[Jan Bebbington] I'd like to introduce our first speaker for the day, which is Angus Laing, who appointed Jeffrey to this place and I had many conversations with Jeffrey about his thought about being here and his enthusiasm about coming to Lancaster, and indeed that enthusiasm was not unrelated to my enthusiasm about being here as well. So, Angus can you start our day for us?

[Angus Laing] Excellent thank you, Jan, thank you very much for that for that for that opening, and I am delighted, genuinely delighted to be at this event, but like like everyone else sad by the trigger for this for this event, but as Jan has said, I had the privilege of appointing Jeffrey to to the Chair at Lancaster and he was, in my view, without doubt one of the academics I will remember for the rest of my life.

He was an academic who had impact, genuine impact, impact on individuals, impact
on organisations, and it was a combination of what he did, and how he did it, as a point I think Jan was starting to start to pick up on. Because I knew Jeffrey before he joined Lancaster, mostly it has to be said on the basis of reputation, but I did have some slight personal knowledge of Jeffrey before I started having been on one memorable occasion at a BAFA event, being robustly, but as you can imagine from Jeffrey very politely, challenged around the value and the role of the Chartered Association of Business Schools academic journal guide.

I came away from that discussion with absolutely no doubt about two things, one, his intellectual ability and secondly, his steel, his inner steel, his determination to ensure that his view if not necessarily prevailing, was at very least at very least heard. Now, what I subsequently learned from working with Jeffrey at Lancaster was that this intellectual ability, that determination, was wrapped up in a genuinely warm and kind personality.

Now, he had very high standards, very high standards of himself, very high standards of others, but what was really striking was his ability and his willingness to support others in reaching the standards that he set, unlike many, many colleagues we can all point to who have high standards and do nothing to try and lift up colleagues to match those standards.

Jeffrey was passionate about bringing people up to to his standard, and for me in so many ways he epitomised what we look for in a contemporary academic. We take the outstanding intellect almost as a given, but then it was his engagement with practice and being as has been said already, very passionate about students so it was about impact, it was about making an impact on thinking, on practice, and on people, and that is what we as an academy need to do today.

So when we appointed Jeffrey, sustainability was becoming a central theme for the Management School at Lancaster. We'd been in the fortunate position where the Rubin Foundation had funded the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business, and an increasing number of colleagues from across the school were engaging with that broad sustainability agenda, and Jeffrey joined the Centre absolutely seamlessly, taking up the role first of all as one of the Deputy Directors, and then subsequently as the Interim Director, and it was in this context that I first came to really appreciate Jeffrey's leadership skills, the handling of what were unequivocally challenging circumstances with genuine aplomb, and engaging the Pentland Centre fully with the interests and ambitions of the School.

He was very much an institution builder, but his modesty also came out in this, because I was looking at what he was doing and thinking, well we've got a ready-made Director for the Centre, but while he accepted the interim role without any, without any hesitation whatsoever, he made it abundantly clear, and I mean abundantly clear, that he had no desire to take on the directorship of the Centre on a permanent basis.

He'd served as head of school at Royal Holloway and he was adamant that his contribution at Lancaster, his legacy, would be as an academic in the field of Accounting and Sustainability, a legacy which although cut somewhat short, would be envied by many academics who enjoyed a far, far longer career, so impact over a relatively shorter number of years than than than many of us have was absolutely enormous.

And, his sense of commitment to the sustainability agenda, to the institution was such that, despite this absolute desire to refocus on his research, he was really instrumental in supporting the ongoing development of the Pentland Centre, not least through the role he played in encouraging Jan, encouraging Jan Bebbington to join, to join LUMS as, as the Director and the Centre has unequivocally flourished under Jan's leadership, so quite a legacy that Jeffrey left to, to Lancaster.

Now, in linking back to that broader sustainability agenda, there does feel some to be something appropriate about celebrating Jeffrey's legacy in the week of COP26. So, if we look over the past quarter of a century since the initial COP summit, sustainability has become increasingly central, central part of our our lives, in the operations of organisations, companies in public policy, and business schools have reflected this rising salience, with sustainability becoming an increasingly significant theme which cuts across the full range of our research and teaching activities.

We can cite many examples, the growing prominence of the SDGs and the thinking of business schools, the evolution of the responsible research in business and management network, the creation of the positive impact rating, all point to the central place of the wider ESG agenda, the responsibility agenda of business schools, which is likely to almost certain to expand in the decades coming.

Now, business schools such as Lancaster have, unequivocally in my view, the potential to be important players in supporting that transition to a much more sustainable economy and supporting responsible businesses. Our research around, for example, the consumption of plastics, plastic waste, our engagement, for example, around supporting eco-innovation, our teaching and inculcating a clear sense of social and societal responsibility amongst our students, these are all dimensions that are going to become an increasingly significant part of our future.

Now, Jeffrey in his all too short time at Lancaster played a central role in progressing this agenda through his research, through his teaching, and last but most certainly not least his leadership. He, if you like, bequeathed us a platform and it is our responsibility to build on that platform, and I am certain there is the capability and the commitment in the school to really build on that on that platform, so thank you very much for the opportunity Jan to say these few words, and can I now pass back to, back to you to bring our next speaker in.

