[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 speaker...is representing actually an institution and two people, so our next speaker is Andy Rubin who is part of our, you know, our funding base, but also a collaborator and that is not about, you know, firing and forgetting, it's about being engaged, and I certainly appreciate his advice and help as I've been um finding my feet here at Lancaster. You also have...Stephen Rubin with us as well, online as well, who is part of that journey as well, and is indeed the, the Chair of my advisory board, so, absolutely delighted that both of you are here, but also delighted to hand over to you, Andy.

[Andy Rubin] Thank you very much. This is a wonderful example of a hybrid online ability to get together. So, as Jan said, I'm Andy Rubin representing the Pentland Group. I'm a third generation owner and Deputy Chair of our family company. We operate in sporting goods and retail.

Our story goes back to 1932, we were founded in Liverpool, not far from Lancaster, by my grandfather who was an immigrant to this country who arrived with no money and not speaking English. He borrowed two hundred pounds from friends and family and started a shoe business. Eighty-nine years and three generations later we have global revenues over six billion pounds and employ 55000 people across 20 countries.

As Pentland we own brands such as Speedo in swimwear, Ellesse in tennis and ski, Canterbury in rugby, Berghaus in the outdoors, Endura in cycling, and Mitre in football. We're also the majority owners of JD Sports Fashion plc, a publicly listed retailer based in Bury, again not far from Lancaster, operating in sports fashion with over 3000 stores in 20 countries.

As a private family business we can take a long-term view. Unlike many businesses, in our world 'a quarter' is 25 years. As a company we're on a journey to align purpose and profit and ensure that we make our contribution to solving problems of people and planet.

To align ourselves with global initiatives, and benchmark against the best, we signed up to the UN Global Compact 20 years ago, and in our brand division we focus our positive business initiatives against eight of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Last year, as you heard from Angus and from Jan, we agreed to extend our sponsorship of the Rubin Chair in Sustainability and to continue to fund the important work of the Pemberton Centre for Sustainability in Business here at Lancaster into a second five-year term.

We're very proud of this association, bringing together the best minds in academia and business, to try and contribute to solving some of the world's biggest problems.

The Pentland Centre was established in 2015 and at the launch my Chair, who I also call Dad, who is in on this call, Stephen Rubin said: "having worked in the area of sustainability for a very long time it seems to me that there is still so much short-termism in corporate life. We have to realise that in the world we are living in we cannot endlessly waste resources. We need to lay the foundation stones for those generations that follow. It is my hope that the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business can utilise academic and practical insights to scale up business solutions for sustainability and to enable business leaders to make more courageous decisions."

In 2020, at the completion of the first five-year phase of the Pentland Centre's work, and importantly during Jeffrey's tenure as Interim Director, Stephen said: "it is with a measure of gratification during this particularly extraordinary time for us all that we can look back at the solid way in which the Pentland
Centre has planted its roots and began to flourish I hope that the Pentland Centre has now become an integral part of Lancaster University and can look forward to many years of productive research and collaboration helping to solve some of the world's biggest problems."

As interim director of the Pentland Centre I met with Jeffrey several times. I admired how keen he was to learn about how we, as a company associated with Lancaster University, aligned ourselves against the UN SDGs. I could clearly see that he saw us as the living case study. We discussed the challenges business face to minimise harm to the planet, particularly through a business like ours with a complex global supply chain, where many aspects of what we do are subcontracted to third parties. We discussed how we measure our progress and he was always keen to help us understand how we could account for what we do and how we contribute.

Jeffrey had a very nice, calm, understated manner, but he asked great questions that were well thought through and delivered with a softness that belied the perceptiveness of his line of questioning.

Our company will be 100 years old in 2032 and to mark this anniversary our brand's division has set out an ambitious positive business strategy known as '100-1-0'. This has three targets by 2032 that I know Jeffrey we would have approved of: to help 100 million consumers live positive, active sustainable lives; to improve the lives of one million people in communities where we work; and to be a net zero business by 2032.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Jeffrey. He was clearly a pioneer in sustainability accounting, working in the field before people knew what it meant. He clearly had the foresight to be able to predict that we would need to account for our corporate activity in all areas of sustainability to ensure that we are held accountable and can then work together to minimise harm to our planet.

COP 26 is showing the world why we need to do more to solve the biggest problems of people on the planet, but Jeffrey knew this was coming three decades ago. We wish his family and friends sincere condolences and hopefully they will take comfort in knowing that Jeffrey's legacy in the academic and business world lives on and will help us all be better companies and citizens of this great planet.

We now look forward to seeing how his work inspires the research being led by Professor Jan Bebbington who you've met, and her team at the Pentland Centre. So thank you from us at Pentland to all of you for being here to honour Jeffrey and I wish you a great Symposium.

[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.

[Jan Bebbington] I'd now like to ask Gloria to come, and in particular Gloria worked with Jeffrey at Royal Holloway both as a...as a colleague, but then wrote with him for a long time before that as well.

[Gloria Agyemang] Hi everybody, good afternoon. It's a real pleasure to be here this afternoon talking about a project I did with Jeffrey, and also talking about our work together in leadership in the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway. But Jeffrey and I go back a very long week way. He often called me his first academic friend because we were working together in Thames Valley University, which is now University of West London, and we were the two academics interested in research. Everybody else was interested in making sure we got the ACCA accreditation, making sure we help students pass CIMA and the professional exams, but Jeffrey and I were, Jeffrey, Jeffrey of course was leading the charge with with research and then he corralled me into it. He said, one thing I remember him saying is that 'it's the research that keeps you young Gloria' and that's typical Jeffrey, sharing hi...his views about how to how to progress your career and everything. Things that I'm going to be talking about in...this presentation.

Interestingly the very first paper we wrote was in 1998 and it was in a paper on accounting education. We had carried out some sort of experiment with students and we had to, we wrote it up, and I mean that was the very first time that we worked together. The project that we worked on was, in a project we worked on, in NGO accountability in Ghana between 2006 and 2017, or 2017 was the final paper we wrote together, and it was with Brendan O'Dwyer, Brendan is going to be speaking, myself and a colleague in Ghana. And I remember being at the airport with Jeffrey, you have these television screens showing different places that flights come in, he said 'Gloria, where's Ouagadougou?'

I said 'it's in Burkina Faso', then he said 'where's Burkina Faso?'. I said 'it used to be called Upper Volta, it's right up, just north of Ghana.'

And that was Jeffrey, Jeffrey was always a lot of fun, he was always prepared to to share things and ask questions. And one of the questions he asked 'why wouldn't you let me eat street food?' [laughter] I said 'Well, no I'm protecting you, I don't, I don't want any...issues with your tummy or anything here. Let's just have fun okay, if you...smell something, you want it, we'll make it at home for you [laughter] okay, but not street food.'

So, the project - improving the effectiveness of NGO accountability - was a project funded by the ACCA. We carried out the work in 2006, 2007, 2008, and provided a report in 2009. I mean I got into this project with Jeffrey and Brendan, they'd been working together on accountability, NGO accountability for a while.
By the way it introduced some case study work in an environment outside, outside a developed country they've been looking at NGO work, a lot of work in Ireland mainly, and they wanted to look outside a developed country. So we... we developed this project looking at investigating the effectiveness and the impact of NGO accountability mechanisms at grassroots level. Because a lot of the work they'd been looking at, we're looking at office funding level, and not so much work at at grassroots or beneficiaries.

Prior to doing this work of course they had been looking at advocacy NGOs, and this work brought us into development NGOs, and throughout the project we were worried about, 'what do we as accountants know about development, we haven't studied development, so what do we know?' And there's a lot of literature in the development literature about the work of NGOs, but not about accountability. So I think that's where, where our main emphasis was going to be. So we went to Ghana and the first stage of the project we worked in, if you like, head office, the capital in the...capital we visited the NGO main offices, headquarters, offices in...Accra, so there's the three of us, and then our young man that we had who was helping us with translation and everything.

This was the, this was a Dutch NGO we ended up...we... we interviewed Dutch NGOs, Danish NGOs, British NGOs, quite a few. I mean we, we ended up doing about 30 interviews, at...in headquarters in Accra we did eight, but most of the work was done up in the north, in the villages, so we went to the village, Jeffrey didn't want to spend the 12 hours driving through the country so we took a 45 minute flight into...into Tamale, and there's Brendan, this is in 2007 when Brendan ...joined us. This was a focus group... interview because we were interested in hearing the voice of the people at the grassroots, we're interested in hearing the voice, voices of of beneficiaries.

