The Accounts of a Business—or Perhaps the Business of Accounts?

In this chapter we continue our exploration of the active role of text and texting in organization. We do so, however, in a different kind of organization from Explora. This time, the site of research was a forprofit French private enterprise, a construction firm whose current operations span that entire country. And the “texts” we focus on-the documents generated by formal accounting procedures-also differ from those we have just been considering in Chapter 4, where they were, essentially, personal expressions of people’s “stories-so-far.” In both cases, nonetheless, making an accounting of what you are doing, however constituted, becomes the source of the “flow” of documents that Kirsch and Neff (2008) perceived to be the basis of all organizing in the large: how up-, down-, and cross-linking are accomplished.