Thank you.

[Jan Bebbington]
Our next introduction is to somebody who Jeffrey and I knew very well, and that I actually got to know him through Jeffrey, and that's Richard Spencer who is the Sustainability Director at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, who are a massively august institution, in fact so august I can't quite work out why they let me come and do things with them because [laughs] they are really rather superb people.

And Richard is one of the best, and I know that he worked very closely with Jeffrey and, um on occasions Jeffrey and I may have plotted about what we were going to try to get Richard to do next as well, and so in the nicest possible way he's been a long-standing collaborator, um with um, our community. So, Richard - all yours.

[Richard Spencer] Thank you very much for inviting me here today. It's a real privilege to be here um and I'm absolutely delighted... I come from Jeffrey's professional body and, um I'm going to say this quite frequently through this Jeffrey was exactly the sort of member that makes us incredibly proud.

I joined the institute in 2005, so quite a long time ago, and those first years were a bit like pushing jelly uphill, trying to persuade members in business and members in practice about this thing called sustainability. And Jeffrey was one of the first people I met, which is quite nice, and I've been sort of routinely roasted by quite a lot of academic accountants since then [laughs], but Jeffrey was completely different. The, the fierce intellect that is so enjoyable to...be around and to be stimulated by. But what a gentle and humble man, and I think that coupled with his absolutely wicked sense of humour was such a help and support to me as I, oh I have to confess actually I'm not an accountant so, so [laughs] I came over from the dark side from investment banking, and Jeffrey kind of helped me navigate that kind of complex and unique species that is the chartered accountant and the academic chartered accountant.

So, you know, I benefited enormously from his support and his wisdom and his humour. And, and Jeffrey played a huge part in the life of the Institute, um he was the Vice Chair of our Research Advisory Board, and I should say that the Chair of the Research Advisory Board is always a practitioner so Jeffrey was the kind of leading academic at the Institute for a long time. And a really important role because not only with the Research Advisory Board the partner gives out the cash for research, which is always important, but in a sense the Institute navigates or, or kind of is the, the calibrator between the world of academia and members in, and our members in business and practice, and Jeffrey's played such an important part in bringing those two, two pieces together, so his role there was just so important.

But I remember in 2014 um we, we have a governing body which is called Council, and in 2014 we asked Jeffrey if he would let us put his name forward to be co-opted onto Council. And Jeffrey said, you know, 'what an incredible honour, but what would I have to offer?' and it was kind of like 'Cripes, Jeffrey, [laughs] what could you have to offer...the honour is entirely ours.' And, um, as expected you will blow us away. My work, just Jeffrey was so supportive with my work all the way through, and I was a sole practitioner for a long time and eventually built up a team, but Jeffrey was always there backing this up, and we've done some things at the Institute where we're punching way above our weight, and the, the importance of Jeffrey's support, and particularly on Council was just fundamental.

But, but what we got to do, what I want to do is talk to you about a particular example which I've called 'the Unerman question', and this, this was very quietly in Council, at the Council annual meeting Jeffrey said 'so what is the Institute doing about its carbon footprint? You're doing all this wonderful work with members' and, and of course that's where our big impact is, we have over, about 160,000 members in a huge [inaudible] across the globe and, and that's going to be our impact, 'but what are we doing to walk the talk?' And it was just a very innocent, almost quiet question that he asked and, and it just has changed everything.

We now have the Sustainable Development Goals embedded as one of our key five strategic themes. We have gone carbon neutral, and we were the first professional body to do so. And we have a road map for driving out carbon emissions. And I come hot foot from our Finance For The Future Awards, now these are quite a prestigious set of awards that we do in conjunction with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales Accounting for Sustainability Project and Deloitte, and it's been going for 10 years now, and I was absolutely thrilled that, um, the Prince of Wales, the Chair of Deloitte, and our own Chief Executive agreed to change the name of one of the categories.

The category was 'driving change in the financial community' and this has now become the 'Jeffrey Unerman Award for Driving Change', and I think before I come to talk about this, Jeffrey...it's so appropriate that, because Jeffrey represents everything that I think our members should be about, and that's driving change and that's what he did. So, I want to do this as this is kind of our report card back to Jeffrey, when he said 'what is the institute doing?' So this was for you Jeffrey, and I hope we, I hope we match up.

So, of course, what I'm trying to say here is, of course our influence is through our members. So we think we all know the, the big firms but, there are actually 12,000 member firms, all small and medium-sized practices, that advise 3.5 million businesses, so there's this wonderful magic ratio here that if we can get our members in practice engaging our members in business and other businesses to change on climate, on biodiversity, on social inequalities, we can really make a difference here. And Jeffrey recognised that, but equally we have to walk the talk.
So

I just want to talk to you about what we've, what we've done. We did our our carbon footprinting following, following Jeffrey's question. We, we measured our footprint, and into that footprint we included what's called our Scope 3 emissions, so what that means is - I had to have this explained to me so I'm explaining to you [audience laughs] - it's not just the emissions that, the carbon we produce, it's not just the carbon we produce by buying electricity, but it's the carbon that we cause by, and mainly by our own travel and by the travel of our staff and our volunteers. And rather than just say 'oh well, we'll just we just look at what we produce and what we buy in electricity', we will, we will take responsibility for the emissions that ..our members and, what we call our active members, and members of, members of committees, members of council come and, and support everything we do, and our staff, so we, we measured our footprint, which at quarter three 2020, I should say that...that footprint was based on a pre-Covid figure, so we didn't we didn't get use the 'get out of jail free card' of nobody travelled to work, which would have got rid of about 60 percent of our emissions immediately.

So that's our pre-Covid, and what we did, we, we purchased offsets against that whole footprint. Now we haven't sort of said 'oh that does it, we've got a roadmap - as you can see - to...to drive out emissions', but we thought right from the start we will offset. And I'll come back to the offsets that we bought. We engaged Verco to help us do this, so it wasn't me as Head of Sustainability doing it internally and fiddling the figures and so on to get it right.

We had external consultants who've held us to account the whole way through. And, um we realised, we really, we reckon we can get a 20 percent reduction by 2025, a 40 percent reduction by 2030 which does leave us with 60 percent of our emissions that sit outside of our direct control. So these are the ones we can influence, so how do we influence our staff and our members travel?

As you can see here, that travel accounts for about 66 percent of our admissions, the largest bit being our employee commuting, and flights for business travel. And then our offices around the world, we have offices in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, um, they produce around a third. And this...what we've done here is, um, this is just to show you the kind of, what we've done all the way along is publish our story, so it's all on our website, with the idea that if we're doing this maybe that gives our members, particularly our members in practice, permission to start doing it and, and so we've always sort of published how did we do this, what did we do to get there, what were the sort of checklists that we used.

And this is a kind of a bit of a warning because in a sense that...it's very easy to to say we will try and do this but the big word here is 'if'. The profession has got to demonstrate that, that it can recover. I think we've lost the public trust in a lot of ways and how can we recover it? Well we can we can recover it by delivering on the thing that matters most to people, and that's achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, so I want you to think about our carbon neutral journey as an example of a much wider ambition. And I suppose it points to very much something, that again Jeffrey would have noticed, start with something simple.

Don't overwhelm people with the enormity of the task and, and therefore his question wasn't...it was, it was very deliberate and very well placed in that, you know, what you're doing about your carbon footprint is a very easy place to start and takes you on a much bigger journey. So we had, we had been doing some work that Jeffrey's question accelerated in, in the in the five years before, in between 2015 to 2020. Where we had started on LED lighting, we'd moved to all, all the things that sounded kind of trivial but changed the way you do, you do business, and and we've had a tremendous take-up of all this so,so for instance with flights, we have no...our travel policy prohibits any internal UK flights.

And now this is looking forward, um what are the projects we're going to do to drive out more emissions. So we're looking at removing gas as a power source, we're thinking about how do we use hydrogen, um moving our data centre to the cloud, and I have to say we are not using Amazon platforms in Maryland, because of course they are all coal-fired [laughs]. And, as I said changing our, changing our flight policies.

But of course we have bought offsets, and when we set out on our journey to buy offsets, we were very clear that we weren't just going to go into the markets and buy a standardised product, we wanted something that was going to have additionality to it. So, what, what other of the goals could our carbon offsets work towards. And these are the projects that we've invested in. Clean drinking water in Cambodia, and biogas plants in Vietnam, and forest protection in Kenya. All of those have social consequences and non-carbon consequences, if you like. And I should say that we haven't reduced our holding of offsets as during, during this year as staff travel's completely, obviously, collapsed, so we have...we've maintained our purchases.

And we published, as I said, our whole carbon neutral journey, so that we can inspire others, and in terms of thinking about this. This question that Jeffrey asked. As a result of this we've been and presented to what's called the Global Accounting Alliance, which represents the principal accounting bodies around the world, so the, the US accounting bodies, the Canadians, Hong Kong, South Africa, big, the big impactful accounting bodies, and many of those have now started a carbon neutral journey themselves. We've presented to Chartered Accountants Worldwide, and if you think about Commonwealth countries, and we started inspiring some of those to change. We've presented to the signatories of the Green Finance Education Charter, so professional bodies outside of accountancy in the finance sector who are equally now exploring the possibilities of becoming carbon neutral. And we've been part of setting up the Professional Bodies Climate Action Charter and again using our carbon neutral journey as an example to others.

So I'd say, Jeffrey, I hope you're pleased with what we've done. I'd say that your legacy and your impact goes well beyond that question, and for us, your contribution and your legacy is not just as an absolutely fierce academic, nor is it simply, or even complexly, as a professional acting in the public interest, but it's as somebody who has actually done something that drove change and has made a difference, and I think it's all of those that make us very proud that you are a member.

Thank you.

[Jan Bebbington] We're going to continue our journey through a couple more professional connections, and the next one is the British Accounting and Finance Association.

So, I'm a part of the BAFA, I'm a previous chair of Conference of Professors of Accounting and Finance, and I know that Lisa won't be too cross with me when I say it's not the most interesting institution, but it really matters, because we're the body that looks at the various conditions that pertain to people working in accounting and finance, we're the nominating bodies for various assessment processes, etc.