So we asked our questions, and of course we had the young man doing the translation for us, and getting responses. Theoretically, over time, Brendan and Jeffrey had developed the ideas of hierarchical accountability and holistic accountability. Hierarchical accountability, of course, is reporting upwards, reporting upwards through, from the field officers, to the country managers, and then to the funders, and there's a lot of work that has... has looked at that. It's your typical accountant's type accountability where we have a prescribed report or prescribed format, and you account for monies received and how the monies were spent, focus a lot on efficiency and on, on outcomes. Basically quantitative reports ,supplemented with a bit of narrative.

Jeffrey and Brendan, in developing those theoretical ideas, felt there was a need for a holistic accountability, where you're not just reporting upwards to, to funders, but actually you're recognising that the work of the NGO impacts many, many people, many stakeholders, and therefore we need to be accountable to, to all stakeholders upwards to donors, but also downwards to beneficiaries. Thinking about accountabilities to...to funders, field workers, beneficiaries and managers, using multi-directional approaches, or both formal and informal ways of finding out what, how funds have been used and what the benefits have been.

Of course, I mean, accountability is complex, it is complex, and loads of people have written about accountability. I mean, I think one one article that was really very insightful was one by Sinclair in 1995 when she talks about the chameleon of accountability that it's something that is always, always changing. Then Mulgan in 2000 talking about accountability as something that's constantly changing and, and expanding. Yet the key issues of accountability - for what, by whom - is, it seems to be the core, and there's a sense of accountability as actually reporting back, and to some extent external control, and also of course ensuring that the performance of the organisation is, is improved, is managed.

What Jeffrey and Brendan and my work tended to show that it's accountability includes that, but includes, it's even more than that.

Okay, key accountability contributions from our research. That upward accountability is is problematic, you only get one side of the story. And to some extent our...our respondents, the people who we interviewed, told us it was really leading to external coercive control, controlling what they they did, and how they did things. Our analysis showed that accountability, upward accountability in the, in the sense of it being coercive, often led to inappropriate, unintended questions...unintended consequences.

If you have an inappropriate accountability mechanism that's just focusing on how much did you receive, and what did you do with it, some of the nuances get lost. For example, our respondents told us that they told the funders what they wanted to hear because they were scared of losing funding. There's a fear of funding being curtailed, so actually they were being quite strategic in the sorts of things they told them. An example being that, well we trained, we trained so many children, and what they didn't tell them was that they had to feed the children as well before the children would come to school. They...they were tactical in the sorts of responses that they gave to the funders.

And a lot of times the local context was downplayed, the local context of course is what's set in the situation helping what may have an impact on the actual performance, but that was that was downplayed. The funders had a list of performance indicators that they were in interested in, and of course the...the officers provided those, those performance indicators. But they felt, they felt that those performance indicators were not the right performance indicators to tell you about the work of the...of the NGO. The NGOs' offices operated in different ways and there was a sense of the accountability, the upward formal accountability, that they engaged in, but also more important to them was they felt accountable, and so they did things that they needed to do in order to, in order to achieve the mission.

From our work, I mean, we came to the conclusion that NGO accountability is an important concept, or accountability as a whole is an important concept, because it impacts on people's lives, in our work with the beneficiaries. We came to, we came across the rights-based approach that some of the NGOs were using which helped to empower these beneficiaries, gave them a voice to...to explain their feelings, their responses, their problems, and that's important because it's, it's in the downward accountability, it's in the...rights- based approach that you...you are able to really influence what you're trying to, or achieve what you're trying to achieve with, with the funding.

One of the papers we wrote was was called 'Seeking conversations for accountability' because our work suggested that that's what the NGO field workers were looking for, they wanted conversations, they wanted to be able to talk freely about, about their, their work and and the gains they were getting and the problems that they were facing. So they were demanding more informal and more social approaches to accountability, more so than the formalised quantitative reports that they were giving through the upward accountability.

Reciprocity was something that was very important to them because often the funders were demanding to know what you have spent money on, but the funders were not explaining to them why they needed that information. So, through our work we got, we got a really rich understanding of the groundwork of NGOs and the necessity for feedback, and necessity to give officers and, and the beneficiaries opportunities for learning. So, I think from our work the, the statement that it's, it's accountability is an important concept, especially when we think about how it impacts people's, people's lives.

Where to identify the contributions, I think Unerman and O'Dwyer were pioneers of NGO accountability research, they explained downward, upward accountability, they helped to explain the complexities associated with NGO work. As a result of the introduction of this into the accounting literature, have a lot of work, a stream of work that has been developed by younger academics as they push, as they push the area forward. Unerman and O'Dwyer have written, have been guest editors, so with several, in several journals looking at NGO accountability, they've written many academic papers, their book chapters, and interestingly of
course there's a lot of practitioner activity as well as a result of, of this work.

I want to switch, and look at Jeffrey as, as a manager at Royal Holloway, and then somehow link the two - accountability and Jeffrey as the manager. Jeffrey was the Head of School from 2011 to 2016. During that period the department grew significantly from 50 to 100 academics, doubled, doubled in in five years, But he introduced several, or he was, he was significant in managing, several changes within the school, and that's at the University college level. He introduced into the school transinternational, transnational education whereby we have academics teaching in Royal Holloway, but then flying also to Singapore to offer the degree in, in Singapore. And that was, that was a hard thing to introduce to...in, in the school. Academics, as Sandra said, love to complain, do not like change, but Jeffrey was able to, to institute... institute that and get that acceptance.

He also introduced, or the college introduced, a teaching career pathway, and Jeffrey was able to embed this in the school. This has this dichotomy between accounting and finance. In most university departments you have your teachers, who are the non-researchers, and the researchers, and the teachers often are looked, or they feel like they're looked down upon by the by, the researchers, but Jeffrey was able to embed this within...within the school such that the career teachers are just as welcomed as the researchers. And of course he fostered a very rich research environment, to the extent that in the 2014 REF we ended up 29th out of the 101 business schools.

Well, that's Jeffrey as the manager, but as others have said, Jeffrey actually was a leader, and management and leadership I think are...different. And it's in his leadership that perhaps we saw accountability in action. The fact that he was very transparent in his, in his decision making. Everything was explained and justified. There was reciprocity, you could... you could why, and you would get a reasoned explanation. He introduced value-based leadership to the extent that intellectual curiosity became a key value that we all coalesced around.

Apart from intellectual curiosity, the encouragement of knowledge and developing yourself, he also, he also introduced the idea of diversity and inclusivity as something we should value. The idea of collegiality, making it making it actually work. A lot of departments talk about 'we are collegial', but actually they are not very collegial, but Jeffrey was able somehow to make, embed collegiality within, within the school. He created a nurturing environment. Early career researchers felt valued, similarly middle career researchers were pushed, senior academics were encouraged to take on leadership roles. So he was able really to put accountability in action.

But more than that, he was inspirational, he maintained his research. During that period he became, he gained the distinguished accounting academic award that Lisa mentioned this, this morning. During that period he earned prizes for the best guest editorship, the best reviewer. He...he earned many, many accolades and awards. He didn't give up his research because he was doing a hard grind of, of being a Head of... School. He developed talent and supported young people to help them achieve their, their career goals.

So, what can we say about Jeffrey? I saw this statement in a, a tribute Brendan wrote about Jeffrey. I thought that was, it was really quite poignant. Jeffrey's academic legacy is exemplary. But, more important, he's obsessed with making a difference to practice and policy, and we heard that this morning, we heard that his work with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, we also heard about the work of CSEAR, and the work with, with BAFA. So, practice. Getting...working to make a difference to people's lives, I think that's what's the core of Jeffrey, he wanted to make a difference to people's lives in whatever little way he had.

And the challenge for us, of course as researchers and academic leaders, is to continue this in order to celebrate Jeffrey's life.

Thank you.

[Jan Bebbington] We're now going to move on to a presentation who's going to come to us over the streams. Leonardo, you are most welcome.

