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The Struggle Over Meaning in Accounting and Corporate Research: A Comparative Evaluation of Conservative and Critical Historiography

Tony Tinker (Baruch College)
Marilyn Neimark (The City University of New York)

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal

ISSN: 0951-3574

Article publication date: 1 June 1988

1569

Abstract

This article examines the construction of systems of meaning at two levels: the writing of the history of the corporation; and the role of annual reports in constructing a system of meaning about the experiences of individual corporations.We argue that the transaction cost explanation of corporate history, which stresses the formative roles of technological and market forces, and management's quest for efficiency, serves to legitimate the modern corporate form and oligopolistic market structures. We provide an alternative, critical framework, which emphasises the importance of conflict over the distribution of income and wealth to our understanding of the emergence of modern corporate structures, strategies and accounting information systems.This alternative approach is illustrated through the history of General Motors' (GM) relations with the US State. The annual reports of the company are used as the primary, although not exclusive, source of data. We show that these documents represent history and current events in a partisan manner that makes them weapons in distributional conflicts.

Keywords

Citation

Tinker, T. and Neimark, M. (1988), "The Struggle Over Meaning in Accounting and Corporate Research: A Comparative Evaluation of Conservative and Critical Historiography", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 55-74. https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000004620

Publisher

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MCB UP Ltd

Copyright © 1988, MCB UP Limited

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