Sociology of worth: Justifying an ambitious sustainability agenda at a university

Within each society choices must be made between competing approaches about where valuable and scarce societal resources will be allocated. In every society there is, and should be, a constant struggle between differing ideas, ideals, and world views; each representing divergent interpretations of how society should best operate. In critical accounting studies there has long been interest in how accounting is employed as an ‘objective’ technology to provide information to aid decision-making in such competing worlds. A separate stream of research analyses the role that universities should play as community and business exemplars for sustainability practices. In regional Australia, Charles Sturt University (CSU) laid claim to being the first Australasian university to be accredited as achieving carbon-neutrality. This paper employs a sociology of worth framework to analyse the impact of accounting in privileging or compromising the implementation of CSUs sustainability agenda. This paper analyses the transformation of CSU to a ‘green’ university and investigates the role that accounting and account giving have played in the justification between different orders of worth in the university context and outlines how the sociology of worth framework can be used to explain the success of CSUs ‘green’ agenda in a time of financial constraint.