So, Leonardo is a another colleague from Royal Holloway, but also another co-author and, and good close friend of Jeffrey's. So, over to you Leonardo.

[Leonardo Rinaldi] Thank you very much.

I really miss you, I would have loved to be with you today. But still it's a privilege to be able to celebrate and remember Jeffrey along with several friends and colleagues.

Drawing on what has already been said by Richard, Lisa and Ian this morning, and Sandra and Gloria this afternoon, I think they have presented very well several reasons why Jeffrey is so respected within the accounting community, the academic community of course, but also the practitioners community. Jeffrey's contribution, particularly scholarly contribution, have been acknowledged as Gloria has just said, in several settings and span across many areas of sustainability, within an intellectual triangle, I feel formed by the reporting, accountability and responsibility arenas.

But Jeffrey was not only a sharp, eclectic fun and prolific academic, he devoted a lot of time and energy to support junior colleagues during their careers and helped them fulfil their potential.

Not probably many of you know, but Jeffrey was the very first person I met when I, when I moved to the UK, the very first, literally. I moved to the UK in 2006. He was the first person I met in the arts building, for those of you who are familiar with Royal Holloway's campus. He was coming down the stairs, I was going up for my job interview, and, and he was generous enough to not only of course to contribute to offer me the job but also to mentor me, to mentor me since then. At the beginning this mentorship took a less formal shape but as time went by this mentorship became more and more formal.

Today what I would like to do is to reflect on these aspects of Jeffrey's scholarly contribution. First I would like to focus on his academic work, particularly on the joint work that Jeffrey and I conducted and published on the emerging field, at the time, of integrated reporting, then I would like to provide some highlights about being mentored by Jeffrey.

Now, in terms of our academic scholarship an area that is important concern for much of the social environmental accounting community, and of course for Jeffrey since his PhD, is the corporate social environmental disclosure and all the processes that stem from it.

And he's done a lot of research in the area in various times. I've been reading a lot of Jeffrey's work again and again, of course lately more than, than ever, and I can think of, for example, his early work on corporate social reporting in 1999 with Linda Lewis on CPA, but at the same time I can think of research published in 2003, 2005 and lately with Franco in 2014. Those research provided insights into several aspects of sustainability disclosure including, and this is very much of Jeffrey, how sustainability reporting is produced, how it could be interpreted, and why the various forms of sustainability reporting were different from one another, so 'how', 'how' and 'why', this question is keeping kind of forcing me to think of.

However, as well as the broad interest in the social environmental reporting Jeffrey was particularly committed in extending the field. This is one characteristic of Jeffrey, you know, looking beyond a long-term view, and in one feature of Jeffrey's quality contribution concerned with critically engaging with novel phenomena, emerging phenomena, at a, at a very early stage. And it was the case, for example, of the then new development of integrated reporting, and later with the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure.

So, I'm going to talk about integrated reporting though. What he did when he approached the field, he advocated for interdisciplinarity work he embraced tailored theorisation, and it was another feature of Jeffrey's work was the the, the firm desire to pursue societal relevance, and he did that by way of in-depth research and solid research. I had the privilege to work with Jeffrey on two papers in this area and in that time I learned most about Jeffrey's deep passion about doing research, but also how he interpreted the role of the researcher.

In the first paper, which we published in 2014, in the first paper we discussed the, the emerging phenomena of integrated reporting, the aim of that paper was to explore the development, to the policy and practice of reporting and accountability, but also to provide the accounting community that was beginning to look at this field a foundation on which to build the work. At the same time the paper offered pathways, so our perspectives and a critical eye on the various research approach.

That paper, you know, being in one of the few in, in the field, in an emerging area, rapidly became popular with scholars and is still one of the most read and highly cited paper of Jeffrey. But I would like to focus on Jeffrey's contribution in that particular work which was crucial.

The main contribution, I feel, was consistent not only in his, that was something I deeply admire of him, is the ability to help shape the project and structure the paper, he had... sorry, innate tailor to...to find the aim, and I remember the conversation we had several times, and he kept asking me. 'what is the aim of your project Leonardo?' There's a kind of obsession with that, but it was immensely talented in fine tune the structure of that paper.

But also, but I feel it was an even greater contribution in the project, was his attitude to pursue rigorous scholar research with the size of relevance. Theoretical diversity, methodological openness were also part of Jeffrey's scholarship. But not only I mean skills, they were also my, my impression was also duties, that he carried with him all along. He called many times, and in many forms for enhanced engagement in theory, engagement with practice and method, with no hesitation. Whether it was commenting a paper at a conference, or giving a paper in a conference, or being called in for a keynote, or even in the...in the highly prestigious outlet in which he used to write.

For example, he contended that to analyse the considerable breadth and depth of complexity that underlie sustainability, rather than greater meta-theory, accounting scholars should engage in a range of refined theories, each providing a simplification of specific aspect of his complexity, and again this was in contrast with some prestigious and prominent academic, but he, he didn't care, he just had the idea and expressed it very clearly.

And again, I'm quoting from his AOS paper that he wrote in 2016 with Brendan O'Dwyer, "the simplification of this complexity should help us", and he was alluding to the academic community, "transform accounting for social sustainability data into robust evidence to influence policy and practice." But I alluded to the paper in 2016 but I could allude to the other paper he had with Chris Chapman in 2014 which had a similar message.

As far as I can tell Jeffrey's concern with robust research and... and the specific refined theory has a long route. At least, at least to the... his commentary in 2008, when he published, well the editors of triple-A J published two commentaries on a paper, on the newly proposed theory of strategy reputation risk management. He felt very strongly for that paper, and the justification used in the commentary, which I strongly urge you to read if you haven't read it recently, reflects I think entirely the way he felt about the usefulness of theory and theorising, and the analysis of complex phenomena.

And he wrote about this many times, so novel approach to theory and theorising, looking for narrow deep theoretical perspective, in depth rigorous research, these are kind of mantras that I, you know, from his approach to doing research that I kept, sorry I keep with me all the time when I approach research myself.

And of course this, his work on integrated reporting was no exception, and that's exactly what he did in the second paper on integrated reporting that we managed to publish in, later on. So this second paper looked again at integrated reporting practices because some time have gone by the first paper, so we wanted to reflect on the... these practices, they had had time to mature, time to become more widely adopted, and we built on the growing body of literature in the area, borrowing from other body of literature, particularly the creativity and innovation literature, finding that whether extensive research was, it had been undertaken in some phases of the integrated reporting journey, there was one part... missing, particularly much work that was the conclusion of that paper remained to be done, on the final phase, which is impact.

And was an important finding that links directly with Jeffrey's personality and Jeffrey's character - the pursuing of societal relevance for his research. So in this respect the, the combination of the two papers speak loud about this trait of Jeffrey's nature. Both paper aimed to raise awareness on the role of integrated reporting and in turn of social environmental accounting research in helping solve urgent problems.

And importantly he was very concerned that very little research was published on impact. Impact, impact, impact. Something that I keep hearing from colleagues and I couldn't agree more. But his scholarly contribution I think is perhaps even more important now than it was then. He argued that as society provide us with resources, and this is something that he kept saying even at the BAFA 50th anniversary celebration that has been mentioned earlier on. As society provide us with resources what we as an academic community need to do is to provide evidence for knowledge exchange, so that we can enhance society, to give back.

And he said so in the keynote address and I'm quoting again from that address. "Such a crucial function of research is only effective where society values the expertise and integrity of a field of academic research." So integrity, solid research, they're all part of the same path that Jeffrey brought all along with him.

But he was very aware that maintaining the legitimacy of academic research is difficult particularly in certain point, where in time, where socio-political turmoils are taking place, in particularly he alluded to the political context which unfortunately has become increasingly hostile towards evidence-based policy making, and and in an area, in a moment in time where people tend to rely on, reinforce their views on on things ,which have sometimes very minimal basis in fact.

So he argued that in order to avoid it, or at least overcome, robust research was the way to go. And we can see that in the different narratives that have surrounded the Covid-19 pandemic, and more recently in the COP26 climate change conference that is taking place not far from here.

So socially significant, high quality research, the idea of moving beyond the comfort zone, are all features of Jeffrey's scholarship. And particularly I could decline that in terms of making a difference through the work that he was doing, the rigour, putting as much effort as possible, innovativeness and openness of in mind, of his mind, this is something that I carry with me all the time.

