7 8 9

A Grande Ecole for environmental and life sciences. 200,000 French francs is currently 30,490 euros and 1,000 000 French francs 152,449 euros. 7,000 French francs is currently 1,067 euros.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

11

5.4.3. Identification according to the elite’s thought style The écobilan was framed as an innovation for and by elite engineers. The construction of the tool’s identity was defined in relation to the field it was to operate in, that is the power elite. It was claimed to be the first time that an integrated tool enabled the whole product to be measured, and thereby, the impact of public policy. It was also the first time that there was a global approach incorporating water and waste aspects, together with an analysis of raw materials and aspects related to sub-products. It was quickly labelled revolutionary and purely scientific, using an approach opposed to “environmentalism”: And that was precisely the basis on which Ecobilan was founded, by saying: [ . . . ] we will begin work to provide companies with decision-making tools that they can understand and use, that they are accustomed to using, I mean tools for an engineer, as it were. (Consultant, interview 7) The French technical know-how, even their education system, is very specific, you know, they get into details, ( . . . ) they really do influence other organizations in the world. (International interview 3) The approach also had to be standardized so that écobilans could be conducted on the level of technical sophistication defined by the elite engineers. French experts were also certain that écobilans based on an approach intended to be scientific were the only serious basis for obtaining a label (Perez, 1993). On the écobilan, it has always been, by and large, the richest version possible, that is to say, what is normal is to do the job the way we do it—that is to say, comprehensively. (Consultant, interview 8) During the ISO standardization process, he [from Ecobilan] made the point that you can only make comparative research on the basis of “solid science”. (International interview 6) When the name of the tool became “analyse de cycle de vie” during the French standardization process (1992–1994), the French name for the tool still embodied the very technical view of the tool through the word “analysis” and not “assessment”, a different perspective from the international name given in ISO 14040: We finally agreed that it should be “life cycle assessment” because assessment has both a sort of subjective and a sort of analytical or technical symbolism; analysis is more of a technical analysis with less subjective pieces, and we realized that in life cycle there are some subjective pieces, not straight analytical ones. That’s why we use the word life cycle assessment and I remember when I saw the French translation of 14040. ( . . . ) When it was translated from English to French, assessment was actually analysis. (International interview 4) 5.4.4. Gate-keeping work: building barriers around the innovation As a new business built around the écobilan innovation, the elite engineers slowly built barriers to entry, consistent with their image of the high-end work they were trying to achieve. Gate-keeping consisted in first constantly achieving best research and development in the methodology, second in developing the largest possible private dataset needed for highend écobilans and third in integrating their methodology into proprietary software. By mimicking high-end consultancies and selling at high prices, they were able to mobilize resources for research and development, which was key to sustaining their leadership. The consultancy secured a big contract with the food industry that became the main source of revenue to recruit and develop, and take the time to think about and develop its research on the écobilan. Elite engineers were able to identify previous failures and presented solutions to “impossible” technical problems. The strategy was, according to an interviewee, to resolve the problems that others had not resolved and, therefore, to go after markets that were said to be impossible. The consultancy targeted three markets deemed impossible for écobilan: Agriculture: we have production loops like that, which pose a problem for extending the system, and so when we attacked it, it was still a subject of academic research, and people were stumbling around. The construction industry: in the field of construction, the écobilan was deemed unfeasible and impossible to do, it's too complicated, too particular. And electronics: it was too complicated; you would never be able to do it. (Consultant, interview 6) After first acquiring resources for research, they started to construct a database. As leaders in the market, they were collecting vast quantities of data and building up the strongest private database in the market place according to an interviewee (Government/Governmental body, interview 10). Through their leadership, Ecobilan consultants also framed the first écobilan software, thereby blackboxing their way of performing écobilan calculations (Consultant, interview 5). 5.4.5. Theorizing and standardization as locking mechanisms The consultants from Ecobilan had resources for research, and as they worked for different industries, they continued to build on methodology. They wanted the external norm to equate to their way of doing things, and standardization was part of their strategy to demonstrate leadership. Standardization was a locking mechanism to avoid substandard services that would not have been very reliable in the inventory and interpretation phases. Ecobilan provided the summary of all other international methodologies, reports and studies, stating that they were the most suitable experts to provide knowledge on écobilan as they had invested “five man-years of high-level scientific research” to elaborate their own know-how, as well as having a unique theoretical and professional experience in Europe on the subject (Source: archives of the AFNOR/ISO standardization process on LCA between 1994 and 1998).

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

12

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

The company’s methodology had to become the norm, [ . . . ] you say to yourself that the standard, it must be that everyone has to behave like Ecobilan. The principle of any company trying to standardize is to say “I’m the standard and others must follow me”. (Consultant, interview 8) France—precisely because it had the expertise of the Ecobilan company—was the first country in the world to standardize écobilan, which later became the standard for Life Cycle Assessment; France supported it internationally. If you do a line by line comparison of what was in the original French document and ISO standard 14040, it shows how small the differences are. (Government/Governmental body, interview 11) 5.4.6. Maintaining the status of the French elite LCA was used in the writing of the EU’s Packaging Waste Directive,10 to help “unfocus” on the end-of-life impact of materials such as plastic. In 1994, after three years of intense negotiations and lobbying, the European Parliament approved a Directive on packaging waste. It fixed for the European Union the percentage of recycling and recovery to be achieved for domestic waste. What was at stake was not only ecological but also economic, a competition between institutional systems and the different European industries, patterns of consumption and territories (Escande, 1994). In short, the écobilan, via its multi-criteria approach, contributed to the rejection of a hierarchy of solutions, and it worked because the Directive was not purely German-inspired. (Consultant, interview 8) You have to understand that Ecobilan was started for combative reasons, for reasons of competitiveness between governments. And for us it was an important tool to position the discussion, not let the discussion be monopolized by the Scandinavian countries. ( . . . ) One of the reasons we started Ecobilan was precisely to counteract German influence in the regulatory systems, especially at the European level, because at the time France was under heavy pressure in Brussels about the packaging directive. (Consultant, interview 4) French experts tried to impose a burdensome and expensive procedure on Europe, hoping to thereby make obsolete current or planned national systems for eco-labeling in other countries. For the European eco-label, the Ministry of the Environment worked with Ecobilan. Therefore, we had a very rich écobilan to decide on criteria for the European eco-label for paints and varnishes. Then after that, we did the same thing in France. We did research on rubbish bags based on LCA, that is, a very rich LCA. Here too, this was work that went to Ecobilan, who won the bid each time. (Government/Governmental body, interview 12) 5.5. Elites countering elites: 1995-2000 5.5.1. From French experts to worldwide experts Ecobilan soon had a national monopoly, winning all bids and contracts in the French market. They monopolized all the contracts with public agencies (the French Environmental Agency and the Research and Agriculture Ministries) and virtually all the bids put out in France for French and European eco-labeling (Blouet & Rivoire L’écobilan, 1995). Ecobilan’s strategy was to be a pioneer and the best in écobilan applications for companies and government agencies in France and possibly in Europe. Their idea was to expand from being leaders in France to taking leadership of the global market. Together, friends of Ecobilan and my team at [steel industry], we said: it would be really good to internationalize our business. We at [steel industry], we manufacture steel in Germany, in the U.K., and throughout the world. And we’re going to try and convince our friends abroad and competitors, but especially foreign colleagues, to do the same thing [écobilans]. (Industry, interview 15) Having achieved prominence as the French specialist, the consultants from Ecobilan became the reference among the international scientific community. They also monopolized the representation of écobilan consultancies from France in the international market and associations by being the only French nationals on the board at SETAC and SPOLD11 (Blouet & Rivoire L’écobilan, 1995). 5.5.2. Using a wolf to guard sheep The creation of new institutions is the work of a wide range of actors, not only of institutional entrepreneurs, but also of “those whose role is supportive or facilitative of the entrepreneur's endeavors” (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). In the case of écobilan, it is the work of an elite group of consultants, graduates of engineering schools and members of the “Corps des Mines”, but also the work of supporting actors such as the French Environmental Agency, the network of Corps industrialists,

