Dean Neu
Professor Dean Neu is the Director of the CPA Ontario-Schulich Centre for Digital Financial Information in the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto, Canada. Prior to joining the faculty, he was the Director of the Centre for Public Interest Accounting and Future Fund Chair of Accounting at the University of Calgary. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto and Universidad de Autonoma del Estado de Morelos in Mexico. He is also a former co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Accounting.
As an accounting scholar, Dean is committed to understanding not only how accounting is used in the public sphere but also how it can be used to facilitate social accountability. Dr. Neu’s program of research uses both very big data and very small data to study social accountability. With his colleague Dr. Saxton, he utilizes Twitter data sets that consist of millions of data observations to examine how social actors such as individuals, NGOs and even bots enlist accounting words and numbers to ‘speak truth to power’ . Additionally, Dr. Neu uses micro level ethnographic methods to study the role of accounting in the world of undocumented work in North America as well as organized extortion processes in Central America . The use of big data and ethnographic methods contribute to our understanding of the potential and limitations of accounting in encouraging social accountability outcomes.
