Abukari Atchulo

Research student

You can email Abukari Atchulo directly; but for media enquiries please contact a member of The Open University's Media Relations team.

Biography

Abukari graduated from the University of Ghana Business School with First Class Honours. He received the KPMG award for best overall graduating student in BSc Administration as well as the Professor Amoako-Adu award of excellence for best all round graduating student in his year of graduation. He went on to work as a teaching and research assistant at the University of Ghana Business School with responsibility for organising tutorials for business mathematics and quantitative methods at the undergraduate level and financial management at the postgraduate level. He was subsequently recruited by Barclays on the Barclays Africa Leadership Programme and worked in the Finance Department of Barclays Bank of Ghana Limited for about six years. He won the prestigious British Chevening Scholarship and subsequently studied for his MSc in Accounting and Finance at the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, which he passed with merit. Following this, he worked for the United Bank for Africa (Ghana) as the Head of Local Corporate with responsibility for deal ideation, initiation and execution.

Abukari’s present PhD research at the Open University Business School is looking at how organisations incorporate social and environmental considerations into financial decision making.    

Current research

Funding Models for Electric Vehicles

The uptake of Electric Vehicles can encourage and facilitate the shift from a fossil fuel transport system to a low carbon one. The Milton Keynes Electric Light Vehicle InfraStructure (ELVIS) project is looking to the widespread uptake of battery electric cars from 2012 onwards. My PhD research is linked to this project.

 Any capital project that seeks the control, reduction, or prevention of pollution is an environmental investment (White et. al., 1995). My research is focusing on organisations (fleet and company car) users of cars. A key finance issue is that battery electric cars have a different financial structure to petrol/diesel cars. The purchase costs are high but running costs are low. Additionally, there are other social and environmental costs elements which organisations may consider when deciding as to whether to take up an environmental investment like the electric vehicle and may be viewed in a Corporate Social Responsibility context. White et. al., note that usually projects with a strong environmental content are automatically labelled “environmental” and escape systematic financial analysis even though they may, in fact yield a competitive return if profitability analysis were performed. Burritt and Schaltegger (2010) indicate that sustainability accounting research should be oriented towards improving management decision making.  Traditional capital budgeting techniques do not integrate social and environmental issues which cannot be overlooked in recent times into the evaluation process. My study primarily looks how organisations incorporate social and environmental considerations into financial decision making.

My PhD project would adopt the New Institutional Sociology (Dillard et. al., 2004) as a guide to the study. The project involves a combination of survey and discussion group work with organisations that are likely to take up electric vehicles or be involved in one environmental investment or the other. In depth interviews with management accountants and others entrusted with decisions regarding capital investments would also be undertaken with the Milton Keynes electric vehicle project as the case study.

The research would use the interpretive methodology. The researcher holds the opinion that reality is socially constructed; hence emphasis will be placed on the social context within which accounting/capital budgeting takes place.

Supervisors

• Professor Stephen Potter
• Mr Martin Upton

Publications