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The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersection of professional values and career roles in accountants’ presentations of their professional identity, in the face of enduring stereotyping of the accounting role.

This study presents a qualitative investigation of accountants’ construction of their professional identities and imagery using a Goffmanian dramaturgical perspective. Viewing professional identity construction as a presentational matter of impression management, the investigation employs a reflexive photo-interviewing methodology.

Accountants use a variety of workplace dramatisation, idealisation and mystification strategies inside and outside the workplace to counter the traditional accounting stereotype. They also attempt to develop a professional identity that is a subset of their overall life values.

Their professional orientation is found to embrace role reconstruction and revised image mystification while not necessarily aiming for upward professional mobility. This has implications for understanding the career trajectories of contemporary accountants with associated implications for continuing professional development and education.

The paper focusses on professional role, identity, values and image at the individual accountant level, while most prior research has focussed upon these issues at the macro association-wide level. In offering the first use of reflexive photo-interviewing method in the accounting research literature, it brings the prospect of having elicited different and possibly more reflective observations, reflections and understandings from actors not otherwise possible from more conventional methods.

The purpose of this paper is to put forward an argument for the importance of social and situational dynamics present when groups of organizational members view images. This both enriches psychoanalytic theories of the visual previously brought to bear on this topic and adds a valuable psychoanalytical perspective to visual organization studies.

The paper extends Burkard Sievers’ concept of the “social photo matrix” (SPM) through an interdisciplinary review of literature in psychoanalysis, audiencing, media studies and social theory.

A socially nuanced variant of the SPM is put forward as a way to explore organizational members’ experiences of work and employment, as part of a nascent “visual methodological approach” to studying organization(s).

The ideas within this conceptual paper would benefit from empirical investigation. This would be a fruitful and interesting possibility for future research.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the contemporary utility of the SPM as a psychoanalytically‐motivated method through which to understand visually‐mediated effects of organizational action, as collectively experienced by their members and stakeholders.

The paper makes a particular contribution to the poorly‐researched area of the collective reception of organizational images and opens up possibilities to work with the hidden anxieties and defences that arise in the course of organizational action.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how “the visual” might be conceptualised more broadly as a useful development of qualitative methodologies for organizational research. The paper introduces the articles that form the basis of this special issue of QROM, including a review of related studies that discuss the analysis of organizational visuals, as well as extant literature that develops a methodological agenda for visual organizational researchers.

The Guest Editors’ conceptual arguments are advanced through a literature review approach.

The Guest Editors conclude that studying “the visual” holds great potential for qualitative organizational researchers and show how this field is fast developing around a number of interesting image‐based issues in organizational life.

A future research agenda is articulated and the special issue that this paper introduces is intended to serve as a “showcase” and inspiration for qualitative researchers in organizations and management studies.

This issue of QROM is the first collection of visual research articles addressing business and management research. The Guest Editors’ introduction to it seeks to frame its contents in contemporary interdisciplinary debates drawn from the wider social sciences and the arts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a visual method, snaplog (snapshots and logbooks) from a performativity theory approach.

The paper uses empirical examples from a three‐year qualitative research project where snaplogs are used as an experimental method. The paper presents a reading of performativity theory and discusses the performativity of using visual methods in the research process.

The paper concludes that visual methods have a special ability to activate the field in a way that avoids preconceived ideas, and creates possibilities to observe the researched phenomenon and how it practices, resists and revoices the questions asked by the researchers.

The paper explores and discusses the authors’ experiences and reflections on the positioning and scope of using snaplogs as a visual method. It does not report a systematic evaluation of its implications.

Snaplogs offer the researcher the possibility to activate and cooperate with the researched phenomenon.

The potential value of the paper is that it offers inspiration to organization researchers looking for innovative/performative research methods.

This paper aims to set out several of the key issues and areas of the inter‐disciplinary field of visual perspectives on accounting and accountability, and to introduce the papers that compose this AAAJ special issue.

This takes the form of a discussion paper, exploring several key issues related to visual perspectives on accounting and accountability.

The paper suggests that there has been some myopia with regard to the importance of the visual in accounting and accountability, and introduces a variety of theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches.

It is hoped that the issues and approaches explored in this paper, together with those of the various papers of this AAAJ special issue, will stimulate increased research on visual perspectives on accounting and accountability.

The analyses of the ways in which the visual is implicated in accounting are of interest to accounting researchers, practitioners, trainees and auditors.

