Publications Database

Welcome to the new Schulich Peer-Reviewed Publication Database!

The database is currently in beta-testing and will be updated with more features as time goes on. In the meantime, stakeholders are free to explore our faculty’s numerous works. The left-hand panel affords the ability to search by the following:

  • Faculty Member’s Name;
  • Area of Expertise;
  • Whether the Publication is Open-Access (free for public download);
  • Journal Name; and
  • Date Range.

At present, the database covers publications from 2012 to 2020, but will extend further back in the future. In addition to listing publications, the database includes two types of impact metrics: Altmetrics and Plum. The database will be updated annually with most recent publications from our faculty.

If you have any questions or input, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

 

Search Results

Kieran Taylor-Neu, Abu S. Rahaman, Gregory D. Saxton, Dean Neu (2024). "Tone at the top, corporate irresponsibility and the Enron emails", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 37(9),336-364.

Open Access Download

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to examine whether senior Enron executive emails celebrated, or at least left a space for, corporate irresponsibility. Engaging with prior organizational-focused research, we investigate how corporate emails sent by senior executives help constitute Enron by communicating to employees senior management’s stance about important topics and social characters.

Design/methodology/approach

The study analyzes the 527,356 sentences contained in 144,228 emails sent by Enron senior executives and other employees in the three-year period (1999–2001) before the company’s collapse. Sentences are used as the base-level speech unit because we are interested in identifying the tone and emotions expressed about specific topics and stakeholders. Tone is measured using Loughran and McDonald’s (2016) financial dictionary approach, and emotion is measured using Mohammad and Turney’s (2013) NRC word-emotion lexicon. Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regressions are used to explore the determinants of senior management tone and emotions.

Findings

The analysis illustrates that while both senior executives and other employees utilized email to help accomplish task-related activities, they employed different evaluative tones to talk about key topics and stakeholders. Also important is what is left unsaid, with a “spiral of silence” emanating from senior management that created a space for corporate irresponsibility.

Originality/value

Combining advanced computerized textual analysis with qualitative techniques, we analyze a unique dataset to explore micro details involved in using email to communicate a tone at the top. The findings illustrate how what is said or not said by senior management contributes to the constitution of an organization.

Brivot, M., Cho, C.H. and Kuhn, J. (2015). "Marketing or Parrhesia? A Longitudinal Study of the AICPA Leaders’ Communications in Times of Public Trust, Crisis Management and Trust Repair", Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 31(1), 23-43.

Abstract This paper examines how the U.S. accounting profession, through the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), sought to restore its damaged reputation and re-legitimize its claim to self-regulation after the Enron scandal. We do so by analyzing the content of AICPA leaders’ web communications to members and outsiders of the Institute between 1997 and 2010 and draw upon the concepts of logics and discourse. We argue that the marketing language surrounding the AICPA's “Vision Project” prior to Enron (1997–2001) is not durably supplanted by the language of parrhesia, celebrated during the Enron crisis management episode (2002–2004) – it reemerges after 2005, juxtaposed to parrhesia. This study contributes to increasing our understanding of the institutional complexity of the accounting professional field by suggesting that this complexity is, in part, cultivated and reproduced by AICPA leaders’ navigation between different conceptions of being an accountant. Institutional complexity can thus be viewed as a resource, rather than a constraint, which provides flexible impression management opportunities.