And so Jeffrey is a past chair of the Association, as is Lisa, and so really pleased to have you here today, Lisa, lovely to see you and she will say a few words next.

[Lisa Jack] Thank you very much Jan, it's very kind of you and hopefully you can all hear me.

I was sorry not to be able to travel to Lancaster to be with you today but, um...I'm pleased I still have the opportunity to speak because, the last time I actually saw Jeffrey was at the P. D. Leake lecture at Chartered Accountants Hall, where, which we've just been hearing about his connections, which must have been the last one they did before lockdown.

And I was sitting between Jeffrey, and between, and with Hillary Lindsay, who I had to keep very quiet on that evening, because I couldn't tell her at that point she'd received the distinguished contribution award from BAFA which she was given later that year, and we discussed BAFA and Jeffrey was always very, very supportive when I was President [pause] and we both said yes, it'd been a [pause] good experience, we'd [pause] enjoyed the work we'd done, but we both were very glad to have, be able to lay it down and move on to other things, it's quite time consuming and all-consuming while you're doing that role.

What I remember from that evening is that Jeffrey was invariably kind and supportive. I'd been an external examiner at Royal Holloway, we'd met obviously many times at conferences, but I often wish we'd met earlier, because in fact we were both students during the mid-1980s in Staffordshire even though that we were at different institutions. So it's possible our cards could have crossed earlier and that would have been great. [pause]

But his contribution to BAFA was immense. He was Secretary and then Vice President from 2007 to 2012, and then he became President from 2012 to 2014. And then he was followed by John Cullen, and then myself. The key thing is that as Secretary of the British Accounting Association, as it was then [pause] he realised that the association was now nearly 40 years old, but it needed to be reformed because it really wasn't meeting the needs of the 21st century.

It had begun as the Association of University Teachers of Accounting in around 1967-68. [pause] But of course by 2007 the demographic had really changed. Um there were more women, there were more early career researchers, and we'd welcomed many, many colleagues from all over the world, who were teaching accounting in British universities. More importantly, as Secretary he realised that actually, to put no too find a point on it, we were preaching a lot about corporate governance and our own corporate governance was [pause] well, more like a club.

And he grasped this, and realising that charities, and BAFA is a charity, were being scrutinised and that learned societies are under the perpetual threat of being removed from charitable status he got to work with David Otley and they rewrote the constitution of BAFA. They changed the structures by which it was organised and brought in more accountability and in fact corporate governance.

And John and I were able to build on this work, introducing new membership systems, I had the great pleasure of grappling with GDPR, and we've hope we've handed over to the current president, Teeven Soobaroyen, a platform on which BAFA can build for increasing diversity and inclusion, and indeed sustainability. What Jeffrey taught us, indeed, was that you can't take trusteeship lightly.

You can't take your stewardship of an organisation lightly. So, I'd like to read a little bit that Jane Broadbent wrote when she nominated Jeffrey to be the Distinguished Accounting Academic of BAFA, which is an award we give to one person every year.

And she wrote this, she wrote that "Jeffrey, as Secretary, led BAFA
through a range of changes to its constitution. He served on the leadership team of BAFA as an important time in its development, and was also wise enough to realise that he should delegate, and pass on to new hands to take the reformed organisation forward."

She said "Jeffrey can take control, but does so with a view of enabling others, and it is this aspect of his academic leadership that helped to lay the foundation for a learned society that is now fit for purpose."

And one of my great pleasures as President was to be able to award the Distinguished Accounting Academic prize to Jeffrey [pause] for his work with BAFA, the ICAEW, but his other organisations, for all his care of his doctoral students, undergraduates, post-graduates, at home and abroad, this is why he...and, it goes without saying, his immense work in the field of sustainability and accounting... that's why he won the Distinguished Accounting Academic award.

And in some ways he had the best of it, because he was awarded the prize at the dinner we had in 2017, in the Scottish Parliament building, now not actually in the chamber itself but in their rather fantastic hall outside, and because we had a little bit more panache in our proceedings by that point, um we were able to, you know, bring a little bit more razzmatazz to the occasion.

Following a glowing citation by his dear colleague Gloria Agyemang, who herself has now been awarded the Distinguished... Accounting Academic award, he gave a wonderful acceptance speech in this surroundings, telling us about his journey from apprentice accountant to distinguished academic. And it was very inspiring, and a reminder that just where the [pause] whole discipline has developed in his lifetime and how much contribution he made to it.

And then to top this his annual lecture, which he was obliged to give the following year, was at our 50th anniversary celebrations. It was one of the highlights and it took place in Central Hall, Westminster which is a fantastic setting, and he delivered a fine, deep and humourous lecture on the role of accountants in combating false news, echo chambers, and misrepresentations such as those becoming rife in UK and US politics and which I suspect are being played out to some extent in Glasgow this week.

And then as President of BAFA one of my great pleasures also was to be able to write the nominations for our Distinguished Accounting Academics to become Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences, and Jeffrey provided me with his CV which enabled me to see the richness of his leadership work at home and abroad, the positions he'd had in Japan, South Africa, Sweden as well as at Royal Holloway, uh Prince's Trust Chartered Accountant, and BAFA. The immense value of his research and the depth of his teaching, it would have made them, writing the nomination easy had I not been restricted to only 500 words.

