Impact She Wrote: Genres of Narrative Accounting in the Cultural Sector

The notion of accountability is understood as the duty to provide an account of the actions for which organisations are held responsible in the eyes of their stakeholders, or, more generically, as the giving and demanding of reasons for conduct. It should come as no surprise, hence, that a certain narrative capacity, an ability to narrate and enable audience comprehension is to be found at the core of accounting. The resulting magic - through which words and numbers become translated into objects, people, and actions, and then back into words and numbers - has long since captured the attention of accounting scholars, and the extant literature has established that accounting narratives do indeed use stories, metaphors, and attributions within their numbers. Nevertheless, as narrative accounting becomes an ever increasingly dominant presence in current practices with the increasing emphasis on impact and connected issues which lack clear, standard measurements, old issues resurface and new ones emerge. The paper proposes an alternative methodological approach, considering narrative reports as stories and analysing them through tools from narratology, to answer some of these open questions: how are contemporary accounts of impact constructed from a narratological perspective? Which narrative devices might be conducive to the production of good, meaningful stories?