10

Directive 94/62/EC. SPOLD, the Society for the Promotion Of Life Cycle Development, was a Brussels-based society specially created “to promote the sound development and application of LCA” in 1992 (Hindle, 1996). It was disbanded in 2001, after the SETAC/UNEP Life Cycle Initiative was initiated. SETAC, the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry is an international non-profit professional society for environmental scientists and engineers established in 1979. SETAC formed LCA groups both in North America and Europe in 1990/1991 and became one of the major arenas for LCA discussions during the 1990s and until 2002 (when the SETAC/UNEP Life Cycle Initiative was launched). 11

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

13

and the French Ministry of the Environment. However, this coalition of support was fragile and temporary, and the growing power of one part of the coalition (here the consultancy), could be viewed as a threat, like for example, when Ecobilan lobbied for the creation of a chartered accountancy of the environment. For French industry, it was considered a threat to their discretionary power (Ramirez, 2001). After a few years, the economic elite among Ecobilan’s clients started to be afraid of the power that the Ecobilan consultancy had achieved: Our biggest concern was to grow and become central because I remember the environment director at a [major] steel company at the time, [ . . . ] a guy with a pretty good sense of humor; he was Mr. Environment for the [president of a steel company] who at the time was at the head of all the members of the Corps des Mines, “I’ve come to get a look at the head of the octopus,” he said jokingly, but he’s a guy who knew that the team in place had clout on the topic. (Consultant, interview 8) They [the economic elite] were terrified by the idea that [Ecobilan] could become a public monopoly, [ . . . ] a state agency. (Consultant, interview 4) Ecobilan insisted on the need to use completely independent processes to do écobilans, noting that this was a strong Anglo-Saxon tradition, and that the French law on financial auditing was similar to what was needed for écobilans. Moreover, écobilan was an “intrusive” tool in its approach, exposing internal matters that French multinationals did not always want to reveal. The eco-labeling scheme using écobilan was of concern to manufacturers, who perceived it as a threat. The cradle-to-grave vision and all the details required by life cycle assessment would reveal aspects of their businesses that were seen as internal (Ventère, 1995). One consequence of our point of view, that the naysayers have considered a substantial anomaly, is that we managed to put on record in the standard the internal critical review. And of course, you know that a critical review is an audit made by a third party. And we wrote that the third party can be a colleague who checks the quality of work. Being understood vis-à-vis the outside, “independent third party” is more credible. That’s it. This was to say that we considered ourselves qualified. (Industry, interview 19) During the French standardization process, industrial firms insisted on the possibility of establishing internal écobilans, while the founder of Ecobilan insisted that by nature, the tool could not be used by firms not having access to their suppliers’ data, and also insisted on the technical sophistication and the know-how required to work according to the rules. The ministry also realized that using écobilan was not a sustainable strategy and backed off from using it for eco-labeling. Ecobilans were expensive and cumbersome; they were not accessible to small- and medium-sized organizations: It started out very strong. But after that, we went backwards [ . . . ] I’m talking about how we decided to base eco-labeling on écobilans. It was a very strong start but it was a direction that they didn't stick with. We went backwards, that is, écobilans are a bit expensive. And after, we did normal research, simplified research and silly research, which were not especially life cycle. (Government/Governmental body, interview 12) Finally, the French Environmental Agency also expressed doubts related to the consultancy. Ecobilan had black-boxed the tool, so that it was now difficult, or impossible, to judge the consultancy’s performance. The agency was all the more suspicious since the tool had been developed externally from it: And you can easily imagine that for a while, it was difficult to make a quantitative judgment about what Ecobilan was doing. . . . But when you have a company and only one company, you have a hard time, [ . . . ]evaluating the work being done, because when it comes down to it, you are not exactly facing a black box, but it's hard getting into it because you don’t have the tools for it. (Government/Governmental body, interview 10) The original culture from the French Environmental Agency was holistic and poorly quantified according to an interviewee, therefore contradictory to the one embedded in the écobilan tool. Moreover, the consultancy was very secret and other international members of the LCA community remember that they did not display much interest in sharing their data or methods. The name “écobilan” was a bone of contention in the battle to monopolize the right to the name (Farjaudon & Morales, 2013). These struggles over definitions are not neutral, since they embody changing positions of power (Oakes, Townley, & Cooper, 1998; Everett, 2003). Indeed, the name “écobilan” favored the organizational actors (Ecobilan), making it possible for them to maneuver comfortably within the field (Oakes et al., 1998), and the act of “denaming” symbolically disempowered the consultancy of its monopoly over the tool, allowing the écobilan methodology to gain independence: First, you notice that we gradually went semantically from the term écobilan to the term life cycle assessment. You know what it's about; the idea was to separate the name of the company from the name of the method, a classic approach. [ . . . ] There was Ecobilan, the company, and the product was called écobilan, too. And so the separation that was made was to say, ah, there is Ecobilan the company, and then there is life cycle assessment, the method. (Government/Governmental body, interview 10) The debate around the naming of the tool also created a new obstacle to the willingness of the Ecobilan consultancy to associate their work with that of chartered accountants. According to the archives of AFNOR, the arguments of Ecobilan in the first debate of 1991 on the tool’s name in the future French standard was to say that the accounting concept attached to the notion of “bilan” (balance sheet) translated the quantification approach or the accounting of flows very well. A “bilan”

