A response to Stone and Parker

Purpose – To respond to the comment by Stone and Parker on my paper “The struggle to fabricate

accounting narrative obfuscation: An actor-network-theoretic analysis of a failing project”.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper responds to issues highlighted by Stone and Parker.

Findings – This response argues that there is at least one alternative to the augmentation of Flesch:

that we bring our skills and experience as accountants directly to bear on narratives, to analyse and

report on how accessible and informative they are – and even to what extent they obfuscate – in ways

that will, at least according to some definitions, be subjective but perhaps no more subjective than

asserting that some simple statistic represents a reliable proxy for a complex notion such as

accessibility.

Originality/value – This comment adds to the necessary debate about how we should tackle research

on accounting narratives