Gregory Saxton

About Gregory Saxton

Gregory D. Saxton is Associate Professor of Accounting at the Schulich School of Business. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Communication at the University at Buffalo, SUNY and Associate Professor of Public Administration at SUNY, College at Brockport, and has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Singapore Institute of Management. He has received PhDs in Political Science from Claremont Graduate University (2000) and in Accounting from York University (2016). He also received a M.A. in Public Policy from Claremont Graduate University, an M.A. in Political Science from McGill University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Victoria. He has worked for the California state government and as a consultant for nonprofit organizations.

Greg’s research focuses on the role and effects of technology – especially Big Data and social media – on the flow of information to and from organizations, particularly nonprofit organizations. His research has been widely published in an array of highly ranked business and social science journals, including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Journal of Business Ethics, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Journal of Communication, Public Administration Review, Australian Accounting Review, Information Systems Management, the British Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy. He also serves on the editorial boards of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and Voluntaristics Review and has won Best Paper awards from the National Communication Association, the International Communication Association, the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, and the American Review of Public Administration.

Research Projects

Among his recent projects Big Data and data analytic techniques are leveraged to analyze textual and social media data in a variety of accounting contexts. For instance, in one study recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics, he examined how firms use social media (particularly Twitter) to communicate corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors with the public. Building on signaling theory, the paper asks whether and how messages conveying CSR-related topics resonate with the public and, if so, which CSR topics and signal qualities are most effective.

In another study, appearing in Accounting, Organizations, and Society, he examines how large accounting firms use social media both to communicate with external stakeholders and professionalize employees.

A third study, recently published in the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, examines the role of voluntary disclosure of financial and non-financial information in increasing donations to nonprofit organizations.

In other recent work he has examined such topics as crowdsourcing, the effect of stock bloggers on stock prices and information asymmetries, new forms of social media-based social capital, the use of social media in nonprofit fundraising, how firms react to public CSR demands, and the accumulation of reputational capital from CSR-based activities. In these and other ongoing studies he has become increasingly interested in the application of a variety of machine learning techniques – such as stability selection, support vector machine (SVM) algorithms, and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling – to code and analyze Big Data.