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

14

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

describes a set of assets to be managed; an écobilan, according to them, was to be the work of a chartered accountant (expertcomptable). 5.5.3. The elite withdraws its support from life cycle assessment In 1995, the Ecobilan consultancy was sold to Dow Chemicals. They were in a position where their quest for excellence was starting to cost too much: There you have the birth of LCA as a design tool. And I believe that Ecobilan pioneered it. However, the company lost lots of money. [ . . . ] all of a sudden, their eyes were a bit bigger than their belly. They thought they could do a complicated thing too quickly. They got caught up in big pieces of software that they could no longer finance. (Consultant, interview 14) The founder and several consultants from the beginning of the consultancy left. The sale of Ecobilan had major consequences on business. They lost customers in industry—including the entire insulation industry (which encompassed Dow)—but also the French Environmental Agency, which was “not thrilled to work with people who had become ‘Americans”', according to an interviewee. Moreover, the market declined; a phenomenon of saturation appeared as the main materials had all been analyzed, such as glass bottles versus plastic, paper nappies versus cotton ones, or the dishwasher versus washing dishes by hand. The most serious problem was the growing suspicion on the part of industrialists who had previously supported the creation of both the tool and the consultancy: To tell you what manufacturers were thinking, when I retired in 2000, no one replaced me in my company [to] perform LCA. In other words, in my mind, the LCA market did not get off the ground at the beginning of the decade. I think things had come to a standstill. (Industry, interview 19) The only competitor of Ecobilan finally took off with the support of European contracts in 1999 and 2000 outside the French markets. This competing consultancy started to be better known, and contracts allowed the company to develop improved methods and consolidate their team. 5.6. Popularization and demonization: 2007-2012 5.6.1. Popularization As the tool was regaining advocates in the business and governmental worlds in the late 2000s, the world outside the elite started popularizing the tool. This work consists in deconstructing the complexity embedded in the elite identity of the tool, for example by creating simplified “sub-standards” (such as the one used for the construction industry, or the one for the French experiment on labeling), or by developing automated software to make it easier for non-experts to use. Popularization is a second act of resistance against the hegemony of the elite identity embedded within the tool, after the internal act of resistance in the late 1990s by the elite against the initial creators of the tool. New customers started to emerge in the late 2000s, with the expectation of environmental labeling regulations. The distribution sector—at the interface between customers and suppliers—and the construction industry started to take an interest in life cycle assessment: Through the ISO 14025 standard, which was very important, and which refers to the communication of environmental data, we got involved in the communication of environmental data for construction products published in a database called INIES that just passed a milestone by entering its 1,000th database record. ( . . . ) That's a success. It's a success and it's not the end of the story. (Industry, interview 19) Moreover, efforts were made to localize expertise on life cycle assessment and develop access for small- and mediumsized enterprises. In 2010, a consultancy named CD2E in the north of France created a website and a network called “Réseau avniR”, which organized an international congress on LCA in November 2010 and still serves as a connection point between regional and local authorities, researchers, professors, and industry to promote the work of local eco-companies. The network was intended to “contribute to the rapid development of local skills in the area of environmental labeling and provide the average company with lessons learned so that it can take action” (Descamps, 2012). One consultancy has developed an online platform for life cycle assessment called “Instant LCA”, which allows non-expert users to measure and compare the environmental impact for different products in the same product line. This is part of the LCA’s “popularization” process. The increased interest in the issue of carbon also contributed to the renewal of interest in life cycle assessment, and participated in the development of more databases and better tools (Schiesser, 2012). Finally, the launch of the labeling experiment based on Article 225 of the Grenelle 2 law boosted the demand for life cycle assessment services. The challenge was to shift from one criterion (carbon) to multiple criteria, based on LCA methodology. The experiment started on July 1st 2011 and ended in 2012, with 168 companies taking part in the experiment. The same thing happens with labeling. There are 1,200 people involved in the AFNOR-ADEME platform, so they’re trying to understand it. As you can imagine, that's not bad, 1,200 people, including many in companies or professional federations. That boosts LCA, so again, that's very good. (Government/Government body, interview 12) As a result of new regulations, simplification of the tool and the “spillover” effect of interest in carbon, there was a boom in small companies and the price of the service dropped.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

15

Another trend in the evolution in France of the life cycle assessment market is the starting up of lots of small companies, lots of small businesses in the last five years. It really took off, I'd say, the number of life cycle assessment service providers. ( . . . ) There are lots of former Ecobilan people. (Consultant, interview 5) In 2007, a group of industrial companies including Renault, Areva, SEB and Veolia Environnement, in partnership with research institutes, created CREER (Cluster Research: Excellence in Ecodesign and Recycling) to develop non-competitive research on ecodesign. Research networks have also emerged in France: ELSA is a research network in the south of France that was set up jointly by different schools in 2008 to connect researchers but also create new training courses on LCA for students. Another research network is the association EcoSD that today links together more than 80 researchers from 18 institutions, including the Ecole des Mines, 50 doctoral students and 30 industrial companies. The most recent network, ScoreLCA, was created in March 2012. This network has a collaborative functional approach between industry, the public sector and science laboratories to work on “global environmental quantification methods”, which include LCA. Popularization has produced simplified tools, a boom in consultancies, and the spread of life cycle thinking as an institutionalized “rationale” for environmental accounting: And with that law that will take effect soon, I think things again will explode. So, companies will need help producing not one or two data sheets, but hundreds of data sheets per company. So between that, the building industry, environmental labeling, plus the bilan carbone initiative which as we said was a success by the French Environmental Agency, and now, there are services that cost less than before. (Consultant, interview 5) However, there are still fears that the economic elite will impose their vision through the use of life cycle assessment: But I fear that the smaller companies, if you impose on them the obligation of environmental labeling, small businesses will have trouble keeping up with large companies. And those large companies will impose their worldview, their own issues. (Other, interview 16) Internationally, the UNEP SETAC initiative also emphasized life cycle approaches and life cycle thinking, along with a more qualitative approach than the initial life cycle assessment standards: You don’t always have to do a full LCA, you can do things very qualitatively but looking at it from a life cycle perspective, and that’s an area we really need to help develop. (International interview 4) 5.6.2. Demonization In response to this popularization work, the elite conducted demonization work. The elite thought style not only framed the issue in the early 1990s, but also tried to close off alternative and incompatible perspectives two decades later. Demonizing includes defining what is right and what is wrong (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006), which is what the elite continues to argue by defining their standard of LCA as “right”, and the possible simplification movements as “wrong”. Demonizing work is the embodiment of “a tension in the innovation community between the desire to maintain a particular identity of the innovation” (Becker et al., 2013), and the concern of others who would like to see the innovation’s dissemination. For example, the focus on carbon instead of multi-criteria analysis is rebuffed as primitive: We lost a lot of quality of analysis and we came back to the old way, which is fairly primitive stuff. The bilan carbone [the French carbon assessment tool], what one said at the time of launching Ecobilan is that it had existed since about 1973 in the United States [ . . . ]. It's like a single-criterion analysis. It does not account for the whole reality and the variety of situations. (Consultant, interview 8) The technically “incorrect” use of the methodology is regretted and demonized as “paternalism” and “avoidance behavior”: I do not think there are many people who exploit this tool fully today, that is, use it “correctly”. (Consultant, interview 8) So that’s how we ended up with people who battled for—well, I can give you a choice—for the simplified écobilan, the bilan carbone [the French carbon assessment tool], the concept of life cycle, just as it is, without any quantification, checklists and so on. [ . . . ] The lobbying argument agreed by and defended by these people is that the écobilan method is too expensive and too complicated and therefore, as these people haven’t much money to spend, we must do things that are really simple for them. So it’s a form of paternalism. [ . . . ] All this is, in a sense, avoidance behavior. (Consultant, interview 6) There are still barriers to changing the structure of the life cycle assessment business model and a refusal to create a pyramidal structure in consultancy work: I proposed [ . . . ] a business where we would do environmental labeling on a large scale, not with engineers but with technicians in a pyramid structure, with executives, engineers and technicians, like any industrial company and not just top-level engineers doing environmental labeling for products, for all French companies. ( . . . ) Not 30 people, in the end, if we succeed in getting all the companies that work, I don't know, there will be 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 people who will do that all the time in France, so there will be job opportunities for everyone, and fairly systematic work. (Consultant, interview 17)

