Accounting Beyond the Calculative: Expressing Corporate Disclosure Through Aesthetic Materiality

In an era characterised by the political economy of financialised capitalism, accounting plays an instrumental role in shaping decision-making through the principle of materiality.  This principle influences how physical climate risks are perceived and addressed.  The role of accounting and the principle of materiality are foundational to using corporate reporting to prepare markets for the effects of climate change.  
The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD, 2023) has highlighted persistent inadequacies in corporate disclosures, particularly their failure to provide decision-useful information for managing or mitigating the financial and societal impact of extreme weather events.  Inspired by the Absurdist literary tradition, the paper offers a conceptual alternative: expressing materiality as an aesthetic performance that embraces the ambiguity and complexity of climate risk.
To visualise this interplay, disclosure is interpreted as a form of communicative storytelling, where accounting frameworks set the plot and characters, shaping stakeholder engagement.  The tangible impacts of physical climate change function as the unpredictable forces driving the narrative, while aesthetic materiality transforms these elements into a cohesive strategic risk management framework.  This dynamic symbiosis, imbued with Absurdist tensions, illustrates how narrative, financial structures, environmental realities, and performative aesthetics collectively influence decision-making in the face of climate risks.
The Absurdist lens reveals how contemporary disclosures embody a condition of "waiting for the correct data," a state of deferral legitimised by incremental approaches to risk management.  Traditional calculative paradigms in accounting—such as materiality thresholds, metrics, and financial quantification—struggle to address the non-linear and interdependent risks posed by extreme weather events.  By aestheticising materiality, this paper argues that corporate disclosures can better cope with these limitations, engaging stakeholders through participatory and relational communication rather than static, deterministic metrics.
Aesthetic materiality shifts the focus from rigid frameworks to systemic interconnectivity, inviting decision-makers to critically reflect on the unpredictability of climate risks and to co-create meaning alongside stakeholders.  This perspective complements tools such as impact-based forecasting and early-warning systems by addressing the socio-cultural dimensions of risk communication.
Empirical insights from 44 interviews with stakeholders across 16 FTSE350 organisations illustrate the limitations of calculative realism in accounting for climate scenarios.  Participants reported deferring action in pursuit of elusive “objective truths,” grappling with helplessness amidst multiple potential realities and feeling hopeless by the inexpressible ambiguity associated with accounting for extreme weather risks.  These findings underscore the Absurdist tension between striving for control and coping with the immeasurable—a tension that current frameworks fail to resolve.
Aesthetic materiality is a conceptual response to the systemic inadequacies of existing corporate disclosure practices.  It disrupts normative accounting principles such as reliability and objectivity, advocating instead for evocative narratives, symbolic imagery, and dialogical engagement that better reprehend the interconnected nature of extreme weather events.  Such a transition also signals a shift beyond the prevailing interdisciplinary accounting discourse by foregrounding the limits of language and representation, emphasising the performative aesthetics of materiality and expressing disclosure as an unending process.