Professor Frank Birkin
Professor in Accounting for Sustainable Development
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Before entering higher education, Frank held appointments in the UK and in Africa as financial accountant, management accountant, financial analyst and systems analyst. His practical experience was gained in electrical, electronic and computer manufacturing as well as in opencast and underground metal mining. He is an associate of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. He has lectured in the UK and in Kenya on all major branches of accountancy as well as on related management subjects such as statistics, information technology, business mathematics and business strategy.
His work has always enjoyed a high impact from his early contributions to the development of environmental management accounting, which is now an emerging global practice, and accounting for sustainable development, to helping industries in the UK and China become more sustainable.
His recent book, Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability, has been recognised as a highly original and groundbreaking work with the potential to bring about major changes in personal lives and businesses worldwide.
Intrinsic Sustainable Development Blog - about a book about a new way of living and doing business
Intrinsic Sustainable Development - Get the basics and buy the book
Research
Frank´s research work has the goal of accounting for sustainable industrial development and this is a very broad topic that embraces social, environmental and traditional accounting as well as engineering, scientific, cultural, philosophical and policy aspects of sustainable development. For example, he obtained £300k+ European Union funding for an international project to develop a first account of the sustainable development performance of island tourism using stakeholder analyses. This culminated in the co-hosting of a European conference on sustainable tourism in Venice with guest speakers from the European Commission, the United Nations Environment Programme, World Tourism Organisation, World Wide Fund for Nature as well as ANPA, the national Italian environmental agency. He has collaborated with many different universities and companies to win over £1 million in research funding.
Teaching
Frank is keen to pass new knowledge on to his students. His management accounting modules for example are groundbreaking and give students not only a vision of emerging accounting practice but also an indication of how they themselves can bring about, and benefit from, further change.
He always provides a view of his topics that is balanced between theory and practice and numeric and narrative aspects. This balance is particularly important for getting to grips some of the world’s biggest sustainable development problems and the kinds of solutions that are now emerging in accounting.
Publications
Selected recent publications include:
Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability. London: World Scientific Press. 2011.
"An Epistemic Analysis of (Un)Sustainable Business", Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 103, 2011, pp. 239–253
"An Exploration of Critical Scientific Realism: focused upon changes in accounting for sustainable development", International Journal of Critical Accounting, vol. 2, No.2, 2010, pp. 146-149.
"A New Business Model for Sustainable Development: an exploratory study using the Theory of Constraints in Nordic Organizations", Business Strategy and the Environment, with T. Polesie and L. Lewis, vol. 18, 2009, pp. 277-290.
"New Sustainable Business Models in China", Business Strategy and the Environment, with S.C. Lenny Koh, Adrian Cashman, and Zhen Liu, vol.18, 2009, pp. 64-77.