Abstract
Accounting, as Keynes observed more than sixty years ago, occupies a significant position in the functioning of society. In organisations and in society alike, what is accounted for shapes participants’ views of what is important, sets the agenda, and determines how institutions function (Burchell et al., 1980; Macintosh, 1985). This is not a new view; accounting authorities have long since argued that accounting is critical to decisions involving economic planning, industrial regulation, wage and price determination, taxation, and international flow of money (Paton and Littleton, 1940; Solomons, 1978). Recently, there has been a resurgence of the idea that the symbolic, non-rational roles of accounting, including ceremony, power distribution, value clarification, and political manoeuvreing, should be the subject of research (Ansari and McDonough, 1980; Cherns, 1978; Davis et al., 1982; Boland and Pondy, 1983; Markus and Pfeffer, 1983; Meyer, 1983; Schreuder, 1984; Matthews, 1985; Parker and Guthrie, 1986). This paper reports the results of a critical theory analysis of a case study of IBM’s annual reports in terms of their construction and reconstruction of an ideology of an inferior role for women in the computer workplace.
Under the peculiar logic of accountancy, the men of the nineteenth century built slums rather than model cities because slums paid
(Keynes, 1933)
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© 1990 David J. Cooper & Trevor M. Hopper
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Macintosh, N.B. (1990). Annual Reports in an Ideological Role: A Critical Theory Analysis. In: Cooper, D.J., Hopper, T.M. (eds) Critical Accounts. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09786-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09786-9_8
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