But these are themes of his personality that reflected not only on how he did his work but also in how he got himself involved in the development of colleagues, junior colleagues. So I would like to talk about this in the remaining part of...of this conversation.

Ian noted earlier that there is a lot of Jeffrey's personality and humanity that are less visible than his published work. Nonetheless I argue they are equally important, and one aspect of this rounded personality is him being a point of reference for younger academics.

He was inspired by a true and genuine interest in, and care for people. He was an invaluable mentor for many of us, from junior scholars to even more senior ones, taking informal approach to mentorship, more formal approach, Jeffrey helped us achieve our personal and career goal, a goal, some more than others, depends on the intensity of this relationship of course. But he introduced us who had the, the privilege to be met by him to new ways of thinking, he challenged our limiting assumptions, and he kind of forced us to share valuable life lessons, standing up against bullies and offering new research and leadership skills, learning opportunities.

Another trait of Jeffrey's personality that also infused his research is that he privileged the importance of the message over the form. And I'll give you an example, a personal one, and I joined Royal Holloway and...and I had never taught in English before, and so I was also very anxious, and I was anxious for teaching and research, and for my first teaching task I ended up teaching a very large second year undergraduate students, in what was, it still is, at Royal Holloway, the largest and a rather intimidating venue there is at Royal Holloway.

So, I was just, I was very preoccupied, and one of the my main concern was English proficiency. Jeffrey didn't hide these limitations, never and this is consistent with the message I heard with, with other colleagues, so he acknowledged this limitation, however he reassured me, and there's one thing that I always remember. He...well, I try to kind of put it into terms that I of course remember, memory can, can play some tricks here, but he said 'we all have to respect our students and, and we all have to give them the best we can, but you know much more than them about the topic', at the time I was teaching management accounting, 'and you, you will ever know much more than them at least in your time when teaching to them, and even if you make some spelling mistakes, they will feel that, and they will respect it. The language fluent will eventually improve.' And it did.

So this is typical of Jeffrey, I mean long-term view and positive thinking, he's always been positive. But this is not a story of a humble beginning, of working hard, there are some who have a gift and then there are those who are propelled by those people. People who have a gift and believe in them, and such is the case of Jeffrey's mentorship with me.

And I have a proof, I have still, I have several things, but this is a letter of recommendation that Jeffrey wrote for me, for the younger me, when I was applying to APIRA, APIRA 2007 doctoral colloquium in New Zealand, Oakland. It was my first ever colloquium, my first ever contact to this level of research. I needed somebody to vouch for me. And these are words that are still, I mean if I think of the younger me at the time I was coming from a rather hostile environment, with little if at all research propensity, and no mentorship whatsoever support, so I was coming from like a very, very hostile environment and if I look at me and his words, that's why I still keep them very close to me, and these are some, some line I would like to read out for you.

"When Leonardo applied for his current post at Royal Holloway he was rather frustrated with the inward looking nature of his academic life and was very hungry to learn and develop his work in the area of social and environmental accounting. He has made some good progress in this regard since September 2006," this letter dates April 2007, "but there are still many theoretical and methodological issues in which he needs to develop his expertise. His eagerness is as strong, if not even stronger, than it was when he started, and coupled with his eagerness he has undoubted intellectual abilities to learn and adapt quickly to our more recognised ways and standards of conducting high quality academic work."

Jeffrey was very aware though that in order to have an impact the message that we deliver must be credible, must be robust and provide in-depth rigorous evidence in support. In our several conversations we discussed many times about this. I remember when, for example, I shared some ideas about approach that I had in mind, and I remember how carefully he listened, waiting for me to finish, then I recall him asking two razor sharp questions that of course were not easy to answer. Straight to the point. And some of these question were of course, what is the aim, what is the impact of your project? He stressed that all the time, and he used the funnel metaphor several times, the funnel never forget that, the funnel metaphor to explain the process.

He was always to the point. It was always, I mean more than to the point, but he you know this is something I think characters of Jeffrey - he never made anyone feel uncomfortable. He always asked the right question to trigger the thinking, to trigger reflection, and more importantly the self-assessment process. And was always there, he was always there to support despite his busy schedule. [Coughs] I'm sorry.

Gloria has just mentioned he was Head of School from 2011 to 2016, so he was very busy when he was Head of School. Nonetheless he would find a time.

So the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic and, you know, this enormous turmoil, that...it has caused deep social reconfiguration, and all areas knowledge in, in these exceptional times are called to present a contribution. And accounting, and sustainability of course, make no exception. Having known Jeffrey for 15 years sometimes I wonder how he would have approached the study of those phenomena, and I reflect, after reflecting on his legacy, listen to what colleagues have said, he would probably have pointed towards a focus on the most urgent concerns looking into emerging themes, drawing on new ideas, possibly from outside accounting scholarship.

On a personal level, Jeffrey mentored me on and off for almost 15 years [pause] he was also a friend [pause] and working with him was a privilege [pause] and of course his death was devastating. [pause]

Franco at the funeral service outlined very eloquently that Jeffrey had an extraordinary successful career, achieved remarkable things, but he had always time for everyone. He was approachable, was humble, willing to help. And I, as many others [pause] have been assisted by Jeffrey in some fundamental ways in my life. [pause]

But on a more positive note his legacy lives on [pause] not only at Royal Holloway, and specifically at the School of Business and Management, where sustainability accounting and accountability is now enshrined in the school research activity, and in the group of exceptionally talented colleagues at the School of Management I have the honour to work with, and in the School and the Accounting department particularly, some of whom Jeffrey helped recruit. But at a much, much deeper level I will miss him immensely. [pause]

There is one, one last thing I would like to say. [pause] That Jeffrey never, never told me what to do. He did it and let me watch him do it, and for that I am terribly, terribly grateful.

Thank you.

[Jan Bebbington] We're going to stay online, and I see you're there Brendan, so welcome um virtually to the, the day, and thank you very much for coming in to join us.

[Brendan O'Dwyer] Thank you very much Jan, and thank you very much everybody for inviting me to speak this afternoon. I'm going to just share some slides with you now and talk to them, and then I'll talk without the slides later. I've only been able to listen to the last hour or so of the presentations because I've been actually teaching all day here in the Netherlands, so I've missed some probably wonderful celebrations of Jeffrey and his work.

But I'm going to focus my reflections on some of the issues that were addressed by Leonardo and Gloria earlier, regarding his theoretical engagement and his journey in that regard, and then I'll spend a little bit of time at the very end just reflecting on my own experiences of working with him, because I did work with Jeffrey for nigh on 23 to 24 years.

We met each other as part-time PhD students struggling with 16 to 18 hour teaching loads back a long, long time ago. And the first thing I want to do is, I want to look at Jeffrey's work around accountability, because that's a very key theme that was embedded in all of his work, and people have spoken about that in the past hour as well.

I want to look at one aspect that I've always really enjoyed about the way he addressed issues of accountability because it also reflected the way he taught, and the nature of the person he was. And as Dave Owen and Rob Gray did in their initial work on broader notions of accountability, he always linked accountability to seeking responsibility, and owing duties for particular actions and behaviours. But when Jeffrey tried to think about issues around accountability he always imbued his thinking with contemporary resonance, he was always trying to locate his thinking within what was actually happening, not just in the broad business domain, the wider societal domain in which he was operating.

I learned this a lot from working very closely with him in his thinking on these issues. And he had a very careful approach, reasoned approach, to thinking about accountability, the notion, and also linking it sometimes to notions of risk and how risk was conceived, and how risk was presented. And that mightn't seem evident to some people have read his work, but to me who worked closely with him it was something that pervaded most of what he did over his career.

Now to reflect on this I just want to think back to the way in which he constructed a reasoned argument around the extent to which we should hold NGOs who advocate for certain issues, accountable for their advocacy. Now this was expressed in a paper in 2006 quite clearly, and I'm going to outline some elements of the paper to make the point about how he went about his thought process, and he always started off with decision frames, whereby he would ask a question, 'well, are entities accountable to all those upon whom their actions can have a direct or indirect impact?', very broad question.