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

16

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

However, the tool is being reinvented by Ecobilan alumni to make it seem relevant to new concerns (Cooper et al., 2016), such as the willingness of companies to introduce organizational footprints beside their product footprints, or the need for better accountability through standardized audit processes. Therefore, numerous tools and concepts based on the LCA platform are now being standardized. The organizational LCA (TS14072, published in December 2014) and peer review processes (TS14071 published in June 2014) have entered the normalization process under the lead of a former Ecobilan employee. One day, it will apply to the entire portfolio of a company’s products. Companies will be judged on the company’s global LCA. That's clear. (Consultant, interview 13) 6. Discussion The elite defined LCA, and Vincent-Sweet (2012) continues to think that today, LCA is a tool that reinforces the power of the powerful. However, the elite has faced continued resistance with increasing popularizing efforts. The longitudinal view of the tool’s history reveals the strategies of different actors, including some within the elite, to diffuse and popularize LCA despite its origins. The story of LCA demonstrates the tension between elite creators—who need to let go—and the imperative of diffusion. Through the unofficial history of LCA in France, this research demonstrates the critical role played by the French elite in creating what is considered the major environmental accounting tool of today. Through the emphasis on the actors involved, I contribute to our understanding of the idealized schemas that they have embedded in the tool, and the purposively difficult diffusion of this tool. Second, this paper brings to the forefront the specific creative work of the elite. Finally, it clarifies the dynamics of institutional work, with an integrative model (Fig. 2) of three levels of work identified. 6.1. The elite as institutional agents in creating environmental MAIs Research on institutional agents has focused on the position of members in the field (Battilana, 2006) where it has been shown that institutional change agents are often those in peripheral positions or new entrants (Zilber, 2002) (Berland and Chiapello, 2009). Actors situated on the fringe of a field are more likely to develop ideas for change, since they are less connected, less aware of norms (Leblebici, Salancik, Copay, & King, 1991). This research demonstrates in what context and under which conditions the elite—central and embedded actors (Hardy & Maguire, 2008)—can also become change agents. This research has emphasized the link between the elite, the field they belong to, and the type of work they performed to achieve their goals. Environmental issues were the monopoly of the French elite. It was shaped as an economic topic, and thus became an area that only the economic elite could manage. This became even more crucial when the European debate on packaging threatened the French industrial system with unfavorable rules designed by Northern and Germanic countries. In that regard, the creation of a tool to measure the environmental performance of a product “belonged” to the French elite, in comparison to other actors who contributed internationally to the LCA’s history (including the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, and university laboratories in other European countries). Through this paper, I analyzed how actors of institutional change are products of their institutional fields (Hardy & Maguire, 2008); and how the French institutional context determined “what sorts of actors would perform what kind of institutional work” (Hwang & Colyvas,[9_TD$IF] 2011; David, Sine, & Haveman, 2013).

[(Fig._2)TD$IG]

Fig. 2. Institutional work of elites and resistance: three intertwined levels.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

17

Secondly, the elite combines a strong ideological foundation with a significant power base (Marriott, 2010), which can explain their role in determining key accounting innovations in a specific country. In our case, the elite thought style was strongly infused within the LCA methodology and inscribed under their leadership within the first French LCA standard and, later, the international one. Finally, understanding why the elite became the change agents in the case of LCA can also explain through their identification and locking work, why this environmental management accounting innovation was institutionalized but little diffused (Burns & Vaivio, 2001). 6.2. Creative work The achievement of the elite has been defined in previous literature (Boxenbaum & Battilana, 2005; Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006) as their ability to reach out, build bridges and connect with the external world, to break out from their inherent embeddedness and be drivers of change. This paper demonstrates, on the contrary, that the elite’s creative work was conducted in such a way that everything was connected back to their own elite status, without making any effort to connect with others. Instead of reaching out, the work was carried out such that the new tool was strongly identified with elite identity, and strong locking mechanisms were constructed so as to avoid any non-elite interference with the tool’s development and use. First, the allies mobilized were also exclusively from the elite group. This included the employees from Ecobilan, the Mines research laboratory that served as an incubator, clients from French industry (Corps des Mines network) and support from the French Environmental Agency and the Ministry of the Environment. They all belonged to the same elite, and the great majority were part of the Corps des Mines network. Second, identity work was conducted. Identity work consists in shaping the key characteristics of the innovation that then defines what it is and the tool’s very essence. The identity of an innovation is “a particular understanding of the innovation that relates to the way the innovation is used or interpreted, or to the functions it is made to fulfill” (Becker et al., 2013). Identity work consisted of two different types of work: mimicry work with elite and respected professions such as the worlds of Anglo-Saxon consulting and chartered accountancy, and the work of constructing the tool according to an elite thought style. Mimicry work was based on other elitist professions. Mimicry work with chartered accountancy is a way to “naturalize” the tool, to establish it as inherent in the economic arena. Moreover, mimicry work with prestigious AngloSaxon consultants brought distinction, esteem and reputation. Identity work was conducted to connect back to a strong elite identity. Indeed, the elite must “promote moral excellence and obtain or retain an honorable status, [ . . . ] take great care of the way it will ‘represent’ itself to society. This explains the importance of ethos, that is to say, the self-image that one forges and that should be as flattering as possible to increase auctoritas, the ‘decisive and effective influence of an individual or of a community on the actions or the decisions of others”' (André, 2011). The mimicry work with accountancy was very strong at the time of creation (1990–1995). It was not only conducted by Ecobilan but also through the proposals of Bio Intelligence Service (Ecobilan’s only competitor at the time) to promote écobilan and environmental accounting among the accounting profession through articles in the specialized accounting journal “La Revue Française de Comptabilité”. Ecobilan was advocating the creation of a chartered accountancy of the environment. In the name “écobilan” itself, it had embedded the financial accounting term “bilan” (balance sheet) that emphasized a quantification approach. Furthermore, identity work consisted in defining the relationship between the accounting innovation and the field of power with which it is congruent (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). LCA is an example of a management innovation that was defined as complex and high-end so as not to appeal to a wide audience, unlike others such as standard costing (Armstrong, 1985). The way it was created is contrary to what is expected of an innovation for it to spread (Djelic, 2008), that is to be simplified and universally applicable. Life cycle assessment was intentionally closed off according to the methodology and norms developed within the Ecobilan consultancy in the early 1990s. It has been acknowledged that the French standard greatly influenced the international ISO standard. Therefore, life cycle assessment was seen as the most complete, the most high-end technical tool, with no interpretative flexibility (Qu & Cooper, 2011). Contrary to standard costing, which was made “too simple” by engineers and was later “stolen” by accountants (Armstrong, 1985), life cycle assessment was inscribed in the standard as very complex. Contrary to accounting technologies that are represented as simple in order to appeal to a wide audience (Armstrong, 2002), life cycle assessment is still often considered unapproachable by small- and medium-sized enterprises. This is despite the fact that the rationale of social and environmental accounting is “that it should result in greater openness and responsiveness to wider social interests, the social philosophies inherent in the design of the approaches and procedures should not be at variance with the underlying rationale” (Hopwood, 1978). Third, the elite conducted gate-keeping work. They built boundaries around the tool’s creation, making entry barriers that prevented others from contributing to the creation process. This included first, constantly achieving what was considered to be the best research and development in the methodology; second, constructing the largest possible private dataset for highend écobilans; and third, integrating their methodology into proprietary software. By doing that and being very secretive about their methodology and data collected, they made sure that the cost of starting a competing consultancy was too high, and that they would remain the leaders so as to continue to define what an écobilan was, and what it should look like.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