He did indeed become a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. I like to think that given time, he might have been in line for a nomination to the British Academy as well, to join the very small number of accounting and finance people recognised at that level. Time, sadly, was cut short but I am so pleased that he did receive the Distinguished Academic Accounting Academic award and the Fellowship with the Academy of Social Sciences while he was with us because, there are very few people who have deserved it more.

Thank you very much indeed.

[Jan Bebbington] Our final speaker for this morning is a very long-standing collaborator of of mine Ian Thompson, and so there's, there's a few of us who are not as young as we wish we were that go back to the
very, very early days of of social environmental accounting, and the difficulty of last year is we also lost the founder to social environmental accounting, Rob Gray, in the same year, he died in the June. And so that was a very sort of tough year in any event, and it really sort of brought us all back to the, the times in the the 1990s when when we've, we first met and when we, as a group of us started collaborating together in various combinations.

And so I'm thinking Brendan O'Dwyer, who we'll hear from later on today, Carlos Larrinaga, who I know is on on the connection as well, Ian Thomson, myself and Jeffrey as well. And so we, we saw each other a lot over the years and some of the pictures in your programme... the one on the the top right hand side, was indeed from a 1997 conference when we're all just starting to get to know each other and we all look very young, and my, my most delightful PhD student just told me earlier on she was three when this was taken, so um yeah it sort of tells you that, that time, time invested it makes outcomes which is really great.

So Ian, may I invite you to come and provide some reflections from the Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research.

[Ian Thomson] Thanks everyone, it really is my kind of privilege, it's not this morning, it's this afternoon now isn't it, and to to pay tribute to a real star of the CSEAR network, one of whom, Dave Owen, who many of you may know, called that, was one of the 'Ant and Dec' of social environmental accounting.

And this was in no way meant to be a derogatory, but rather captured their enthusiasm, insights and passion and new ways of thinking about a topic, which was seen as a really welcome change from the grumpy older men and women who had actually kind of [inaudible] you know kind of started it off. One of the great kind of joys I found was, was actually discovering that Jeffrey was older than me having, having, having kind of existed for about 20 years thinking he was younger than me. So um so again a bit of a 'Peter Pan' in this field as well.

But, Dave, in the same conversation to me, marked him, marked him out as future intellectual leaders, of the field and of the CSEAR network. Just for a little bit balance, they've also said in the same thing, he said if academic accounting didn't work out for me I always had a career in stand-up, which was kind of quite encouraging for for you know your research from an eminent professor at the time, but I think he was wrong about me but he certainly wasn't with Jeffrey and the mystery 'Dec' (I'm going to keep, keep that person a surprise).

Jeffrey played a heroic role in building CSEAR from what was a small, tight-knit network initially focused on disrupting the kind of the mainstream academic and practice, and he moved it from that tight disruptive network into a global movement - a global movement which now has an active community of 900 scholars across every single continent that you can get. And...it's growing, it's a global movement that's now respected by the critical and the mainstream, and as we heard from practice as well. A significant kind of transition that I think many people wouldn't have thought was possible to actually to do that. It is worth pointing out that CSEAR, even though we've got all these things, we've got no money, we have no money, we get a little bit of membership, virtually everything, 99 percent of what we do is voluntary. It's effectively people choosing to act for a purpose with no ostensible reward, and sometimes derision, certainly in the early stages where it's like you're involved with CSEAR, why are you doing that?

But people persevered and in many ways as the kind of the, the convener of the council it's humbling to witness this massive collaborative effort, in what is effectively a self-organising network. And today I want to try and do justice to Jeffrey's decades of work in this regard but I won't be able to do it, to to do all, I think it would, it would, I don't know how long it would take to actually to document everything.

Now, I will not pretend that I always agreed with Jeffrey, and I know that he didn't always agree with me. How did I know that? I'm not a mind reader? No. He told me, when he didn't agree with you he told you. Not to pick a fight, not to grandstand, not to platform, because but of a kind of a, a genuine concern with the topic or the network. He cared about, he cared about genuinely and respectfully engaging in scientific conversations, as a productive dialogue not false platitudes or storming off in the huff when things don't go your own way, which we all know is a really attractive kind of thing to do, the theatrical 'Oh, I'm not staying for any more of this'.

But he kind of, I kind of learned an awful lot of, of how you do, how you can do things. He was able to separate robust scientific argument from personal relationships, and that insight was essential to building the community. Productive engagement and dialogue. Saying everything is great doesn't work, neither does disagreeing with everything there's a middle ground. Productive engagement, collaboration, partnership, respect and these are, these are things Jeffrey embodied, and things he embedded in CSEAR. It was great fun to argue with Jeffrey, it was really, really good fun he was quick, insightful, politically aware, incredibly well-read, but always had a concern about making change happen, making things better, a pragmatic concern that actually kind of didn't let perfect get in the way of better.

