THE ROLE OF SUSTAINABILITY DISCLOSURE IN PROMOTING CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY: AN ANALYSIS OF THE SAMARCO CASE BASED ON BOURDIEU'S CAPITALS
Name: ANDERSON FIORESI DE SOUSA
Publication date: 06/12/2023
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANNOR DA SILVA JUNIOR | Advisor |
Summary: The research aimed to investigate how the dynamics involving capital, in a Bourdieusian
approach, enables or limits the role of sustainability disclosure in promoting corporate
accountability. The study delves into discussions on sustainability and articulates the main
concepts of Pierre Bourdieu's social theory to discuss the role of sustainability disclosure in
promoting a process of corporate accountability that reaches typically more distant
stakeholders, i.e. the communities affected by corporate activities. Sustainability is defined as
a social, historical, political, and ideological process that takes place in a social space, in
Bourdieusian terms, in which the legitimate notion of sustainability is at stake and, once
recognized, shapes the power relations in the social space, as well as the participatory process.
It is argued that power relations in the social space can either enable or limit the role of
sustainability disclosure as a catalyst for accountability, depending on the symbolic notion of
sustainability that is recognized as legitimate. The methods used in this study are based on
social reality as historically and dialectically constituted by the dynamics between objective
social structures and structures subjectively embodied by agents. It is a qualitative study with
an interpretive approach that investigated the research problem based on a case study, namely
Samarco Mineração, and its historical relationship with other agents in the city of Mariana-MG.
The data was gathered from interviews with people living in Mariana-MG, field observation,
and documents. The method used to analyze and interpret the data was narrative analysis. The
interpretations make sense of the fact that Samarco's sustainability disclosure constitutes a
discourse on sustainability aimed at markets willing to receive it and recognize it as legitimate
because of the symbolic domination of the notion of sustainability in the social space
investigated, which is an economically-oriented notion of sustainability that mitigates social
and environmental problems, which shapes the process of corporate accountability. The
implication is that sustainability disclosure, on the one hand, can be understood as promoting
accountability for a market involved in the game of the economic field limited to the notion that
providing information promotes accountability. On the other hand, the notion of sustainability,
which values social and environmental issues, prevalent in other fields that cross the
communities affected by Samarco, implies needs and demands that are not recognized by the
agents in the game of the economic field or in sustainability disclosure. In this sense, Samarco's
sustainability disclosure works as a mechanism that reproduces a doxa of sustainability that is
economically oriented towards a market that values and recognizes this way of talking about
sustainability made up of holders and operators of financial capital and part of the people in
Mariana-MG who are more engaged in the game of the economic field, and does not respond
to the demands of communities that are less engaged in this game.
