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This paper is concerned with some speculations and observations on the position of women in relationship to leadership roles in organizations.

The paper is a theoretical piece. It attempts to analyse some of the reasons why women find it difficult to attain leadership roles and reflects on the costs to them when they do.

It considers why women are considered a threat to organizations and why organizations seek to subject women to the therapeutic imperative of rationality as the price of membership and of “success”. Put simply, it considers how women have to demonstrate male characteristics in order to “succeed” as leaders and must set aside feminine qualities: to live hyper‐abstractly “in order thus to earn divine grace and homologation with the symbolic order”. This results in an irresolvable lack in terms of what the organization desires for its completion.

Leadership is defined by the phallus and women's leadership by its absence. The woman vanishes.

The aim of this paper is to find the relationship between the purely representational aspects of the statements of account and the everyday lived experiences of those who were directly affected by the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in India in 1984. The paper seeks to consider the rhetorical force of photography in capturing the tragic and to compare this with the position adopted by Union Carbide in accounting for the catastrophe.

The paper reviews the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and draws on the works of Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe and Julia Kristeva to examine the relationship between photographic representation and statements of account.

The rhetorical character of the ways in which the tragedy has been represented and the impact of the photographic image when set against the statement of account is considered. The photographic image is an attempt to restore the body to the text, to bear in mind that, in the face of inevitable abstract, it is important to remember the body, albeit with the caveat that the image too succumbs to the force of rhetoric. Nonetheless, the image reminds one that one is dealing not only with figures and statements but also with life and death.

The paper contributes to discussions about the need for a dialogic approach to accounting. Frequently, in disaster analysis, the co‐existence of multiple perspectives and fragmented stories i.e. a dialogic approach, is paramount to gaining an insight into the complexity of the system which has failed. The paper demonstrates how images can complement cosy, coherent, monologic statements of accounts and help to retain the human character of disaster.