IMAG[IN]ING ANNUAL-REPORTS

Visual images are integral elements within corporate annual reports. Y et, these visual images have been largely ignored in accounting resear ch. We begin to explore the significance of selected visual images app earing in U.S. annual reports during the late 1980s and early 1990s. O ur intent is not to produce a general survey of images, but rather to offer different ''ways of seeing'' images and through these ''ways of seeing'' to encourage a critical dialogue that focuses upon the repres entational, ideological and constitutive role of images in annual repo rts. Our first way of seeing views the image as transparently conveyin g an intended corporate message. The second way of seeing draws upon n eo-Marxist aesthetic literature and considers the ways in which images in annual reports may be mined for their ideological content and may also reveal society's deep structures of social classification, instit utional forms and relationships. Finally, we employ critical postmoder nist art theory to see images in terms of their constitutive role in c reating different types of human subjectivities and realities. We argu e that this way of seeing creates the potential for new voices to be h eard and the possibility to subvert the dualisms typical of the totali zing theories of modernity.