He understood about transition, he understood about how to, how to kind of to build things. And he's very much, his philosophy was we mustn't let our differences divide us or define us, but actually our similarities unite us. Now that's a valuable lesson to someone like me who is instinctively oppositional, it's it, it really is is my kind of thing. But it also is a lesson that it's kind of like key to building a community.

Jeffrey also opened up a Southern front, the Southern trenches in 'that London'. The home of imperialism, where the dreaded market existed. Up until that point CSEAR had largely been a little bit peripheral, marginal, Northern like in, in all its regard, pointing the finger down at them. Jeffrey lived there, he kind of embedded so much about, like I've learned so much about London around there, he became the Southern rallying point, if you like, in that, in that space, and instrumental in building the community south of the Watford Gap, with many a fun discussion about where civilisation started and stopped and and many of those kind of Jeffrey's things.

He also, along, alongside Linda Lewis he, a lot of people don't necessarily remember, when you look at Jeffrey's work, he was one of the first to seriously investigate the role of the internet and digital, he shifted us from analogue to digital. In a way he was first, first really person types to do a serious study on the impact of this, and that was his first work. Which again, I think people have said, in terms of his longer term vision and seeing where things is his ability to future.

Now, there's a, there's a... little story about, about this which I'll I'll go, and I'm sure Brendan O'Dwyer who's going to take... will remember. We, the three of us, decided we'd go to the Irish Accounting and Finance conference in Galway, largely because Brendan was from Galway, and it said it's a brilliant place to go, it'll be absolute great craic, and so we thought, okay let's go, but to be honest me and Brendan, we're a little bit worried about how Jeffrey's going to go down. I mean he definitely had, he's got the poshest English accent I've kind of...of any of my friends, right, and and he's definitively English, you know you can't really argue, you don't say, you never say oh Jeffrey where are you from? You could have, you got that sort of like right away, and and he's walking into this you know this rebel, rebel kind of like hotbed of kind of like Western...Ireland sitting there, and at the time social environmental accounting was not the traditional fare of, of the Irish Accounting and Finance Institute.

So, oh well, he's...he's a big boy, he'll do it. So anyway, so Jeffrey, kind of walked into the front, stood there and he said 'Hello, I'm Jeffrey', I can't do his accent so I won't even try, and 'I'm going to do this thing on corporate social responsibility on the internet.' Perfect pause. And he goes 'now, if you don't know what the internet is I believe it'll be coming to you soon.' [audience laughter] And exactly that, there was laughter, there was ice broken and a memorable three days emerged. But that was that kind of thing that confronting the kind of the challenge, and just to let you know CSEAR Ireland had its third conference with 176 people attending, from that very kind of small thing, and Jeffrey was invited back more than once to go and talk, talk to them there.

He was a master of the art of being quietly critical, making points powerful insights, deeply informed by theory but without appearing to be critical, or needing to resort to political polemics or pantomimes. Preaching to the converted was not his style, he didn't see the point, he could polemicise with the best of them but in private. He was not a natural revolutionary but he changed things, he built bridges. In CSEAR he was very much the rebuilder of bridges that had been broken as part of the creative destruction process that's often necessary for any kind of radical transformation. And it's a much harder job than it sounds, but it's really important, and I know for many of us involved there that was not, that was not our strength. And to be honest I still love a little bit of creative destruction, you kind of get in there, you [inaudible]. The problem with creative destruction as a consequence you're left with broken pieces that need to be put back together, and you need people to put them back together, and Jeffrey instinctively moved to that space. Nobody said can you do that, he knew that was that was actually the part to do it, he recognised the need and got on with it. Much of it was backstage out of the pub...out of the public limelight, even reaching out to existing allies inside and outside CSEAR engaging with whoever needed reform.

He didn't see the profession or practitioners as a monolithic all-powerful enemy who slavishly worshipped at the altar of neoliberalism but he rather saw them as a conflicted complex assemblage of individuals and institutions. Many of them were experiencing the same amount of oppression that other businesses and other people were actually feeling. They were communities that were struggling to do the right thing, or didn't know what the right thing was to do, okay? He also recognised that there was some in there who were vehemently opposed to any social and environmental accounting reform. His great insight was that this last group was a minority and it was about seeking allies elsewhere and it was all too easy and had fallen into the track of, of conflating the vocal opposition to social environmental accounting reforms and neoliberal propagandists with the profession. His great gift was that these 'shock jocks' were actually a minority and to see beyond them with the people who wanted to change and you could actually work with. And his approach really contained tactics about engaging with the 'would like to do something but don't know what to do' by telling them what they could do, that's what they should do as well. And he was actually able to to create, recreate bits of CSEAR as a home if you like for people who wanted to do things where you could have, where you had also people from marginal...who were marginalised in other communities, and and to do this...his approach was highly effective and he was also acutely sensitive of culture and context.

He started from, as Americans say, where where people are at, not from the Irish, well if that's where you're going you wouldn't be starting from here. Okay? Where are we, what can we do. I remember conversations when we had...sort of like, first kind of group of people from, from China, mainland China, coming to CSEAR conferences and they were presenting papers which you know to be honest were rubbish, right, and we were going, oh look at that they're rubbish, and Jeffrey pointed out, no they're not rubbish, what they're doing is they're doing normal science properly, they've been reading the articles they've been following the kind of trends and they're being kind of like emulating and replicating. We shouldn't criticise them for doing that just because it's different. Our responsibility is to engage and to nudge and to move them forward and to make things better, not to criticise or dismiss.

