Identifying and ranking the challenges of implementing environmental management accounting in hotels

Subject Areas : Management Accounting

Azadeh Alsadat Torabzadeh Bafghi ¹ , Mahmoud moeinadin ² , Nasim Shahmoradi ³ , Forogh Heyrani ⁴

1 - PhD student, Department of Accounting, Yazd branch, Islamic Azad University, Yazd, Iran
2 - Associate Professor, Department of Accounting, Yazd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Yazd, Iran
3 - Assistant Professor, Department of Accounting, Yazd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Yazd, Iran
4 - Assistant Prof, accounting group, yazd branch, islamic azad University, yazd, Iran

Received: 2023-12-16 Accepted : 2024-02-07 Published : 2024-06-23

Keywords: Management accounting, Environmental accounting, Hotel industry, Fuzzy Delphi, Copeland&#039, s method,

Abstract :

At present, many environmental issues worthy of attention threaten the future of mankind, and therefore, the development of methods and standards to deal with environmental issues in companies and organizations is expanding. Studies that examine the environmental concerns of companies have often focused on manufacturing industries and service companies have attracted less attention. The main goal of this research is to evaluate and rank the challenges of implementing environmental management accounting (EMA) in 3–5-star hotels in Yazd. The research method is survey and qualitative. The statistical population of the research includes specialists and experts in the field of hotel management. Sampling from this community was done purposefully and finally 12 experts were selected. First, by reviewing the literature and theoretical background, the challenges of EMA implementation were identified in the form of 7 main challenges and 45 sub-challenges. A researcher-made questionnaire was compiled with 45 questions related to the challenges of EMA implementation, including technical (6 questions), cultural (5 questions), financial (4 questions), accounting (6 questions), managerial-organizational (13 questions), legal-strategic (7 questions) and individual-psychological (4 questions). The challenges were evaluated with the help of experts' opinions and using the fuzzy Delphi method, as a result of which 16 sub-challenges were extracted and ranked using the definite mean method. Then the main challenges were ranked by the Copeland technique. The results of Copeland's method showed that legal-strategic and cultural challenges are the most important, and individual-psychological challenges are the least important challenges facing the implementation of EMA in hotels.