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 narrative