18

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

Finally, the elite developed strong locking mechanisms in their theorizing and standardization work. This was to prevent the tool from ever being popularized and used outside the elite realm. Theorizing is “the development and specification of abstract categories” (Greenwood, Suddaby, & Hinings, 2002). The ability to define legitimate classifications, which sets limits upon cognition, is a way to demonstrate power (Cooper, Coulson, & Taylor, 2011; Everett, 2002), and therefore theorizing is a strong means for an elite to maintain their power over an innovation. Knowledge of the social world, “and, more precisely, the categories that make it possible, are the stakes, par excellence, of political struggle, the inextricably theoretical and practical struggle for the power to conserve or transform the social world by conserving or transforming the categories through which it is perceived” (Bourdieu, 1985). In the case of écobilan, it acted as a strong locking mechanism, inscribing into the standard the technical excellence in methodology advocated by the elite consultants. After having defined the type of work the elite used to create an innovation while trying to maintain the power of French industry, it is also interesting to note the absence of certain types of work, at the time of creation in the 1990s. For example, there was no educating work during the creative period, although it is said to be “necessary to support new institutions” (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). There were also no research centers developed outside the Ecobilan consultancy, and theorizing was largely absent in France after elite consultants left. Indeed, this absence continued to prevail until very recently (2007). Whether certain types of work were consciously avoided is questionable, since educating would have probably meant simplifying a tool that was meant to stay high-end, complex, technical, out of reach of the mainstream, and avoiding widespread diffusion to non-elite actors. 6.3. Integrative model of institutional dynamics This research contributes to our understanding of the processes and mechanisms that drive changes in the institutional life cycle, as well as to a more integrative understanding of institutional dynamics (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010; Lawrence et al., 2013). It emphasizes the multiple intertwined levels of institutional work. In the case of écobilan, three levels of institutional work can be identified. First, the elite conducted overall maintenance work in order to maintain the institutions that constitute the elite as such (Kaplan, 2012). The second level is the creative work conducted by the French elite in the construction of an environmental performance measurement tool. Although maintenance work can be characterized by its routine work (Peton, 2012), recent work has suggested, on the contrary, that maintenance work could be associated with institutional change (Kaplan, 2012). This research thus further explores the resilience of organizations or groups facing institutional change. This paper contributes to the nascent research on exploring how maintenance work can be intertwined with creative work (Currie et al., 2012; Flood, 2011; Kaplan, 2012; Micelotta & Washington, 2013) when the elite faces a potential threat to their status. Elites try to defend the status quo by “adjusting to change in a way that continues to favor ( . . . ) powerful actors” (Currie et al., 2012) under cover of the creation of a new institutionalized tool—in our case, the écobilan. The third level comprises the specific actions conducted by the elite in the creation of écobilan, specifically defining the institutional work that a group of institutional agents—the elite—did or did not perform. The gate-keeping and locking mechanisms used by the elite can be explained by the broader maintenance work that they were trying to achieve in creating the tool. The tool’s fabrication could not escape to another group of entrepreneurs. In this respect, the three levels of institutional work, from the specific work conducted by the elite to the broader creative work and overarching maintenance work, are very closely intertwined and explain each other (Fig. 2). Second, this research expands understanding on the institutional life cycle and the mechanisms behind it. Indeed, the 20year story of écobilan in France is composed of four periods: creation (1990–1995), the elite battle (1995–2000), a standstill (2000–2007) and “rebirth” with popularization and demonization work (2007–2012). The different works conducted by the elite at the time of creation have consequences on the standstill period, when diffusion in France was near to none, and on the “rebirth” after 2007, when popularization work was conducted to disembed the tool from its elite identity. Both stability and change were the norms at different times (Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010), and even at the same time, creative work was performed in the name of maintenance work. The transitions between the different periods are defined through acts of resistance first within the elite, then from outside the elite (2007), embodying the long struggle to disentangle the elite’s thought style embedded within the écobilan tool. 7. Conclusion This paper describes the emergence of a new environmental management accounting tool, life cycle assessment, over the period from 1990 to 2012. Based on interviews and the collection of a detailed set of secondary data, including archives, it seeks to further understanding of the creation of management accounting innovations by defining institutional creative work produced by a specific type of institutional change agents, the elite. The role of particular agents in the innovation process has been emphasized, linking the possibility of extending their agency with the historical and cultural conditions under which the innovation took place. In the case of France, the monopolization of the environmental question by elites is to be understood through the definition of who they are and the place they occupy in French society.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

19

Second, the specific strategies developed by the French elite in developing and black-boxing the tool have been analyzed and defined, while noting the absence of particular types of work normally involved in the creation of new institutions, such as education. Finally, the consequences of this black-boxing of LCA have been acknowledged in the difficult diffusion and translation of the tool into companies. Two moments of resistance inside and outside the elite have also been emphasized, namely “denaming” and “popularization”. Contrary to studies that focus on the dynamics of elite production (Clegg, Courpasson, & Philips, 2006), I focused on understanding how the class-specific interests of the upper echelons, which are largely concealed, are transcribed into creative environmental accounting work, to continue to serve the French national interest and maintain their own elite position (Maclean, Harvey, & Kling, 2014). From this focus on the elite as change agents, I have contributed to current understanding on how they are able to mobilize environmental accounting into maintaining their own elite status. Contrary to what was initially thought, the elite can be actively creative not by bridging or disembedding themselves but by locking new tools into their own thought style. Given the central role of accounting in the management and accountability of organizations, new forms of accountings will affect our ability to pursue sustainable development (Unerman et al., 2007). This research on environmental MAIs therefore helps further understanding on how sustainable development can be pursued through accounting. Studying the origination phase of environmental MAIs has enhanced our understanding of lock-ins and the close links between certain innovations and the current regime (the French elite), and potentially how they could be unlocked (Brown & Dillard, 2013). This paper sheds light on the institutional field of life cycle assessment in France, links to the government, regulations and the economic elites, and the lack of links with university research and the educational field during its creation phase. The French elite monopolized the écobilan creation process to shape what could be measured in the environment, and how, according to the elite’s codes and principles. The paper points to the difficulty in unlocking the links made between the tool and the elite through the popularization work that has been taking place since 2007 in France. The same popularization work has been taking place internationally through the UNEP-SETAC initiative since 2002 and the Sustainability Consortium initiative. In the case of this initiative, there were tensions between simplification—which could threaten the LCA experts’ own relevance and the legitimacy of their profession—and stubborn insistence on complicated methods, which could have the same result. In the end, the Consortium shifted away from LCA in favor of less quantitative product assessments to demonstrate the sustainability of their goods (Freidberg, 2013). Napier (2006) said that the constitutive role of accounting has scarcely been analyzed. The story of the creation of life cycle assessment demonstrates how accounting can be constitutive of policy-makers’ views. Indeed, LCA was used in political debates over recycling for the 1994 European directive. The use of LCA results radically transformed the EU’s recycling policy, proving that a 100% recycling policy would not be entirely beneficial to the environment. LCA was further used in eco-labeling debates in France and the European Union. Today, LCA is the backbone of the experimentation on environmental labeling in France. It thus being used as a basis on which to constitute what is considered “good” or “bad” for the environment in many environmental regulations today. Finally, France defended the multi-criteria approach before the European Commission versus the “only-carbon” approach to define the two most recent methodologies for environmental accounting developed on a European level (named PEF and OEF for product and organization environmental footprints). Future research could explore how a tool made by the elite for the elite could be made available to smaller “non-elite” organizations, or simply be made more accessible without losing the quality of analysis, a problem still faced by the French experiment on environmental labeling. The underlying question is how a tool made by the elite can be democratized, as social and environmental accounting innovations “should” be (Hopwood, 1977)? Furthermore, the complexity built into life cycle assessment as an “expert system” (Giddens, 1990) raises questions of the trust that can be placed in those systems, especially related to environmental topics. Other unofficial histories of new accountings in the social and environmental arenas could further understanding on “the creation of systems and methodologies by which governance for sustainability can be achieved” (Porritt, 2007[10_TD$IF]). Acknowledgments The author would like to extend special thanks to the two reviewers, the two guest editors Charles Cho and Sophie Spring, and to professor Hélène Löning. The author also gratefully acknowledges the many helpful comments by Keith Robson, Jan Mouritsen, Fabrizio Panozzo, Charles Cho, Vassili Joannides, Marc Journeault, Michelle Rodrigue and the assistance of Carl Dowling and Delphine Libby-Claybrough in proof-reading this work, Brenda Miller for translating citations, as well as the comments by Hélène Lelièvre and help from Christine Cooper and Diane-Laure Arjaliès. The author finally acknowledges the helpful comments by participants in the 2012 EAA doctoral colloquium in Bled, the 2012 Alternative Accounts doctoral colloquium in Quebec, the 2012 Egos conference in Helsinki, the 2012 [1_TD$IF]CSEAR conference in St Andrews, and the 2013 [12_TD$IF]CSEAR France conference in Montpellier. The author would also like to thank all those who agreed to be interviewed in relation to the écobilan/LCA story. Interviewees do not necessarily endorse my analysis, for which I take full responsibility. The author acknowledges financial support from the Association Francophone de Comptabilité for the Alternative Accounts Conference in Quebec, 2012, and for the proof-reading of this paper.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

20

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

Appendix A. Interviews for the exploratory first phase.

Academia Parliamentarians Consultants US EPA/Tellus Institute Environmental Accounting Project, UN EMA project French Environmental Agency Former French director of the environment Total

Number of interviews

Minutes

4 1 2 4 1 1 13

154 29 114 176 57 76 606 minutes

Appendix B. Interviews for the second phase.

Academia Consultancies NGO French industry Government/government agencies Total

Number of interviews

Minutes

2 9 1 4 4 20

40 528 25 228 186 1007 minutes

Appendix C. Academic origin of interviewees. Academic origin

Number of interviews

Corps des Mines Ecole des Mines Grandes Ecoles (Engineer) Grandes Ecoles (ENA/Normale) Other Engineering schools Other Unknown Total

3 2 4 2 3 1 5 20

Appendix D. Overview of sources. Type of source Second-phase interviews First-phase exploratory interviews AFITE conference recording Books Press articles (Lexis Nexis) Press articles (other) Other sources (archive, congress presentations, etc.) Standards

16.7 hours (20) 10 hours (13) 2 hours 878 pages (4 books) 1192 pages (557 articles) 97 pages (25 articles) 551 pages (22 documents) 3 standards (the French standard from 1994, and the international ISO standards)

Appendix E. Sources by period. Period

Pages

1990-1995 1995-2000 2000-2007 2007-2012 Total

453 217 536 1512 2718

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

21

Period

Total length of interviews (minutes)

