Sustainable Production System

4Accounting: The Figure in Dialogue

4.1. Performance systems

To illustrate the purpose of the Energy Transition for Green Growth Act (projet de loi relatif à la transition énergétique passed by the French National Assembly on July 30, 2014), energy was described as “this economically vital force, this force in action that irrigates all our activities in the same way as blood circulates in tissues and supplies cells while our communication systems, material and immaterial, manage its production and delivery, its circulation, its switching points and its distribution in the same way as a nervous system”.

This biological allegory positions the energetic transition between two levels of reality. A “force in action” thermodynamically influences the productive system, while the individuals and social groups that make up society retroact “like a nervous system” on the energy system.

If we refer exclusively to the energy sector that supplies French society, the thermodynamic conception of energy predominates. To continue the allegory, the programming of energy transition can, in this case, focus on ingestion, digestion, vascularization and the passage of nutrients to cells.

On the other hand, if we refer to French society in relation to the problems of energy transition, we give a central place to the human sciences. It is then necessary to think of the internal metabolism, according to the movements to which the whole organism is destined. The “energy reality” is then considered ...