ABSTRACT
It has been suggested by Schaltegger et al (1996) that one of the driving forces in the development of environmental accounting was the need to placate, through the production of appropriate information, those members of society who could be classified as environmental activists. They further suggest that the environmental accounting information developed for this purpose has now been adopted into the repertoire of organisational accounting and forms an important part of the internal management control information of the organisation. It has been argued in Chapter 4 that these assertions are untrue and that environmental accounting is not directly influenced by environmental pressure groups and does not form a part of the internal accounting information and control systems. This chapter explores this assertion in greater details and so in this chapter there a semiotic analysis of environmental accounting and reporting is undertaken in order to test the hypotheses 4 and 5 developed in chapter 4.