He was um also the kind of CSEAR's bridge to institutional opportunity in other communities, got access to grants, identified change in regulations and standards as opportunities to influence change. And it's really hard to underestimate the time, persistence, long hard kind of job that that is, poring over rules and regulations, keeping abreast of possible interventions, reading minutes, following up meetings, responding to drafts and consultations, this is very much the unglamorous hard yards of accounting engagement. It's quite ironic being a sporting metaphor for Jeffrey, I just realised that I've done this. I remember we had a, a competition one time in a bar and we said how many players are in a rugby rugby team, football team, rugny union team and cricket, and he got one right, which is anyway...

In some ways the the ritualistic academic arena was important but he kind of thought it was too disconnected to make a difference, and I was really fortunate enough to to witness Jeffrey's skill with regard to his work on the CSEAR council, where for years he displayed his many leadership skills. Hard conversations. Coherence with vision, capacity building, intelligent negotiation and attention to detail. His work at transforming the Social and Environmental Accountability journal from an informative newsletter to a fully-fledged peer-reviewed scientific journal which still kept the essence of the original communication was testament to all these skills. Not only that, he set it up, but then he then took it on and did the work as editor. So it's all very well to say oh do this, he actually went in and he did it and he's actually kind of again not just got the, the vehicle of SEAJ but actually he's then set the tone and that kind of transformation which is now a journal, a recognised journal in its own right, and a key kind of like publication in our network.

He contributed to CSEAR as a research innovator and leader. He was a gifted researcher and social scientist whose work remains an inspiration and a blueprint for others to emulate. He was able to apply different theories and different methods intelligently, but also humbly recognise the limitation. What really got him annoyed was poorly done research, not different theories or different methods, it was like just do the job properly. He could patholog...pathologically dissect papers and I've been on the other end of that pathological dissection on a number of times, but he rarely did it in public and he actually never did it in public with early career researchers.

As well as appreciating his lively workshops and kind of paper presentations at various CSEAR conferences, his masterful plenary performances, my abiding memory was not Jeffrey in front of a microphone here, it would be when you came out for coffee he'd be sitting quietly with somebody who just presented a paper and he'd be like scribbling down wee notes, quietly, privately having having conversations with this kind of this person about how maybe you can, constructively engaging with them, nudging them towards better ways to achieve their research questions. Not his or not ours. And I think he put hours in this, in this patient endeavour, helping build the community, creating and arguably saving careers, and I'm sure many of us have benefited from this freely given advice and looking around the audience i know people who've had the benefit of those sitting in the corner, round the edges [inaudible].

Jeffrey was a powerful advocate for for social environment accounting research and CSEAR in particular, and his many roles which we've heard about today but also as an editor, council member and also kind of a reviewer in that place. There was decades of hidden community building practices which will always be in his debt. Now I don't want to paint this picture of a bureaucratic minded diplomat, nor was he always a peacemaker. When harsh words were needed and difficult decisions to be made he spoke and he acted, but not in his own interest but for the bigger picture and vision. He was delightfully mischievous...[laughs]

If you chair in a session or you were sitting there they would chair with, eventually they would be out like a one word and there'd be a ripple of laughter and you could just like...trace it back to where Jeffrey was sitting and other people were giggling. But he did provide the balance and wise counsel that was needed to grow, create and mobilise a community he worked easily alongside the ranters, the silenced and the marginalised, he constructed our capacity for impact and for that we are eternally grateful.

[Sandra Nolte] So, hello everybody. Now as, as Jan said I'm Sandra Nolte, I'm the Head of Department in Accounting and Finance. And, well, when Jan came to me last week to invite me to this Symposium to say a couple of words about Jeffrey, I must say I was really honoured to do that.

And at the same time she created created a lot of headaches for me, because I was asking myself what shall I share with you about Jeffrey, because you need to understand I'm Head of Department of an Accounting and Finance department, coming from the dark side, I'm coming from the finance side.

So, I think I asked myself shall I discuss Jeffrey's academic career, shall I discuss Jeffrey's public published publications, or shall I discuss his contribution to the field, to which I thought there are a lot of people in the room here today which could do that much better than myself.

And what I would like to share with you today is something which is much more personal to me, and something which is much more personal to the department, not only me as a person as a Head, but to all the colleagues that he had in that particular department, and I think that is much, much more important for me, than at least as important for me as the academic career that he had and the contribution that he made to the field.

Because what in fact, what the Accounting and Finance department is missing at the moment is someone who was caring, someone who was supportive, and a really, really kind colleague. And to give you an example of that is, I know we have one of those talented young researchers here in the room, so what you might not know here is that Jeffrey helped us to recruit two very talented junior academics in our department, Di who is sitting here, and Dasha who is not here at the moment maybe she's joined online, exactly, hi Dasha. So somehow, and what was really, what Dasha and Di was were really impressed with was Jeffrey supporting manner. He engaged with those young academic even before they came to Lancaster, meaning they were not even having a foot here, that he engaged with them, he communicated with them, he supported them research-wise and, and in a lot of different dimension, and that impressed them really much because those youngsters said, 'hey, I'm not only starting to work for a department, that department cares, that department is going to support me' and that is really something we are indebted to Jeffrey.