And, in asking that a very broad simple question he would then draw on various theoretical perspectives, in this case here on perspectives on relational accountability, the extent of accountability owed to various stakeholder groups, and on notions of identity accountability regarding how individuals themselves may feel responsible for being accountable, and that was very relevant to the NGO advocacy domain he wanted to study.

But in asking questions like this, in the context of NGO advocacy, he was trying to work out what do you think, and how do you reason through whether these entities, these organisations, have direct and indirect responsibilities. And the idea behind his theorising in these areas was to offer a reasoned viewpoint and ask you to think with him along these lines, and this again reflected very much the character Jeffrey actually was. And if you thought for example entities did have these broad responsibilities, then he asked, well, in the context of NGO advocacy, is there or are there certain types of advocacy which are definitely effective in making people do things and mobilising people to do things?

And again, he asks a simple question, and then he draws in the theory, in this case here mobilising the work of the risk sociologist Ulrich Beck to try and understand how NGOs operate in what Beck calls a sub-political arena, an arena where informal interactions take place through lobbying, etc, etc, and where experts and so-called counter experts, compete to try and grab attention and to influence behaviour. And you can see what I mean by contemporary events linking to Jeffrey now.

And he asks about whether you believe that counter experts like NGOs can in some sense strive to produce outcomes they want in this area. How can they actually work to produce what they want, is it possible or not? Think about this. And so in developing this notion of accountability and the extent to which they should be held accountable for their advocacy he asks a reader to think along with him. He doesn't tell you he asks to think with him, and he brings you with him by drawing on theory to try and inform what he's doing. And as I'll mention later on in my talk, it's not just about Jeffrey being used by theory, he uses theory to make his arguments and to make you think.

Now if you agree with the fact that NGOs can have this power in Beck's sub-political arena, Jeffrey will then say to you, okay, many of these organisations produce what he calls linear predictive narratives, narratives which predict a certain future based on certain actions, a certain form of conception of risks and how risks will play out in society in relation to certain issues. And in his deliberation on whether these narratives are going to be deemed plausible to convince enough people to move in that direction or not, he actually thinks about the issue of how implausible experts might be deemed by so-called counter experts like NGOs.

So he sets up this arena where he gets you to discuss and think about the idea as to whether NGO's linear predictive narratives can have some traction, within the context of the theorising of Beck, and he asks you to ask yourself, will counter experts like NGOs be able to come up with plausible actual reasons for what they're saying, and plausible enough reasons to get you to go with them and to act in the way they want you to act. And of course in this context he used an example in his paper of the bit of the controversy around the MMR vaccine in the UK, talking about how counter experts can convince enough individuals about their conceptions of the risks from MMR to actually try and shift policy.

Now where am I seeing that in the current environment. Now, in looking at this accountability for NGO advocacy and whether you believe in this accountability or not, he asks you to think about whether in fact his examples and his approach here convinces you that counter-expert views can actually have the potential to be accepted by enough individuals and organisations to make a difference. If you accept that, you then ask well, do these narratives then also have strong enough, substantial enough rhetorical power, to really mobilise change, to bring change about, be it positive change or negative change.

So he talks about the rhetorical power of linear predictive narratives all the time drawing on Beck's conceptions. And then he talks about this sub-political arena and how when you have these informal interactions among experts and so-called counter experts, does the rhetorical power of certain NGOs have potential to make change and bring about change.

He talks about the focus of NGOs on their brands and trying to convince with this rhetorical instruction. And then at the end of all this he asks you as a reader to say to yourself, okay if you're, if you actually come along with the yes arrows in my conceptualisation here, then you actually believe that highly trusted NGOs yeah may be held responsible and accountable for a broad range of direct and indirect outcomes resulting from their advocacy activities.

Now there's two things about this that's... that sums up some things about Jeffrey for me. On the left-hand side in my slides you've got, you've got a fairly straightforward thinking process going on leading you in a logical direction, on the right hand side of the slide he's using theory to help him enable you to think and come to certain conclusions.

He's not telling you how to think, he is leading you in a certain direction, but he's also telling you can drop off any stage. And then when he gets here he elaborates on how this responsibility and accountability might arise. So this to me, to an extent, illustrates the core character of Jeff, this reasoned theoretical argument, enabling you as a reader to decide the extent of accountability, if any, NGOs who advocate should be held to. He subjects all positions to counter arguments, and then illustrates the extent to which he was always a reasoned and reasonable academic.

When I say 'reasonable academic', I don't mean reasonable in the context of the quality of his work, I mean in the way he carried himself in general. And I think in the discussions of accountability that Gloria alluded to, and that Leonardo alluded to, this for, this paper for me was always one whereby you could see the individual - how he taught, but also how he theorised coming through extremely clearly in a very, very powerful manner. And it's why I tried to just briefly today reflect on that in the context of the contribution Jeffrey made much more broadly to issues concerning accountability.

Now, Jeffrey, in the context of looking at accountability, also did always engage with theorists who want to look at issues of risk and risk in society in organisations in general. And what many people mightn't be aware of was is, he actually tried at one stage to develop much, much clearer and developed and cohesive ideas around corporate social disclosure as a so-called hegemonic discourse of risk. As a, as a way of engaging in a risk discourse. And he was doing this back in 2004.

Now if you look at the recent developments that Jeffrey was involved in soon before his death, around TCFD reporting and risk reporting generally, you'll see he came back to that, and it was something which was always lying there around for him to come back to in his career. Some of it came to the fore in the chapter that was written for the A4S book in 2009 for the Prince of Wales project but, but he never really managed to come back to it in its core while having engaged in great depth in his career early on.

But you'll see in a moment, probably a rather sad feature of my presentation, that he was about to come back to this area of accountability and its relation to risk and risk discourse in great depth in his later days.

When Jeffrey joined the Pentland Centre, the risk notion and the connection between accountability and risk start to come back to the fore. He was absolutely thrilled to work on the project when Pentland was providing some consulting advice to a major French multinational on their engagement with the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures, and what I noticed about that process he went through was, he started to move from thinking about accountability and risk, and to think more about uncertainty. Moving towards the notion of uncertainty, as opposed to the notion of risk which has probabilities attached to it.

And in that he was becoming intrigued by notions around scenario analysis, and how companies might report on scenario analysis, and cope with scenario analysis, and indeed he advised on this in the work he was involved in in Pentland. So the idea of accountability for risk, uncertainty and opportunities was starting to become very prevalent in his work.

And then in 2020 we published a paper together reviewing the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures agenda, and setting out um some research suggestions in that particular area. And in the discussions that we had then we had decided, as a new [inaudible] moment to finally get back to working intensely together on a project, after having not worked intensely on one big project for a number of years. And that was a project that was going to be engaging with members of the TCFD and the broader field within which the TCFD was emerging, and it was going to go right back to the engagement Jeffrey had with risk notions and their attachment to accountability in the early, early to mid 2000s.

Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to progress that, but in some sense I wanted to relay that to you because this was the direction that he was going in, and his unfortunate passing means we'll never really get to know where he would have gone with that.

Now in the context of theory, people have talked about theory and Jeffrey's, Jeffrey's allusions to theory. Jeffrey was never a fan of theory for the sake of theory, and the title of this slide is deliberate: using as opposed to being used by theory. He saw theory as something that should be used in a rather instrumental manner, in lots of ways. And, however having said that, if I look back at his work, which I've done in preparation for my talk to you this afternoon, he contributed so much to developing theory, and to using theory in a way that allowed him to express ideas that always had serious practical significance.

For example the early work with Linda, it's brilliant to know that Linda is here in the online chat, with Linda Lewis, in implanting ethical relativism in CSD research, was initially going to be part of his PhD but was published in CPA in, I think it was 2000 and, no 1999, sorry, in one of his first pieces of work in this area.

He then went on to reinvigorate Habermas's ideal speech situation in work he published in AOS in 2004 on stakeholder engagement and stakeholder accountability in relation to Shell, no doubt influenced to some extent by his close association with the wonderful Richard Lachlan. He also advanced notions of legitimacy theory in his work on assurance, in trying to offer more in-depth conceptualisations of the theory, but also in order to enable and encourage people to start thinking about practice in this area in a much more complex, but also much more an enlightening way.

He moved on to use theory like Giddens' mechanisms of modernity to explain withdrawals of trust in systems of audit and accounting after the Enron collapse. But again, italicised 'using': he used the theory to enable him to say something, and to enable him to conceptualise something in always an accessible manner.

