Cogent Business & Management

Advancing Social Accounting and Stakeholder Value Measurement

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in expanding the notion of organizational value beyond traditional financial metrics which often fail to capture the full social and stakeholder consequences of organizational action. While accounting and management research have historically focused on economic performance, increasing attention is now being paid to the broader value organizations create for their stakeholders. In this context, social accounting approaches offer promising frameworks to capture the multidimensional nature of value creation, following stakeholders theory approach. Emerging research has explored how organizations generate social value and, more recently, how they may also contribute to less tangible dimensions such as relational and emotional value. However, despite these advances, there is still limited integration between financial, social, and stakeholder-based perspectives in value measurement, and a lack of widely accepted methodologies that allow for consistent and comparable assessments across organizations and contexts.

This topic is particularly important given the increasing demand from policymakers, investors, and society for more comprehensive and transparent information on organizational performance. Traditional accounting systems are often insufficient to capture the full spectrum of value generated, especially in contexts such as social economy organizations, public institutions, and sustainability-oriented firms. Prior research has highlighted the limitations of existing tools such as CSR reporting or impact measurement frameworks, which frequently fail to provide integrated and monetized assessments of stakeholder value, and more broadly remain limited in their ability to measure value, disvalue, distribution, and accountability in integrated ways. Advancing methodologies that incorporate both social and more intangible dimensions—such as stakeholder perceptions or emotional value—can improve decision-making, enhance accountability, and contribute to more efficient resource allocation. At the same time, aggregated value measures may allow positive outcomes to obscure negative impacts on specific stakeholders, highlighting the need for frameworks that explicitly capture both value and disvalue and their distribution. Developing robust conceptual and empirical approaches can help bridge the gap between theory and practice in management and social accounting research.

We welcome conceptual, qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, comparative, experimental, and case-based research, as well as critical and methodological reflection on the possibilities and limits of social accounting and stakeholder value measurement, addressing topics such as, but not limited to:

• Theoretical contributions advancing stakeholder theory and its implications for social accounting and performance measurement.
• Contributions that develop, test, compare, critique, or apply methods for measuring stakeholder-relevant organizational outcomes.
• Development and application of social accounting methodologies, including monetization techniques and stakeholder-based valuation models, supported by case studies or in depth empirical applications.
• Approaches to measuring organizational impact, sustainability performance, and stakeholder outcomes beyond financial metrics
• Empirical and conceptual studies examining social value creation across diverse organizational contexts, including private firms, public sector entities, social enterprises, and hybrid organizations.
• Comparative and critical analyses of existing measurement frameworks, including ESG, integrated reporting, and social impact assessment
• Stakeholder based approaches to measuring and conceptualizing emotional value in organizational contexts.
• Measurement and analysis of organizational disvalue, including frameworks and methods that prevent its neutralization within aggregated value metrics and support distributional analysis across stakeholders, making visible asymmetries, tradeoffs, and stakeholder specific losses.

When submitting to this Collection, please select the section "Accounting, Corporate Governance & Business Ethics," and the title of the Collection when prompted.

Jose Torres-Pruñonosa is an Associate Professor at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja and Principal Investigator of the REDEES Research Group. He holds a PhD, an MA in Stock Markets and Financial Derivatives, a BA in Actuarial Science and Finance, a BA in Business Science and is a graduate of IESE Business School. His research focuses on finance, banking, social value, religion and sport economics. He has published in a range of prestigious academic journals, including Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Electronic Commerce Research, European Journal of Management and Business Economics, Journal of Vacation Marketing, Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, International Journal of Organizational Analysis, International Regional Science Review, Cities and Entertainment Computing, among others. He is serving as an Associate Editor for Electronic Commerce Research and, the Journal of Management and Business Education, as well as a member of the editorial board for Sage Open and Football Studies.

Associate Professor of Economics at Deusto Business School, specializing in Social Accounting. He holds a PhD in Economics and Business Studies from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), as well as degrees in Philosophy (University of Deusto) and in Clinical and Industrial Psychology (UNED). He also holds a Master’s in Advanced Finance and is an expert in Advanced Methods of Applied Statistics. He participates in several research groups: HUME (DBS), ECRI (UPV/EHU), and MGCF (Sorbonne–Paris 1); and is a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Trujillo (UCT). He serves as Scientific Director of GEAccounting (Global Economic Accounting) and Co-Director of the AECA Commission for the standardization of Non-Financial Information. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Lantegi Batuak. He is Vice President of Aurkilan (Association for the Research and Promotion of the Social and Solidarity Economy) and a member of the Scientific and Editorial Committee of CIRIEC. He has more than 100 indexed publications and has participated in numerous congresses, seminars, workshops, and conferences. Previously, he served as President of EBEN (European Business Ethics Network) Spain and President of REAS Euskalherria. He has also been director of several consulting firms (TECA, OPE, Grupo Integra, Bultz-Lan), as well as Director of Training and Employment at Cáritas.

Leire San-Jose is currently Full Professor at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Bilbao (Spain). She is the leader of ECRI, a research group on Ethics in Finance and Social Value. Previously, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at Huddersfield Business School (UK) (2009-2022) working alongside Chris Cowton, as well as a visiting professor at Loyola University Chicago under the supervision of Professor John Boatright and at Darden Business School under supervision of Professor Edward Freeman. Her most important publications are about treasury management, social value, impact, social efficiency and stakeholder theory.

The Guest Advisors do not have Conflicts of Interest to disclose.

The Guest Advisors acknolwedge their use of ChatGPT 5.4 to assist with language editing and stylistic refinement.

For more information about this Collection, please contact the Commissioning Editor, Dr. Molly Cole, at [email protected].