What also came around when we discussed about what Jeffrey did in our department was his positivity. Meaning whatever happened he always had a smile on his face, he always tried to find the positive aspect of every single situation. Might it be academically related, might be day-to-day life, because you know academics like to complain a lot as well someone about whatever it is, and Jeffrey always, like Sarah said who's also sitting here in the room today, to me said you know, when I complained that our department is really quiet during the period before Christmas, Jeffrey said to me but you know there are a lot of things you can do before Christmas, and it only happens before Christmas and not on every single period of the time of the year but enjoy that here, here is the positive here is the positivity that we are looking for, and that's...that was in every single, single activity that Jeffrey took over in our department.

What is also really, what I need to highlight here is, he always had time for all of us. And it didn't matter if we are a finance colleague to him, or we are coming from the accounting group, he always took the time to talk to us, you know, if you bumped to him during the...on the corridor, in the kitchen, he always had five minutes time to allocate, to listen to you, to give you advice, and what was incredible is that during those five minutes he made you feel like the most important people in, person in the world. Those five-minute mattered to him, that you feel better, that he is able to help you, and he's able to, to see or to discuss the future with you.

Now that kind of...of manner also transpired in the way how he taught, meaning when Jeffrey entered the lecture theatre and here we are sitting in a brand new one so it's look, it looks nice, we have some other lecture theatres which are not that nice, somehow, a little bit dark, a little bit not that bright, but when Jeffrey entered the room his enthusiasm for accounting transpired. Meaning he was there to engage students, especially our first-year students, you know, you are 18 years old, you start learning about accounting, and well what Jeffrey was trying to explain to them is that accounting is not only a balance sheet. You can do a lot of great things with accounting, you can shape the future thinking of a company, you can influence them, it's not only looking at an Excel file and while doing, uh I guess I can say that as a science person, doing boring finance or doing accounting in that in that sense, but trying to inspire the next generation, actually.

But what is really really important for me, because as you, as the name says, I'm the Head of Department of an Accounting and Finance department, and what I would like to highlight here for you today is Jeffrey's willingness to actually engage in every single kind of research activities, and it didn't matter if it was on the accounting side or on the finance side, which is really really important for our department, because some people might say we are orthogonal to each other, you know the finance guys do things in this in the corner and the accounting fine guys do other things in the other corner, but that was not Jeffrey.
Meaning, I guess not a lot of people know about that, and I think Jeffrey wouldn't mind that I share that with you today, is when when you were in the process to recruit Jeffrey to Lancaster to get him here, he expressed often, during the process, the fear that his research profile actually doesn't fit in our department, for the reason that our department didn't do any sustainability accounting, so you are doing some other things in accounting, but not sustainability, and during the process of getting him here into Lancaster he actually expressed that concern a lot, to say how do I fit in, it's going no...it's not completely obvious to him. But what I can say is he just needed a couple of days from Jeffrey to be here in our department to actually, for the department to recognise what great additional asset he was to the department. Because he was a ball of fresh air you know, he came with other ideas, with other point of view and as was mentioned this morning, not in a critical way but trying to make us think a little bit further down the line, to push the thinking basically, and this is something which was invaluable for the department that we are here.

And that is not only true for accounting colleagues, which with whom he had maybe a little bit closer relationship research-wise, it's also true for well the finance side of the department, and people like me, meaning I still remember the first time I met Jeffrey on the, on, well, in the corridor here in on C Floor,
and well after saying 'hi I'm Jeffrey', 'hi I'm Sandra', and trying to explain to each other what we were doing, Jeffrey concluded Sandra, I'm not doing any numbers. I said Jeffrey, I'm only doing numbers [laughter], but it is his open-mindedness and his willing to understand the people or the person in front of him who actually helped a lot our department to integrate what Jeffrey was doing, to value him to value the contribution that he is making and this is something which is really really important because he didn't feel excluded, you know the fear, the fear that he had during, during the recruitment process disappeared after two or three days, because well his open-mindedness and our open-mindedness helped a lot to integrate both, both sides and that is something I would like to highlight, highlight here for all of us. Now, what I can say is basically that Jeffrey joined and basically this this uh this fear of not fitting in, I guess I can mention John O'Hanlon, he was, he was kidding, so he was talking him all along after after he came to see, why were you scared about it, you know we are open-minded everything works fine, and that is the, that is really really valuable for on our, on our side.

So what I would like to say today, and I would like to keep it short, because I guess a lot of people have a lot of, of, more things to say, is that Jeffrey made a remarkable and significant, long-lasting contribution to our department. Meaning he made us discover what sustainability accounting is, it's not something which is going to go away from this department, it is something which is going to be developed in the future as well, and well, as a Head of Department, I'm really grateful for that to him to have introduced some new, new disciplines here, new colleagues who I'm sure they are going to bloom in the future as well in a way or another. And somehow I would like to say from the whole department that we dearly miss him.

Thank you very much.