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Dr. Abu Shiraz Rahaman joined the Schulich School of Business as Professor of Accounting in July 2023. He was a Full Professor of Accounting and Director of the Centre for Public Interest Accounting at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, prior to joining Schulich. Dr Rahaman earned his doctoral degree in Accounting from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and held academic positions in New Zealand and Australia before taking up a position at the University of Calgary.
Dr. Rahaman’s work on accounting as a social and institutional practice involves the use of qualitative case studies and quantitative archival computerized textual analysis of large datasets. His research has been published in leading journals such as: Accounting, Organizations and Society; Contemporary Accounting Research; Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal; Critical Perspectives on Accounting and the Journal of Business Ethics. He has received major research funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Chartered Professional Accountants of Alberta. He won the Outstanding Paper Award for his paper published in Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management and also received a Highly Commended Award for the Mary Parker Follet Award for outstanding papers published in Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal. He currently serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Accounting Research and Critical Perspectives on Accounting, among others
Dr. Rahaman teaches Cost and Managerial Accounting at various levels, including undergraduate, MBA , EMBA, and PhD programs. He has also taught a doctoral seminar in Financial Accounting at the University of Calgary. During his time at the Haskayne School of Business he won major teaching awards such as the University of Calgary Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Award; the Chartered Accountants’ Education Foundation Teaching Award; and in 2022 he won the Chartered Professional Accountants’ Education Foundation Teaching Excellence Award.
Recent Publications
Liu, M., Taylor-Neu, K., Saxton, G.D., Neu, D., Rahaman, A.S. and Everett, J. (2025), "Indigenous peoples, environmental accountability and the semantic meaning of resource extraction firm disclosures", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal.
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to explore how Indigenous peoples and their concerns become “entextualized” within the environmental disclosures of resource extraction firms. Design/methodology/approach
A mixed-methods content analysis of 11,850 annual information forms filed by resource extraction firms with Canadian security regulators between 1997 and 2023 is conducted. FinBERT transformer encodings, agglomerative hierarchical clustering and computer-assisted techniques are combined with inductive analyses. Findings
The findings show that, although Indigenous peoples and their concerns have become a more important element in environmental disclosures, dominant semantic meanings tend to view Indigenous people as impediments. At the same time, the entextualizations of Indigenous peoples and their concerns sometimes escape these dominant frames. Big firms appear to be no more likely to exhibit leadership or substantively take Indigenous peoples and their concerns into account than smaller firms. Originality/value
The study offers a longitudinal perspective on how the environment and Indigenous peoples are portrayed in corporate disclosures. The study emphasizes the need to view environmental accountability as inextricably intertwined with accountability to Indigenous peoples and also illustrates the importance of identifying the semantic meanings that are being communicated. We propose that analyzing how and why specific semantic meanings about Indigenous peoples and their concerns become entextualized provides activists and policy-makers with a starting point for improved disclosure practices and, hopefully, better resource extraction practices. Gregory Saxton, Dean Neu, Abu Shiraz Rahaman and Kieran Taylor-Neu (2025), "The Ethical CPA: Journal of Accountancy Letters to the Editor", Accounting History, 30(1), 114-135.
Abstract
This study uses computerised textual analysis methods to examine 1,769 letters to the editor published in the Journal of Accountancy between 1951 and 2020. Arguing that these letters enunciate an evaluative and expressive stance about issues affecting the profession, we first map the social characters, concepts, and subjects that letter writers talk about. Second, we build on this initial mapping by identifying the discursive communities that are present within the letters and the positioning of ethical words vis-à-vis these communities. Third, we consider the moment(s) in the letter when ethical words are enlisted. The study contributes to our understanding of professional accounting by foregrounding how letter writers articulate their vision of accounting work. The study also demonstrates the usefulness of computerised textual analysis methods for studying historical accounting textual materials.
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.
KeywordsAbstract
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. Abu Shiraz Rahaman, Dean Neu, Jeff Everett (2024), "Accounting Artifacts and the Reformation of a National Healthcare System", Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 99, 102719.
Abstract
This study examines the role of ‘accounting artifacts’ in the reformation of a country’s healthcare system. Focusing on a single hospital and four decades of policy reform in the African nation of Ghana, and starting from Pierre Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice, the study shows how different forms, constructions, and classifications of accounting information—or accounting artifacts—shape policy regimes and facilitate particular patterns of activity and interaction. The study demonstrates how these regimes and patterns, in conjunction with the embedded social memory or habitus of individual actors, in turn lead to the construction and use of new artifacts. Finally, the study highlights how hospital staff and patients use various tactics to work with and around these artifacts, resulting in at times unintended consequences and the need to pursue new policy directions. In so doing, the study furthers our understanding of why policy-reform processes in the field of healthcare are so often sequential, if not perpetual, in nature.
Jeff Everett, Abu Shiraz Rahaman, Dean Neu, Gregory Saxton (2024), "Letters to the Editor, Institutional Experimentation, and the Public Accounting Professional", Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 99, 102725.
KeywordsAbstract
This study examines the ‘letters to the editor’ section of the practitioner accounting journal and its role in the process of accounting professionalization. Data for the study are derived from the AICPA periodical Journal of Accountancy. The theoretical framing for the study draws on the linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. The study’s analysis relies on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The study finds that the letters forum helps to construct a believable and useful image of the professional accountant. The forum also provides a means for practicing accountants to intervene in, impact, and, at times, challenge the activities of the field’s authorities. Besides contributing to our understanding of accounting professionalization and the field’s competing institutional logics—professional, commercial, and bureaucratic—the study offers a methodological contribution, building on a first wave of topic-modeling research and demonstrating the usefulness of a theoretically-informed, but not theoretically-determined, approach to the study of textual accounting materials.
Dean Neu, Gregory D Saxton, Abu Rahaman and Kieran Taylor-Neu (2023), "The Tone from the Top: Editorials Within the Journal of Accountancy", Accounting History, 28(3), 468-489.
Abstract
This study examines the tone of editorials published in the Journal of Accountancy. Drawing upon prior historical accounting and linguistic-anthropological research, the study proposes that editorials in practitioner journals like the Journal of Accountancy communicate an expressive tone to internal audiences. This tone from the top is important because it communicates a professional worldview to a geographically dispersed and somewhat heterogeneous readership. The study utilises computerised methods to identify the tone expressed about key topics in 46,189 sentence-level editorial utterances published in the Journal between 1916 and 1973. The analysis illustrates that topics involving external social actors, institutions and events were more likely to use a negative tone compared to the topics speaking about internal aspects of the profession. The study contributes to our understanding of professional accounting narratives by enumerating the topics that Journal of Accountancy editorials speak about, by illustrating how sentence tone varies depending on the sentence topic and by documenting how the prevalence of certain topics changes over time.
