Call for papers for a special issue of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal: ‘Accounting and the Visual’

This special issue aims to contribute to a recent and steadily growing interest in organisational visual images and methodologies with particular application to the field of accounting. In essence, the practices of accounting for and auditing organisational activity relate to visualisation – rendering tangible and intangible values visible in the form of reports, charts, graphs, diagrams and pictures for instance. These artefacts can fruitfully be studied from a visual perspective as being traces of – and drivers for – organisational action, processes and culture, as indeed can organisational artefacts more generally. Likewise, the changing image of accounting as a profession can be read visually, for example trends in corporate architecture, space and accountants’ professional identity. The extent to which organisations trade on their image in such societies is also worthy of attention. Branding, organisational and/or corporate aesthetics management, and the construction of symbolically redolent buildings are all visual activities, and ways of accounting for the visual is also a theme we might usefully engage with. For example, in New Zealand, the ‘arts bonus points’ scheme allows organisations to gain more favourable planning decisions if they agree to invest in and display publicly accessible artworks in their buildings – importantly, these points are tradable, effectively creating a market that leads to the concept of an ‘aesthetic bottom line’ (Monin & Sayers, 2006). In addition, accounting and management control processes can be studied visually through the use of documentary photography, photo-elicitation techniques and respondent-led photography. In sum, as contemporary societies become defined by their ‘visual culture’ and technological advancements mean that ‘the image’becomes all-important in every sphere of life, so organisational and accounting scholars must engage with these developments theoretically, empirically and methodologically. To date, the role of images and the visual world has been strangely overlooked in organisational research despite having a healthy provenance in the social sciences more generally, and a prominent profile across arts disciplines and associated cultural studies. This special issue aims to begin to rectify this neglect. With these ideas in mind, we invite contributions that address any aspect of the visual and accounting, whether theoretical, empirical or methodological. We would particularly welcome creative, innovative approaches to the topic. An indicative, but not exhaustive, list of what we see as potential questions or approaches of interest is given below: