Financial narratives of the modern corporation

This paper is about the ways that financial narratives are used by corporations to drive organizational change. Analysis of financial practices within BHP Ltd, a large Australian resources company, is used to trace the development of new management strategies, how they have been propelled by financial tactics and tools and how specific investment outcomes have been valorized to the exclusion of others. The second section of the paper focuses on the role of the logics of finance and accounting in general and the ways particular corporate accumulation and distributional outcomes are produced. The section draws heavily on insights into accounting representations of the firm in the work of Anthony Hopwood and his peers centred on the journal Accounting, Organizations and Society. The third section discusses possibilities for alternate distributional outcomes which might arise from different stakeholder participation in the governance and operation of large firms.