1990-1995 1990-2000 1995-2000 1995-2012 2000-2012 Total

368 304 42 238 54 1006 minutes

References ADEME. Introduction à l’analyse de cycle de vie (acv), note de synthese externe, 2005. AFITE. Presentation de l'association, 2013. www.afite.org/presentation.html (accessed April 27, 2013). Alberganti M. Management de l'environnement écobilans: l'inventaire des pollutions cherche son mode d'emploi. Les Echos, 1993 May 5. Alcouffe, S., Berland, N., & Levant, Y. (2003). Les facteurs de diffusion des innovations managériales en comptabilité et contrôle de gestion: une étude comparative. (French): Diffusion determinants of managerial innovations in accounting and management control: a comparative study. (English). Comptabilite´-Controˆle-Audit, 9(3), 7–26. Alcouffe, S., Berland, N., & Levant, Y. (2008). Actor-networks and the diffusion of management accounting innovations: A comparative study. Management Accounting Research, 19(1), 1–17. André, M. (2011). Introduction. Camenae, 9, . Armstrong, P. (1985). Changing management control strategies: the role of competition between accountancy and other organisational professions Accounting. Organizations and Society, 10(2), 129–148. Armstrong, P. (2002). Management, image and management accounting. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 13(3), 281–295. Ax, C., & Bjørnenak, T. (2005). Bundling and diffusion of management accounting innovations—the case of the balanced scorecard in Sweden. Management Accounting Research, 16(1), 1–20. Ball, A., & Craig, R. (2010). Using neo-institutionalism to advance social and environmental accounting. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 21(4), 283–293. Battilana, J. (2006). Agency and Institutions: The Enabling Role of Individuals' Social Position. Organization, 13(5), 653–676. Battilana, J., & D’Aunno, T. (2009). Institutional work and the paradox of embedded agency. In T. B. Lawrence, R. Suddaby, & B. Leca (Eds.), Institutional work: Actors and agency in institutional studies of organization (pp. 31–58).Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Battilana, J., Leca, B., & Boxenbaum, E. (2009). How Actors Change Institutions: Towards a Theory of Institutional Entrepreneurship. The Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 65–107. Bebbington, J., Gray, R. H., Hibbitt, C., & Kirk, E. (2001). Full cost accounting: an agenda for action. ACCA Research Report n 73. Certified Accountants Educational Trust. Becker, S., Messner, M., & Schäffer, U. (2013). Tensions in the promotion of innovations: beyond budgeting and the love of technology. Working Paper.. Belhoste, B., Dahan, N., Dalmedico, A., & Picon, A. (1994). La formation polytechnicienne, 1794–1994. Paris: Dunod. Berland, N. (1997). La naissance du contrôle budgétaire en France (1930-1960): role des consultants, apprentissage organisationnel et jeu des acteurs chez Pechiney et Saint-Gobain. Comptabilite´ Controˆle Audit, 3(2), 5–22. Bernard, M. (2010). La me´ritocratie franc¸aise: les e´lites franc¸aises. Tome 1. Paris: L'Harmattan. Bezat, J. (2012). La France joue le tout-atome. Le Monde Hors Se´rie. Birkinshaw, J., & Mol, M. J. (2006). How management innovation happens. Sloan Management Review, 47(4) . Birnbaum, P. (1978). La classe dirigeante franc¸aise: dissociation, interpe´ne´tration, inte´gration. Presses Universitaires de France. Biseau G. La tête du Corps des Mines, un rêve de PDG. Libération, 2002 Nov 4. Bjørnenak, T. (1997). Diffusion and accounting: the case of ABC in Norway. Management Accounting Research, 8(1), 3–17. Blouet, A., & Rivoire L’écobilan, E. (1995). Les produits et leurs impacts sur l’environnement. Paris: Dunod. Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification. The economies of worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1985). The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society, 14(6), 723–744. Bourdieu, P. (1989). La noblesse d'Etat: Grandes ecoles et esprit de corps. Paris : Minuit;. Boxenbaum, E., & Battilana, J. (2005). Importation as innovation: Transposing managerial practices across fields. Strategic Organization, 3(4), 1–29. Brown, J., & Dillard, J. F. (2013). Accounting Innovation and Sustainability Transitions: What might we learn from the Multi-Level Perspective? Working paper presented at CSEAR Conference. Burchell, S., Clubb, C., Hopwood, A. G., Hughes, J., & Nahapiet, J. ([14_TD$DIFF]1980). The roles of accounting in organizations and society Accounting. Organizations and Society, 5(1), 5–27. Burns, J., & Vaivio, J. (2001). Management accounting change. Management Accounting Research, 12(4), 389–402. Chiapello, E., & Berland, N. (2009). Criticisms of capitalism, budgeting and the double enrolment: budgetary control rhetoric and social reform in France in the 1930 and 1950 Accounting. Organizations and Society, 34(1), 28–57. Clegg, S. R., Courpasson, D., & Philips, N. (2006). Power and organizations. London: SAGE Publications. Cooper, C., Coulson, A., & Taylor, P. (2011). Accounting for human rights: Doxic health and safety practices The accounting lesson from ICL. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 22(8), 738–758. Cooper, D., Ezzamel, M., & Qu, S. (2016). Popularizing a management accounting idea: the case of the balanced scorecard. Working paper.. Costedoat, S. (2012). L'analyse du cycle de vie (ACV): outil ou contraintes pour la compétitivité des entreprises. Responsabilite´ et Environnement 66. Currie, G., Lockett, A., Finn, R., Martin, G., & Waring, J. (2012). Institutional work to maintain professional power: recreating the model of medical professionalism. Organization Studies, 33(7), 937–962. Dahl, R. (1958). A critique of the elite ruling model. The American Political Science Review, 52(2), 463–469. David, R. J., Sine, W. D., & Haveman, H. A. (2013). Seizing Opportunity in Emerging Fields: How Institutional Entrepreneurs Legitimated the Professional Form of Management Consulting. Organization Science, 24(2), 356–377. Descamps O. Affichage environnemental: le casse-tête de l'étiquette. Environnement Magazine, 2012 Jul 1. Djelic, M. (2008). Sociological studies of diffusion: Is history relevant? Socio-Economic Review, 6(3), 538–557. Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse. New York: Syracuse University Press. Escande P. Crise et changement de présidence à l'agence pour l'environnement. Les Echos, 1993 Nov 4. Escande P. Elections européennes: emballages, éco-produits, normes l'environnement, arme à part entière de la bataille économique. Les Echos, 1994 Jun 8. Etzion, D., & Ferraro, F. (2010). The Role of Analogy in the Institutionalization of Sustainability Reporting. Organization Science, 21(5), 1092–1107. Everett, J. (2002). Organizational Research and the Praxeology of Pierre Bourdieu. Organizational Research Methods, 5(1), 56–80. Everett, J. (2003). The politics of comprehensive auditing in fields of high outcome and cause uncertainty. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 14(1–2), 77–104.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