He re-theorised how organisational fields get formed when looking at integrated reporting and its evolution. Something that Leonardo alluded to a moment ago. He reconceptualised accounting for externalities in his ABR paper a few years ago. And the key thing about what he was doing there was, he was actually reintroducing wonderful work which people like Jan Bebbington and Rob Gray had been doing back in the, in the 1990s actually, which to my, in my mind was largely getting ignored with, with this rush to embrace externalities in practice.

In all of this Jeffrey was trying to extend notice of accountability and trying to implant ideas from practice in the brains of academics, and also trying to in some way engage with practice, I mean the, the reconceptualisation of accounting for externalities was part of a P.D. Leake lecture he made for the ICAEW.

But a very important part of Jeffrey's engagement was, he was always conscious of echo chambers. He was conscious of, conscious academic echo chambers, as you can see from his BAR plenary speech a number of years ago, but he was also highly conscious of echo chambers in the context of how academics used theory. And this was always very important to him, and came up regularly in the conversations we had.

What's the point if you're not making the theory do something for you, to make the point you want to make, as opposed to you being trapped by your desire to show the theory in some way in an academic paper. And that, that links very much to this impact and practice oriented focus Jeffrey had in his career, that both Leonardo and Gloria alluded to in their earlier conversations.

I worked with Jeffrey, as I've said, for a very long time. Now this is a part of the presentation where I might get a bit upset, but I won't, okay I hope not. I did a count. We wrote 18 academic papers together, and I couldn't believe it, and the reason I couldn't believe it everyone because, and you won't believe this, writing with this guy was the most pleasant experience I've ever had in a working relationship. It was smooth, it was fun, it was rigorous. We had, we had wonderful arguments which always ended with somebody giving in, but also with a lot of laughter. And we were very, very hard on each other, but the thing is it never felt like work working with this individual, never. And...and that was that was probably because in some senses we were similar, but in other ways we were completely different, and so in all my career, the thought of working with Jeffrey was always a pleasure and it just happened very naturally.

And by the way, I will take credit for us working together because it took me about 18 months to convince him, come on we have to do something together at some stage, because he was so busy with various things in his career when I was pushing him on that. I met Jeffrey in 1997 at the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting conference in Manchester. And the reason I got speaking to Jeffrey was, I was in the middle of almost an existential crisis during the conference because all I saw around me were angry people, angry critical scholars screaming at each other, screaming at Rob Gray, screaming at Dave Owen and people like this in, in this environment.

I'd never been at an academic conference before or met some of the people I met there before in my entire life. I remember sitting at one stage, and I was thinking of starting a PhD at this stage, I remember sitting down in a corner, just trying to catch my breath having seen some of the rather caustic debates going on in the various seminars, when Jeffrey passed by, mentioned he had heard about me from maybe I think was Ian Thomson, who at the time was quite dashing walking around wearing sunglasses, in Manchester by the way, and he said 'what did you think of some of those seminars?' and I said 'well, Jeffrey, I found some of them rather disconcerting'.

And he just calmed me down straight away and said, 'listen you've got to put this thing into perspective. There are performers in many of these domains and many people are here to perform'. And from there we actually got to know each other quite well, and in fact so well that I met him in London in late 1999, just after I'd submitted the first draft of my PhD, uh...yeah the second draft of my PhD. and I told him with great glee, 'now Jeffrey, this is done, I think I'm going to leave academia', and he brought me to a rather noisy pub in the middle of London to actually talk me out of the idea of walking away from academia, even though I had very serious plans in place at that time.

Gloria alluded to our trip to Ghana in two...I was there in the summer of 2008, and that was an absolutely incredible experience working with Jeffrey because you got to see him in a very different context. We gathered data together in very conventional contexts as well over his career, but in Ghana it was... I could never picture Jeffrey roughing and tumbling in Ghana before we went there, but as Gloria will confirm he was quite good at it because it was a very intense period and very, an incredibly insightful and interesting period as well, gathering that data among those local communities, at the time we were actually there.

But it, but there I saw a side of Jeffrey too that, that everybody has talked about. The incredible empathy he had for individuals in all sorts of different contexts, wherever they came from, and also his incredible ability to engage with people at whatever level in...in society and in the domains that he moved in, and that was something that stuck with me all the time I met him.

One thing about Jeffrey, working with him was, he was a great guy for giving me advice, so I gave him advice as well I must say. But he was also a great guy for giving me advice he completely ignored himself. I won't tell you about some of the details here but it happened quite often. I'd often point this out to him when he did it, and those of you know Jeffrey well would, would know about his raising of the eyebrow or the eyebrows, and just expressing the word 'quite', did an awful...did that an awful lot with me when we actually engaged together and had debates about me complaining that, 'you're giving me all this advice now Jeffrey, but listen if I look at you, you completely ignore it yourself'.

So even though Leonardo has alluded to the advice Jeffrey gave and Jeffrey's mentoring, which was absolutely fantastic I saw it firsthand, he did have a habit sometimes in my experience of ignoring his own advice as well, and then smiling about it, and telling me to get on with my life.

In the work with Jeffrey we did other things without, apart from working together as well we've worked on different individual projects. I'm somebody who tends to stick with things until it becomes desperate and only then will I stop with it. He would continually talk to me about sunk costs, and about avoiding sunk costs and stopping and moving on. And he saved me from myself on many occasions in projects I was doing on my own.

But one thing I will say to you quite clearly here today, and this is something that I've alluded to earlier, is that I never had a situation with Jeffrey where we did not finish something. We always finished stuff we started. It's incredible. And it wasn't out of a sense of compulsion, it was out of a sense of the sheer enjoyment of doing it, and also because we're both very very stubborn individuals in many respects.

But we never ever ever stopped, we kept going, and I suppose one of the most disconcerting, sad parts of me talking to you this afternoon, is that we had decided, we met together in Manchester in March 2019 and we said we've got to start working together on some major project, it's really, we're very productive we love it we have great fun together. And we were going to work, and we had actually got ethical clearance for a major project to work together on the evolution of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

We never got the chance, and now this is a sole authored study I am working and I will complete in his memory.

While I'm getting a little upset at the end of this presentation it's worth then quickly switching to a final wonderful memory.

This is Jeffrey's wedding day in July 2007. It remains the only wedding my eldest son Tim has ever been at actually, in his life, he was three years of age at the time. It's a memory I'd like to leave you with.

It's three smiling people, and it's Jeffrey. Thank you.

[Jan Bebbington] I'm going to try to finish the... the 'colleagues' part of this process in terms of, of papers, and in particular, I mean by now you should start to get a bit bored, because you're going to hear some of the same things again, and so if you like, we're talking about the same person and it's always nice when you hear people speaking, you think 'ah, yes I recognise exactly who we're talking about here.'

And in particular I was very taken by a note in the chat, which then came to me via my phone, because this is the wonders of hybrid technology, from Linda Lewis, who's online, and it's really, I'm really pleased that you're there Linda, and her message was she was appreciating that she recognised the person and she agreed with what was being said, and so I think that's where I'm going to sort of keep on going as well.

So firstly, I want to tell you about two of Jeffrey's superpowers, and they really are quite amazing superpowers. And I think one of them comes from his CV, from being entrepreneurial, because I think if he wasn't in academia he'd probably be someone like Jeff Bezos and have a, have a rocket to the moon or something like that, because he was hugely entrepreneurial, and I think both in terms of his when he worked at Topshop after school, when he went into accounting training, and then he went into academia, and at each stage he bit off these really sort of big bites with a great vision that were required, and came through and brought them home.

And so I want to give you three very, very concrete examples of when this has worked: Shell and the related work, which is very early work, which is where I first met him, because as academia and academics you meet people through their papers first and then you meet them later on, and I then want to talk about the Sustainable Development Goals, which is work that he and I did together, and then I want to come back to what Brendan was talking about, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which is actually a pretty big deal of, of something that's going on. And then I'll also say a little bit about building institutions with him.

And so there's a quite an interest in gap-spotting, and so this is a sad wee rat, that's unwittingly made it into the news, and the reason for this, this poor fat rat being stuck in a manhole being rescued by firefighters, is that one of the things I really miss about Jeffrey is that I don't get pictures of unicorns coming across my Whatsapp so much anymore. I don't get pictures of quite mad, wee things that we see, and we'd passed between each other and we'd spend a bit of time giggling about it.

