Model-Driven Ethical, Social and Environmental Accounting

Abstract

Ethical, social and environmental accounting is the practice of assessing organisations' performances in sustainability and business ethics topics. The organisations typically publish the results in a sustainability or non-financial report. We aim at offering a novel perspective from which researchers investigate, practitioners apply and policy-makers regulate ethical, social and environmental accounting (ESEA). The large quantity of ESEA methods and tools causes managerial problems, affecting the identity of social enterprises and complicating policy making. We will develop a domain-specific modelling language to specify existing ESEA methods and capture the advantages of model-driven engineering. We will create a repository where method models can be stored. These models contain the data structure and configuration of the methods. We will also develop openESEA, a run-time model interpreter that automatically executes ESEA method models. We will offer features to allow organisations to tailor the methods to their needs, to support model management operations, and to compare existing methods to inform policy makers about their similarities and differences. This project combines expertise in information science and social entrepreneurship with the intention to pave the way to future research avenues in ESEA and, eventually, to profound changes towards a fair and sustainable economy. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Information systems applications; Collaborative and social computing systems and tools; Open source software.

The OpenESEA Modeling Language and Tool for Ethical, Social, and Environmental Accounting

“…The overall research objective is to reduce the complexity of using the openESEA DSL to model ESEA methods. Herein we extend a paper presented during the 7th Workshop on Managed Complexity (ManComp 2022) [9], by means of providing more extensive theoretical background and in-depth explanations of the modeling language primitives, the usage of the modeling language and the protocol for evaluating the modeling language.…”