22

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

Ezzamel, M., Hyndman, N., Johnsen, A., & Lapsley, I. (2014). Reforming central government: An evaluation of an accounting innovation. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 25(4/5), 409–422. Farjaudon, A., & Morales, J. (2013). In search of consensus: The role of accounting in the definition and reproduction of dominant interests. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 24(2), 154–171. Fligstein, N. (2001). Social Skill and the Theory of Fields. Sociological Theory, 19(2), 105–125. Flood, J. (2011). The re-landscaping of the legal profession: Large law firms and professional re-regulation. Current Sociology, 59(4), 507–529. François, P. (2010). Les gue´pards du capitalisme franc¸ais? Structure de l’e´lite patronale et modes d’acce`s aux positions dominantes: Journe´es d’e´tudes conjointes DRM-IRISSO Les e´lites e´conomiques en France, Working paper. Université Paris-Dauphine. Freidberg, S. (2013). Calculating sustainability in supply chain capitalism. Economy and Society1–26. Gehrke, I., & Zarlowski, P. (2003). La diffusion de la valeur actionnariale en France: une lecture néo-institutionnaliste. Comptabilite´ Controˆle Audit, 9(3), 189–205. Genieys, W. (2011). Sociologie politique des e´lites. Paris: A. Colin. Giblin, B. (2001). De l'écologie à l'écologie politique: L'enjeu du pouvoir, de la nécessité de savoir penser l'espace. He´rodote, 1(100), 13–31. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge. UK, Oxford: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell. Greave, J., Labouze, E., & Rousseaux, P. (1996). ACV, outils d’aide a` la de´cision industrielle? Analyse critique de l’existant, recommandations me´thodologiques. Paris: propositions d'axes de recherche. Greenwood, R., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutional entrepreneurship in mature fields: the big five accounting firms. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 27–48. Greenwood, R., Suddaby, R., & Hinings, C. (2002). Theorizing change: the role of professional associations in the transformation of institutional fields. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 58–80. Grisel L, Osset P. L'analyse du cycle de vie d'un produit ou d'un service: Applications et mise en pratique. Saint-Denis-La Plaine (Seine-Saint-Denis): AFNOR; 2004. Hardy, C., & Maguire, S. (2008). Institutional Entrepreneurship. In R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, K. Sahlin, & R. Suddaby (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism (pp. 198–217).Los Angeles (Calif.): Sage. Harun, H., Peursem, K., & Eggleton, I. (2012). Institutionalization of accrual accounting in the Indonesian public sector. Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change, 8(3), 257–285. Hecht, G. (2007). Quelques mots coloniaux à propos de la nucléarité exceptionnelle de la France et de la banalité du nucléaire français. Cosmopolitiques 16. Hindle, P. (1996). Tieme de Oude N. SPOLD-Society Development. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 1(1), 55–56. Hopwood, A. G. (1977). Editorial. Accounting. Organizations and Society, 2(4), 277–278. Hopwood, A. G. (1978). Social accounting–the way ahead? Social Accounting. Hopwood, A. G. (1987). The archaeology of accounting systems Accounting. Organizations and Society, 12(3), 207–234. Hunt, R. G., & Franklin, W. E. (1996). LCA- How it Came About- Personal Reflections on the Origin and LCA in the USA. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 1(1), 4–7. Hwang, H., & Colyvas, J. A. (2011). Problematizing Actors and Institutions in Institutional Work. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(1), 62–66. Jacquiot, P. (2007). Comparaison des processus de formation et de diffusion du mouvement écologiste en RFA et en France. Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 2(123), 217–244. Jones, C. T., & Dugdale, D. (2002). The ABC bandwagon and the juggernaut of modernity. Accounting. Organizations and Society, 27(1-2), 121–163. Kaplan, R. (2012). Whose matrix is it? Business elite mobilization and the creation of the corporate social responsibility framework, 1945-1959. Egos Conference. Kilfoyle, E., & Richardson, A. J. (2011). Agency and structure in budgeting: Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 22(2), 183–199. Kokubu, K., Nashioka, E., Koichiro, S., & Imai, S. (2003). Two governmental initiatives on environmental management accounting and corporate practices in Japan. In M. Bennett, P. M. Rikhardsson, & S. Schaltegger (Eds.), Environmental management accounting: Purpose and progressDordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lalonde B. L'écologie, c'est la planète et la planète c'est nous. Responsabilité et Environnement 2007 (46). Lawrence, T. B., & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and Institutional Work, In S. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organization studies2nd ed. Sage. [20_TD$IF]Institutional work: Actors and agency in institutional studies of organization. In T. B. Lawrence, R. Suddaby, & B. Leca (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, T. B., Leca, B., & Zilber, T. B. (2013). Institutional Work: Current Research, New Directions and Overlooked Issues. Organization Studies, 34(8), 1023– 1033. Leblebici, H., Salancik, G., Copay, A., & King, T. (1991). Institutional change and the transformation of interorganizational fields: an organizational history of the U. S. radio broadcasting industry. Administrative Science Quarterly, 36(3), 333–363. Lee, B., Jung, S., & Kim, J. (2005). Environmental accounting guidelines and corporate cases in Korea: implications for developing countries. In P. M. Rikhardsson, M. Bennett, J. J. Bouma, & S. Schaltegger (Eds.), Implementing environmental management accounting: Status and challengesDordrecht, London: Springer. Maclean, M., Harvey, C., & Kling, G. (2014). Pathways to Power: Class, Hyper-Agency and the French Corporate Elite. Organization Studies, 35(6), 825–855. Malmi, T. (1999). Activity-based costing diffusion across organizations: an exploratory empirical analysis of Finnish firms Accounting. Organizations and Society, 24(8), 649–672. Marimon, F., Alonso-Almeida, M. d. M., Rodríguez, M. d. P., & Cortez Alejandro, K. A. (2012). The worldwide diffusion of the global reporting initiative: what is the point? Journal of Cleaner Production, 33, 132–144. Marriott, L. (2010). Power and ideas: The development of retirement savings taxation in Australasia. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 21(7), 597–610. Mellett, H., Marriott, N., & Macniven, L. (2009). Diffusion of an accounting innovation: Fixed asset accounting in the NHS in Wales. European Accounting Review, 18(4), 745–764. Mia, A. H. (2005). The role of government in promoting and implementing environmental management accounting: the case of Bangladesh. In P. M. Rikhardsson, M. Bennett, J. J. Bouma, & S. Schaltegger (Eds.), Implementing environmental management accounting: Status and challengesDordrecht, London: Springer. Micelotta, E. R., & Washington, M. (2013). Institutions and Maintenance: The Repair Work of Italian Professions. Organization Studies, 34(8), 1137–1170. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (2003). Analyse des donne´es qualitatives. Brussels: De Boeck Université. Miller, P. (1991). Accounting innovation beyond the enterprise: Problematizing investment decisions and programming economic growth in the U.K. in the 1960. Accounting. Organizations and Society, 16(8), 733–762. Miller, P., Hopper, T., & Laughlin, R. (1991). The new accounting history: An introduction. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16(5-6), 395–403. Miller, P., & Napier, C. J. (1993). Genealogies of calculation. Accounting. Organizations and Society, 18(7–8), 631–647. Miller, P., & O’Leary, T. (1990). Making accountancy practical Accounting. Organizations and Society, 15(5), 479–498. Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Moyen D. 2 rue royale, en l'an de grâce 1971. Responsabilité et Environnement 2007(46). Murphy J. The rise of the 1%: an organizational explanation: In: Egos conference; 2012. Napier, C. J. (2006). Accounts of change: 30 years of historical accounting research. Accounting. Organizations and Society, 31(4-5), 445–507. Oakes, L. S., Miranti, P. J., & Louis, D. (1996). Brandeis and standard cost accounting: A study of the construction of historical agency Accounting. Organizations and Society, 21(6), 569–586.

Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003

G Model YCPAC 1947 No. of Pages 23

D. Gibassier / Critical Perspectives on Accounting xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

23

Oakes, L. S., Townley, B., & Cooper, D. J. (1998). Business planning as pedagogy: language and control in a changing institutional field. Administrative Science Quarterly, 43(2), 257–292. Osset P. Analyse de Cycle de Vie-ACV. Etat de l’Art. Presentation at the AFITE Conference, 2011. Perez A. Ecotechnocratie. Les Echos, 1993 May 5. Perkmann, M., & Spicer, A. (2008). How are management fashions institutionalized? The role of institutional work. Human Relations, 61(6), 811–844. Peton, H. (2012). Mouvements sociaux et processus de de´sinstitutionnalisation: Le cas de l’amiante en France. PhD Thesis. Paris: Université Paris Dauphine. Porritt, J. (2007). Foreword. In J. Unerman, J. Bebbington, & B. O’Dwyer (Eds.), Sustainability accounting and accountabilityLondon, New York: Routledge. Poujade R. Naissance d’un ministère. Responsabilité et Environnement 2007(46). Qu, S., & Cooper, D. J. (2011). The role of inscriptions in producing a balanced scorecard Accounting. Organizations and Society, 36(6), 344–362. Ramirez, C. (2001). Understanding social closure in its cultural context: accounting practitioners in France (1920-1939). Accounting. Organizations and Society, 26(4/5), 391–418. Riaz, S., Buchanan, S., & Bapuji, H. (2011). Institutional work amidst the financial crisis: emerging positions of elite actors. Organization, 18(2), 187–214. Rojas, F. (2010). Power through institutional work: acquiring academic authority in the 1968 third world strike. Academy of Management Journal, 53(6), 1263– 1280. Rowbottom, N., & Locke, J. (2016). The emergence of
Please cite this article in press as: D. Gibassier, From écobilan to LCA: The elite’s institutional work in the creation of an environmental management accounting tool, Crit Perspect Account (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.03.003