And I'm...I like giggling, Jeffrey liked giggling as well, and that was one of the things I really, really enjoyed about him. But I also want to say that this is actually sort of quite, you know, serious as well because there's a big academic conversation about gap-spotting, and in particular this these two colleagues here are looking at the ways of constructing research questions. And they're contrasting gap-spotting with problematisation. And they're very right to do so, because there is a sense in which, and I don't think these two colleagues do this, but from time to time this worry comes up in academia that we spend time surveying existing fields and finding little holes that no one else has filled in, and we spend our time filling in those holes or repeating a study but in a very, very slightly different place or repeating a study with a very small factor changed, and that whilst that is important, and it's important to layer knowledge of that sort it doesn't really take a field forward as such.

And so what the people talk about is thinking about, not so much gap-spotting as horizon-breaking, and I think Jeffrey's work really demonstrates how you can open up new horizons and find new things in them.

Another way of framing this is the idea about 'edgelands' and about a pristine centre and an uncomfortable periphery, and I think Ian's conversation in particular highlighted that when we, you know sort of the older folk here, when we all started out in social environmental accounting it was thought to be well you know if you want, to you can do that but you clearly don't want a career, or just don't do it, and in some ways one of the very edifying things about being in the field now is people saying 'oh you guys had it sussed' and I don't think we thought we had it sussed 30 years ago, but our interest in that field is now becoming much more mainstream, and has been coming into the centre, it's not on the edge anymore, and I think that's... in part, due to the efforts of many, many people including Jeffrey.

And the idea about the centre then and what that looks like in you know some forms of scholarship, it says that theory is the source of the questions. Now, that's not to say that theory is bad nor that Jeffrey wasn't theoretically strong, and I think Brendan really illustrated that so well, about how has he had that strength in theory, but it's that theory is a great deal more than that.

Likewise it's not following standard approaches, it's not finding questions that are only of interest to academics. And I think what I really liked, and there's many, many papers of his that I liked, is that there is one where he's...titled 'Celebrating advances in LGBT+ diversity in the accounting profession' - not letting idealistic purity become the enemy of progress.

And so in that respect if you like, he knew that we had incomplete work, and even if we get better at risks around climate change, we still have incomplete work. But we go back, we revisit it, we refine it, we don't sort of say 'oh it's no good so it isn't going to be...we shouldn't be doing it'.

And this is where I think of, of Di, so Di's now going to be 'oh!'. Di said something to me the other day that could have been Jeffrey speaking to me, which I really, really appreciated. He said 'if you want to be right, be super critical, because you'll always be right'. And so actually doing something different from that is really hard, but it's also really important.

And so I [addressing Di in the audience] don't know how much of his mentoring rubbed off on you, I think it actually came from you, but you're the right sort of person, because he would have mentored you into that but you were there already, so thank you for saying that, you didn't know you're making me so happy just at that moment.

[Addressing audience] It's also I think come through in his...his British Accounting and Finance Association plenary, which actually was potentially quite rude to a lot of people, and did, you know, he intended it as such, and it was also very good.

So, asking us not to get into those self-referential peer-reviewed echo chambers, and that's a harsh and tough message to hear, but it's something that we ought to hear, we ought to guard against for ourselves as well.

So, I want to go back to what was me, my first encounter with Jeffrey, looking at his work in... in Shell in the late 1990s, and I'm going to start on the, the right hand side of the slide, perhaps a wee bit perversely. So one of his early studies he looked at a hundred year content analysis which looked at a broad range of Shell's corporate reports. A hundred years times a broad range gives you an idea of the amount of material that was brought together and synthesised in order to be able to come, to actually produce that paper and to be able to say something about it.

I always think of papers as having sort of arcs, and some papers I look at their citations to tell me what kind of papers they are. So some papers are sort of like they, they hit, they hit hot, you get a bit of a chat off them and then no one ever looks at them again, okay. I've got other papers that no one ever looked at as far as I can tell, because no one ever cited them, so they're sort of flatlining from the outset, but this particular paper which is his, his best-selling paper is still getting really solid citations.

So, this year so far, 43 citations. So that means 43 people found this paper to be informative enough to inform their current work. Last year it got 47 citations, so it's doing solid ongoing work some 20, 21 years after it was written.

But of course, when it was published, the work probably happened another two or three years before that. So that depth of insight and imagination about what you could say is, is coming from a long way back, and it remains relevant today.

The second paper then, which is published in AOS in 2004, although work again was much earlier, and what really struck me about going back to this paper, it was the first paper that I'd... where I realised I needed to know Jeffrey Unerman, it was this paper that sort of helped me get there.

I don't know if you remember your first internet search, I'm now going to skim over all the young people, okay, I'm just going to leave you be, but I remember my first internet search. It was in 2000, I'd just started working at the University of Aberdeen and of course there wasn't Google at that stage, I had to 'Ask Jeeves' because that's all you had available, and I had no idea what I was doing, but it was sort of like it was something like electric on the screen, so I sort of like tapped some things in and thought, 'okay, I'll press return', I am a slow learner, I will give you that as well, I'm sure other people were doing it earlier, and I found some things on the internet.

To be fair, I didn't actually know what had just happened, I mean whereas now you can't get through five minutes of your day without doing that. So he's looking at... they coded dialogue through the internet, not through Twitter or a chat or something like that, but through a bulletin board, a forum that Shell put together, at a time that I don't think I even really knew what the internet was. So again it tells you about how early that work was and there's some really iconic things in this paper, I've been re-reading it again recently, and I'll quote this, this is a direct quote from here, from him.

"There has been little if any debate within the practitioner or the academic literature regarding the extent to which internet-based stakeholder dialogue can contribute towards a democratic determination of corporate social environmental economic and ethical responsibilities."

That is so fresh it could have been written yesterday, but also it's...it really exemplifies him seeing something that's really important to look at and going to look at it earlier. So, I think that 'there's been little if any...' is a conversation starter that he had often in papers and brought to the fore.

The other thing about this paper is just, you know, the volume of it. So he's looked at this is, this is definitely pre-twitter, so people could put text messages in of up to eight and a half thousand characters, to say what they thought of Shell, and then somebody from Shell would write back to you. And so [laughter] indeed, I don't think it said to you to bugger off, I don't think that was the outstanding sort of response, but it was, if you like thinking about this accountability, there was this negotiation of accountability in a public domain. They didn't censor, at least it didn't appear that they censored, who got to post, and then if you like there was this live experimentation with, with accountability.

And of course they were feeling very vulnerable at that time, because they'd come through both the Brent Spar, and some of the issues in Nigeria, and so they were, they kind of woke up one morning and found themselves the bad guys when they thought they were the good guys, so they're having a real troubled time doing this work. So from 1999 through to 2000 they received about one and a half to three thousand...posts per month, and what he did is he went through all of those posts for a two and a half year period, up until the 20th of October 2001. He read them, he analysed them, and he put them in a structure in order to understand what's going on, and one of the you know sort of quite difficult jobs that Desna and I did in the last wee while, is we sorted out his...his office, and we found this [research materials] and I...you know in some ways, I don't know if anyone's going to be using these ever again, but I cannot dispose of them.

A 10 inch stack of materials, analysed with all of, all of that working out from that huge data source that he brought together, and then distilled it all down into this this paper. Rich conceptualisation, meticulous working methods, and really impactful solutions from it. And I'm going to read you the last thing that he...he wrote in that in terms of, of what he found as a result of that study.

And I quote: "if future empirical work in this area demonstrates that managers fail to systematically enact the standards of behaviour resulting from more democratic stakeholder dialogue it would be...it would then be necessary to develop enforcement mechanisms to ensure companies meet the moral responsibilities to a wide range of their stakeholders rather than to just those with economic power."

So again, really, really fresh insight and fresh conclusions, and then what I really like about the acknowledgements in this paper is that he didn't sort of make it up and then sort of bung it out there and think how would it go, he acknowledged Richard Lachlan, Nola Buhr, who will be a name from the past for several people, Dave Owen, Brendan O'Dwyer, the anonymous referees, and he then had presented this at an APIRA, at a seminar in Edinburgh, at the British Accounting Association annual conference, and APIRA - Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research and Accounting conference, at a Social Environmental Accounting research conference, and in the Irish annual association.