The paper surveys past work on visual perspectives in accounting and organization studies, provides an overview of challenges in the area, and sets an agenda for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to put forward a “next step” research agenda for investigating accountants' professional identity.

The visual nature of identity construction is discussed, issues of media stereotyping are revisited and recruitment/educational implications are reviewed. Attention is also paid to the accounting profession's attempts to change perceptions of the accounting identity.

A hybrid strategy of research participant generated photographs and semi‐structured interviews is exemplified as a fruitful methodology and outlined as a way forward for tapping into the identity construction processes and perceptions of accountants from their particular perspectives.

The paper is intended to stimulate further research into accountants' identities from a visual perspective. However, it does not directly report on empirical findings.

Questions of identity construction offer us a window into the degree to which public stereotypes are matched by professional accountants' own personal definitions and the bearing these may have on current and future career intentions. Such insights can provide foundations for a range of profession policy issues spanning recruitment, retention, training and professional development.

This paper proposes a visual methodology not employed in accounting research before and addresses the neglected area of accountants' identities as individual professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on Professor Lee D. Parker's article on photo‐elicitation.

Two exciting possibilities addressed in Parker's paper are discussed: the potential of archival photographs to transcend their status as “evidence” of times gone by; and the mobilisation of emotional oral histories through photographs as objects.

The status of photographs as emotional artefacts and issues surrounding their production, curation, storage, circulation and consumption are found to be as important as analysis of what photographs depict.

Analysing the performative and emotional character of historical research using photographs poses a challenge for the accounting and management scholar on account of the non‐reductionist nature of images.

Addressing these difficulties has great potential advance research methodology in this area.

Literature and ideas from geography and museum studies bring a new perspective on Professor Parker's article. The paper is of interest to researchers interested in the visual dimension of accounting and management, or those wishing to keep abreast of avant‐garde developments in accounting research methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of incorporating such visual methods as photoelicitation and photovoice into qualitative research, in order to retrieve something that, as a result of particular group socialisation, has been hidden, unspoken of or marginalised.

The research design combines 40 in‐depth verbal interviews with male butchers, with the use of photoelicitation and photovoice, in order to increase participant control of data generation.

Results suggest that photoelicitation enabled working‐class men to engage with themes which are rarely reflected on or discussed; which may sit uneasily with desired presentations of self; and which challenge traditional notions of gendered work. It prompted participants to elaborate and translate their daily experiences of physical labour into more expressive and detailed accounts. This provided room for the display of positive emotions and self‐evaluation and the surfacing of the aesthetics and the pleasures of the trade – aspects that might have been otherwise concealed as a result of adherence to identity affirming norms. Photoelicitation also evoked powerful nostalgic themes about the past: a lament for the loss of skills; the passing of the time of closer communities and more traditional values.

The use of photovoice and photoelicitation in the exploration of a class and gendered “habitus” has highlighted the power of visual methods to offer a closer look at what participants considered important, to open space for the emergence of unexpected topics and themes and to allow for more comprehensive and reflective elaboration on specificities of personal experiences and emotions.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss participant‐led photography as a response to the author's need for an “aesthetic approach” to ethnography during fieldwork, including the importance of an embodied, sensory orientation to ethnography in organizational contexts.

The paper reviews a range of literature and draws on the author's experiences to support a conceptual argument.

There is currently scant attention to the sensory dimension of ethnographic practice and the paper puts forward an agenda for future research.

Suggestions are made as to how aesthetic and/or sensory ethnography can support changing landscapes of organizational research.

In drawing together multidisciplinary literature, the paper advances the agenda of ethnographic research in organizational life.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative approach to the visual, which offers aesthetic strategies for creating future research accounts in organization and management studies.

The paper reviews existing visual research in organization and management studies and presents an in‐depth analysis of two early, almost classical, and yet very different endeavors to create visual accounts based on ethnography: the multi‐media enactments by Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, Susanna Shannon, and Patricia Reed, and the filmic and written work by Trinh T. Minh‐ha and her collaborators.

The authors’ analysis of how the visual is performed in both cases identifies a repertoire of three distinct and paradoxical aesthetic strategies: de/synchronizing, de/centralizing, and dis/covering.

The authors analyze two rarely acknowledged but ground‐breaking research presentations, identify aesthetic strategies to perform multiplicity and reflexivity in research accounts, and question the ways that research accounts are written and published in organization and management studies by acknowledging the consequences of a performative approach to the visual.