Critical financial analysis and accounting for stakeholders

This paper challenges the fundamental assumptions of the Corporate Social Reporting school of accounting research to which Sutton and Arnold's paper belongs: that financial accounts cannot usefully be used by and for other stakeholders and that these stakeholders cooperate in their efforts to generate profit and share in their distribution as one big happy family. It draws on a financial analysis of the privatised utilities to show that Sutton and Arnold's thesis is redundant at best and may perhaps serve to reinforce the false ideology of the stakeholder concept. © 1998 Academic Press Limited.