He didn't just sort of bung the work together. He took it, he tested it he made sure that it made sense, he would have responded to many people's queries and criticisms as that was happening, and as a result has produced an absolutely, you know, another outstanding paper, that again is still getting citations in the 30 to 40 each year...I don't, I don't know about you but I dream about such things... It's a, it's you know it's a paper that's living still, that's working and making a big contribution.

The second example is the Sustainable Development Goals, and these have been mentioned already this morning. They are, they were produced in 2015 after the Millennium Development Goals, and they are also sometimes called the 2030 agenda. All countries of the globe signed up to these as being the way of describing the thing that collectively we're trying to do.

And they've got you know some really important components to them. They're intergovernmental, but obviously when a country signs up then organisations, you can sign up as well, but also business itself has worked through and picked up how they can contribute to this, and Richard spoke very eloquently about how the accounting profession sees its role within these, these goals as well.

So about one through to seven, these are the human needs, this is the, the flourishing of people and communities across the globe, which we don't currently achieve, but which we absolutely need to work towards trying to achieve. Then if we go right to the other end number 16 and number 17, about the processes by which we might be able to build institutions to realise these outcomes. If we go back a wee bit more - 13, 14, 15 - this is the basis on which everything else happens it's the ecology, it's the soundness of our, our ecological system that's so challenged in the current time. But then right across the middle, number eight 'decent work and economic growth', number nine 'industry, innovation and infrastructure', number 10 'reducing inequalities', 11 'sustainable cities and settlements', 12 'responsible consumption and production', this is the core of the work where accounting and organisations can start to make a difference and indeed, I'm going to tell you about, if you like, his and my journey through that particular frontier.

So again, what happens is that, and there's only there's only three people in this world that fit into this category, sometimes people ring me up and, and they say you know 'I was thinking...', and if it's Ian, or if it's Carlos, I know he is here online as well, or if it's Jeffrey, I sometimes say 'yes' then, because it makes it quicker, okay. Then so, 'I was thinking...', 'yes, I will...' I often say, they say you don't know yet, I know it's going to be good, so it'll be fine, okay.

On this one it was, it was a funny phone call because I knew about the SDGs because of my sustainable development sort of policy work. I knew that there was nothing happening in our literature yet. I knew, but I wasn't as aware as Jeffrey was, was the deep engagement of the accounting profession and the professional services firms that we're looking at, because he was doing that legwork that Ian talked about, of reading their reports, of seeing what they were talking about, and seeing what kind of conferences and meetings were being had with the professional services firms in particular, and realising there was a frontier here that was developing.

But very the same idea as the Shell work, that nobody in our field was talking about yet. So this phone call wasn't the same 'I was thinking' and I got to say 'yes', because he was dancing, he was dancing around the issue, said 'well, I don't know, you've probably heard of the SDGs', and then he ran through a whole series of things, and the whole time I'm thinking I do hope he's going to ask me to participate, otherwise he's going to run me through all of this and say 'Brendan and I are going to do some work together'. No, pick me, pick me, I want to be on your team, and so, so he said 'oh, I know you're really busy...', I was thinking, 'yeah, I know you're really busy too, but we never follow our own advice'. And he said would I, would I want to work with him on this, to which the answer is really straightforwardly 'yes, thank goodness you want to work with me on this,' and so this started our journey in the SDGs, which is by no means over.

So we started off with you know an idea and a paper, we knew we were going to do a special issue and so we had to negotiate a special issue with editors who were really, you know sound and wonderful, but for whom we were trying to propose a special issue about something that no one's writing about yet, which is always a bit of a hard sell. But we wanted to say well this will put a mark in your journal about these things, so he was canny he knew the way editors thought about life, the things that editors like is being the first to put their mark on something.

And then I said, well if we don't write the first paper, nobody will know what we mean by the SDGs and we were really worried that people would sort of spin off in all sorts of what we would find unhelpful directions, so we wrote a pre-paper, and we wrote it against quite a tight deadline, and it ended up winning an award which was you know astonishing, and really sort of interesting for that, but it set the tone for the, the special issue. We then had a workshop before the special issue to try to help people work up their ideas, then it was the special issue itself which involved, you know a great deal of editing and co-editing, and then eventually the special issue came out, and we wrote an editorial for that.

So the idea of just sort of starting with, well let's have a special issue that, that is like a three or four year journey with all of these other steps that need to be in the place as well.

So I would say something about the...legacy, and I think it's in this one it comes through really strongly: there's a stacking approach, and I really like things that stack because they do more.

So, there's scholarship, there's thoughtfulness, there's tough-mindedness, there is a large engagement with the world of policy and practice. Then it's negotiating with editors and knowing how to do that, there's editing, encouraging, planning, execution, and when you stack all of that on top of each other, you get somewhere with it, but it doesn't it, doesn't happen by chance you have to design that in, you have to learn how to do it, and I learned how to do a lot of this alongside Jeffrey.

Then the last thing I'd say which is on topic wise is on TCFD, and this is an area that Brendan was talking about, and I very much look forward to Brendan's work in this area, because it's a really interesting thing that's coming to the fore, and it's going to be followed by the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures as well, so this is using the capital markets as some kind of hinge, to create a connection between ecology and economics.

And right at the moment we're sitting at a really interesting space in that hinge, so today, up the road in Glasgow...the Chancellor is going to formally announce, he's already pre-announced it, but it's he'll formally announce, the launch of something that that requires investors to say how they can tell whether or not the investments they're making are green, and that requirement is already there through an EU programme, but it's being replicated in...Britain because that's the way we do things these days, and so what we're starting to see is again a stacking in this area.

So we have corporate reporting which came through Jeffrey's work in Shell, integrated reporting, and all sorts of other places, there's this investor disclosure that's going to be required and that's really coming in under consumer protection but if you say to me, 'I've got a green investment' and I say 'how do you figure that out?' that opens up a whole bunch of other questions.

The stock exchanges initiative, and particularly the sustainable stock exchange initiative, is trying to make sure stock exchanges can deal with the problems that are coming their way. Then there's risk translation and communication, of which TCFD is a really important part of it, and so looking at this as a whole we might be heading into, it will be very interesting and whether or not it's effective as another question, but looking, that that holistic look at things is really important in this context.

And then, like my other colleagues, I'd like to say something about building institutions. So...I was, and Ian Thomson spoke I think quite eloquently about this, and this is Jeffrey's final superpower if you like, is that the Centre for Social Environmental Accounting Research, I was around as it was, as it was founded in 1991, 1990, more or less like that, and it had this Social Environmental Accounting research journal, and it was, it did all right...it actually had a really long and... and great history, coming from something called the Social Accounting Monitor.

But it was at the stage that either it lifted its game or it disappeared, and so Jeffrey and I decided we were going to see if we could get it to lift its game, and we were the first co-editors that moved it from the Accounting Research Journal to the accountability research journal. And firstly you have to get your hands on that task, and that wasn't easy because someone else was doing it, and so you have to gently get yourself that job, then we work to get it to refereed status, and then to a journal publishing house, and then importantly to the next set of editors.

And this is something that I think is sometimes quite hard to do when you're a senior academic, and that is to pass something on. So you don't need to hold something forever, you need to have something well designed and as Lisa talked about, well governed, well laid out and when you've done your bit, pass it on to someone else to learn from to build and to do their bit, so they too can then pass it on, and I really like that the journal has been passed on several times since that, and it's doing really well, because that ethos is still there.

We did the same thing with the Sustainability Accounting and Accountability book which is, was an edited version, Jeffrey and Brendan and I went through two editions of that, and then it went on to some new contributors and collaborators, who would do it, who just produced it, and it's beautiful, and it's going to work really well.

And then I guess I'm sort of coming full circle to a certain extent to what Angus Laing was talking about at the beginning, what Lisa Jack has talked about, and what Richard Spencer's talked about, is this building of institutions was, was you know, it happened everywhere in every bit of life that Jeffrey encountered, he built better institutions as a result of it.

And in ways that many times we didn't know he was building the institutions, but there was always something better at the end of it as opposed to the beginning.