Abstract
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The paper compares the social and environmental disclosures of Royal/Dutch Shell (sustainability reports) and Friends of the Earth (FoE) International counter account - The Other Shell Report around the common phenomenon of oil spills in the Niger Delta as a form of multidimensional dialectic of conflictual spectacles in an era of global capitalism.
The paper adopts Debord’s (1967; 1988) and the Situationists concept of the spectacle to compare meaning-making and ideology based on capital vs community.
Social and environmental accounting whether from a corporate autobiographical perspective or biographical counter account framework is an example of an inter-spectacle or dialectic that has implications for revealing contests, contradictions and silences.