[In]visible [in]tangibles: Visual portraits of the business élite
Jane Davison
School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX, UK
article info
abstract
Visual portraits of the business élite are widely disseminated, and form significant sites for
communicating messages regarding leadership and associated intellectual, symbolic and
social intangibles, yet have been neglected in accounting research. At the same time,
accounting for intangibles is recognised to be inadequate. This inter-disciplinary article
constructs a framework from art theory to interpret portraits of the business élite and their
associated [in]visible [in]tangibles. Four sets of rhetorical codes in portraiture are identi-
fied: physical, dress, spatial and interpersonal. Illustrative portraits from annual reports
and the media are analysed to indicate how [in]visible [in]tangibles are portrayed through
visual rhetoric.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The successful businessman, relatively unseen in the
past, is today visually omnipresent in corporate documents
and in the media. Such visual representations range from
the sober parades of seemingly un-contrived passport-
style photographs of individual directors in annual reports,
to relaxed group poses of boards of directors, formal poses
and cartoon depictions, together with flamboyant promo-
tional images. A complex alchemy of image management
takes place, as individuals and firms seek to manage
impressions about themselves. It is a commonplace that
visual images saturate contemporary society, and large
amounts are spent on their production and dissemination,
yet in accounting research they have largely been over-
looked or regarded as lightweight in comparison to num-
bers or text. It is argued here that they are on the
contrary heavyweight signs in business, as in all other,
communication, and that the rhetoric of these often care-
fully constructed visual portraits warrants elucidation.
This paper adds to a small but burgeoning accounting
literature that interprets such constructed visual images
in annual reports (Davison, 2002, 2007, 2008; Graves,
Flesher, & Jordan, 1996; McKinstry, 1996; Preston, Wright,
& Young, 1996; Preston & Young, 2000). Visual images of
the business élite are important to accounting for the fol-
lowing reasons: (1) leadership is key to assessing business
performance and potential; (2) intangibles such as leader-
ship, or indeed celebrity (Rindova, Pollock, & Hayward,
2006), are excluded from the financial statements; (3) vi-
sual portraits of business leaders constitute an important
form of impression management, perception management,
or even ‘‘intangibles management”, whether disseminated
as voluntary disclosures in annual reports or whether circu-
lated more widely in the media (Aerts & Cormier, 2009; Els-
bach, 2006; Hayward, Rindova, & Pollock, 2004; Rindova
et al., 2006); (4) visual images occupy difficult but interest-
ing borderlands between representation and construction,
both theoretically and empirically, where the aims and arts
of accounting and marketing coincide and overlap.
The business élite are at the very heart of Bourdieu’s
intellectual assets, symbolic assets and social assets (Bour-
dieu, 1986; Maclean, Harvey, & Press, 2006), which are
interlinking intangible assets of organizations. The busi-
ness élite is the mainstay of trust, feared to be lost or dis-
appearing in The Audit Society (Power, 1999): from the
medieval system of feudal loyalty to the London Stock Ex-
change’s longstanding motto ‘‘my word is my bond”, the
pre-eminence of trust to business life echoes down the
ages. Quality of leadership is key to understanding a busi-
ness’s affairs, and there is longstanding research interest in
the relationship between directors and firm performance
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2009.03.003
E-mail address: jane.davison@rhul.ac.uk
Accounting, Organizations and Society 35 (2010) 165–183
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