Corporate accountability to internal stakeholders

Abstract

There exists little consensus on what accountability, specifically corporate accountability, entails in the context of modern organizational setups that have multiple stakeholders to ‘account’ to, and whose relationship with its stakeholders continues to become more and more symbiotic and vertically integrated. In a generic sense, accountability is the duty to provide a justification of actions to whomever it may concern (Gray 1987, Williams 1987, Roberts & Scapens 1985). While narrower definitions exist from a business perspective, all tenets of accountability are essentially concerned with information sharing between two or more parties where the one who is accountable to justify them self to whom the account is owed (Gray 1997). A more rights based perspective argues accountability as “To Account for something is to explain and to justify the acts and actions for which one is responsible to people with a legitimate interest” (ISEA 1999).